Online Marketing Blog

This post is about Congratulations, Convergence and Content.

First off, congrats to Aaron Kahlow on his great news, I’m sure UBM TechWeb will be pleased with OMS, it’s an impressive event with a great following. Speaking of OMS, despite the wimpiest Minnesota Winter in years, February is a fine time to go somewhere warm and luckily, OMS and SES Search & Social Accelerator in San Diego are coming up fast Feb 6-9, 2012.

Online Marketing Summit has grown quickly and the annual event in San Diego boasts an impressive roster of topics, training opportunities and speakers. The conference kicks off with an Online Marketing Bootcamp, then 3 days of OMS sessions on every topic under the Online Marketing sun.

This year was my 5th attending the SES conference in Chicago. While smaller than SES New York or SES San Francisco, the Chicago show serves a significant number of client side marketers, agencies and consultants in the Midwest and according to Incisive Media who run the event, attendance at this year’s SES Chicago was the best ever.

This was the first SES for our new Marketing Manger at TopRank, Ashley Zeckman, who stepped up to the plate and liveblogged the event for us. She did a great job and her posts were well received by Online Marketing Blog readers as well as other online publications that picked up her posts. Below is a summary of her blog posts, an embedded TopRank Online Marketing presentation on Social, SEO & Content Marketing, responses on Twitter and a few of my favorite photos from the event.

As SES Chicago reaches its final sessions the audience is still alert and ready to learn at TopRank CEO Lee Odden’s afternoon presentation on “Content Marketing & Optimization.”  According to Google’s Eric Schmidt, every 2 days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of time to the year 2003.  With so much information being shared what can we do as marketers to make our content easy to spot and easy to consume?

Can Customers Find Your Content?

Content creation is so much more than marketing, it is a way of engaging and enticing potential customers to take action.  Optimized content can make sure that customers interact with your brand.  There are many types of content that companies publish and many different audiences that a company should interact with.  Content creation is one of the most effective form of online marketing, it also happens to be the most difficult.

Proper execution of a local and social media strategy is still a head scratcher for many internet marketers.  The session on “Local + Social: the Future of Promotion” featuring Gregg Stewart and Benu Aggarwal at SES Chicago was a must see to answer several important questions.

A Best Practices Approach with Gregg Stewart

Did you know that roughly 20% of all Google searches have local intent?  When you look at mobile data that number is even higher.  These statistics alone should show us as marketers how important a online local strategy is for improving engagement.

Checking the Box Won’t Work

While website All Facebook says that 96% of small businesses are on Facebook, Mashable.com says that 64% of small businesses think that social media is unnecessary.  Part of what this data tells us that many companies are simply checking the box, but aren’t sure how to properly utilize social media marketing channels.

Wednesday morning’s panel discussion on search, social, and content was flush with information that was easy to digest and provided helpful tips for implementation. The session was moderated by Anne Kennedy from the SES Advisory board and featured speakers:

• Aaron Kahlow, Chairman & Founder, Online Marketing Summit & SES Advisory Board (@omconnect)
• Arnie Kuenn, President, Vertical Measures (@arniek)
• Lee Odden, SES Advisory Board & CEO, TopRank Online Marketing & SES Advisory Board (@leeodden)

Kahlow Presents the What, Why, How, and Who of Search, Social, and Content

Aaron Kahlow focused on some very basic but essential areas that all marketers should focus on when creating a campaign either online or offline. In regards to search, social, and content he had this to share:

Michael DeHaven’s presentation at SES Chicago on “User Generated SEO” started with some actual user generated content from the audience. Before the session DeHaven gave 5 volunteers a bite sized Ghirardelli chocolate bar. In exchange for the treat he asked that each of the volunteers write a review of the chocolate and then share it with the rest of the audience.

What Was the Response?
The chocolate was called everything from waxy, to too sweet, messy, and melt in your mouth goodness. In contrast the packaging created by the Ghirardelli marketers was quite different, “take time to slow down and feel yourself melt with each bite.” As you can see the professional marketers took a much different approach than the consumers.

