Online Marketing Blog

UK based e-consultancy holds periodic round tables meetings with agency and client side search marketers to discuss issues in the industry with a report published afterwards. The most recent September report, which highlights a number of search engine industry developments, SEO challenges and tactics motivated me to write this post. Many of the issues in the report are on the minds of in-house and agency marketers world wide.

Here are a few of the issues discussed and my own thoughts as they relate to each with a nice little rant at the end:

For this post I am using for inspiration (with attribution) a recent post headline from Steve Rubel, “The Future of PR is Participation, Not Pitching“. As with most “this tactic is dead” posts, I think the reality is that while pitching the media as we know it today is in decline, it will always provide value as a method of communicating story ideas to journalists. It’s the method or technology that will change such as pitching with Del.icio.us or RSS rather than a phone call.

The DM Days 2007 conference kicked off with a keynote presentation starting with DMA President and CEO, John Greco. The keynote was titled, “Next Gen Interactive: How Marketers are Optimizing the Power of Social Media to Connect and Deliver Results”.

With technology evolving, customer preferences changing and competition that is sharper than ever, the focus of this year’s DM Days event was on “What’s Next?”

Greco sees direct marketing as more than an industry, as a core process. Rather than “direct marketing” he sees it as “marketing directly”, which is the ability to engage individual customers with relevant and timely interactions that provide the information and offers they want using any of a variety of channels.

Coming up very quickly next week is the Media Relations Summit in Washington D.C. and I’ll be bringing one of our account managers, Mike Yanke, who works with many of our public relations clients to learn from some of the best and brightest in the PR and media relations industry.

I’ll be joining fellow SEO/social media/PR practitioners Jamie O’Donnell and Sally Falkow, who are both flying in from California, in a session called “Media Relations Unbound: How SEO and Social Media Have Revolutionized Our Reach”. I’m speculating that Greg Jarboe is on yet another exotic island vacation.

It’s an interesting thing when concepts get defined according to the intentions and goals of a few influential voices. Take social media optimization and marketing (SMO/SMM) for example. What started as a set of tactics unique to their channels (blogs, images, audio, video) became a more closely defined set of tactics ala Rohit’s Rules for Social Media Optimization.

To me, social media is characterized by communities that allow users to do many or all of the following:

• Create profiles/accounts
• Grow a network of friends
• Submit content or collaborate
• Vote on content
• Tag content

There are two perspectives on creative link building that I’ve been thinking about lately involving creating content and resources that offer value and the sensationalism of content promoted through social news communities. My take is that link bait focuses on creating unique, useful and provocative content that people respond to by linking to it and sharing with others.

Digg bait, which is not limited to Digg but all social news and bookmarking sites, focuses specifically on the interests of social communities and what they respond to. With Digg bait, the power is not in the usefulness and value of the content, but the title and description of the news item, sometimes bordering on the sensational. Think tabloid style writing, “Elvis gives birth to alien baby”.

Over the past 6 months we’ve been doing a bit of resource aggregation regarding social media both as a practical application for marketing client content online as well as reviewing research conducted on social media usage. There’s not a lot of research out there but here are a few interesting reports:

• BIGresearch - Simultaneous Media Usage Study

• University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth’s Center for Marketing Research - Inc. 500 Companies Fast Adopters of Social Media

• Yahoo! and comScore Networks Study Reveals Influential Consumers Can Be Reached Through Search, Social Media and Communication Tools

A few interesting tools I’ve been made aware of recently that online marketers could use for making their social media more interesting or different include the following tools to add text to images or video:

BubblePLY - Enables you to add narrative bubbles to video. From a practical standpoint, this is helpful for offering translated versions of a video.

Comeeko - Create comic strips from your photos.

I’m sure there are a host of other tools for mashing up and modifying original media. Feel free to suggest your favorites in the comments.

Today I’m doing an online radio interview over at RSS Ray on social media and search engine optimization. Our discussion will cover fundamentals of social media and how businesses, small and large, might use such tactics as part of their online marketing mix. We’ll also discuss blog marketing and press release optimization.

The kind of social media optimization and marketing that gets the most play these days is hitting the home page of digg or getting tons of traffic from Stumbleupon, del.icio.us, reddit, etc. Many of the SMO/SMM campaigns we run achieve these kinds of results, but it’s not the end goal. If you’re familiar with the services we provide at TopRank, you’ll know we take a holistic approach to search marketing and view things like social media on a longer term basis.

The super popular social bookmarks tool that Thomas created last year has recently been updated. We’ve been keeping him exceptionally busy with “client projects that are fun, interesting, challenging” for quite a while, but he was still able to sneak in a quick update and added several social news and bookmarking services.

New services added:

• Google Reader
• Diigo
• Netscape
• DZone
• Squidoo
• Looklater
• RecommendzIt
• Segnalo
• StumbleUpon
• Mr. Wrong

Several of these should have been added a long time ago, but hey, we’re busy helping clients.

WebProNews has posted another great video interview, this time with Todd Malicoat and Neil Patel. In this interview, Mike McDonald of WPN discusses social media optimization and digg with Todd and Neil who presented on a SMO session at SES Chicago.

Speaking of social media, Neil and Cameron’s Pronet Advertising blog was awarded “Best Blog on Social Media Optimization” in Search Engine Journal’s recent Blog Awards. Barry does the best roundup of the blog winners over at Search Engine Land though. Note to Loren: Please take notes from Barry, it would be easier to find the good stuff on SEJ!

David Dalka on social media and an improved democracy: “How to Forge a New American Mandate Via Social Media Political Revolution”

Trouble at Netscape, Trouble at digg? Graywolf and Calcanis share their insight.

MarketSmart Interactive closes it’s doors. That’s too bad because we used to get a good number of inquiries from their dissatisfied clients.

Google’s Blogger now offers free domain hosting or mapping for blogs.

FeedBurner’s BlogBeat blog stats now available. I spoke with Rick Klau about this at WMW Pubcon in Vegas but he didn’t give many details.