Online Marketing Blog

One of the fun things we get to do on Online Marketing Blog is interview interesting people we meet and get to know by being involved with the industry. This interview is with Rebecca Lieb, Editorial Consultant to ClickZ and former Editor for the past 7 years. In addition to previously offering sage advice on getting more out of marketing conferences here on OMB, Rebecca works as a consultant, is writing a book on search marketing and is often retained as a speaker for industry events.

In this interview Rebecca shares tips on selecting interactive marketing vendors, shares her insights into upcoming marketing strategies and talks briefly about her upcoming book on search marketing as well as the MIMA Summit here in Minneapolis where she’s the keynote speaker.

Your journalism and editorial background has taken you many places topically and geographically. What are some of your favorites?

There’s already a ton of buzz on this but it’s potentially a big change for the web as John Battelle called it, “This Is Web OS, Make No Mistake“. Google’s release plans (in comic book form) for their new web browser were first posted by Phillip Lenssen with follow up by Google Blog and many others including Google’s Matt Cutts.

Outside of a better browser that is to run faster and more securely, the search engine marketing side of this story is that Microsoft’s new browser MISE 8 is to have functionality capable of blocking text ads, such as Google ads.

According to a story on Google Chrome and implications related to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer by AP:

Google is the Wizard of search marketing’s Oz. The all-powerful being around which our universe orbits, and the all-knowing guru to whom we turn for website advice. While Google, like the wizard, may guard its own secrets, it lifts the curtain and lets us look at the inner workings of websites. In this session, two of Google’s own, Avinash Kaushik and Tom Leung, gave us an insider’s tour of changes in Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer, two tools of incredible value to search marketers and webmasters alike.

Google Analytics

Avinash, author of Analytics Evangelist, outlined a few key uses of Google Analytics that can make a huge impact on the success of your website.

Bounce Rate

Satya Nadella is the SVP of the Search, Portal & Advertising Platform Group for Microsoft. In this session, Satya discussed the evolution of search and outlined strategies to help prepare for success. Specifically, he brings light to how we think about the evolution of search and the unique assets that will take it to the next level.

The evolution of search:

We can categorize the history of search by looking at 3 dimensions:
1. Core technology of search
2. Business model
3. Expectations

The core technology of SEO is the magic of keyword base search. The business model continues to shift with CPC driving efficiency as we continue to measure quantitative results and ROI.

Online video has seen a surge in popularity over the past few years. What started out as simple user-generated content (UGC) has become a medium for everyone from the rich and famous to the video blogger next door. It is no surprise that marketers were quick to recognize this trend and capitalize on the success of viral videos in order to reach out to consumers. Yet online video marketing is almost as varied and complex as the ranting of LonelyGirl15. This session examines these complexities and how they relate to marketers. Moderator Rebecca Lieb, contributing editor at ClickZ, led a panel of three Online Video gurus as they discussed the viral video phenomenon, its causes and its future.

Many business owners and marketers can agree the current economy is having an impact on marketing plans, making every dollar and click matter. As part of the TopRank Account Team, I am excited to learn a new perspective to help clients increase conversions for their marketing campaigns.

Bryan Eisenberg, Co-founder of Future Now Inc., along with Brett Crosby, Group Manager for Google, shared insight to identify missed conversations and how to improve your landing page and increase PPC ROI.

Pay Per Conversion, as explained by Eisenberg, is a shift from our Pay Per Click mentality. No longer focusing our efforts to just get the click, but rather transforming those clicks into a business opportunity or conversion.

Where is search headed?  We’ve heard of semantic search for a few years now, but what’s going on with it?  Each major search engine is taking the next steps but some are closer than others.  

Actually, what we are beginning to see is semantic and universal search merging together.  Yahoo, Ask, Powerset and Hakia showed screenshots that included images, videos, ratings and other media.  Are universal and semantic search the same?  Possibly. 

– Sorry for the bad pictures. I haven’t got down the art of taking pictures of PowerPoint slides.

Last year at SES San Jose 2007, universal and blended search was the new thing going on in the background, and wasn’t really talked about in the sessions yet. Over the past 12 months, Google’s universal search and blended search has exploded across the internet. Everyone wants to know how to dominate the rankings on Page 1.”Let’s get pictures, video, local listings AND text results for my company all on one page!” Okay, no problem Our expert panel in the first session of SES San Jose 2008 takes us through the basics and the future of blended search.

With so many “Web 2.0″ technologies coming in to play with web design and online application development, the effect on the search engines’ ability to find, crawl and index content becomes an issue. As such, this session moderated by Kevin Ryan included deep dive advice from Chris “Silver” Smith, Lead Strategist from Netconcepts and Ambles Kwok, a Senior Engineering Manager from Yahoo Canada.

Chris Silver Smith was first up and gave examples of Web 2.0 technologies including the idea of folksonomy and tagging by showing a tag cloud from Delicious. It’s an alternative method of navigation based on user defined keywords assigned to a piece of content.

Today’s Orion panel at SES NY really took a different spin on the topic of universal search. I went in expecting to hear the same info  about what it is, how info is gathered and how to optimize for universal search. Which, if you are interested, can be read about in a previous SES Chicago post regarding universal search.

This session was moderated by Kevin Ryan and Mike Grehan. The session was lively and engaging. Panelists included:
John Battelle from Federated Media, James Lamberti from comScore, Lyndsay Menzies from Big Mouth Media and Jack Menzel from Google.

James led the group by presenting not-seen-before data about universal search from a study comScore recently conducted.

Of the 1.2 billion queries studied, 220 million contained a universal result, categorized as news, video, images etc.

Closing out day 1 at SES New York was a panel discussion on vertical search moderated by Incisive Media’s Kevin Ryan and Rebecca Lieb and featuring panelists Bill Tancer GM Global Research at Hitwise, Jason R. Finger CEO Seamless Web, Paul Forster CEO Indeed, Steven Krein CEO Organized Wisdom.com and Joshua Stylman Managing Partner Reprise Media.

While very important and certainly a hot topic, I felt this session was lacking a certain “umph” to get the audience involved and engaged (myself included).

I have to say I’m a bit surprised as I’m usually partial to SES conference “end of day sessions” for their ability to empower industry folks, like myself, and give me a warm fuzzy feeling about being a part of something special. This ’something special’ feeling is what makes me pick up the phone and try to explain, again, to my relatives what it is that I do for a living.

Google hosted a party last night at SMX West, entitled Google Groove. And groovy, it was.

Andy Beal and other SMXers enjoying the party

Main bar, all in Google Colors

SMXers playing Rockband

SMXers enjoying drinks, notice the colorful Google cups, which people went crazy over

Blinky Google spheres, also very popular

Check out all of the photos at TopRank’s SMX West Flickr set.

            Subscribe to this Feed