Online Marketing Blog

You may or may not be using social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, or Digg in your business. The overarching theme from this panel at PubCon was… why not, what do you have to lose?

Social media gurus, including Warren Whitlock, Co-Author of The Twitter Revolution, Brian Carter, Director of Search Marketing for Fuel Interactive, Guillaume Bouchard, CEO of NVI, and Kent Schoen, Facebook Product Manager, joined forces at this session to discuss the Big sexy buzz around social media and provide some food for thought to convince skeptics that social media can be a successful marketing channel.

Warren Whitlock kicked off the session discussing twitter habits.

There are two stages of Twitter:
1.    Denial: Why would anyone care what I ate for breakfast?
2.    Reluctant Acceptance: I have a Twitter account but haven’t seen any traffic

Several of the TopRank Online Marketing team attended a Social Media Breakfast last Friday, along with about 150 local business leaders, code warriors, internet marketers, agency peeps and social media enthusiasts, to hear a presentation by David Meerman Scott, author of “The New Rules of Marketing & PR”. TopRank CEO Lee Odden posted a short write up and video interview with Scott as well.

David started his presentation with an impromptu survey, asking the audience to respond with a show of hands to questions like:

• How many of you have been to a tradeshow as a participant, not an exhibitor, in the last year? (very few people in the room raised their hands)
• How many of you have responded to a Direct Marketing piece in the last year? (very few people in the room raised their hands)

1. Geeking with Jonathan, no wait, “Greek-ing with Jonathan Mendez with the speaker, the listener and the argument in “Lessons in Ad Persuasion from Aristotle“.

2. Proactive Profile Linking. Social profiles and profiles of any kind can provide benefits as part of a Search Engine Reputation Management effort since they can rank well on brand and company names. Profiles can also provide a source of crawlable links. It may serve a company well to secure the profile names before the competition does. Two tools that will quickly check user names at multiple sites include: usernamecheck.com and the social media keyword check tool from Solo SEO.

Incorporating a company blog into your social media and marketing mix can be a tug of war, finding both supporters and defeaters within the organization.

At the MIMA Summit (Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association) this afternoon, I attended a session discussing the pros and cons, along with the challenges a corporate blogger must overcome to represent the company and still make a connection with the blogging community.

Valeria Maltoni is a blogger at Conversation Agent and Director of Marketing Communications for SunGard. Valeria kicked off the session with a discussion around how an organization can get started with social media and a company blog.

As a business and marketing professional, we are tasked to find different ways to make a profit, find new customers, and build the company brand.

The annual MIMA (Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association) event kicked off this morning with Rebecca Lieb as the opening keynote.

In a nutshell, the sessio

n was funny, insightful and not without the inevitable internet issues which seem to plague all search conferences (ironic, yes?).

Rebecca got Minnesota online marketers thinking about the following 3 items:
1. Informative (be the content)
2. Entertaining (let people play)
3. Viral (make something people want to share)

From Jerry Seinfeld to French maids to Sarah Silverman’s video about Obama, everything Rebecca shared with the audience centered on the above 3 items.

The first is be the content. It isn’t enough, and hasn’t been for awhile, to publish product or service content. Rather, content that is compelling to your audience needs to be created for them.
No one wants to read standard brochure information. No one.

Social Media Marketing Services from TopRank Online Marketing

Social Search can be used to drive traffic, conversions, and increase ROI by monitoring conversations happening online. This panel is a first for SES with Marshall Sponder, Senior Web Analyst for Monster.com as the Moderator.

Industry leaders Todd Parsons, Co-founder and CPO of Buzz Logic, Rob Key, CEO of Converseon, Edmund Won, Vice President of Strategy for iCrossing along with Breanna Wigle, CRM manager for Military Advantage share insight into monitoring the conversation and best practices to track success.

Marshall kicked off the session making the case for Google to start measuring and reporting user trends in social media.

Categorizing referring traffic from social media is the first step in attributing success. Is your traffic coming from blogs, social network sites, message forums, bookmarking sites, micro media sites and photo sharing sites?

News search engines offer a great way to receive targeted traffic related to breaking topics or to help with a public relations launch. In this session, industry experts Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, Lisa Buyer, President & CEO of The Buyer Group and Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR look at how to make use of press releases and news content to tap into the power of news search.

Lisa kicked off our session explaining that optimized press releases are a vital part of any news SEO strategy.

The first step to defining the online PR opportunity is to define the media segment. With your online PR campaign are you targeting editors, journalists, analysts or the media?

Social media marketing is fast emerging as a must-have in search strategies. In this session, industry experts Vanina Delobelle, Global Product Director for Monster, Erik Qualman from Search Engine Watch and Global VP of EF Education, along with Brnet Csutoras, Online Marketing Consultant offered some tips to successfully integrate social media into your search marketing mix.

Vanina kicked off the session this morning discussing what social media is and how, when used correctly, it can benefit your business.

So, what is social media?
- Social networks like MySpace, Facebook and Xing
- Forums such as Phorum and phpBB
- Microblogging with twitter or pounce
- Multimedia sharing sites like YouTube, Flicker and Slideshare
- Diggs with Wikio and digg
- Blogs and live casts
- Virtual Universes like Second Life

If you are in the market to harvest leads from your web site, then this is the session for you! Industry experts Barbara Coll, CEO of WebMama.com, Patricia Hursh, President and Founder of SmartSearch Marketing and Adam Goldberg, Chief Innovation Officer for Clearsaleing gave some tips and insight to help B2B marketers develop search strategies to increase the number of qualified leads from their search campaigns.

Patricia kicked off the session with 10 tips for B2B Marketers!

1. Reach prospects early in the buying cycle
The sales cycle can often be long and complicated. B2B marketers rarely face the fact that people are conducting product searches at the beginning of the buying cycle. Reality is, your customers are looking for your product information way before they are ready to convert. You have to be there early!

The global market represents a huge opportunity for those who can master the nuances of local customs and languages.

In this session, leading global B2B search marketers Patricia Hursh, President of SmartSearch Marketing, Kevin Lee, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder for Didit, and Jeffrey Pruitt, President of SEMPO and VP of Corporate Sponsorships for iCrossing share their advice on how to optimize your global search efforts to improve ROI for global B2B campaigns.

Patricia Hursh kicked off the session, giving tips on how to get started in global B2B search.

Before launching a global B2B search campaign, consider:

• Which search engines to focus on
• The importance of translation
• Regional search trends
• Ease of PPC campaign set-up

Satya Nadella is the SVP of the Search, Portal & Advertising Platform Group for Microsoft. In this session, Satya discussed the evolution of search and outlined strategies to help prepare for success. Specifically, he brings light to how we think about the evolution of search and the unique assets that will take it to the next level.

The evolution of search:

We can categorize the history of search by looking at 3 dimensions:
1. Core technology of search
2. Business model
3. Expectations

The core technology of SEO is the magic of keyword base search. The business model continues to shift with CPC driving efficiency as we continue to measure quantitative results and ROI.

Online video has seen a surge in popularity over the past few years. What started out as simple user-generated content (UGC) has become a medium for everyone from the rich and famous to the video blogger next door. It is no surprise that marketers were quick to recognize this trend and capitalize on the success of viral videos in order to reach out to consumers. Yet online video marketing is almost as varied and complex as the ranting of LonelyGirl15. This session examines these complexities and how they relate to marketers. Moderator Rebecca Lieb, contributing editor at ClickZ, led a panel of three Online Video gurus as they discussed the viral video phenomenon, its causes and its future.