Online Marketing Blog

A few months ago, the PR folks working with IBM Press sent me a copy of “Audience, Relevance and Search: Targeting Web Audiences with Relevant Content” by a trio of authors: James Mathewson, Frank Donatone and Cynthia Fishel. I have somewhat of a connection with IBM Press because of editing the Social Media Marketing chapter of Mike Moran and Bill Hunt’s Search Engine Marketing Inc., 2nd Edition. (Interview)

Funny Story: Fast forward to Oct 13th and I’m on my way through the MSP airport to catch a plane to Las Vegas where I’m speaking at Blog World New Media Expo. I complain on Twitter about $36/day parking (highway robbery in my book) and James Mathewson chimed in with advice on parking at Terminal 2. Ironically, the book I picked out to read on the plan was Mathewson’s “Audience Relevance and Search”. On top of that, James is a fellow Minnesotan and we’ve never met or had any kind of correspondence before. Writing this review was simply meant to be

Our digital marketing agency, TopRank Marketing, works with some very smart client marketers who have invaluable insights and perspectives. I’m happy to share the following sage advice from Jon Miller, VP Marketing and co-founder of Marketo, and author of Modern B2B Marketing blog on something important to all marketers: keeping the CEO on track with your marketing budget for next year.

Now is the time when marketing executives everywhere are going through the annual dance of building and then cutting their marketing budgets for the year.  The process typically looks like this:

1. The CEO asks each department to come up with a proposed budget for the next year
2. The CMO pulls together a budget based on his or her best calculation of what is actually needed to achieve next year’s goals

While companies are hiring consultants, internal community managers, testing social media marketing management software and making other kinds of investments in social media marketing, there are a number of things, despite making those investments, many businesses are doing to sabotage their social media success. We could probably list a lot more than seven of these social media sins, but I’ll focus on some of the most important things I’ve been observing.

1. Fear - Of course we know fear is all in the mind and by the looks of it, there are some pretty vivid imaginations out there. Remember when companies feared putting up a blog with comments because, “What if someone says something bad about us?”.  In contrast, companies successful with social media are celebrating such criticism and showing how well they address customer concerns – in public.

As more and more people join Twitter, Facebook and other social networks, bloggers are increasingly trying to get their content shared and it in-front of more people. And why wouldn’t they? A post is perceived as higher quality when it’s coming from a friends than from anywhere else.

So how can you increase the social reach and shareability of your posts? Here are a few tips:

Create good content.

First and foremost it’s about good content. No one likes the same content they can find everywhere else, or content that is self-indulgent.

Create unique content that informs, educates and/or entertains. Be different, be you, be successful.

Add media.

Text is great, but pictures are what most people will notice first. Add compelling graphics and/or videos to compliment your content. Try to create, or find, media that will act as a magnet and pull people in.

Congratulations to our 2 winners of a free pass to the PRSA International Conference in Washington D.C.!

• Tia Peterson for “Is SEO the Missing Link In Your PR Strategy?“
• Catherine Lockey for “PR’s Kickin’ it “New School” with Social and SEO“

Thank you to everyone that entered! You will receive a copy of our eBook “Optimize: SEO for Public Relations.

With our roots in the public relations and media relations world, TopRank Online Marketing has a deep appreciation for the strategy, storytelling and networking skills that are essential for successful PR campaigns. We’ve also talked a lot here about the intersection of both SEO for PR and Social Media with PR.  It’s an incredible combination that increases reach, engagement and delivers even more value to business than Media Relations alone.

Checking out new tools is part of what we do to stay current and find ways to be more efficient with Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing.  Sometimes a few tools offer interesting features or stand out for some reason and rather than keep those goodies to ourselves, we share them with you. Here are a few handy social media, analytics and link building tools worth a look:

Reinvigorate – Real-time web analytics with heat maps. Ooh, the colors are so pretty – all the way to the bank. This service is A-M-A-Z-ing. Monthly, daily, hourly and page level details plus the ability to name tag registered visitors.  If real-time web data is your caffeine, then this is the tool for you. There’s a dumbed down freebie version and a free trial. The paid service is very low cost starting at $10 per month.

Snappy title eh? Here are a few others I was considering:  ”Fall Into Search & Social Media Smarts at SES Chicago”, “Leaf the Competition Behind at SES Chicago”, “No Cold Ideas at SES Chicago”, “Remember December SES Chicago?”.  You get the idea.  As a long time attendee, speaker and media sponsor, here’s the good news and more good news about the upcoming Midwest Search and Social Media Marketing conference held in the windy city.

First, the lineup of keynotes is pretty impressive and includes 3 TopRank Online Marketing Blog interview alumni:

Avinash Kaushik – Co-Founder of Market Motive Inc and the Analytics Evangelist for Google talked to us about Storytelling & Web Analytics. At SES Chicago Avinash will be giving an opening keynote presentation that promises to help attendees rethink their online marketing, better present analyses, and enthuse their peers.

This post is one of a series of liveblogs from the 2010 MIMA Summit.

When you think of geotagging, or checking in, what do you think of? Probably GPS, FourSquare, Facebook Places or letting a photo site like Flickr know where a photo was taken. But it can also be done for blog posts.

Geotagging in blog posts is still relatively new, but it well on its way.

WordPress.com already supports geotagging on profiles and posts so that you can let others know where you are posting from. They will also soon launch a Geo Search feature that will allow people to find posts based on their location.