Online Marketing Blog

About today’s guest post: As companies mature their online presence though more robust social engagement, individuals within those companies are advancing use of social technologies to communicate and collaborate publicly. At the same time, consumers’ evolving use of social platforms has lead to increased expectations for brand information discovery, consumption and engagement. Surfacing organizational culture and expertise helps companies better connect with their customers in terms of who they are and what they stand for.

Tapping into the collective wisdom of an organization’s thought leadership has enabled social business transformation in ways we never would have imagined 5 or 10 years go. In today’s post,  Ethan McCarty, IBM’s Director of Enterprise Social Strategy, @ethanmcc has offered to bring some clarity to this opportunity and to share one example of what IBM is doing about it. 

Whether it was at SES London or one of the many other search marketing conferences in the U.S., I’ve always been able to count on Dixon Jones for great advice on link building. Dixon was recently recognized for his content contributions to the online marketing world in our Top UK Online Marketing Influencers and Bloggers list.

Working with Majestic SEO as their Director of Marketing, (TopRank has used Majestic for years) Dixon has been a fountain of smarts when it comes to the value of of links for SEO, but also for many other purposes. Links are the connective tissue of the web. Before Google and other search engines, links were the only way to find content. Their importance has changed over the years but not diminished.

When you work in the digital world, there are insightful, smart and good people you “meet” online that you really look forward to meeting in real life.  Ekaterina Walter is one of those people who I finally met at a BlogWorld conference 4 years ago.

Since then “E” has really made her mark as a social innovator at Intel. When I presented at Intel’s first global social media conference a few years ago,  Ekaterina had everyone leaning forward and focused on her approach to enterprise social media. She’s a force to be reckoned with for sure. “E” has continued her advancement and sharing by becoming an author: “Think Like Zuck: The Five Business Secrets of Facebook’s Improbably Brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Today’s post is like a virtual reunion with two people I have known in the search marketing industry for a long time that are also authors: Vanessa Fox formerly of Google wrote Marketing in the Age of Google, and Mel Carson formerly of Microsoft has co-authored a new book, Pioneers of Digital.

When writing this book about success stories from leaders in advertising, marketing, search and social media, Mel asked me for a quote about Vanessa’s contributions to the search marketing world. I easily obliged. I’ve had a chance to read through a preview copy of Pioneers of Digital and there are an impressive mix of lessons to be learned within. Rather than doing a regular book review, Mel agreed to share an excerpt from the book so I can share it with you.

On occasion we connect with smart people and ideas we think are worth sharing as a guest post here at Online Marketing Blog. Today, I’d like to introduce you to Heidi Ambler, Director of Social Business at IBM.  Heidi has over 20 years with IBM where she leads a team responsible for their enterprise social software business.

In a digital world where technology and  consumer behaviors are changing rapidly, Heidi makes the argument for better alignment between IT and marketing as a path towards greater success and competitive advantage.

According to recent survey results, 60 percent of marketers cite a lack of alignment with the company’s IT department as the biggest obstacle to reaching today’s digitally empowered and social savvy consumers.

[We're trying something different and including this sponsored post from Oli Gardner, Co-Founder & Creative director at Unbounce, a sponsor for the Minneapolis launch of Lee's book Optimize.  You may know Unbounce as that clever service that gives marketers and marketing agencies an easy way to create, publish and test landing pages without IT or developers.]

As a digital marketing agency that does a substantial amount of consulting in the B2B Marketing space, we’ve paid a lot of attention to the topic here at Online Marketing Blog with tips posts and the recent B2B Marketing Innovation eBook we put together in partnership with MarketingProfs.

My friend of many years, John Jantsch is a marketing consultant, speaker and author known the world over for offering practical marketing advice to tens of thousands of small businesses. This week he’s launching a new book, The Commitment Engine – Making Work Worth It and I asked if he’d share a peek for our readers here at TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog. 

With growing popularity, more companies are becoming aware of the importance and impact of content marketing. But many are unsure how to create content that customers actually want and that can have an impact on the business bottom line. In this guest post, John Jantsch offers practical advice that any business, small or large, can implement today for less mechanical and more meaningful content creation.

Photo Credit: Geoff Livingston - Flickr

[Note from Lee: The growing trend towards integration of marketing and communications disciplines has brought a tremendous demand for guidance and insight. I'm happy to say that my friends Geoff Livingston and Gini Dietrich have published a new book about just that. We rarely publish guest posts but the message of integration and optimization in this book blend perfectly with our core messages here.]

One of our favorite books to come out in a long while is Lee’s Optimize. We love the three discipline approach — content, search and social — to online marketing. Without integration across all marketing disciplines we fail to understand the customer experience.

We just published Marketing in the Round on a overarching integrated communications, traditional and new, and see online as the backbone for all marketing today, on or offline.

With SES Chicago over, we’re picking up our Wednesday guest posts again. This time with my friend David Meerman Scott, best-selling author of numerous books including The New Rules of Marketing & PR, Real-Time Marketing & PR and a new book called Newsjacking (Wiley) created specifically for the Amazon Kindle. David is someone who has always been a forward thinker and a few steps ahead of most marketers. This post gives some perspective and an example of newsjacking that opportunistic marketers are increasingly tapping in to due to availability of trend, buzz and social stream monitoring tools. 

With Google now indexing new content in real-time, there is a tremendous opportunity for clever people to rank at the top of the results for emerging keywords. One great way to accomplish this is to engage in what I call newsjacking.

[Note from Lee: Our Wednesday Guest Post Series from digital marketing experts has been very well received and today's post from my friend Heidi Cohen will not disappoint. Heidi is a long time and very popular Columnist at ClickZ and Content Marketing Institute, Adjunct Professor at NYU, an active marketing blogger as well as President of  Riverside Marketing Strategies. When it comes to internet marketing Heidi's  perspective resonates well with me and I appreciate her insight into the intersection of direct marketing, digital, content and social media a great deal.]

Does your content jump off the page and grab readers by the collar to get their attention? While no one sets out to create content marketing that’s a snooze, sometimes it misses its intended objective. If this is the case, you have to pump life into your content marketing to make it useful for your target audience.

[Note from Lee: The next in our series of Wednesday guest posts comes from no less than the Godfather of Content Marketing, Joe Pulizzi. I’ve known Joe since he published his first book, Get Content Get Customers, and have been amazed at his relentless efforts to lead the charge towards better marketing.

What I like best about Joe is that he’s a “Walk the Talk” content marketer with Junta42, Chief Content Officer magazine and the largest annual content marketing event, Content Marketing World. Joe is also co-author of Get Content Get Customers and Managing Content Marketing plus he writes a content marketing blog.  For this post Joe focuses on what businesses need to know about smarter planning for content marketing into the coming year.

[Note from Lee: Social Business is everybody's business when it comes to modern internet marketing. IBM's social business efforts are really at the forefront of this trend. Ben Edwards is the VP of Digital Strategy at IBM and leads the strategy, design and development of IBM's marketing and communications in the digital realm. Ben joins us today to share his insights into the journey of not only embracing the social web for external marketing, but to adapt and adopt social media tools internally to empower socialized marketing.]

Companies of all shapes and sizes, in every industry, are increasingly adopting social media strategies and technologies for their marketing efforts, using Facebook to reach out to customers or YouTube to demonstrate new products. These are good first steps, but there is so much more that “social” has to offer. The era of social business is here and it is becoming clear just how transformative it will be for B2B marketers.