Online Marketing Blog

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.

Hot off the heels of Avinash’s SES opening keynote, day two of SES San Francisco 2012 included another famous Googler to start the day. Matt Cutts (@mattcutts), Distinguished Engineer for Google, is the head of the Web spam team. He and his spam fighters, as he refers to them, make up part of the Google Knowledge Group.  He was a last-minute addition to the SES schedule, interviewed by Mike Grehan, VP and Global Content Director for Incisive Media, as part of the day two kickoff.

Watch out link-and site-buyers alike! Matt Cutts is in town!

For those of you know don’t know (is there anyone out there who doesn’t?), Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s web spam team; which means any secret we are hearing at SMX Advanced, Matt is making sure the shady tactics aren’t working anymore next week.

Beginning with a pop culture comparison, Matt states that risky link building behavior is a lot like Milli Vanilli. If you do something that will benefit your site right away, like lip synching your way to a Grammy, you will get caught and it wont benefit your company in the future. You will be stripped of your Grammy and acquire a drug problem. And your site will be banned.

Sometimes a Monday blog post deserves a good collection of links:

• The Fox on viral link building and listening to your audience
• Smackdown on Matt Cutts re: spanking SEO blogs
• Jeff Jarvis @TheGuardian and the social whirl driving the development of search
• eMarketer says B2B’s are buzzing over Marketing 2.0
• Vox on Video: Measuring engagement of user generated video
• SEO Lowdown on the LED: “You’re doing the SEM industry a dis-service by characterizing the level or complexity of SEO work according to the size of a company.”
• Grehan Clickz’s the SEO and Public Relations connection. Mike, what took you so long?
• Speaking of PR and Search, be sure to check out Himler, Bradfield, Miele and Odden @PRSA Webinar on PR and Social Media Feb 26

Are Paid Links Evil? Optimus Prime versus Megatron.

As I attended “Are Paid Links Evil?” as my last session of Day 2 at SES San Jose 2007, I was glad to see that everyone there was still in high spirits after the long day of learning, blogging, networking and preparing for the Google Dance. However, I didn’t expect to see a battle of the Autobots against the Decepticons.

First off in this battle of the galaxies was the ever-famous Matt Cutts, Software Engineer Guru at Google, stating clearly and concisely that paid links that pass Google PageRank are in clear violation of the Google webmaster guidelines. And as we all know, we do NOT want to be in violation of these. Any violation of these commandments could result in being bounced out of the Google index, which could severely impact your website traffic in a very negative way.

I haven’t participated in a blog meme for a while so Andy Beal who was tagged by Nathan who was tagged by Randy went and tagged me, so here goes:

1. Like Andy, I started blogging (Dec 2003) as a way to save information, comment on it and share with coworkers.
2. Blogging is a fantastic marketing tool. Our biggest clients ($30bn to $80bn) had read our blog for several months and then called to do business. What’s not to like about that sales cycle?
3. Blogging is a great connector for both online and offline social networking. People read our blog, say hi at conferences and many of those turn into friendships or business relationships. I also always mention our blog when I meet people offline or in interviews which often turns them into RSS subscribers.

Is it an April Fool’s joke or the real thing that Google’s Matt Cutts blog has been hacked by Dark SEO team? Either way, there’s a ton of buzz about it already ranging from at Search Engine Land to several forums to Digg.

Danny Sullivan reported Matt’s site has been slow and that he’ll be offline until Monday so the hacked page will be up for a while. Interestingly, Matt’s blog and this blog are both hosted with the same company – at least from what I can tell from his DNS records.

While the defaced page is up over the weekend, it will attract quite a bit of buzz and links. For an April Fool’s joke, taking out all the archives of the blog seems a bit extreme.

Rand posts a great interview with Neil Patel and Cameron Olthius from ACS and the Pronet Advertising blog where he asks about their tactics, their business and some of the politics and intrigue surrounding Digg.

20 Real Facts about Matt Cutts from Chris Winfield including fun tidbits like: Matt is 34, goes to Burning Man and no longer has his top secret security clearance.

Google AdWords Ingnores Redirected Landing Page URLS – Chris from e-consultancy reports the problems he’s having with Google ignoring the redirect urls they use in the AdWords campaign. Google sends those visitors to the web site home page rather than the redirect destination.

Dr. Susan dispenses Dave Pasternack with a dose of SEO reality.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7148079713264516081
Matt Cutts of Google was nice enough to take a minute to do a quick interview on his way out from the Pubcon conference in Las Vegas. This was something we had coordinated via email before the conference, but I was lucky to catch him at the last minute.

Matt gives his take on Pubcon parties as well as the “Site Review” panel and sticking up for the mom and pop sites that make silly mistakes because they don’t have good information. Thanks for taking the time Matt!

Update: I want to be clear that Matt is NOT “ripping” on Yahoo and Microsoft in this clip as you can see – he just decided to go to parties that were open to all Pubcon attendees.

I have to say, the Pubcon conference last week was one of the better search marketing conferences I’ve been to. The overriding impression from just about everyone I talked to was that the content was great and the networking even better.

Below is a roundup of Online Marketing Blog’s blog posts, photos and videos from the WebmasterWorld Pubcon Las Vegas 2006. I have to say thanks to everyone that let me put my Sony CyberShot to the test and do these 1 minute “interviews”. :

Videos
Brett Tabke – WebmasterWorld
(Happy about the conference, speakers and the next one in Vegas)

Greg Hartnett – Best of the Web
(Pubcon has been very good to BOTW and those black shirts are marketing genius)

Marketing Sherpa Gets Acquired by MEC Labs Group (Marketing Experiments)

Quintura LSI Keyword Research Tool Updated – SEOBook
The Digg Algorithm – Unofficial FAQ – Cristian Mezei
Transcribing Matt Cutts’ Videos: One through Fourteen РPeter T. Davis
Elite Retreat – Learn to optimize your business with Dave Taylor, Shoemoney, Aaron Wall and Lee Dodd

Jim Boykin is taking a break from blogging and getting down to business, a very good idea worth exploring but sad because Jim puts out some excellent information.

Matt Cutts interview with eMarketing Talkshow

Jobs in Search turns 2 years old

New SEO candidate articles at Marketing Pilgrim

Putting Blogs to Work for Wall Street – CNET article on using blog and social media tracking services to give traders competitive intelligence on investor sentiment