Online Marketing Blog

When you think of successful consumer brands in the social media space, names like Dell, Zappos and Pepsi come to mind. Another is Ford. Last year the Ford Fiesta movement generated a tremendous amount of awareness (and pre-orders) for a vehicle that wasn’t available to the public yet. (Great summary on Jeff Bullas’s blog) At the same time, it inspired a community to engage, create content and continue discussions about the Fiesta with over 7 million video views.

While in Dearborn, I visited The Henry Ford Museum, The Rouge Truck Factory and had an invitation to visit Ford’s Head of Social Media, Scott Monty at Ford’s World Headquarters where we did a short interview. We’ve talked to Scott and live blogged about Ford social media efforts in the past, but in this interview he talked about the place for social media with Ford’s new product lines, local social media work with Chapter 2 of the Fiesta movement and advice for companies on empowering communities.

(CC) Randy Stewart, blog.stewtopia.com

Vanessa Fox works as Entrepreneur-in-residence with Ignition Partners but is especially well known in the Search Marketing world because of her past work as Google’s search engine strategy spokesperson and creator of Google Webmaster Central. I’ve interviewed Vanessa several times on video in the past here, here, here and podcast here but nothing as substantial as what you’re about to read.

Vanessa has a new book coming out called “Marketing in the Age of Google“, which I’ve had the opportunity to preview and it reminds me of how important it is to draw attention to her exceptional insight. My kudos for the book:

eMarketer is one of the most cited resources for internet marketing trends, so when I received some tasty predictions for 2010, I thought they were too useful to keep to myself. These insights include future monetization models, the effect of transparency on advertising, social and search, mobile, social commerce, public relations, social advertising, Twitter, video and mom/pop internet usage. Enjoy!

Hybrid Plans that Combine Subscription Fees with Advertising
More marketers will increasingly embrace online video advertising, supported by the twin boom of video streams and video ad networks.

Further support for video ad growth will come from sites that offer a deeper catalog of professional video content—such as whole seasons of TV shows (both present and past), exclusives of entire sports events and other premium content. Such offerings will attract larger audiences. But in order to maintain the costs of deep-catalog video, the sites and their studio and TV network partners will need to introduce hybrid plans that combine subscription fees with advertising.

The next in our series of interviews with Minnesota based, social media savvy marketing and public relations professionals is Greg Swan, Digital Account Group Manager at Weber Shandwick Digital.

Greg manages and executes interactive public relations programs for Weber Shandwick clients across consumer, technology and public affairs industries. As the social media team lead, Greg oversees the U.S. Army’s social media efforts, including pioneering instant messaging and mobile programs and the launch of the Army’s first-ever Soldier blog. Greg has helped clients, such as The Coca-Cola Company, Snickers, Verizon and Chevrolet, take the big leap into the social mediasphere to influence consumer behavior online and create authentic engagement.

You’re in an elevator going to the 45th floor (NYC) and you’re asked what you do. What’s your reply? If that happened in any other city, would your answer be different?

Online Marketing Blog continues sharing Minnesota-based social media expertise with the next installment of our MiNterview series.

Connie Bensen is a key voice amongst online Community Managers. Her blog is recognized as a leading resource for cultivating online communities and providing best practices for this emerging role. She also provides mentorship and inspires individuals to explore this new career. Connie is the Director of Social Media and Community Strategy at Alterian, which provides leading marketing products for the enterprise.

Please describe your personal evolution in becoming a community strategist and explain what that role is?

Dan Zarrella, a self-described “social media marketing & viral marketing scientist” lives at the intersection of social marketing and web development.  He’s known for conducting experiments with Twitter, compiling data behind the social web, creating interesting web applications and blogging.  And now, he has released a book.

Dan’s book is called “The Social Media Marketing Book” and is aimed at helping those who are new to social media marketing learn the basics.  The content is well-written and outlined into clear sections.  Those just getting into digital marketing will find it to be a good starting point in their journey.

To learn more about the topics discussed in the book, Dan was nice enough to answer a few questions for Online Marketing Blog readers.

