Online Marketing Blog

The speed and availability of information online has given more power to the individual to be vocal about their opinions and feelings, both positive and negative.  Social media, blogs, forums and online groups can leave you vulnerable to negative attacks if you are not involved in the conversation.

This panel of brand ambassadors, including Jessica L Bowman, Sr. Marketing Manager for Yahoo!, Lauren Vaccarello, Director of Publishing for Forex Capital Marketers, Tony Wright, CEO and Founder of WrightIMC, and Brian Combs, Senior VP & Chief Futurist for Apogee Search, discussed the ins and outs of how to manage both your reputation and brand in the intricate and sometimes hostile environment on the web.

If you talk to companies that do blog optimization or promotion, you’ll soon learn that there are rules, or best practices, for blogging.  Things like have a good deal of post content, have a well designed site, internal linking is important, and categorize posts to name a few.  However, some blogs break the rules and still succeed.

Have you been to I Can Has Cheezburger?  Millions of people have.  It’s one of the most popular blogs on the web, yet it’s not following best practices.

Here are a few of the item they’re not doing.

• Design – The design is lacking.  They have a great logo, but there is so much going on that it’s hard to know what to focus on.  It’s also hard to distinguish the post title from the rest of the page.

As is tradition at Online Marketing Blog, we take quite a few photos at conferences. I’ve never come back from an event thinking that I took too many.  Here are a few photos from day one of the WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference in Las Vegas, which for me, was interrupted by a trip over to the Zappos headquarters where I took a tour. Afternoon sessions were well attended as was the Zappos Tweetup at Hard Rock Cafe.

Joe (here flanked by Vanessa Zamora and Melanie Mitchell) is always the luckiest guy in the room – especially in Vegas

Zack at Zappos Headquarters

Zappos, Elvis Style (including music)

6 SEOs Can’t be Wrong: Marcus, Bob, Chris, Greg, Neil, Cameron

Dan Perry and Ethan Giffin are pretty happy about Pubcon

You may or may not be using social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, or Digg in your business. The overarching theme from this panel at PubCon was… why not, what do you have to lose?

Social media gurus, including Warren Whitlock, Co-Author of The Twitter Revolution, Brian Carter, Director of Search Marketing for Fuel Interactive, Guillaume Bouchard, CEO of NVI, and Kent Schoen, Facebook Product Manager, joined forces at this session to discuss the Big sexy buzz around social media and provide some food for thought to convince skeptics that social media can be a successful marketing channel.

Warren Whitlock kicked off the session discussing twitter habits.

There are two stages of Twitter:
1.    Denial: Why would anyone care what I ate for breakfast?
2.    Reluctant Acceptance: I have a Twitter account but haven’t seen any traffic

Building and designing a successful social media campaign can be a lot like designing and building a skyscraper. You need to research the materials, lay a strong foundation, and continue regular maintenance to ensure your building, or social media promotion, doesn’t collapse.

In Understanding the Complex Social Media Marketing Playing Field, moderator Joe Laratro led a panel of social media marketing architects who shared their social media design tips.

Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz, gave an overview of some of the various materials an online marketer can use when constructing a social media plan. Michael Gray, president of Atlas Web Service, created a strategic design plan for building successful social promotions. Cameron Olthuis, CEO of Factive Media, outlined best practices for interacting with social communities in ten steps. Neil Patel, CTO of Advantage Consulting Services, Inc., ended the session with a controversial look at “the dark side” of social media marketing.

The WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference in Las Vegas opened up today with remarks from founder Brett Tabke, who mentioned that only about 30% of the content of this year’s event are dedicated to search marketing. The rest is made up of social media and other related internet marketing topics.  As interests in the industry changes, Pubcon is also evolving.

The opening keynote presentation was done by Shawn Rorick of Cirque du Soleil who talked about the changing media and marketing landscape and how online marketers need to focus on consumers, learn traditional media language and focus not so much on linear marketing but on prioritizing what online marketing tactics make sense in a fragmented web.

The amount of information in the world doubles roughly every 6 months. The speed and availability of information via cloud computing means a sea change for marketers.

Now, more than ever, marketing companies and consultants need to get competitive for client dollars and what better way than advancing your knowledge and your network?

There are many options for companies and agencies to train digital marketing teams and to keep tenured employees up to date including conferences such as: this week’s WebmasterWorld Pubcon, Search Engine Strategies, Search Marketing Expo, numerous regional and niche events and an increasing number of web based offerings including SEMPO Institute and the DMA Search Engine Marketing Certification program. I would be remiss not to mention the upcoming “Social Media Smarts” workshop in NYC covering all aspects of social media marketing including a strategy exercise and tips on building a business case for a social media effort in your organization.

One of the hottest topics that transcends the public relations, social media and search marketing worlds is online reputation management.  Search engines are fantastic for finding things. They’re also a significant contributor to influence online. Blogs, forums, social networks and media sharing sites all offer venues for customers to express their opinions about brands – good and bad.

The influence of search visibility as well as word of mouth on social media sites (the social web) is too significant for companies with any kind of brand equity to ignore. Lucky for readers of this blog or those you pass it on to, there are two upcoming opportunities to learn in depth about how to tackle online reputation management.

Several of the TopRank Online Marketing team attended a Social Media Breakfast last Friday, along with about 150 local business leaders, code warriors, internet marketers, agency peeps and social media enthusiasts, to hear a presentation by David Meerman Scott, author of “The New Rules of Marketing & PR”. TopRank CEO Lee Odden posted a short write up and video interview with Scott as well.

David started his presentation with an impromptu survey, asking the audience to respond with a show of hands to questions like:

• How many of you have been to a tradeshow as a participant, not an exhibitor, in the last year? (very few people in the room raised their hands)
• How many of you have responded to a Direct Marketing piece in the last year? (very few people in the room raised their hands)

In October we decided to mix things up a bit and offer more posts with practical tips, especially the SEO Basics series. While many of our readers appreciate industry insights, observations, conference coverage and interviews, it was the practical tips and resources that attracted the most interest.

While started out with tips focused on search engine optimization in October, we’ll begin offering similarly practical tips for digital PR and social media marketing as well.

The two day Social Media Smarts workshop in conjunction with the DMA will offer more than enough basic social media tips to share.  Here are the top 10 Online Marketing Blog posts according to visitors, post ratings and incoming links for October: