Online Marketing Blog

While in the speaker ready room this morning, I had the chance to sit down with Michael Gray and Bryan Eisenberg for a quick discussion about social media marketing and the changes with the influence “friends” have on social news sites like Digg.

Does reducing the weight of votes from “friends” take away from the reason people engage with social media sites? Find out in the video:

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Our first video from Search Engine Strategies San Jose is with Dan Perry of Cars.com who talks about the value of attending search marketing conferences for in-house SEMs. He also promotes the SEMPO in-house search marketing event this evening where he’s the MC.

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Spotlight on Search: Interview with Mike Grehan

Photo credit: webmoxy

One of the most popular categories of content we publish at Online Marketing Blog is the interviews. Recently, we ran a poll asking OMB readers for suggestions on people we should interview in anticipation of SES San Jose. There were some great suggestions and I’ve just started contacting a few folks as well as their mega company PR depts for pre-approval.

A book author, popular columnist at ClickZ, sought after public speaker and man about town, Mike recently joined the Bruce Clay organization as VP International Business Development and even more recently, was named the chairperson for the 2008 Search Engine Strategies conference in London.

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Our plan is to bring multiple TopRank team members to SES San Jose next month and each will be blogging different sessions. This will free me up significantly to do video interviews, take photos and other more creative conference coverage. Everything will be posted here at Online Marketing Blog so be sure to tune in August 20-23rd if you’re unable to attend SES San Jose.

So, my question to you dear Online Marketing Blog readers, is what search marketers would you like to see text and/or video interviews with? What are the top 2-3 questions you’d like asked?

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Here is a collection of short video interviews taken during day one of the DM Days conference in New York. The Direct Marketing Association has a variety of special interest groups called “councils”. One of them is focused on search marketing and appropriately named, the Search Engine Marketing Council, or SEMC.

I serve on the operating committee of that organization as does Heather Lloyd Martin of SuccessWorks, Mike Moran of IBM, Andy Wetzler of More Visibility, Jeanette Kocsis of Harte Hanks, Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit, Doug Garfinkel from Epsilon, Detlev Johnson of Position Technologies and Lisa Merizio Smith from the DMA.

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David Brown and Brian Mark invited me to do an interview with them for the Beginning SEO Podcast recently. The interview was sliced and diced a bit according to the questions and have been posted over the course of this week. Here are the posts so far:

• Industry Conferences
• Does Page Rank Matter and Why Build Widgets?
• Who Can Really Benefit from SEO Consulting?
• Analytics Tools for Blogs
• NoFollow
• What’s One Thing New Site Owners Should Do?
• Competition

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Incisive Media announced this morning that Kevin Ryan, formerly CEO of Kinetic Results and one of my favorite columnists at iMedia Connection, will be joining Incisive Media as VP, Global Content Director, Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Strategies. Kevin also made a post on the Search Engine Watch blog.

In essence, Kevin is filling the giant shoes that Danny Sullivan left and that’s a very, very tall order. Danny has made nothing less than groundbreaking progress in a very short amount of time with Search Engine Land and from all accounts, the SMX conference.

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We are all about the social media on this blog and our coverage of conferences with interviews, photos and below a few videos.

Here is the programming chair of the conference, David Berkowitz talking about how this is the biggest Search Insider Summit yet as well as the kinds of topics that drove the programming ranging from innovative search technology to click fraud to mobile marketing.

I also caught up with Cam Balzer of GoogleClick Performics oops, I mean DoubleClick Performics. As tempting as it was to ask Cam about Google’s acquisition of a company that provides natural and paid search marketing services, I kept it PC.

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I was able to do just two video interviews before my camera got dropped in a glass of water. I’ll have to explain that in another post.

Here’s Michael Gray, aka graywolf, just before our session with Todd Mailicoat and Neil Patel on “Social Bookmark Strategies” where he talks about tips for conference goers. Coverage of that session can be found at The Lisa, Search Engine Roundtable, Small Business SEM and CenterNetworks.

I also caught up with Mona Elesseily from Page Zero where she talks about Yahoo Panama pros and cons. Also two new Panama enhancements: Quality based bidding and being able to opt out of Yahoo’s content network.

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Today I’m doing an online radio interview over at RSS Ray on social media and search engine optimization. Our discussion will cover fundamentals of social media and how businesses, small and large, might use such tactics as part of their online marketing mix. We’ll also discuss blog marketing and press release optimization.

The kind of social media optimization and marketing that gets the most play these days is hitting the home page of digg or getting tons of traffic from Stumbleupon, del.icio.us, reddit, etc. Many of the SMO/SMM campaigns we run achieve these kinds of results, but it’s not the end goal. If you’re familiar with the services we provide at TopRank, you’ll know we take a holistic approach to search marketing and view things like social media on a longer term basis.

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Todd And (Andrlik) published a list of 150 marketing blogs and I’m happy to note that Online Marketing Blog is ranked at #5 between Brian Clark’s most excellent Copyblogger and Church of the Customer’s Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba. With Seth Godin at #2 and Steve Rubel’s Micropersuasion at #17 I’m pretty amazed. This is a dynamic list and you can read about the ranking criteria here.

A few people did interviews with me that were published this week. One with Michael Gray as part of his awesome collection of local search marketing interviews, “Local Search Tips, Tricks and Secrets“.

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On Jeremy’s show tonight over at WebmasterRadio.FM, “Net Income”, he and Andrea interview Brian Axe, AdSense Product Manager. It’s a great show that starts out with quite a few clarifications of Google AdSense changes in terms of service ranging from not displaying images next to ads to the review and reinclusion process. Too many for me to list here, so be sure to listen to the full podcast.

A few notes from Jeremey:

• Google is not against arbitrageurs but rather respect it as a business model.
• Confirmation that not only is YouTube doing revenue sharing but it will be apart of AdSense.

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