Online Marketing Blog

Marketing? View from beach house on Sunset Beach, Oahu where I didn't think a lot about marketing.

I’m blogging on a plane coming back from a week in paradise. That’s part of my process for returning to the “real world”.  As a marketer I cannot help but think what’s behind the communications and actions of companies I engage with as a consumer. My time on Oahu talking with local residents and surfers in Haleiwa was a notable contrast to the techie social media marketing world I live in day to day.

In today’s digital age, things move fast. New models of communication establish themselves quickly and new categories of brand and consumer engagement continuously emerge. Defining the means for communicating with and engaging with customers is by no means static whether you’re trying to reach cosmopolitan buyers in London or tourists of a sleepy village on a tropical island.

The SES New York 2011 conference wrapped up last week on the heels of one of the biggest Google updates in recent years.

And although there was enough Panda talk to make a passerby think we might all be zookeepers, there were other themes running through the conference as well including content, paid strategies and tools, tools, tools.

Here’s a quick recap:

Panda: The Aftermath, as it was called essentially recapped what TopRank and other content advocates have been saying along.

Create unique, quality content that is written first for the target audience and second for the search engines. It’s those who have been living dangerously – or maybe just naively – creating what’s now referred to as shallow content who likely got hit the worst.

Content, Content, Content.

After attending search conferences for a few years now, it seems only right that content is getting some time in the spotlight. This week at Search Engine Strategies (SES) New York, I had the great pleasure of presenting on the topic of content marketing.

For so long talk has been about how to optimize and then how to promote – but we’re circling back around to meat and potatoes of online marketing which is the content.

Without it, what are we optimizing and promoting? Oh no, please don’t say it’s your static product pages… Well, if it is (and we’ve all been there), it is most definitely time to look at content marketing and what it can do to take your brand to new levels of customer engagement and acquisition.

Facebook Marketing is on the mind of just about every company with an online presence, small and large, BtoB and BtoC. The fast pace of the social web right along with changes in consumer behaviors and technology can make it a challenge to nail down specific and enduring best practices.

Recently I participated in a webinar on social media ROI that took a holistic view of the value created by social engagement, beyond direct customer acquisition. Many of the questions from that webinar reflect the growing curiosity about specific social media applications and websites. We couldn’t get to all the questions so I’ve compiled them into similar topics starting with Facebook.

Some of the questions are fairly common and others are unique. Hopefully you’ll get value from these answers and feel free to ask your own in the comments.

The intersection of SEO and social media marketing continues to gain traction amongst online marketers everywhere you look in the industry. As an example, the enthusiastic interest in our recent compendium of blog posts, Essentials of Integrating SEO & Social Media. I think most experienced marketers “get” that SEO and Social Media functions are less effective as distinct channels within a marketing program and work better as a coordinated effort.

Integration of Social and SEO makes sense for a variety of reasons when considering evolving consumer information discovery behaviors. Even so, I think a lot of companies are looking for direction and what’s next. This week Brandon Prebynski and I chatted on his Webtrends.TV show about the mix of search and social media and one area we discussed that I think is worth sharing here is about future direction.

Concurrent with SXSWi in Austin, Texas this weekend was the TECHmunch event for food bloggers run by Babette Pepaj of Bakespace. Babette rounded up a stellar cast of characters to present on a variety of topics including numerous food journalists from the likes of CNN and the LA Times plus PR pros like Erik Deutch, Sarah Evans and Eric Schwartzman. Of course, no event during the week of SXSW would be complete without appearances from well known digerati like Brian Solis and Robert Scoble.

My task was to talk about SEO with a dash of Social Media and Content for blogs. Knowing just a few things about blogging, I shared the following info with abundant food metaphors to about 150 food bloggers and journalists.

After 7+ years, I’ve seen it all in blog comments. Genuine people responding, asking and sharing in ways that inspire streams of comment responses and even blog posts elsewhere on the web.

I’ve also seen far too many bots that automatically find blog posts that are of a certain age, written on a certain keyword topic and that have follow vs. nofollow links. Once found (automatically using software) they scrape parts of previous comments to create a new one with embedded links to their Viagra SEO New Delhi Insurance Leads spam site. Bleh.

Then there are the benign “good job [insert blogger name here] comments or those that have been translated into another language and back into English. Here’s another good one: comments from reputable people from reputable companies that insist on leaving their full email signature in the comment. One link isn’t enough, they must have two or three or more. Greedy.

The value of content marketing has been well established here and in many other places on the web.  It’s nothing new for many marketers, especially those in B2B Content Marketing. As companies seek competitive advantages and to adjust their ability to reach and engage markets, the creation of content as a vehicle for key messages and influence has grown substantially.

I hate to say it, but some online marketers are pretty lazy. They take shortcuts in order to find the least amount of effort for the highest impact. That’s a workable short term strategy if you have a disposable brand. Long term, it can cause problems if content does not add significant value.  The recent Google Panda update has drawn a lot of attention to the consequences of such short term thinking with low quality content being dropping from Google search visibility.

Social Media Optimization is Here to Stay

There’s a recent surge in the business press about incorporating social media and search or basically a more holistic approach to natural search optimization. While many popular biz pubs are catching on, bloggers and consultants like the team at TopRank Marketing have been covering the topic for a while.  To help marketers better understand the notion of holistic SEO outside of PageRank, meta tags and link building, here are several of our most popular posts and articles on making online marketing programs both search and social media friendly:

How Does Social Media Affect Search Marketing? – This post answers key questions about social media and search engine marketing: Are they two peas in a pod, complementary or two very distinct channels? The answer lies in understanding searcher behaviors and how expectations have changed as part of the search and social networking experience.

Since 2005 or so, I’ve been pretty active speaking at conferences all over the world. Some of the cities I’ve been to for speaking engagements include: San Francisco, Chicago, Washington D.C., Boston, Detroit, Hong Kong, Auckland, Sydney, London, Barcelona, Toronto, Minneapolis and Park City, Utah. But to this day, my favorite city for a conference is New York.

All of the cities I’ve listed above have many great things going for them, but there’s something about New York that stands the test of time to me as the best city for a search and online marketing conference. This is a timely observation of course, since SES New York is coming up fast, March 21-25.

Yesterday I spoke at Search Congress in Barcelona Spain on the topic of improving online marketing (and PR) with Social Media and SEO. My co-panelist was Aaron Kahlow of Online Marketing Connect and the moderator was the famous Massimo Burgio.

Just before the event, Massimo suggested we break out our Spanglish in the presentations plus I ran into Bryan Eisenberg who did a keynote – unexpectedly in Spanish because the translator didn’t show. “Gracias” and “si” are about all I know, so you can imagine the situation.

Speaking and presenting all in English wouldn’t be very considerate to the audience, so I decided to use Google translator (suggested by Mike Grehan) and translate most of my slides from English to Catalan. The presentation went over fairly well I think:

Google Farmer update paranoia aside, there are plenty of reasons to make content marketing a more prominent piece of your online marketing mix.  Content fuels search visibility, social sharing and consumer interaction. Great content aligns customer goals with those of the brand. Ultimately, useful content helps win and keep customers.

Because we promote editorial marketing here and with clients so much, there are many questions from companies that want more tactical steps they can take. Whether it’s a retailer with an online catalog of products that wants to increase repeat business or a technology company full of tech specifications that wants to increase new leads, there are a number of straightforward ways to make useful content a marketing asset.

After an assessment that warrants a more intensive content marketing approach, here are a few tactical tips: