Online Marketing Blog

With over 100 million blogs tracked by Technorati, there is a tremendous amount of momentum and motivation for businesses to take advantage of all the marketing, PR, support and revenue opportunities that business blogs can bring.

Sometimes it seems there are more “blog consultants” than there are business blogs due to the ease of using free blog software like Blogger or WordPress.com/Wordpress.org. What’s easy to get into is also easy to get out of and many business blog efforts that started out with optimism have petered out like a car out of gas.

Dying corporate blogs (hat tip mykl) are completely avoidable, especially if you understand why they often fail and plan accordingly. Here are 5 of the top reasons why business blogs never make it.

SMX Advanced is less than a week away, and let me tell you, I am excited. Not only is Seattle one of my favorite cities in the country, but the agenda for the 2 day long search marketing event looks outstanding.

Along with the keynote speakers – Kevin Johnson and Matt Cutts – here are a few other sessions I am really looking forward to.

SMX Advanced Day 1

Here we SEO again with a bi-weekly update of TopRank’s BIGLIST of SEO blogs. The list must be hot because we’ve been receiving requests just about every day over the past few weeks. Of course, that’s not the best way to get on the list if you’ve read the guidelines. Links are always a good way for us to find you or being listed on other SEO blogs’ blogrolls is a good way too. This of course, your blog is about search engine optimization, search and internet marketing in general.

• Clicky Media Blog – This UK Agency blog uses cool images with each post, something that does a great job of attracting your attention. Topics range from agency and industry news to internet marketing tactics.

Companies large and small spend significant proportions of their revenue on branding efforts as well as those things that influence customer perception of brand like product development, support and customer service.

While there is debate about who “owns” a brand, the company or it’s customers, partners and employees, it can be agreed that there is tremendous value and equity in a company’s brand. Something of value is worth protecting especially when it contributes to the livelihood of all the employees of the company and their families.

In the past week I’ve presented on online reputation management both for Public Relations and and Direct Marketing audiences and it’s reminded me of how important it is to protect a brand whether it’s new or established.

Late last week, Lee, Jolina and I attended the event, Dual Reality: Who Controls Social Media in the Enterprise, sponsored by the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA). As we sat in the front row, eagerly awaiting the discussion panel to emerge, we reviewed the roster of panelists, including Interactive Directors (titles varying from one company to the next) from Fortune 500 Companies such as Target, Best Buy, General Mills, and Fingerhut. The question in everyone’s mind was: How are corporations really leveraging social media to reach customers online?

The answer is that most companies, large and small are still figuring out where social media as a communication and engagement platform fits. It’s a process of try, test and try again. Organizationally, adopting social media has it’s challenges as Jeremiah Owyang describes in his post Tire, Tower and Wheel.

Someone that I’ve wanted to interview as much as Robert Scoble is Guy Kawasaki. Guy is an enthusiastic promoter and marketer which are qualities Online Marketing Blog readers can appreciate a great deal. In this interview, he talks briefly about his most recent project, Alltop as well as changes he would make to Twitter, business blogging advice and a curious admission that he doesn’t understand SEO.

You have such a long and well published history working with technology and web based ventures ranging from your time at Apple to Garage Ventures to what you’re doing with Truemors and now Alltop. What are 2 or 3 things most people don’t know about you?

I don’t know if there are 2-3 things that most people don’t know about me. My life is a pretty open book.

Lee and Rob at PRSA International 2007

On the marketing conference circuit, online reputation management is a hot topic now more then ever. Whether it’s search marketing, public relations or direct marketing, companies are trying to make sense of how to monitor and manage the brand impact of online conversations and their visibility in search results.

Last Thursday I did a national PRSA teleseminar with Kami Watson Huyse, “Reputation Management in a Google World” and tomorrow in Orlando, Florida the DMA’s ACCM conference is hosting: “Reputation Management: Protecting Your Brand in the Search Engines“, a session with myself and Rob Key of Converseon presenting. Moderater duties will be handled by Heather Lloyd Martin of SuccessWorks.

The results of our poll on how Online Marketing Blog readers use Twitter are in. We had over 220 responses, which isn’t a bad sample considering this blog is fairly niche with a modest sized (and very smart) audience. Below I’ve listed the poll results and a few comments on each.

Follow Lee Odden on Twitter here.

• (39%, 87 Votes) Sharing links to items of interest to your network – Not surprising since the speed of reach on Twitter is so fast. As soon as you find something interesting that’s linkable, you can drop it on Twitter and your network knows immediately. With the URL monitoring tools like the Techmeme-like Twitt(url)y and twitbuzz you can track items of interest before they ever hit the blogosphere and long before they hit mainstream media.

Blogging is fun and rewarding. There are so many good things about it, but comment and trackback spam can tarnish the process. I know that going in and removing 15 different ‘prescription’ comments is not a good use of a bloggers time as they could use it towards creating new posts. But how does one control it?

You can protect comments with a captcha plugin, Spam Karma or Askimet, but what about trackbacks?

Lately I’ve been testing out the Simple Trackback Validation plugin. It checks two items to ensure that the trackback is legit.

1. It checks the page that claims to be linking to your post to ensure it does.

Tonight interactive gurus from General Mills, Best Buy, Target, Fingerhut and Gage will convene at an event hosted by MIMA to discuss: Duality Reality: Who Controls Social Media in the Enterprise?

As a preview, I reached out to Douglas Pollei (left) of Social Media Club Minneapolis and VP of Internet Strategy and Corporate Development for IKANO Communications who helped get the panel created and panelist Jim Cuene (right), who is Director of Interactive at General Mills. to ask a few questions about tonight’s topic.

This dual interview offers everyman definitions of social media, common challenges in large organizations as well as tips and resources for companies trying to figure out how to get their arms around social media in their organizations. We also have reason for new nicknames: “Twitter Jim” and “Wiki Douglas”. Read on.

Conferences are a big part of TopRank’s marketing and content promotion strategy and it looks like a busy summer is ahead of us. Numerous events are coming up quickly – enough to make your head spin. Here is a summary of our involvement with PRSA, DMA, PUSH, SIS, SES and SMX events over the next 30 days:

05/14/08 – MIMA: Duality Reality – Who Controls Social Media in the Enterprise?
The local interactive marketing association along with inspiration and motivation from Doug Pollei, there will be a very interesting panel of in-house Interactives discussing how large companies (General Mills, Best Buy, Target, Fingerhut and OptumHealth) are adopting and measuring social media programs. If you’re in the Twin Cities this week and involved with social marketing now or in the future, this is a MUST ATTEND event.

What a week! Spring is officially here in Minnesota. Don’t laugh, it snowed just 2 weeks ago. This week’s BIGLIST of SEO and SEM blogs includes a nice mix of search, social and online PR content. When I co-hosted the Daily Searchcast on Thursday it was great to have Danny Sullivan mention the BIGLIST and what a great resource it is. We hope Online Marketing Blog readers feel the same, so be sure to follow us on Twitter and spread the word!

• jane and robot - Google and Zillow veteran, Vanessa Fox teams up with Nathan Buggia, lead program manager for Microsoft’s Live Search Webmaster Center to offer advice on designing web sites both for people and bots.