Online Marketing Blog

Matt Ridings & Michael Brito Advocating For Employee Advocacy

Employee engagement is key in improving productivity in any industry.  A happy employee is much more likely to be more productive than their counterparts.

A recent study from the National Business Research Institute (NBRI) shares just how important it is to keep employees engaged.  Findings include:

• Engaged employees product twice as much work product in the time as unengaged employees
• The average adult spends a quarter to a third of their waking life at work
• 40% – 80% of customer satisfaction is affected by employee attitudes

Additionally NBRI identified the following six traits of engaged employees:

1. Believe in their organization
2. Have the desire to work to make things better

For every social media, SEO or content marketing “expert” there are hundreds, if not thousands of smart business people that do not possess advanced knowledge in those areas. That’s not unreasonable, since running a business involves more than keeping up with the latest internet marketing best practices.

On this blog we often include the basics of search, social and content marketing because that’s where a lot of people need confidence and affirmation that they’re on the right track.  To support that approach, here are a series of questions my co-worker Miranda Miller shared with me as prep for an online radio show. Hopefully, if you’re responsible for attracting, engaging and converting new business for your company, you will find them useful.

What is content marketing and what is it not?

The Retailer’s Guide to Big Data

The explosion of mobile and social media has changed the ways that retailers view customer data. This recent infographic from Monetate takes a dive into big data and presents challenges, goals, and tips for developing a big data game plan.

Google To Hire More Help, Users Enticed To Search While Signed In
Google is determined to see G+, local search, and personalized search succeed. To that end, they’re hiring a new product marketing manager for search. This person would be responsible for developing plans, creatives, campaigns, and programs to increase the number of users that are signed in. Via everythingpr.

Historically, link building was critical for companies to appear in search results, as links have long been an important signal to search engines. However, the new link building is about mentions, social visibility, and building your company’s presence, says Alison Groves, Product Coordinator at Raven Internet Marketing Tools.

Groves presented her three simple steps to link building for businesses in a presentation this morning at NMX Las Vegas. Her process, she says, revolves around relationship building and nurturing in order to earn mentions from relevant websites. We need to focus less on the technical and more on attracting targeted traffic by getting our sites in front of the people most likely to be interested in our product or service, she said.

With those goals in mind, here are Groves’ three simple steps for link building:

I am amazed at how much Debba Haupert (@girlfriendology) was able to cover in one short session at NMX Las Vegas.  Debba’s session on Pinterest proved to be very informational and provided practical advice and tools that marketers can use to better engage their followers.

Many brands are still struggling to determine if Pinterest is a platform that will work for their business.  Companies that have taken the leap may be unsure of how exactly to use Pinterest and what their strategy should be.

The numbers don’t lie.  Pinterest has proven that it has staying power.

• 10.4 million users
• 25 million uni visitors/month
• 1/3 use for shipping inspiration
• Average time spent: 1hr 17 min
• Draws more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn, and youtube combined

Helping beats selling. If you sell someone, you can make a customer today. If you help someone, you can make a customer for life. So says social media speaker, author and coach Jay Baer, in the opening of his “Youtility” presentation at NMX Las Vegas.

What is Youtility and why do marketers need to get on board? Audiences have become fragmented, there is far more competition for their attention, he says. Frame of mind awareness is all about inbound marketing, but this doesn’t create demand; it fulfills it. It’s half the cake – it’s a great thing for consumers for already know what they want. In 2004, 83% of people used search engines to find websites, but in 2012, it fell to 2011. The funnel of knowledge is fragmenting; there are so many more places for people to go to find information. We have Siri, Angie’s List, Cha Cha, etc.

Our CEO at TopRank Online Marketing, Lee Odden (@leeodden), shared his War of Words: Myth-Busting Social, Content Marketing and SEO yesterday at NMX Las Vegas.

The premise of Lee’s presentation was actually crowdsourced; the title War of Words comes from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, which was turned into a radio program by Orson Wells and spawned a mass fear that Mars aliens were on their way to take over Earth. There is much misinformation in content marketing, social media and SEO that the hype spreads much like the alien myths of days gone by, says Lee.

Do brands care whether they have influence in social media? They certainly should, said members of the three-person panel on social influence at NMX Monday.

Jonathan Dick, Director of Business Development at Klout,  kicked off the conversation with his thoughts that brands do care, though they may struggle to understand or measure their influence.

Andy Levey, Senior Manager of New Media & Analytics at Cirque du Soleil, believes social influence is incredibly important for brands to connect with and engage fans. “It’s all about them; if we don’t have fans talking about us, we’re not in business,” he said. Cirque du Soleil are lucky, Levey admits. Their brand is creative and entertaining; many businesses lack this stroke of good fortune. What can you do if your brand isn’t inherently entertaining or you’re not in the media space and therefore informative by nature?

“I love Las Vegas.  I love New Media.  What’s not to love?” – Guy Kawasaki

Day two of NMX Las Vegas kicked off with a fireside chat between Mark Fidelman (@markfidelman) and Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki).  Guy is well known for his work at Apple, as founder of Alltop, as well as his books and speaking.

In the interview Guy discussed everything from the devices he uses to what he’d like to change about social platforms.  However, the highlight of the conversation was surrounding Guy’s new book APE: How to Publish a Book.

What Is APE?
APE is a book for authors looking to stray from traditional publishing in favor of self-publishing.

I arrived early to Monday’s Productivity Power Panel and it was standing room only.  I quickly snapped my picture (as you can see the panelists were doing the same of the packed room) and found my spot in the back of the room, on the floor.  This panel discussion features Moderator Craig Jarrow (@TMNinja) and speakers Leo Widrich (@LeoWid), Brett Kelly (@inkedmn), and Mike Vardy (@MikeVardy).

In this session the speakers covered 3 different elements to becoming a highly productive blogger:

- Techniques and Tools

- Social Media and Sharing

- Gadgets and Gear

Techniques For Picking Blog Topics

Craig: One of the first things we get asked about is how do we generate so much content, or how do you write so many posts on the same topic?

If you had to put a value on the UFC, what would it be? You wouldn’t be remiss to put it in the hundreds of millions, or even billions. Dana White got into the UFC for $2 million and people thought he and his partners were out of their minds for paying even that much. Yet today, UFC is a multi-million dollar business, with over 9 million fans on Facebook and 800,000 Twitter followers. This is a highly engaged community White has built; currently, there are over 400,000 people talking about UFC on Facebook alone.

They had an uphill battle from the start; porn was allowed on pay-per-view TV, yet ultimate fighting wasn’t, he points out. White joined Forbes Managing Editor Bruce Upbin on stage for the second keynote Monday morning at NMX Las Vegas to share the story of his organization’s incredible rise from little more than an idea, to an international on and offline cash machine.

As marketers we all know that storytelling is an essential part of connecting with prospects and customers.  Scott Monty (@scottmonty) and his team at Ford have taken the art of storytelling a step further.

In his moving (yes I said moving) keynote, Scott walked the audience through some of Ford’s most recent and innovative campaigns.   In many of these campaigns the story is told not from the perspective of Ford, but from that of the consumer.  Below you’ll find more about the stories of these campaigns, the people who told them, and the lessons learned.

Let Your Customers Tell The Story

The Car: Ford Fiesta

The Buyer: Millennium’s