Online Marketing Blog

21 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2012

Curious to find out what 2012 could have in store for online marketers?  This presentation from DreamGrow shares 21 predictions on what 2012 could look like.

Highlights include:

• Social CRM making inroads
• Social media influencing more sales
• Social commerce on mobile devices

Facebook IPO and Most Popular Social Sites:

For the past 3 plus years, TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog has been hosted by Minneapolis based website hosting provider, VISI.  When our past host shut us down without warning for getting too much traffic, VISI and Online Marketing Blog connected and worked out a sponsorship. VISI is the only company with an ongoing “ad” on this blog.

Uptime for Online Marketing Blog has been amazing since we moved to VISI and customer service has been exceptional. With web site hosting, the ideal situation is to forget about them, to not even know they are there because things are working so smoothly.

But when situations arise, and a site goes down, you remember pretty quickly who your hosting company is. VISI was good about working with us when we had a major problem earlier this year and get the right equipment to meet our needs. As our traffic has increased, there hasn’t been a blip of downtime.

Online Marketing Blog has been toying around with a new blog header and thought it would be best to get your opinion on which design we should choose.

In the upper left corner of this post there are 5 different headers to check out, each with it’s own name. Click on each one and the header will change – see what you think.

Once you decide which one you like best, please vote below!

 Loading ...

We’ll let voting run until Friday this week and then we’ll update the blog design with the most popular header. All thanks to you

After a much deserved blogging vacation last week, I thought I’d start this final week of 2009 with wishes of appreciation for the readers of TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog and the fantastic team of writers we have. It was 6 years ago today, that TopRank started an agency blog as a way to publicly save and comment on industry news.

We’ve been through and observed many, many changes in the internet marketing industry over the past 6 years. Of course, Online Marketing Blog isn’t the only internet and SEO focused blog celebrating a 6 year birthday this year. There are several others listed here including a few that are still very active: Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Journal and SEO Book.

The TopRank team loves to have fun – for holidays, on team outings, at conferences, etc. Because tomorrow is Halloween, a few members of the TopRank team decided to dress up for a costume contest. And it’s up to you to decide the winner! Winning includes at least $50 worth of coffee, so be sure to share this post and get your friends to vote too.

We have a winner – Congrats goes to Dana Larson:

Winner! Dana as Minnesota Strawberry Shortcake

Safari Thomas

Bad Angel Julie

Michelle the Football Star

Monkey Audrey and Veterinary Nurse Amie

Mike as Zombie Soupy Sales

Sue After Being Attacked by Scooby Doo

There are many ways for company marketers to advance their knowledge in the digital marketing and PR space. A big part of TopRank’s consulting services are to provide clients with education so they can better implement recommendations and promote the advantages of SEO, Social Media and Optimized PR in house. We’re also active participants towards industry education on these topics through speaking at conferences.

September is the calm before the storm of speaking events for TopRank but October and November are packed with opportunities to learn strategy, hear case studies and understand specific tactics for implementation on the topics of Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing and Online Public Relations. Here are our upcoming events. We hope to see you there:

Oct 5, 2009 – MIMA Summit, Hilton Minneapolis

Client focused, dynamic, challenging, rewarding, did I say fast paced? Those are some of the words I would use to describe our agency at TopRank Online Marketing.

TopRank has continuously evolved over the past 8+ years to become a well known and authoritative brand in the Search, Social and Online Public Relations space.  Our clients include an engaging mix of companies ranging from start-ups like Marketo, a marketing automation software company, to the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), to the Fortune 20 such as McKesson, a $100 billion healthcare services company.

As one of the leading internet marketing agencies in the Midwest, TopRank Online Marketing has a fantastic opportunity for an experienced Search Marketing Account Manager to join our team of dedicated, client-focused internet marketing professionals.  While plenty of advertising, public relations and interactive agencies are downsizing, TopRank is growing smarter with new team members. Could you be our next Superstar?

Over the next 2 weeks several staff from TopRank be hitting the road for multiple SEO/Social Media/PR speaking and training events. We invite you to attend and would love to meet up with readers of Online Marketing Blog.  

Topics during these events will emphasize the practice areas of our agency: Search Marketing, Online Public Relations and Social Media Marketing. Locations will range from New York to San Francisco to Minneapolis.

May 19: Media Relations Summit, Crowne Plaze Hotel in NYC (event info)

4:30 pm: Mastering SEO, Google AdWords and Other Search Tools to Increase Visibility
If you’re ready to vault your website, landing pages, corporate videos, blogs, press releases, and online newsroom into the top of the search rankings, take in this one-hour bootcamp. You’ll learn all the latest tools, tips and tricks for making Google and Yahoo love you.

Today we’re doing a webinar (2:00 pm EST) with PRWeb on the topic of leveraging search engine optimization and news content for improved search engine marketing performance.  Registrations for this webinar were capped at 2,500, so if you didn’t make it in time, please visit the comments for this post as we’re contining the conversation there after the webinar.

The bottom line for the presentation is that there are opportunities to gain advantage from optimizing content according to it’s purpose or goals. In the case of news content, make it easy for consumers and journalists alike to find your message on the channels and in the format they prefer. That means understanding the difference in search behaviors for consumers vs journalists and analysts doing research on companies/individuals.

I am happy to say that this weekend, December 28th marks 5 years of blogging at Online Marketing Blog. From the infamous “Florida Update” of December 2003 to current, practical advice on social media strategy December 2008, TopRank has been a trusted source of information for thousands of readers.

The entire TopRank Blogging team wishes a sincere Thank You to everyone that has commented, subscribed and linked to us over the years.  TopRank’s blogging efforts have been recognized in many ways including being one of the top 50 favorited blogs on Technorati, ranked a top marketing blog on Advertising Age and endorsed by fans from The DMA, PRSA, Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo and many others.

The entire team at TopRank Online Marketing would like to wish our valued readers a very happy holidays and a fantastic new year. We sincerely appreciate all our subscribers and all the amazing insight, comments and connections you’ve helped us make over 2008 and hopefully between each other.

TopRank Online Marketing is pleased to announce a parternship with The Direct Marketing Association to develop and present a series of 2 day workshops on social media marketing for direct marketers. 

On December 4th in New York the new course entitled: “Social Media Smarts: An Introduction to the Social Web, Tools and Strategies” will introduce participants to the marketing and communications channel opportunities of social media through practical demonstration of social media tools, case studies and exercises. The first 3 workshops will be held in New York, Chicago and then again in New York.

Decreasing marketing budgets and increased consumer skepticism towards traditional advertising is driving many companies to new ways of attracting and engaging customers.  At the same time, new communication channels such as social media represent the most significant change in marketer/advertiser communications with customers in the history of marketing.