Online Marketing Blog

Today I’m giving a keynote at the sold-out Communicator’s Conference in Portland, Oregon to 270 or so PR and Communications professionals.

The colliding or collaborating (depending on your situation) worlds of digital marketing and PR have left a lot of ambiguity about roles, goals and responsibilities between these 2 very important groups.

In this presentation I outline why PR should care about marketing, 3 big trends to watch for and 3 of the most common questions brand PR and corporate communicators have (I polled my LinkedIn network) about integrating PR and marketing. I finish things off with a plan for how PR and communications can tap into digital marketing expertise and contribute messaging and storytelling for more meaningful and impactful marketing / PR performance.

On Wednesday evening in downtown Minneapolis, marketers gathered to hear the answer to a burning question: #whatthefoc? (AKA what is the future of content?)

The Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) hosted the sold-out Future of Content event, with speaker Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing CEO and the author of Optimize, aiming to point attendees in the right direction.

Marketers know content is important; in fact, 78% of CMOs think custom media represents the future of marketing. How has content changed how we view marketing today and more importantly, how can we prepare for the future? These highlights from The Future of Content with Lee Odden should shed some light on the issue:

Ask yourself 3 questions about your existing content strategy.

Odden instructed the audience to ask themselves three questions about their business:

When there’s a good story to tell, it doesn’t matter what else is going on. You have to tell it. That’s where I’m at with the intersection of search, social and content marketing.

For the past few years I’ve been giving presentations all over the world to educate marketers on the importance of an attract, engage and convert approach to content marketing. During an upcoming stretch of 30 days or so, it turns out that I’ll be giving 6 different presentations on the topic from 6 different angles.

This content marketing and optimization “6 Ways” tour starts out in San Diego next week with a presentation on how to use blogging to inspire action at the inaugural Social Media Marketing World conference.

Oprah, Rupert Murdoch Most Influential CEOs in Social Media (or Infographics: This Is How You Do It)

In a brilliant display of content marketing prowess, TopManagementDegrees.com has released a caricature infographic illustrating the 40 CEOs most influential in social media. Oprah tops the list with a Klout score of 92, followed closely by Rupert Murdoch at 91, which just goes to show that social influence is not a popularity contest.

Virgin’s Richard Branson, HDNet’s Mark Cuban, and Jack Dorsey of Square round out the top 5. The top 40 is rife with the usual suspects; tech and marketing CEOs from Twitter, Salesforce, Foursquare, Dell, LinkedIn, etc. One surprising find: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg failed to break the top 50.

Our CEO at TopRank Online Marketing, Lee Odden (@leeodden), shared his War of Words: Myth-Busting Social, Content Marketing and SEO yesterday at NMX Las Vegas.

The premise of Lee’s presentation was actually crowdsourced; the title War of Words comes from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, which was turned into a radio program by Orson Wells and spawned a mass fear that Mars aliens were on their way to take over Earth. There is much misinformation in content marketing, social media and SEO that the hype spreads much like the alien myths of days gone by, says Lee.

On Tuesday November 14^th  we will be heading south for SES Chicago.  This will be my second SES event and I am looking forward to attending sessions to continue to educate myself in online marketing, and share it with our readers, all while hanging out in the city of Chicago.  I will be live blogging along with fellow TopRank-ers – Jolina Pettice, Evan Prokop, Thom Craver and Miranda Miller.

When planning any trip, one of the first things I do is map out the stops which are a MUST SEE. Conferences are no different.  We follow online marketing best practices, and always have a game plan to ensure we can get the most out of the time spent at conferences.

London Calling: Mobility & The Olympic Games

Sadly the 2012 Olympics came to an end this past week.  These Olympic Games were by far the most socially shared to date.  This infographic from Acme Packet shared some very interesting information on everything from estimates for viewership and devices used, to predictions for the 2016 Olympics in Rio.

Twitter Co-Founders Preview Medium, A New Publishing Tool
Evan Williams a co-founder of Twitter describes Medium as “re-imagining publishing in an attempt to make an evolutionary leap.”  Medium takes submitted content like photos or text and organizes items that are similar into collections that multiple users and view, and add to.  Via Cnet.

On the second day of SES San Francisco, I headed to Lee Odden’s session Optimize B2B Content Across the Sales Cycle. Lee kicked off the presentation by polling the audience on how engaged they were in SEO, social media and content marketing. Hands raised all over the room.  When he asked how many were focused on content marketing across the sales cycle, it was striking that there relatively few hands raised.  As focused as we all are on conversions and purchases, we are not all capitalizing on the opportunity to attract and engage with our customer at every point in the buying cycle, and as a result, customers can slip away.

At BlogWorld New Media Expo in New York, John P. and Cali Lewis had me on their GeekBeat.tv show where we talked about a mix of digital marketing topics including “walk the talk” marketing consulting, the power of word of mouth, the value of influence, common marketing challenges for companies, ROI vs. the promise of ROI, budget limitations vs. culture, the “must do” of getting started with social media.

Those companies that take the time to understand who their audiences and influencers are can dig into optimal means of information discovery, what target audience preferences are for media type and format, and how to inspire action whether it’s a referral or a sale.  With that insight, marketers can work to develop a plan to continuously optimize the brand’s effectivenss at connecting content with customers all across the lifecycle: awareness, interest, consideration, purchase, retention, advocacy.

Finding Beauty in NYC is All About Perspective & Vantage Point

Many of you might know that Lee Odden (@leeodden) and I attended BlogWorld in New York last week.  I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to interview many of the speakers that were presenting, and sit in on some really great sessions.

That being said, many of you have already seen the conference from my point of view.  So I thought it would be nice to share some of the feedback and highlights from attendees as a means to share:

• Valuable takeaways from many of the most buzzed about sessions.
• Places where you can find additional highlights on specific presentations.

The final day of SES New York wrapped up with a series of the top rated sessions from other SES conferences. One of those sessions was a presentation on “Content & Customer Optimization” by my boss TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden (@leeodden).

I for one was impressed that on the final day of the conference and the last session of the day the room was packed and people were ready to learn.

Lee began by polling the audience to see what mix online marketing expertise was present in the room.  There were a smattering of SEO practitioners, copywriters, agency marketers (like myself), and those working client side.  Below I’ve included what I considered to be some of the highlights from Lee’s presentation.

Earlier this week Frank J. Kenny did a Skype interview with me about small business blogging and why or why not it makes sense. Frank’s audience is the network of Chambers of Commerce across the U.S..  I think it’s a timely question considering the ongoing “blogging is dead“, “no it’s not“ debate that’s been going on for the past 5 years or so.

As a small business owner myself, I’ve been blogging here at Online Marketing Blog for over 8 years and can testify as to the pros and cons like few others can. In our case, we’ve had great success with our blog as a way to achieve industry awareness and credibility, attract new business, employees, media coverage, speaking opportunities and many other benefits.