Online Marketing Blog

Several of the TopRank Online Marketing team attended a Social Media Breakfast last Friday, along with about 150 local business leaders, code warriors, internet marketers, agency peeps and social media enthusiasts, to hear a presentation by David Meerman Scott, author of “The New Rules of Marketing & PR”. TopRank CEO Lee Odden posted a short write up and video interview with Scott as well.

David started his presentation with an impromptu survey, asking the audience to respond with a show of hands to questions like:

• How many of you have been to a tradeshow as a participant, not an exhibitor, in the last year? (very few people in the room raised their hands)
• How many of you have responded to a Direct Marketing piece in the last year? (very few people in the room raised their hands)

This morning the 8th social media breakfast meeting (started by Rick Mahn) was held at the Deluxe HQ here in the Twin Cities.  In a very short time this meeting of a few social media enthusiasts at a coffee house has grown to over 125 people hosted by the likes of  Best Buy and PartnerUp, a company acquired by Deluxe.

The main speaker at this morning’s event was David Meerman Scott, popular author of several books including, “New Rules of Marketing and PR” which I recently recommended to a crowd of about 400 at the PRSA International conference earlier this week.  Graeme Thickins was able to convince Scott to stay an extra day for the smbmsp event from another speaking engagement, much to the benefit of the MSP social media crowd.

Thank you to Jonathan Dingman, who writes the Google News, Inside blog, for attending the DPAC II conference in New York this week and blogging the session, “SEO: Is Finding Your Inner DAO the Answer?” which included: Ron Belanger, Vice President, Agency Development at Yahoo!, Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner at Beyond Ink, Jolina Pettice, Senior Account Manager at TopRank Online Marketing and Noah Elkin, Vice President of Corporate Strategy at Steak as moderator.

Digital Asset Optimization (DAO) is something that any publisher, of any kind, ought to be doing on a regular basis. Alright, so if you should be doing it, what exactly is DAO?

DAO is, essentially, optimizing what you own as an asset, digitally. It’s pretty straight forward. Whether it’s a video, an image, presentation, or a podcast, as a few examples, those are your digital assets. A video is an asset which should be optimized for maximum exposure.

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.