Online Marketing Blog

This week Thursday 3/26 I will be presenting on 3 panels during the Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York March as well as an iBreakfast meeting on Wednesday 3/25.  If you’re attending SES New York, please be sure to stop by and say hello. It’s great to meet Online Marketing Blog readers in person. 

As a Media Sponsor, TopRank will also be liveblogging SES New York Tuesday afternoon through Thursday and Tweeting from @leeodden. Watch for posts from TopRank Senior Account Manager, Jolina Pettice.   Here are the details for the sessions I’ll be speaking on:

Search Meets Social Media (Wednesday 7:30am – 10:00am) Located in New York City, CresaPartners Executive Center: 100 Park Ave. 40 – 41st St. (24th Fl.)  The Silicon Alley Breakfast Club (iBreakfast) is a long time networking event in Manhattan and this particular meeting is all about how Social Media is powering businesses forward.  

What a great conference for SES at San Jose and the many new people to the event in attendance. Below are the TopRank team blog posts for the final day. Another big thank you goes to (L to R) Jessica, Ashley, Thomas and Dana for a great job covering sessions. If you saw these happy faces at the conference, be sure to comment and say hello.  Thanks to SES too, for having us.

• Google Dance 2008 Photos – TopRank Team
• Blog SEO Tips from SES San Jose – Lee
• Internet Marketing Conference Tips: Michael Brito Intel – Lee
• Social Media Analysis and Tracking – Jessica
• Internet Marketing Conference Tips: Heather Lloyd-Martin DMA SEMC – Lee
• Black Hat vs White Hat Playing Dirty with SEO – Ashley

Wow, what a conference! Search Engine Strategies is near it’s end and what better way to wrap up our series on internet marketing conference tips than with the following super-tips from super smart Michael Brito, Social Media Program Manager at Intel.

Michael worked with HP then moved on to Yahoo and is now with Intel practicing his adept social media stylings. Be sure to check out Britopian and the social media practitioner blog, Conversations Matter, for more of his insights.

Not all marketing conferences are created equal and from a content perspective, some are much better than others. Last month I attended SMX Social in Long Beach, California; and the content seemed to be more aligned with SEO than Social Media. Nonetheless, there were plenty of really good takeaways from the conference, but the true value for me was networking and meeting others who work in the same space as I do. Here are some other things to consider to prepare for conferences:

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?

SES San Jose week is nearly over one might say we’ve saved some of the best internet marketing conference tips for last with the ever enthusiastic and insightful Heather Lloyd-Martin.

Heather is Chair, DMA’s Search Engine Marketing Council and President of SuccessWorks. She also blogs about copywriting at SEO Copywriting.

Attend all the “search marketing site labs” or “search marketing clinics” you can find. During a site lab, a panel of experts review Web sites on the fly and discuss how to improve them for search positioning and conversions.

Here’s why they are so cool:

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

A full featured and information packed day is how many SES attendees would describe day two of the conference in San Jose. I know the TopRank Blogging team would agree with 13 new posts today!

• Advanced B2B Search Marketing – Jessica
• Identify, Analyze, Act: SEM by the Numbers – Thomas
• What’s New with Google Analytics and Website Optimizer? – Ashley
• Global Search for the B2B SEM – Jessica
• 5 Things No One Will Tell You About SEM – Dana
• Search Advertising 101 – Dana
• 7 Proven Ways to Get Your Website on Page 1 Organically & Then Convert – Thomas
• Landing Page Testing & Tuning – Ashley
• Keynote with Microsoft’s Satya Nadella – Jessica
• SES San Jose Expo Hall Photos – Dana

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 Marketing Blog published a record breaking 14 blog posts on the first day of Search Engine Strategies in San Jose. Congratulations to Thomas, Ashley, Dana and Jessica on a great job on what was a very busy day.

• SES San Jose: Search Industry Update – Jessica
• SES San Jose: Video Search Engine Optimization (VSEO) – Ashley
• SES San Jose: The Next Wave for Online Video – Ashley
• SES San Jose: Search Around the World – Part 1: Asia/Pacific & Latin America – Ashley
• SES San Jose: Keynote with Lee Siegel – Jessica
• SES San Jose: Pay Per Conversion – Jessica
• SES San Jose: Storyteller Marketing: How The Art of Storytelling Matches Up With the Business of Marketing – Thomas