Online Marketing Blog

In an online world that increasingly values the 140 character message, keeping campaigns, strategies and tactics short and sweet is the best approach for engaging audiences. To celebrate the succinct, we’ve created the following search marketing Haikus for your weekend reading pleasure. Enjoy!

[Note from Lee: I edited some of these so any of these that are bad would be my fault. The good Haikus are all Dana and Ashley.]

Search Engine Optimization

Social Media

Blog Marketing

Online PR

Email Marketing

Feel free to share your own Haiku or any other search-inspired poetry, and keep the creative juices flowing!

[Photo credits go to: shapeshift, TahoeSunsets, Juliana S. ]

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Companies world-wide are looking for more creative, high impact and accountable marketing.  To find out how marketers were allocating their marketing efforts, we ran a poll of our 18,000 Online Marketing Blog subscribers to get a handle on what the top digital marketing tactics would be in 2009.

Poll respondents cast 1559 votes for their 3 top digital marketing tactics (out of 45) for 2009 with Blogging, Twitter and Search Engine Optimization topping the list. Out of the top 10 tactics, 6 fell into the category of Social Media Marketing.

Companies that don’t have a Social Media Strategy or Roadmap in place now, will most likely fall behind by Q3 or Q4 of this year. I can think of few things more expensive than than having to play catchup, especially in the social media category. You can’t “buy” relationships on the social web.

The media relations landscape has changed as traditional publications have downsized, re-focused online or been eliminated altogether.

Fundamentally, Public Relations serves two groups:  The companies that pay for representation and the journalists, analysts, reporters and increasingly, bloggers, that rely on PR professionals as a source of news content.

Ad dollars shifting online combined with changes in consumer information discovery, consumption and sharing habits via the social web present both challenges and opportunities for PR agencies to deliver more value to their clients. That value can be provided through integration of SEO and social media with news content.

In a 2008 Journalists Use of Search Survey by TopRank, 91% of respondents reported using standard search engines to perform activities such as research companies, past media coverage and subject matter experts.  In the same study, 64% reported using social networks, 55% use blogs and 50% use Wikis as social media tools.

Despite company marketing budgets on hold or in a state of ambiguity, businesses are scrambling over social media, trying to figure out how to boost sales and keep the customers they have.  SEO is an online marketing tactic that’s been tried and true for well over 10 years and is still earning its stripes in the marketing mix.  

On their own, SEO and social media efforts offer companies attractive opportunities for reaching new customers, which is how many marketers implement them.

When you look at shifts in consumer information discovery, consumption and sharing, there’s no arguing with the intersection of search and the social web.  Searchers expect to not only find what they’re looking for on search engines, but to interact with the results, whether it’s through commenting, voting or sharing. As a result, social media affects SEO in numerous ways, creating opportunities for marketers.

Review of the 2009 Social Media Marketing & PR Benchmark Guide from Marketingsherpa

A new report on social media has been released from Marketingsherpa with Senior Analyst, Sergio Balegno, as lead author.  Over 1,800 marketing and PR professionals responded to the survey resulting in one of the most complete, data supported guides on social media published to date.

There are numerous books, seminars and “experts” touting social media advice for marketing and PR professionals. Much of that advice is based on experience and even more is based on wishful thinking. This report takes a structured approach to data collection and analysis offering readers the advantage of understanding what works and what doesn’t when it comes to social media marketing and PR.

Anyone actively involved (in a productive way) with social media as a marketing, PR or customer service communications channel started somewhere. Since it’s a social activity, that means a high degree of influence from others already mastering the channel. It’s no mystery that one way to quickly gain knowledge about and adapt to something new is to find, listen to and engage those that are already there – or at least further along than you are.

It’s not always a linear thing though. There are plenty of directions to go in the social media space and learning from others via participation and collaboration is where the real productivity in acquiring knowledge comes from. Different people focus their attentions, efforts and expertise in different areas and therefore, offer a different set of influences. A herd mentality towards social media expertise does not inspire innovation.

[Editor's Note: This guest post coverage of a recent Marketingsherpa webinar comes from TopRank's SEO Designer Thomas McMahon and Account Coordinator Kristen Hebert.]

Are companies engaging in social media? Are they monitoring their brand? What’s a social media press release? These were a few of the topics covered in Marketingsherpa’s recent “Engaging Bloggers, Journalists and Customers” webinar featuring Todd Defren from SHIFT Communications and Marketingsherpa’s Sergio Balegno discussing new ways journalists are using social media.

MarketingSherpa surveyed 1800 people from both small and large, B2B and B2C companies. In their findings, three out of four companies surveyed feel that social media is changing the way companies communicate. Details of this research can be found in the new Social Media Marketing and PR: Benchmarks and Best Practices report.

Thinking about social media? Or are you waist deep and need some help? A session today at SES NY highlights different approaches to social media, its purpose and how and why you should get involved.

Li Evans, of Key Relevance, hammers home the need for social media strategy within her presentation.

Social Media – done for the sole purpose of traffic or links – probably isn’t social media you should be doing. Social media is not about your marketing message, it’s about what the customer has to say good or bad. It’s about them talking about you.

Whatever you do socially, remember that the end user has control of your message and sometimes your brand. Li goes on to explain that these conversations are happening any way, online and offline, so would you rather be part of it or continue to ignore it?

Day 2 at SES NY kicks off with a lesson in Social Media for the little guy.

The purpose of the session is to find out how small companies with small budgets can freely tap the world of social media to improve business and increase sales.

Here’s what we learned from Jennifer Evans Laycock:

Take the ‘marketing’ out of Social Media Marketing because it isn’t about marketing, but rather about conversations.

In addition, there is a reason social media is called the bleeding edge, because it can hurt especially if approached in the wrong way.

Remember, when you are developing marketing plans, that the goal is not to integrate the latest big thing but rather to integrate what works. As a small guy, the people on the leading edge are other marketers and not likely to be your prospect. There’s nothing wrong with leveraging pre-established social tools.

First things first: Please take this quick poll about integrating SEO and social media marketing.

With concerns over the recession and its impact on marketing, we decided to run a TopRank Reader Poll to discover reader (and their networks) preferences for digital marketing tactics in 2009.  Companies world-wide are cutting costs as well as looking for creative, high impact and accountable marketing.  Our amazing readers both on Online Marketing Blog and followers at @leeodden helped uncover the top tactics.

Over the past 11 days 532 readers have cast 1559 votes for their 3 top digital marketing tactics for 2009 with Blogging, Twitter and Search Engine Optimization topping the list.  Equally interesting was that out of the top 10 tactics, 6 fall into the category of Social Media Marketing. See the full list below along with other statistics about where voters came from as well as info about the readership of Online Marketing Blog.

There are so many Tweets and so little time. What’s a “Tweeple” to do? Twitter aggregator and trend websites use a variety of tactics to filter out what’s up and coming and of interest to the Twittersphere in contrast to the mass of mundane Tweets.  Twitter stream aggregators are useful for a variety of reasons ranging from discovery of news to competitive research. (Follow me on Twitter here @leeodden):

As a Twitter user, you can discover what kinds of Tweets are most often passed along (a “retweet” or “RT”) and use that insight for your own Twitter use. The same learning opportunity exists for companies using Twitter.