Online Marketing Blog

On Wed night of Search Engine Strategies last week I had the privilege of attending a dinner hosted by Gary Price of Ask.com. Organized by their PR department, Ask was making a specific effort to reach out to bloggers in the search marketing space. Other Ask staff were in attendance as well including Paul Vallez the Director of Ask search advertising, a representative from Bloglines as well as Paul Loeffler and Patrick Crisp from their public relations department.

Bloggers in attendance included: Matt Bailey, Rand Fishkin and his mom Gillian, Chris Pirillo, Andy Beal, Loren Baker, Lee Odden, Jennifer Laycock and our favorite party crasher, Jim Hedger. (links are to photos from the dinner)

Here are a few more videos from Search Engine Strategies San Jose. Matt Bailey – SiteLogic, Andy Beal – Marketing Pilgrim and a short clip from Danny Sullivan’s talk with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. You can listen to the full discussion over at WebmasterRadio.FM.

Matt Bailey in between sessions talks about wookiepedia. I had no idea Matt was a Star Wars fan.

Andy Beal before the Ask.com blogger dinner talks about the “lunatic fringe” of search marketing.

And here’s a short clip of Danny Sullivan and Google CEO Eric Schmidt answering a question from the audience about whether Google will start allowing users to monetize the use of their own clickstream data.

This is actually the first session that I covered at the San Jose Search Engine Strategies conference, but I did not get a chance to clean up my notes and post until now. It was a good session about a topic that is very close to the consulting practice of our PR and marketing agency.

Part of the ClickZ track, this session was moderated by Rebecca Lieb and included Gary Stein of Ammo Marketing, Scott Meyer of About.com, Hans Peter Brondmo of Plum, a new social networking service and Brian Monahan from IPG.

First up is Gary Stein who introduces the notion of “clique-through”, which means to use social media to spread your message deep but not wide. The “clique-through” approach is to get specific segments to adopt a particular message. It offers more long term value than the “lightning in a bottle” associated with buzz marketing.

After hearing at several sessions and in the media about the rise of online video, I decided to try something different here at SES San Jose. Armed with a slick Sony Cybershot camera that takes decent video, I’ve started to ask people what they think of this year’s SES San Jose conference. These are very short clips, 30 seconds to 1 min, but provide an interesting view of the people at the conference on what’s happening and what they think.

Here’s one with Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable in the conference Press Room:

Here is another with Jim Boykin of WeBuildPages at the Google Dance:

And another with Mike McDonald of WebProNews.

Moderated by Rebecca Lieb of ClickZ with presentations by Matt Bailey of SiteLogic and Shari Thurow of Grantastic Designs. First up is Shari who answered questions about usability and search.

What is usability? Shows term highlighting in Google search results. Titles, snippets and web address.

Web site usability serves two purposes: Relevancy and encouraging clicks to your site.

Usability addresses all search behaviors.
- Querying (refining, expanding)
- Browsing, surfing
- Pogo-sticking (Jared Spool)
- Foraging
- Scanning
- Reading

What is web site usability? Shari believes usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use (Jakob Nielsen). Usability is task oriented. Usability meets a balance between satisfying users and business goals.

I was able to take a good number of photos at the Google Dance last night as well as a bit of video. Here are some of my favorites.

Waiting for the bus to the Google Dance

Googleplex

Danny Sullivan

Volleyball at the Googleplex

Green Screen Karaoke

Robot Wars

Ice Cream

Google Cafe

The Band

Lee Odden and Matt Cutts in a white hat

Goodbye!

You can see all or most of them on Flickr using the tag, “googledance“. Thanks Google!

This session moderated by Andrew Goodman of Page Zero Media, is near and dear as press release optimization and online PR are big pieces of TopRank’s internet marketing consulting practice. This session included: Greg Jarboe from SEO PR, Sally Falkow of Expansion Plus, and Nan Dawkins of Red Boots Consulting.

First up is Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR who starts off by relating a metaphor for press release optimization as a shortcut. People initially looked at news search SEO as a shortcut tactic into search results. But the search engines have devalued links within press releases. However, there are opportunities and they are not shortcuts.

Classic model of communications was Pavlovian. “Who says what in what channel to whom with what effect?”

I have to say, when I walked into the exhibit hall this am for a quick look, I was impressed! Lots of space and lots of exhibitors. Incisive Media has done a bang up job. Here are a few candids:

Google Booth

Yahoo Booth

Microsoft adCenter Booth

Ask.com Booth

Daron Babin and Greg Hartnet

SEMPO Booth

Mick Jolly and David McInnis of PRWeb

Fionn Downhill and a co-worker from Elixr Systems

Giving away a car?

An animated Rand Fishkin

Moderated by Detlev Johnson of Position Tech, this panel included: Stephan Spencer of NetConcepts, Rick Klau of FeedBurner and Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit.

First up was Amanda with yet again, a unique presentation. There is still lots of unclaimed territory with blogs.

Less than 6% of Fortune 500 companies are blogging according to SocialText. 35% of companies plan to start a blog in the next year.

RSS distributes content and drives traffic.

Build your feeds right from the start. Questions to ask:
- How many feeds are necessary
- How much content is needed to keep it fresh
- Should you publish an excerpt or the full feed
- Will the feed include other media
- How will you propagate the feeds initially and on an ongoing basis
- How to measure performance

There’s an excellent article in USA Today 08/01/06 featuring Danny Sullivan, “Got a search engine question? Ask Mr. Sullivan“. It covers very nicely, how he became involved with search marketing and also how he’s able to command his empire of expertise, mostly involving Silicon Valley companies, from a village 4 hours south of London.

There’s abundant kudos in the article for Danny from Matt Cutts of Google and Tim Mayer of Yahoo and it’s a great introduction for the uninitiated to the Search Engine Strategies conferences. Next week Search Engine Strategies meets San Jose in what may be one of the biggest SES shows to-date. Google CEO Eric Schmidt will keynote and that alone is worth going.