Online Marketing Blog

Search engine optimization can be challenging enough, especially for large, enterprise organizations rich with digital assets.  They’re also rich with policies, procedures and often times a labrynth of  content approval and publishing processes.

An effort to optimize and promote those assets to search engine bots can be even more challenging than standard SEO. And yet it can also be far more rewarding. The notion of Digital Asset Optimization came out of TopRank’s efforts in early in 2007 to describe for internet marketing clients what new opportunities there were to enable prospects and customers to pull themselves via search to company content.

Social Media Smarts: Interview with Richard Binhammer from Dell – @richardatdell

Photo Credit www.briansolis.com 

Of all the companies known for making advances in the realm of social media, Dell holds a place that reaches both ends of the spectrum. References to “Dell Hell” are less about something wrong and more about one of the most popular examples of a major corporation that “gets” social media listening and engagement.  One of the key people at Dell responsible for the successful social media presence so many have come to know is Richard Binhammer. 

Richard has enjoyed a career that has taken him from Canadian politics, lobbying and election campaigns to public relations in the Midwest to Corporate Communications in NYC and then public affairs, now social media/blog outreach at Dell.

TopRank Online Marketing will have two speakers presenting on two panels at SES Chicago this week.  

On Tuesday, Senior Account Manager Jolina Pettice (who recently spoke on a panel with Yahoo’s Ron Belanger and Anne Kennedy at DPAC) will be speaking on a session about how to use Public Relations tactics to improve SEO results.  On Wednesday I will be speaking on a panel about Blog SEO.

Here are the session details. We look forward to seeing you there!

Tuesday, December 9, 2008 - 2:45pm-3:45pm 
“Turning PR Efforts into SEO Results”

Today kicks off another Search Engine Strategies conference, this time in the windy and bleeping cold city of Chicago. 

Change has been in the air for SES with the naming of Stewart Quealy as VP of content development, responsible for creating conference program content for all SES events and training. Also, Marilyn Crafts (whom I like to call “Super Star”) was promoted to senior program director and will work with program development, speaker selection and event strategy.  

Then there’s the really big news of Matt McGowan being promoted to VP/Publisher for Incisive Media’s Digital Marketing Businesses which includes the ClickZ network, Search Engine Watch and the Search Engine Strategies conference.

Day one of the DMA / TopRankMarketing.com Social Media Smarts workshop kicked off covering a tremendous amount of information including defining social media, practical examples & case studies and blogging soup to nuts. Creating, marketing and measuring blog results was covered in 3 different modules.

Social media and making sense out of the social web is a hot topic and I applaud the organizations that sent people to New York this week for our workshop.

During the first day I asked attendees what their learning objectives were which I thought were consistent with most people entering the social media space:

• Build a social media strategy for our organization
• Learn what social media tools to pay attention to and which to ignore for a specific industry

Central to the notion of effective social media participation is the ability to create, publish and share content. The sheer volume of information on the topic of social media marketing makes filtering and prioritizing what’s most important to a specific organization a challenging task.

There’s a lot of excitement from marketers and companies but not everyone is exactly sure how to go about it.

I think it’s important to focus on the key components of what it takes to deploy an effective social media strategy individually and as a whole. By understanding the social web as it relates to fundamental marketing principles, tactics, tools and best practices, you can create a framework or roadmap for the development of a working strategy.

Social Media Smarts Interview with Shonali Burke

I first ran into Shonali Burke right before she presented with Katie Paine at the PRSA International conference, “True Tales From the Social Media Measurement Trenches”. We had not met in person before but were connected on Twitter. Social media will do that – facilitate real world connections.  Based on her PR and social media metric savvy, I thought it would be interesting to do an interview as part of our Social Media Smarts posts.

Shonali Burke, ABC, is an award-winning communications consultant and self-confessed measurement fiend. She was formerly a vice president of media and communications at ASPCA. She and her husband are owned by three shelter dogs and live in the Washington, D.C., area. You can also find her on Twitter.

There are more companies blogging now than ever. How do you measure results? Measuring the social web is a different thing than what most web analytics packages offer. It can be easy to start a blog, but making it successful requires an excellent feedback mechanism. Blog analytics is one of those sources of feedback to know what’s working and what’s not.

We’ve listed interesting blog analytics tools of various types before, but now’s your chance to vote for (up to two) of the best software focused on measuring what happens on blogs.