Online Marketing Blog

With Twitter riding the social media wave to a $1 billion valuation, the attention from celebrities, usefulness for everything from real-time communications in natural disasters to serving as a profitable marketing channel, a momentum of interest has spawned in how to make the most out of spending time on Twitter. Like any tool, Twitter is what you make of it. But Twitter and social communication applications like it are a lot more than just tools. One question about Twitter best practices that often comes up deals with how people (not bots) decide to follow one another on Twitter.

2008 MIMA Summit at The Depot

UPDATE: We have a winner! Liz Giel was selected by a mysterious voting process contrived within the ranks of the TopRank staff and involving various secretive and hurried Account Managers. Suffice it to say, we appreciate all who ReTweeted, linked and commented.  Don’t worry, there will be liveblogging of the event here on Online Marketing Blog and live streaming of several sessions at MIMASummit.org. Congratulations Liz!

In just under a week the annual Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association Summit will be held downtown Minneapolis at the Hilton. With keynotes from Seth Godin and Jackie Huba as well as a collection of local and national subject matter experts ranging from Greg Swan of Weber Shandwick to Scott Monty of Ford, it should be a veritable vortex of interactive velocity.  I apologize, that alliteration was so bad.

Any marketer who’s successfully made the move to social media will tell you the rules of traditional marketing have to be reexamined. That’s particularly true with Twitter, where brands have just 140 characters to inform, evoke emotion and inspire action. One of the most basic and critical rules for brands on Twitter? Be authentic and transparent in all you do.

Check out these 5 Twitter tips for staying authentic and transparent:

1. Reveal who’s behind the Tweets. It doesn’t necessarily matter who it is—the CEO, the social media manager or a marketing intern. It just matters that the person is in fact a person. Putting a face and name behind your Tweets through a photo and brief bio can help followers relate to and connect with your brand.

“Master Story Teller”, that’s how I would describe Greg Jarboe, someone I’ve known in the internet marketing and PR world for several years. Now he’s pioneered yet another essential digital marketing channel: online video. In YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour A Day, Greg has assembled a priceless collection of insights, examples and practical tips for companies that want, that need, to understand how to use video marketing to grow their business. You cannot afford to miss this story.”

That’s the endorsement I gave Greg’s new book based on the preview copy a few months ago. He gave me a copy of the final book at SES and I thought it very timely to provide a more in-depth review.

TopRank BIGLIST of Search Marketing Resources

How do new marketers learn SEO and Pay Per Click? How do professionals stay current with search marketing tactics considering the sheer volume of social media distraction?  Last month we ran a poll of Online Marketing Blog readers to discover preferences for learning and staying up to date with current search engine marketing strategies and tactics.  Below are the top categories selected by readers. However, we’ve taken it a step further and listed over 100 different resources for marketers to start, maintain or advance their level of SEO, PPC and any other type of search based marketing. Enjoy!

Search Engine Marketing Blogs

• TopRank’s BIGLIST of over 400 Search Marketing Blogs (updated weekly/monthly since Jan 2007)
• invesp Ranked List of Top SEO Blogs

Nothing will turn readers away more quickly than blatant errors, boring copy and long-winded writers. Recognizing the deadly sins of SEO copywriting—and identifying ways to avoid them—is essential whether you’re drafting a blog post or creating an article to submit to an online directory.

Critical? Yes.

Difficult? It certainly can be.

But simplify the task and reduce the risk of losing your readers by following these 5 tips for avoiding the deadly sins of SEO copywriting.

HINT: Make yourself a checklist based on these tips and your own. Refer to that checklist at the end of every writing project.

1. Stop going on and on…and on and on. As a writer, one of the biggest challenges is removing yourself from your story in order to determine when enough is enough. To make your writing more concise and to the point:

Google Analytics is a full-featured analytics suite that is free to all to use. The data it captures lets blog owners know referrers to their site, keywords, popular posts, unique visitors and so much more.

With the Google Analyticator plug-in, you can view a summary of the blogs Google Analytics, for the past 30 days, right on the dashboard for quick and easy access.

Here’s how to setup Google Analytics on WordPress’ dashboard.

1. Sign up for a free Google Analytics account. If you already have a Gmail, or other Google account, then just sign-in. http://www.google.com/analytics/

Get Google Analytics

2. Get the Google Analyticator plug-in, install it on the blog, activate the plug-in, and remember to configure it.

Download The Plug-In

Several weeks ago, I revisited the 16 rules for social media optimization. Switching things up, today I thought it would be useful to approach this slightly differently and look at how to optimize time spent in social media.

These tips aren’t necessarily just for brands or companies to follow, rather they may prove even more useful for digital marketing professionals themselves. In the spirit of optimizing your time reading this, I’m going to keep the tips brief and to the point.

1. Aggregate social content about your company, brand or even yourself into a real-time feed using one of the many tools available to do this. Bring the relevant mentions to you instead of always searching for them.

Albert Maruggi

Minnesota is home to one of the most vibrant social media communities in the country, with attendance at Social Media Breakfasts exceeding 300+ (more than NYC or San Francisco).

With all that local interest and talent, I thought I would do a few interviews with some of the Minneapolis social media set that I’ve come to know.

Albert Maruggi is a 30-year communications practitioner whose career spans journalist, public affairs adviser in national politics, global marketer for technology companies and founder of Provident Partners. Through PRSA & Media Relations conferences—as well as through hair-raising driving in the hills of San Francisco—I’ve had the chance to get to know Albert and his keen insight into the future of digital marketing and PR.

[Note from Lee:  The PR industry is in a state of flux with changes in the print industry, citizen journalism and the social web. Consumer behaviors with information discovery, consumption and sharing have been significantly affected by the dramatic increase in social platform usage and ease of self publishing.

Companies that rely on reaching and engaging those consumers through PR and marketing vendors and/or internal professionals need to carefully consider what skills and capabilities are needed to succeed. I've asked Adam Singer at TopRank to present his view on the matter and he's come up with the following post.]

Jason Falls recently made a smart comment about the need for Public Relations professions to be “social media ready”.  In that post, he referenced a 2009 “Digital Readiness Report” to assess the specific social media marketing skills companies are looking for in a PR vendor.

A novelist can ride the tails of that one great book for years. And a print journalist who’s broken the story of the century might be able to play off that success for several months. But for writers producing copy for the web, creating that one great blog post or article is just that: one great blog post or article.

The challenge when writing copy for the web is to consistently create content that is unique, relevant and entertaining—all at the same time. But it’s not easy to feel inspired and creative day after day.

The next time you find yourself in a rut, test out these 5 tips for creating fresh and unique copy for the web:

What a remarkable date today! 09/09/09.  Welcome to the UK Edition of TopRank’s BIGLIST of Search Marketing Blog reviews. Since I’m in London this week, (photo above was taken with my trusty 3GS iPhone) I decided to focus mostly on SEO/PPC and Social Media Marketing Bloggers here in the UK.  It’s a nice mix of search, social, web dev/design and analytics, so fire up your RSS reader and subscribe!

Our Featured SEO Blog this week is from Malcolm Coles. This is a personal blog by Malcolm Coles of Digital Sparkle that offers observations about internet marketing categorized mostly as good and bad reviews. He also focuses very specifically on newspaper web sites. If you want to know anything about UK based newspapers and their place within search engines this is the place to be.