Online Marketing Blog

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.

[Note from Lee: User Generated Content for SEO is something we haven't written about in a while, but now more than ever, marketers need to find efficient ways to generate content assets for search engines as well as the ability to meet customer needs to interact and share. Michelle takes an updated look that I think companies would do well to consider.]

You’ve heard it before: Content is king. But there won’t be much of a kingdom unless that content is optimized. But who is going to create it? Useful, relevant content doesn’t come cheap, especially when your goals are to publish on a consistent basis. As an internet marketer, if you haven’t tapped into the power of user generated content, you may be giving up a goldmine of SEO assets to your competition.

“Of all our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.” Walt Disney

Jennifer Laycock Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Guide helped the audience understand the value of images and 3 benefits to submitting photos to image sharing sites, like Flickr.

She made an excellent point by demonstrating what impacts people the most:
Copy OR Images

Let’s try it. What impacts you more, the description of how I dressed my dog up for Halloween OR the picture of it?

Description: For Halloween, I dressed my pup up as an angel.

Image:

Without the image – or having to include a lot more copy – questions are left unanswered. In this example, questions that are answered through the image, but not the copy include:
-what Wrigley looks like
-what color(s) he is
-what kind of dog

Editor’s note: Social search isn’t the new kid on the block anymore but it still has it’s mystery as far as search marketing implications. The next in our series of guest posts comes from a very well respected guy who I’ve long appreciated as having more than an advanced understanding of where the search marketing industry is going. Ron Belanger is Vice President, Agency Development at Yahoo! and has been a strong voice on topics ranging from search as a powerful branding tool to social search and the future of the search engine industry.

Photo credit Mike Grehan

Social media is a white hot topic, getting a tremendous amount of play in the advertising world. Investors and speculators are tripping over themselves to invest in the next Facebook or MySpace.

In our continuing coverage of the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, we’re shooting periodic video interviews both in the speaker ready room and a few on the exhibit floor.

In this interview Steven Marder of Eurekster talks about how their Swicki product works both for online publishers to attract and monetize traffic as well as serve as a useful web site marketing tool for SEO efforts.

“Video is a compelling SEO channel,” said Sherwood Stranieri of Catalyst Online, “and social marketing and viral marketing are the driving forces behind video optimization.” We’re witnessing, with Google Universal, how digital assets are changing the landscape of search. Video, like audio files can drive unprecedented traffic as well result in a surge of inbound links. This is great- if you have entertaining video content, right? Wrong!

It may seem at first glance, that video optimization makes sense for very particular industries and not others, but this is not the case. Although video optimization is an almost ideal search marketing tactic for individuals belonging to generation “Y”, it is not limited to this demographic. Human beings are interactive and become more engaged when stimulated. Video content plays to our visual and audio senses.

WebProNews has posted another great video interview, this time with Todd Malicoat and Neil Patel. In this interview, Mike McDonald of WPN discusses social media optimization and digg with Todd and Neil who presented on a SMO session at SES Chicago.

Speaking of social media, Neil and Cameron’s Pronet Advertising blog was awarded “Best Blog on Social Media Optimization” in Search Engine Journal’s recent Blog Awards. Barry does the best roundup of the blog winners over at Search Engine Land though. Note to Loren: Please take notes from Barry, it would be easier to find the good stuff on SEJ!

The KBCafe Blog Awards is still taking votes until Jan 10, so be sure to visit category #11 and vote for Online Marketing Blog, Search Engine Roundtable and/or Matt Cutts.

Ron Belanger from Yahoo does a decent job explaining, “Engagement, Search and Social Media” in a video over at iMedia Connection. I like the context in which he presents social search – as a third channel to organic and PPC. Now if iMedia just offered some social bookmark links for the video!

WSJ posits a good question: “Google Tests New Ad Offerings — But Will Advertisers Follow?” In order to accomplish the transfer of ad dollars to other ad formats, Google will need to change existing mindsets about advertising in print, on radio and TV as being too expensive or complicated.

B2B Online’s recent survey gives us BtoB marketers a nice gift: “62.7% of marketers plan to boost budgets in 2007”

Pandia posts it’s Google Santa wish list and Google is listening.

One of the key components of the presentation I gave this morning at the Las Vegas Pubcon conference presented the idea of press release optimization and social media news releases in the context of push and pull. But before that, it’s important to understand the market opportunity with news search.

According to a report released by comScore, half of all internet users visited news sites in June 2006. Of the most popular news web sites, Yahoo News is #1 surpassing CNN, MSNBC and AOL News.

There’s also an increase in the use of social media both by end consumers and the media for tracking information that interests them. This includes: blog and news search engines, social news, social bookmarks, podcasts and video. The thing that ties all of this together is RSS. RSS enables people to subscribe to the kinds of content from the channels or formats that they are interested in.

Danny Sullivan has posted a very interesting and THOROUGH description of how the Search Engine Watch Blog had two different stories get major play on Digg and Google News at the same time. This provided an opportunity for a comparison and it was interesting to read that Google News sent significantly more traffic than being on the home page of Digg.

He does make the distinction that one event does not make the rule and that the Search Engine Watch blog is included as trusted news source in Google news. There are about 7,000 site included in Google News, so this isn’t a situation you can test on your own. Or is it? I’ve written before about how to get into news search engines, including Google News.

Here’s a list of blogs that I’ve come accross recently that I’ve added to my RSS reader that cover topics related to search engine optimization or new media PR and social media. Some of them are new, some have been around awhile and I am just now getting them added to my reader:

Yodel Anecdotal – Yahoo company blog (not the Yahoo Search Blog)

Read/WriteWeb – Richard McManus

CrunchNotes – Michael Arrington

Somewhat Frank – Frank Gruber (I know I’ve listed Frank before, but just to make sure since he’s a very swell fellow)

LifeDev – Glen Stansberry

Pheedo Blog -  Bill Flitter
Web Analytics World -  Manoj Jasra

Small Business SEM – Matt McGee

Linking Matters – Ken McGaffin

I think one of the ways you can sum up the idea of social media optimization and marketing is: “traffic alternatives to Google”. As great as Google is, marketers are increasingly looking for alternative and/or additional channels for content distribution and marketing and consumers for sources of information and interaction.

Some have suggested social search as an alternative. I don’t think social search will ever replace search engines as we know them today, but I do think the rate of growth for major search engines will certainly be affected by the growing number of niche tools and media specific channels such as social networks, social bookmarking sites, personalized search, tagging, podcasts, video blogs, regular blogs and other “social media”.