Online Marketing Blog

I received an invite to CrowdFactory’s “Driving Social Media & Customer Acquisition Throughout the Customer Lifecycle” webinar yesterday with Jeremiah Owyang from Altimeter Group and  Sanjay Dholakia, CEO of CrowdFactory and decided to liveblog it.

Jeremiah has pioneered a lot of the social media thinking found in progressive companies today and his blog, Web Strategist, is known to senior business and agency marketing executives world-wide. I’ve been reading it for many years. This webinar addressed several key issues from a social engagement and commerce perspective and promised to share how marketers are using social media to engage customers and prospects across the entire lifecycle.

No this is not linkbait using Jeremiah’s name. Read on to find out what this “not entirely unlike” business from Google is all about and what it has to do with him.

A while back I wrote about the new design Google is testing (which I like a lot) that adds a third column to search results along the left side.  It’s come and gone a few times since then as I move about the country and as Google reveals it for testing.

As of this morning, Google is delivering the new design to me again and I noticed something different after doing a search on my name. (Admit it, you Google your own name too!) At the bottom of the new column it shows an unconventionally named, “Not entirely unlike” result.  What kind of label is that? It reminds me of the slang phrase, “it doesn’t suck”.

After the keynote frenzy this morning, the session that stood out for me was “Facebook Marketing: Best Practices” with Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester Research as moderator, Evan Mager from AKQA, Holly Liu from Watercooler, Brett Keintz of 750 Industries and Stanford GSB and Kevin Barenblat of Context Optional.

Some of the key takeaways from this session were:

• Be clear with your objectives
• Test spending money on Facebook marketing even if you aren’t sure about the return. Hey, 1,000,000 visits can’t be wrong!
• Understanding the ROI of Facebook requires a new kind of mindset
• Don’t take away the social features of Facebook from users
• Facebook marketing is not about driving traffic to your web site. Keep Facebook users on Facebook

Nothing smacks more of ADD in a Web 2.0 world than micro blogging and microcontent. “Flow Apps” as Stowe Boyd calls them. As such, the last session I’m blogging on day two of Web 2.0 Expo is appropriately named: “Short Attention Span Theater: The Birth of Microblogging & Micromedia”

The cast of characters in this session includes: Greg Narain of Blue Whale Labs who moderated, Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester Research, Brian Solis from Future Works and PR 2.0 and Stowe Boyd of The /Messengers.

Follow these guys on Twitter and you may learn an awful lot about this space:

@gregarious
@jowyang
@stoweboyd
@briansolis

While you’re at it, feel free to follow me as well: @leeodden Not sure how much you’ll learn there but you may be entertained