Online Marketing Blog

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!

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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.

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The WebProNews video blog posted an interview Mike McDonald did with myself and Stephan Spencer during the Chicago Search Engine Strategies conference where we talk about marketing and public relations issues with blogs and social media.

Congrats to Mike, Chris and Richard on a great job with these videos!

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The sheer irony of this post nearly kills me as I’ve had it in my queue to post for a few weeks now. In a presentation I gave at SES Chicago, a video interview with WebProNews and in previous blog posts, I have articulated both a naive confidence in the social news communities at being able to capably police spam as well as reasons not to spam social media in the first place.

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This is a bit of a late post but I want to get it out there before it gets swallowed up by all the other half-finished posts in my WordPress control panel.

I am happy to say that the session on social media optimization with Neil Patel, Andy Hagans, Rand Fishkin, Todd Malicoat and I during SES Chicago last week went pretty well. Todd and I did not do PowerPoint presentations but we did get a few minutes to introduce ourselves and talk a little bit about SMO.

Neil started things off with a very unique and humorous explanation of Wikipedia. Basically, “Don’t spam Wikipedia.”

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This ClickZ track session on advertising with social media was moderated by Rebecca Lieb and included Gary Stein, Henry Copeland, Bill Flitter and Marc Schiller. I covered a very similar session on social media and advertising at Chicago ad:tech earlier this summer a lot more in depth than this post.

First up was Gary Stein who says social media is a way companies can expand beyond the reach of regular advertising.

Consumers are most responsive when you meet them as equals which is most evident with consumer recommendations. When you start partnering with your consumers and allow them to partner with each other in your presence, is when you can gain real value from social media.

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Lately I’ve noticed a few mainstream web publications making concerted efforts to solicit user generated content. Enabling consumers to submit news gives media access to millions of potential stories they might otherwise not know about, or not have a scoop on. I know our local (and likely national) public radio station has been soliciting user generated content and news stories for at least a year and so do some TV stations. Also, Topix.net allows users to interact with news stories on their forums which, according to Topix.net founder Rich Skrenta, has enabled a big boost in traffic.

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One category of social media optimization that’s growing tremendously is online video sharing and social video search web sites.

This session on Video Search Optimization at the Chicago Search Engine Strategies conference was moderated by Chris Sherman and included Eric Papczun from Performics, Jon Leicht from Intuit and Gregory Markel from Infuse Creative. There was just a hint of a competitive flavor in this early Monday morning session, which made it a little more interesting.

For the most part, the session focused on the fundamentals of SEO. The basic concepts that are appropriate for search engine optimization also apply for video search optimization with a focus on “textbook SEO” tactics.

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This Friday I will be doing an online radio interview with eMarketing Talkshow about “Push and Pull Online Public Relations”. I’ll be talking with Cindy Turrietta about the market opportunity with online PR, explaining the concept of push and pull with examples of each as well as considerations on measuring results.

With all the buzz about optimizing and marketing with social media as well as the emerging meme in public relations on the social media news release format, there is an opportunity to help marketers better understand how these concepts can be applied in a practical manner.

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At the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago I’ll be sitting in on a panel about social media optimization. Panelists include Rand Fishkin, Neil Patel, Andy Hagans, Todd Malicoat and myself. The SES San Jose version of this panel included Chris Pirillo and Danny was nice enough to allow me on the panel. I am very much looking forward to hearing and participating firsthand with some of the top SMO practitioners.

At Pubcon in Las Vegas WebProNews did a great interview with Rand, Todd and I where we touch on the whole social media optimization and marketing topic. I won’t be giving a Powerpoint presentation at SES, but I will get few minutes to share my thoughts on SMO.

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As part of my ongoing effort to share SEO, PR and social media blogs here is this week’s list:

SEOPedia - Cristian Mezei’s relentless blog of Diggable content featuring SEO and social media marketing.

Britopian Marketing Blog - Michael Brito’s blog on SEO and social media.

Social Media - Group blog featuring a collaboration of consultants: J.D. Lasica, B.L. Ochman, Jerry Michalski, Kelli Richards, Mark Weaver and Ross Mayfield.

Catherine “Cat” Seda - Cat’s been in the search marketing biz FOREVER and I had the pleasure of meeting her finally at last summer’s SES San Jose conference.

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The buzz amongst online marketers and bloggers about marketing with social media has generated a lot of interesting discussion. One of the memes I’ve been noticing is the issue of spamming social media. A particular aspect brought to my attention recently is the idea that by making it easier for users to bookmark or “vote” for content on social news and bookmarking services, perhaps by using our social bookmarks link tool, that it’s an invitation to spam.

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