Online Marketing Blog

Note from Lee: This guest post comes to us from Andy Beal, CEO of social media monitoring tool Trackur and coauthor of Radically Transparent: Monitoring & Managing Reputations Online. Andy and I have known each other for many years and in fact, Andy was the first “famous” SEO blogger I had the opportunity to meet in person. He was gracious, helpful and very smart then and continues those traits today. He literally wrote the book on Online Reputation Management and I appreciate his willingness to share practical insights into the world of social media monitoring.

Social media monitoring. Reputation monitoring. Buzz monitoring. Call it what you want, but it’s all the rage. All the cool kids are doing it! However, friends don’t let friends monitor social media without first teaching them the six critical steps that most companies overlook.

Here we are near the end of 2009 and at the last Search Engine Strategies conference of the year.  While many conferences are down in attendance, SES Chicago actually beat last year’s numbers by about 100, according to Matt McGowan, VP, Publisher & Head of US at Incisive Media, the company that owns SES.

There are many ways to get value from attending a conference but one that is especially important, and often overlooked, is the ability to connect with industry thought leaders and ask important questions.

While roaming the sessions, exhibit hall and networking events at SES Chicago, I did just that and decided to use my trusty iPhone 3GS to capture some insights on what marketers should be focusing on or considering in 2010.

In the film Hollywoodland, Adrien Brody plays a private eye tasked with determining whether TV star George Reeves, famous for playing Superman, did indeed commit suicide or, as his mother suspects was murdered. Brody’s character remarks that if the biggest headlines are insisting that Reeves’ case is indeed closed, the only way to reopen it is to sway public opinion to the mother’s side by manufacturing their own headlines, simply too large to ignore.

I was reminded of this scene, and how far we’ve come in a relatively short amount of time, while reviewing Andy Beal & Dr. Judy Strauss’ excellent new book “Radically Transparent: Monitoring & Managing Reputations Online.”

If someone has a better photo, please link in the comments

On day three, the last day of sessions at WebmasterWorld Pubcon here in Vegas, I participated on a panel called, “Search and Blogging Reporters Forum” with Rand Fishkin and Andy Beal.

Moderation duties handled by Mike McDonald. Basically, it was a round table-style discussion about blogging in the SEO industry as well as blogging as a marketing tool. There were some good points about using blogs as a public relations tool as well as some debate about hosting team blogs separately or all under the company domain name.

There was some nice back and forth with Andy and Rand plus great questions from Mike and the audience.

Spotlight on Search: Interview with Andy Beal

I’ve known Andy Beal via blogging and search marketing conferences for a while now and had the privilege of speaking with him on a SEO Blogger and Reporter panel at the last WebmasterWorld Pubcon in Las Vegas.

While I had great respect for Andy’s accomplishments at building search marketing companies and developing top notch blogs, his performance during the panel was genuinely impressive. His grasp of the big picture and business aspects of search marketing were/are very insightful. My public relations firm has even hired Andy for some consulting on reputation management and I am happy to recommend him.

Andy Beal lets the cat out of the bag with “Five Secret Strategies to Add $1 Million in Revenue to your Interactive Marketing Agency in 2007″. What the hell is he doing giving such advice away for free??

Mike McDonald of WebProNews interviews Rebecca Lieb from ClickZ and new Editor in Chief of Search Engine Watch.

Sean X. Cummings from Ask.com calls bull$#@! on 3 marketing strategies over at iMedia Connection. Check out the “Billy Badass” sunglasses on Sean!

Chris Winfield to write for SEO Buzz Box – Aaron scores!!!

Rand shares (most) of his kickass Firefox sidebar. Thank you Rand for all that you do!

The new Search Engine Land web design is officially launched.

Yahoo has issued a new weather report.

This morning Andy Beal announced the winner of the SEM Scholarship contest he’s been running the past month:¬† Ben Wills for “The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing“.

As one of the judges for the scholarship, you might imagine that an article about social media would attract my attention and it did.¬† Ben walks away a $6,000 scholarship prize, which in reality, will be worth far more because of the additional knowledge he’ll gain. One on one consulting with Andy Beal alone, is probably worth the six grand.
Ben is not the only winner in this scholarship promotion, Andy Beal and Marketing Pilgrim walk away with a ton of new inbound links, traffic, subscrbers and industry visibility.  Not that Andy needs any more of that.

It only took 5 years, but Andy Beal has finally come over to the world of WordPress for his blog, MarketingPilgrim. Previously, Andy ran SearchEngineLowdown.com on Google’s Blogger platform, building it up to one of the top SEO blogs on the Internet. Then after going out on his own, started MarketingPilgrim.com using the same tools.

The new design sports links to Andy’s consulting services of which I now have first hand experience. My public relations agency recently engaged Andy to provide some training via webinar to our PR team on the subject of brand monitoring and reputation management. Eight of our staff were in attendance and I have to say, Andy knows his stuff. Not only is he a great consultant on SEO firm management and search marketing, but he has established himself as a subject matter expert on the topic of brand monitoring and competitive intelligence as well.

Andy Beal comes over to the dark side and launches a new blog design using WordPress.

Rae posts an excellent interview with Brian Prince of BOTW.org.

Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro does it again with a great article on search marketing reaching critical mass in a follow-up to his previous “Cross the Chasm” article.

Aaron Wall posts “Trusted vs Untrusted Links” and follows up with another “vs” post, “Tactical SEO vs Strategic SEO“, which is excellent, but has more to do with SEO for sites/blogs whose business model is ad revenue than advice most business web sites can take advantage of. Great advice all the same though.

“3 Link Bait Lessons from a Master Link Baiter” SEO Black Hat.

Are you the next big thing in search engine marketing? Then head over to Marketing Pilgrim for Andy Beal’s new Search Engine Marketing Scholarship Contest.

Andy asked me if I would be interested in judging articles submitted and of course I said yes! Other judges include: Rand Fishkin, Mike Grehan, Jennifer Grappon & Gradiva Couzin, Kim Krause Berg, Robin Nobles, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and David Warmuz. You can read the press release, or check out the details below:

The contest will run throughout October and entrants will be asked to submit an article on the subject of search engine optimization, paid search advertising or social media optimization. The winner will receive a scholarship valued in excess of $5,000 which includes:

Andy Beal has been around the block and then some when it comes to building SEO-SEM firms. Today he posted his “Top 10 Business Mistakes Search Marketing Firms Make“. Here are Andy’s tips 1-10 and I’ve thrown in my own thoughts and observations after each.

1. Charging a “Set-up” Fee.
We’ve pretty much moved away from this but not 100% as some small projects warrant it. It does help companies spread costs out, but it also has to be managed properly since so much work occurs during the first 60-90 days of a campaign.

Here are a few more videos from Search Engine Strategies San Jose. Matt Bailey – SiteLogic, Andy Beal – Marketing Pilgrim and a short clip from Danny Sullivan’s talk with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. You can listen to the full discussion over at WebmasterRadio.FM.

Matt Bailey in between sessions talks about wookiepedia. I had no idea Matt was a Star Wars fan.

Andy Beal before the Ask.com blogger dinner talks about the “lunatic fringe” of search marketing.

And here’s a short clip of Danny Sullivan and Google CEO Eric Schmidt answering a question from the audience about whether Google will start allowing users to monetize the use of their own clickstream data.