Online Marketing Blog

As much has been publicized about brands using social media to better connect with their customers, extend brand reach and increase sales, there’s still a high demand for practical insider advice and case studies.

To preview the upcoming BlogWell event Oct 28 on How Big Companies Use Social Media, Online Marketing Blog brings you this first ever group interview with 4 speakers from some of America’s best known brands to share their insights on defining, justifying, testing, outsourcing, measuring and continuing to learn about social media for the enterprise.

Tim Collins, Senior Vice President of Experiential Marketing, is a eleven year veteran of Wells Fargo.  He manages sponsorships, events, virtual worlds, social media, etc.  He also has “Only at Wells Fargo” responsibilities including History Museums and an active Stage Coach Appearance program.

Blogs are undoubtedly a big part of the social media world and that’s why the topic of social media was approached at Blog World Expo from many different angles from monetization and marketing to social media and blogs in corporate public relations.

This interview with Ford’s head of social media, Scott Monty touches on a few things large companies (or any size company for that matter) should be thinking about when evaluating social media as a communications, marketing and community building channel.

You can read plenty more of Scott Monty’s insights on his blog, The Social Media Marketing Blog and on Twitter at @scottmonty.

Blog World Expo in Las Vegas this weekend is by far the most social, friendly and generally “buzzing” conference I’ve been to in a while. Bloggers are opinionated, natural networkers. Many bloggers might not be as open in other situations, but here amongst several thousand other like-minded individuals, people open up. Plus, it’s Vegas baby.

Here are a few of my favorite photos so far from Blog World Expo:

The audience during the “Blogs and PR” panel I was volunteered to join at the last minute. Fun!

Blog World Expo Founder Rick Calvert and Programming Chair Dave Taylor

Beautiful people blog too: Valerie Combs and Brian Solis

Chris Brogan aka ‘Jones Soda Famous” and moi

Woot Woot for the Blog Team! Geoff Livingston and David Berkowitz

There’s a pretty big agenda in store for the upcoming Digital Publishing and Advertising Conference in New York also known as “DPAC II“.  Topics, people and conversations around media, marketing, publishing, and technology will all come together to help the digital content and advertising industry understand what’s next and what’s right for them. Anyone in the digital media industry, especially on the East coast would do well to attend this event.

Thanks to the organizers at DPAC II, Online Marketing Blog has 2 free passes to give away ($695 each value) to our readers.  Over the past two weeks we’ve watched comments made on our weekly BIGLIST Updates of SEO blog reviews where the opportunity to win a free pass to DPAC II was announced.

I wonder how many people reading this blog right now work for a company that:

1) Doesn’t have a blog
2) Has a blog but it’s on life support
3) Is considering blogging but not sure where to start
4) Has been blogging for a while, but wants to make it to the next level

Well, I’ve got some really good news.  On the heels of the OMMA New York conference Sept 18-19 comes Blog World Expo in Las Vegas Sept 20-21. What better place to have the world’s largest conference dedicated to blogging than the city that never sleeps because most of the active bloggers I know don’t sleep either.

TopRank has been asked to speak at the upcoming OMMA Global conference in New York on the topic of, “Digital Asset Optimization.” While TopRank has helped pioneer and promote DAO as a holistic content optimization model for improving online lead generation and sales, this session is geared specifically towards online publishers.

Online publishers are in a prime position to take advantage of advanced search engine optimization strategies like digital asset optimization because creating, publishing and promoting various media formats are what makes them unique compared to corporate or ecommerce web sites.

OMMA Global New York, “Platform Wars” will be held at the Marriott New York Marquis September 18-19, 2008 and features a prestigious line up of speakers including:

I promised myself I’d slow down on conference speaking last year and while I’ve turned down more offers this year than ever before, (and been turned down myself the one time I formally pitched) some really great opportunities have popped up.

Here are the upcoming conferences I’ll be speaking at for pretty much the rest of this year not including private company engagements:

Aug 20, 2008 – Search Engine Strategies, San Jose
Presenting: “SEO Through Blogs and Feeds”
Presenting: “News Search SEO”
Media Sponsor
TopRank is sending 4 bloggers to cover the event (Thomas, Jessica, Dana and Ashley)

Sep 18, 2008 – OMMA Global, NYC
Panel: “Digital Asset Optimization”

Sep 20, 2008 – Blog World Expo, Las Vegas
Moderating a Panel: “SEO and New Media”
Media Sponsor

The initial submissions of session suggestions for the Interactive portion of SXSW that made the first cut have been published. Now it’s up to the voting public to decide which sessions make it next. I’ve heard a bit of feedback from last year’s attendees on the quality of content in the search engine optimization sessions, so it will be nice to see what makes it this year. Tony Adam from Yahoo submitted a proposal, “SEO for Startups” and now it’s up for votes.

The panel looks pretty good with: Todd Friesen a.k.a. Oilman VP at Visible Technologies; Rebecca Kelley, Internet Marketing Consultant from SEOmoz; Carolyn Shelby SEO Consultant and Host of SEO101; Tony Adam, a SEO Manager for Yahoo! and myself.

Innovation, creative problem solving and passionate interest in the subject matter are a big part of successful internet and social marketing – the topics of prime interest to readers of Online Marketing Blog. Those same characteristics apply to organizations and individuals working to make strategic business and marketing changes for the future.

In particular, these values are reflected in the upcoming PUSH 2008 conference in Minneapolis June 15-17. In the very busy run up to the conference, PUSH founder Cecily Sommers took the time to answer a few questions about PUSH and The Fertile Delta event.

My first post from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco is the second half of “Free Traffic: SEO/SMO 101 (Search Engine & Social Media Optimization) with Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts and Muhammad Saleem of Advantage Consulting Services. Unfortunately, I missed the SEO portion and gauging by the crowd around Stephan, it went quite well.

Muhammad Saleem’s portion of the presentation focuses on Social Media Optimization and Marketing 101. I’ve not met Mahammaed in person before and he’s sporting a very cool goatee with a waxed moustache.

Saleem’s presentation focuses on 4 aspects of social media:

• Blogs
• Social News sites
• Social Networks
• Online Video

Many other tools don’t have that big of an impact/conversionrate for the “average” company.

[Note from Lee: Please join me in welcoming Jessica Cameron-Ruud as a contributor to Online Marketing Blog. Jessica works as an Account Coordinator with TopRank's Online Marketing clients]

Over the past few months, MCAD and MIMA have hosted a series of events here in Minneapolis entitled ‘Conversations About The Future of Advertising’ (CATFOA). The most recent of which featured Joseph Jaffe, author of the new book “Join the Conversation”, who discussed conversational marketing as the next step for companies to connect with their customers.

A conversation is no longer defined as a sole dialog between two people, but as Jaffe explained, conversations are being held online between two or more sides including business to business, business to consumer, and even consumer to consumer. The conversation can be positive, negative or indifferent.

One of the most effective online marketing services M&O/TopRank implements for clients in addition to SEO and public relations is email marketing. Within our direct and email marketing practice there are several, very talented people responsible for this success, one of which is M&O co-founder, Julie Brue.

Whether it be list development, landing page QA or email analytics, Julie is an excellent campaign manager and client advocate. Below is an article Julie has been so kind to contribute covering some of the “whys” and high level “how to’s” of implementing a successful email marketing program.

In today’s ever changing and evolving world of blogs, IM, social networks and consumer disdain towards traditional advertising, it is a wonder how any marketing message reaches its intended audience. After all, each marketing message distributed is competing for the attention of its recipient with a multitude of other communication vehicles every second of the day.