Mikel Chertudi, Senior Director, Global Media & Demand Marketing at Adobe Systems, presented Tuesday morning’s opening keynote at SES Chicago. The goal of his presentation was to take a deep dive into:

• How the value of what marketers do is often viewed incorrectly
• Mistakes that many marketers are guilty of
• What questions marketers should ask themselves in order to invest marketing dollars appropriately

Changing the Marketing Conversation
Often times, as marketers we talk too tactically

Many marketers today still refer to marketing dollars as “spend”, “budgets”, or “cost centers”. One of the things that Chertudi urges online marketers to do is change the conversation. What does this mean?  Organizations should begin considering marketing costs as an investment and not just a cost. Instead of focusing on the “burn rate” we are urged to focus on determining if our investment is large enough to fuel the growth of the company. This will enable marketing to be properly viewed as a means of growing the organization instead of being perceived as a cost center.

I’m going to be visiting the windy city for SES Chicago this week and have been trying to figure out where to explore if I can find some time while I’m there. I always enjoy a great meal so turning to search engines and social media platforms was an obvious answer for me to find great restaurants.

Understanding how end consumers use search and social to find and discuss your business online is key in creating an effective online marketing strategy.  The more that you study and adapt your strategy to positively impact new customers, the more successful your social media strategy will be.

With over 70 sessions SES Chicago running November 14-18, 2011 is a virtual smorgasbord of information for Marketing and SEO professionals alike.  Many topics will be covered including: PPC, keyword research, SEO, social media, local marketing, mobile marketing, link building, content, optimization, usability, and so much more.  With so many sessions to choose from where should you begin?  Below are a list of ‘must see’ sessions that I will be sure to check out while I’m there.

#1 – Winning! Measuring Social Media Success

While I doubt that Eli Goodman and Tami Dalley will be channelling Charlie Sheen I am still very interested to hear their take on measuring the success of social campaigns.  I would recommend having your social media metrics handy if possible ( I know I will), so that you can apply the speakers instruction on estimating the value of your fans and followers in real time.  Who knows, we may find that we score better than anticipated.

SES San Francisco is coming up fast and when I discovered that Susan Bratton was giving the opening keynote presentation and on a topic that I have been interested in for years, I wanted to make sure we did a pre-conference interview. For backstory, I met Susan the first time at an ad:tech conference in Chicago while she was the conference chair. That was the same conference where I first met Frank Gruber and David Berkowitz so it was a great networking experience. Since then Susan and I have crossed paths a number of times at events like SXSW and online.

Susan is a real pioneer when it comes to Online Marketing and media. She’s the CEO at Personal Life Media and hosted the famous DishyMix podcast since 2005 interviewing numerous digital marketing industry leaders. Besides serving on the board of several technology companies, Susan is the founder of two industry associations, the IAB and the ADM. At SES San Francisco, Susan will be talking about Conversion Triggers and Persuasion Strategies for Digital Marketers.

The power of persuasion and the role it takes within online content marketing is really a key aspect of online marketing and something that has had a lot more play in the advertising world than SEO or PPC. In this excerpt of our recent interview, Susan gives a preview of her SES keynote and talks about how she’s learned from experience the value and best practices of “getting into the psyche of your customer” to improve online marketing results.

Certainly one of the best cities in the U.S. for a conference is San Francisco and in a little over 2 weeks the famous ClickZ Connected Marketing Week returns with 5 days of deep dive online marketing education, networking and knowing SEOs, plenty of fun.  A big part of the week is the SES San Francisco conference.

I’ve been attending SES conferences since 2005 and while both the online marketing industry and the SES conference have changed quite a bit, that change has spurred continuous innovation to the benefit of attendees, sponsors and speakers. You’ll find many sessions at 90 minutes instead of 45 or 60, so speakers can really get in-depth with their topics. There are also a number of sessions completely programmed by specific advisory board members, an approach that is new to this SES. To Win a Free Pass to SES San Francisco, Read on!

The “Smart Mobile Marketing” session was a panel discussion, moderated by TopRank CEO Lee Odden. To begin the discussion, Lee opened with a question for the room of 80+, “How many people in the room have developed a mobile version of a site?” 3-4 hands slowly raise. And with that, the stage is set: There is a lot of learning to do surrounding mobile marketing.

The session panel consisted of 2 leaders and veterans of the mobile marketing industry, Deborah Hall and Michael J. O’Farrell.

Deborah Hall

Hall founded web2mobile 3 years ago, frustrated with the user experience when trying to access a site via a smart phone. One of the greatest challenges she noticed was the upload speed, or lack thereof, of sites.