Moderated by Simon Heseltine, Senior Marketing Manager for AOL with panelists including: Eli Goodman from comScore, Justin Merickel of Efficient Frontier and Doug McMillen from Microsoft Advertising.

First up is Justin Merickel from Efficient Frontier, which runs about $180m in PPC through their platform. Justin talked about two main trends:

The changing SERP. Data comes front and center to the results page
Justin shows a SERP page for “bottled water” where the top PPC ads display images of bottled water. Not sure of it’s impact. However, if you’re not leveraging Google features (like images in PPC or local listings) you’re missing out on significant visibility.

Advertisers need to think about how to get their products and services into the new multimedia search results page.

Minnesota is home to a tremendous amount of digital marketing and social media talent. The local Social Media Breakfast events are notorious for “selling out” in minutes and attracting upwards of 300 – 350 attendees.  There are over 1,200 members of the group’s SMBMSP social network. The founder of this group is none other than Rick Mahn.

Officially, Rick is the founder of Social Media Breakfast – Minneapolis/St. Paul, Social Media Strategist for Land O’Lakes, blogger, podcaster and author for Personal Branding Magazine. As part of Online Marketing Blog’s continuing effort to showcase social media movers and shakers in the Midwest, I connected with Rick for the following interview.

You’re a technology guy that now works as a Social Media Strategist at Land O’ Lakes. Can you tell us about the journey to that position?

TopRank has been publishing the BIGLIST of SEM blogs since Jan 2007. We’ve created other BIGLISTs of resources as well including the BIGLIST of 100+ Search Marketing Resources posted in October.  The categories for that list of SEM resources includes books, conferences, newsletters, blogs, forums and many more. We decided it would be interesting to see which resources from that list our readers felt were the best.

In the past 3 plus years TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog has run over 50 polls: Everything from Best Social Media Podcast to best Keyword Research Tool to Best City for a Search Marketing Conference. In that longstanding tradition, we recently conducted a poll focused on Best Paid Subscription SEM Communities. We defined the category as membership and subscription model sites that include forums,  tools and/or training or content focused on search marketing. After asking for additional suggestions in the BIGLIST 100+ SEM Resources post, no additional sites besides SEOmoz, SEOBook, WebmasterWorld Supporters and SEO Dojo were suggested.

“A person will work for a living, but they’ll die for recognition.”  I’m not sure who I heard that from first, but it’s just as true for agencies and companies as it is for individuals.  One common way to recognize excellence is through awards. There are awards for just about every industry from software to design to public relations. What about search marketing?

Awards are like lists. They’re valuable in part, because they include, but mostly exclude. The motivation for organizations to run award programs varies greatly from being a source of revenue from entry and sponsorship fees to seeking to advance the industry by recognizing it’s finest to something in between. Many SEM awards focus on paid search and attract large agencies in that space. Others offer a variety of categories.

Remember the Grinch? “Noise, noise, noise!”  Many marketers feel the same way about the plethora of search marketing blogs. We’ve been managing a list of over 500 search marketing blogs (BIGLIST) for the past 3+ years and know a little something about the category. SEO blog reviews are helpful, but some people want a qualifyer when deciding what’s noise and what’s worth checking out. That’s why we’ve assembled a top SEM blogs list ranked by RSS Subscribers. The first list is here.

Below is an updated list of 26 top Search Marketing Blogs with Google Webmaster Central dominating followed by upward movement by SEOMoz and Search Engine Land.  Online Marketing Blog, Marketing Pilgrim and Graywolf’s Blog have seen big increases as well. We’ve also added several blogs that made the 2,000 subscribers cutoff. Enjoy:

Amid all the speculation this week, it’s official that Microsoft and Yahoo! have made a deal:  ”Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.”

The Search Marketing Industry news sites have covered this completely and a joint web site has been setup my Microsoft Yahoo. I also took a little time to listen in on the investor relations conference call with Steve Ballmer of Microsoft and Carol Bartz of Yahoo! and live tweeted some of the Q and A:

MSFT YAHOO conf call Q: Why no display ad component to the deal? Bartz: To keep the deal straightforward as possible