Online Marketing Blog

I’ve been familiar with Brian Solis as many have, for several years. We’ve done a few video interviews with Brian and he’s contributed to popular posts here like this one on social media marketing and this one on content curation.

I have to admit that based on his early writing, I thought Brian was overly confident about the opportunities with social media. When I finally met him in person at a Media Relations conference we were both speaking at, I gained a much better understanding and appreciation for the talents and insight behind the evangelism for what has become the most significant change to the web since the introduction of search engines.

The book, “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies” by Forrester’s Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff offered companies a much-needed framework for companies to understand social technologies and consumer behaviors. It also  introduced the now popular four-step process for developing a social media strategy.

A lot has changed since we first interviewed Charlene Li about the Groundswell, including her move to begin the Altimeter Group. Other changes include blogging having met its match as a popular social technology with the exploding popularity of tools like Facebook and Twitter.

Charlene’s new book, “Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead”, is essentially about how leaders can tap into the power of the social technology revolution and how to be “open” while still maintaining control.

One of the most trusted sources of marketing research and information is MarketingSherpa. I’ve been a subscriber for many years and always look forward to the reports on Search Marketing, Email Marketing and B2B Marketing. Last year MarketingSherpa started conducting research and publishing a Benchmark Report on social media marketing.

The new Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report (affiliate link) was recently released and I’ve had a few days to take a look and will provide a review for our readers.

As you can expect, this guide is a “meaty” 250 plus pages of research, charts & tables, examples and well written advice. Over 2,000 marketers participated in the survey covering a myriad of topics ranging from strategy to forecasting & budgeting to integration with other marketing channels to specific research on social applications such as Twitter, Facebook and blogs.

Our recent reader poll of 14 books either focused on, or with significant content dedicated to, Search Engine Optimization has concluded with 174 votes. And the winner by one vote and 27% of the total votes is….

Art of SEO (Theory in Practice) by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin and Jessie C. Stricchiola.

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Published by O’Reilly, this phone book sized bundle of SEO wisdom is chock-full of advice for marketers that want to leverage search engine optimization as a marketing channel. Congratulations on winning our Reader Poll!

Here are several reviews of Art of SEO to consider or you can take up O’Reilly’s offer to write one yourself.

Runners up for Best SEO book of 2009 were:

“It’s a people driven economy stupid” and “Online word of mouth has made many traditional marketing strategies obsolete”. Those are powerful words and central to the theme in “Socialnomics” by Erik Qualman, Global VP for Online Marketing for EF Educatio, the world’s largest private educator.

I appreciate Erik’s characterization because it’s how I’ve viewed social media since our digital marketing & PR agency started blogging and using social news/bookmarking sites in 2004: as technology that facilitates word of mouth. At conferences, I often say to audiences that if a company has strong word of mouth in the offline world, then Social Media may be a powerful option for them. If not, perhaps social media can help them get word of mouth started.

When Brian Solis asked me to do a review of Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, the book he and Deidre Breakenridge published earlier this year,  it didn’t take a second to say yes. Putting that decision into action took a little longer and it finally took some time on a plane to get it done.

I’ve known Brian Solis through our common industry involvement with social media and the Public Relations world for several years.  Brian is a thought leader not because he’s popular on the social web or because he’s the cool-guy host of the Tech Set parties, or even because of his successful PR business, board memberships with up and coming companies, keynote presentations or the popular blogs he publishes at briansolis.com and bub.blicio.us.

I picked up a copy of Gary Vaynerchuk’s book “Crush It” to read on my way to DMA in San Diego. Get the book from Amazon (link above) not at the airport unless you’re funding your own stimulus package for airport book stores.

For readers that are not familiar with @garyvee and Wine Library TV, like I wasn’t when first  meeting Gary at Blog World Expo a year ago, Vaynerchuck is a poster boy for a small business that has leveraged passion, product and social media to stimulate incredible business growth and community around his brand.

After BWE, the next time I saw Gary was when he keynoted at Affiliate Summit early in 2009. That was an experience. His “tell it like it is” style isn’t for everyone, but personally, I like it.