Online Marketing Blog

If you flip through your TV channel guide, it’s hard not to notice the number of contest-based shows. Whether people are competing to be the next music icon, lose weight or play games using household products the common theme is competition and a chance to win big.

TV producers are smart and continue to find success from audiences who like to compete and love to win.

This same idea can be leveraged in online marketing to get a community excited, find new audiences and keep your brand top of mind.

At the PRSA Digital Impact Conference Sandra Fathi, president and founder of Affect and Ben Pickering, CEO of Strutta guided the audience through the process to create a winning online contest.

Is your reputation management strategy a turn off to your customers and critics?

Should we respond, get angry, fire back, ignore the situation, censor comments, or just see what happens?  Those are some of the many questions that marketers are faced with today.  With more and more consumers and customers turning online to share what they think of a particular brand or company it has become increasingly difficult to capture everything that is being shared.

In April of this year Yelp.com reached 50 million users with over 17 million reviews on their database.  If you are a professional responsible for online reputation management it makes you wonder how many other means are there for your customers and critics to share their opinion about your company.

I think I just might!

It is no longer a question of IF companies should execute a social media strategy.  The question for most companies is HOW to best execute a meaningful and engaging approach that generates results.  With so many social media marketing options available, marketers must also decide best practices and what tactics to avoid.

We all make mistakes as marketers and it’s important that we not only learn from those mistakes but share  with others so that they can avoid them.  I hope that the 20 Social Media Marketing Do’s and Don’ts that I’ve provided within this article not only entertain you but make you think about your current social media strategy. Which tactics are you happy to say you’ve implemented and which mistakes will you admit to?

[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.

Being somewhat of a fan of buzz marketing, day two starts with a panel I’ve personally been looking forward to.  Igniting Viral Campaigns:  Leveraging Consumer-Generated Content promises to unveil the “secret techniques” and technologies that enable companies to stand out and be talked about through a viral word of mouth buzz.

Aaron Kahlow, Chairman & Founder, Online Marketing Summit moderates this panel of speakers:

• Brian Ellefritz, Senior Manager, Social Media Marketing, Cisco Systems
• Matthew Liu, Product Manager, YouTube Sponsored Videos
• Greg Finn, Director of Internet Marketing, 10e20
• Barbara Coll, CEO, WebMama.com Inc.
• Bill Leake, President and CEO, Apogee Search

Will they give away their secret sauce?

Each presenter shared a presentation, and following all 5 was a quick Q&A:

MyBlogLog Glamour Shots

As both an active participant (first and foremost) and a consultant in the ways of social media, it occurred to me that we should engage the communities of interest we’re involved with for tips. Who better to get tips on social media from than people who are actually USING social media?

Online Marketing Blog, which has a top 50 MyBlogLog community, is fairly active and even interviewed MyBlogLog CEO Scott Rafer. Today I pinged the members of our MBL community and within a very short period of time received about 20 responses. Here are 17 that made the cut and one of our own.

Our first tip on MyBlogLog is from none other than Robyn Tippins, Community Manager at MyBlogLog and a blogger at Practical Blogging.

At SES San Jose, I spoke on a panel with Matt McGee and Andrew Goodman about user generated content with SEO benefits. During the conference and after, the topic of UGC has continued to stay top of mind and therefore, I have this post to share, which discusses the trends towards information consumption involving user generated content (UGC) and why it may be a good fit in the search marketing mix.

In the world of natural search optimization, content is King but there’s a price to pay for the ongoing creation of useful, relevant content. Passionate customers and communities are increasingly tapped by web site owners for their content creation benefits but it’s still new territory for most marketers as to what works best. Is it forums, reviews, blogs or social media?