Online Marketing Blog

The TopRank team works really well together, bringing to each team meeting various areas of expertise and interest, which makes for a well-rounded environment here in our Lake Minnetonka office. We know how to play off of everyone’s strengths and ensure our clients are fully serviced based on their needs and objectives by those who can best take on that role.

Below is a list of our favorite online marketing tips , which - as a team - makes us stronger than each individual.

• Build Out Social Relationships Gradually - Social media and social networking are not “dump and run” tactics. Relationships need to be built over a long period of time in a venue that enhances the product or service you are promoting, which is when the promoted piece gets the most positive attention.

UPDATE: Survey Results on Top 10 Uses of Twitter are here.

Without question, the microblogging platform Twitter (follow me here) is a phenomenon many of our readers are exploring or trying to figure out. Whether you’re in search marketing, advertising, interactive marketing, journalism or public relations, there are many ways to use Twitter as a communications, networking and even a socializing tool.

Some people post the most benign information such as the mass fixation on Twittering while in airports. Others produce steady streams of thoughtful goodness, insights and links to content you simply won’t find anywhere else. Twitter can even be a productive marketing tool and if you look, you’ll find an amazing number of resources on it.

About 2-3 times a day a pitch comes in via email, Facebook message or other means asking for a mention or a link. Some are cut and paste pitches from PR reps, some are from companies trying to promote their own message and some are from industry associates that feel they have something special to share.

Even when an announcement seems interesting, more often than not a post won’t be created for it since Online Marketing Blog doesn’t really cover industry news. Unless it’s a topic that’s spot on and can help fortify a post that’s already in the works, there’s little if any chance of getting covered. As much as I’d like to give a mention and a link, I normally don’t. However if it’s really good, I do something much better.

The hot potato in social media this week is the OpenSocial web standards initiative (see screenshots here) promoted by Google involving numerous social applications, platforms and partners including: Ning, LinkedIn, Friendster, Oracle, Plaxo, Orkut, Salesforce, iLike, and Slide. Reported first on TechCrunch, “OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks”. That information includes: profiles, friends and activities.

A distinguishing feature of OpenSocial is that applications will be created with normal HTML and JavaScript. Facebook requires development using it’s own markup language making the apps unusable elsewhere. With the recent $240 million Microsoft investment in Facebook and a $15 billion valuation, the stakes are very high. Some say OpenSocial isn’t really opening any doors or isn’t a threat to Facebook. What say you?

Do you have an interest in crochet? Extreme ironing? Wearing only green shoes? There is probably a social networking community out there for you so you can connect with like-minded people who share your interests. At SMX Social Media this afternoon Rand Fishkin and Liana Evans both spoke on how to find, use and leverage these smaller social networking communities.

To find these micro communities in your vertical, you can check out the web 2.0 lists of social media lists, search for topic relevance and coverage in a search engine and read the social media discovery blogs. The long tail of social networking sites and micro communities is very, very long. You will be able to find a targeted micro community focused on what your interest is.

When you have all the social media essentials, and you know that you need to be social and active in your social networking communities, how do you effectively leverage that to benefit yourself (and your company)?

The speakers in this session on SMX Social Media Day 2 gave the audience tips and recommendations on how to best use social networking, specifically Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace, to make yourself known in the networking world.

Dave McClure of 500Hats spoke first with a fun tutorial on Facebook. Facebook is great for promoting events and for joining groups to share your brands and ideas and products to those interested in your industry. One of the main characteristics of Facebook that Dave focused on was leveraging the news feed in Facebook.

Some of the best advice I ever received starting out in the business world concerned the value of networking. Online communication tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter as well as mainstays like IM and email make it easier than ever (sometimes too easy) to network with other like-minded individuals.

Search marketers tend to be a tech savvy lot so I suspect many Online Marketing Blog readers are likely users of these online communications and networking tools. But which ones? Which are most productive? That leads us to this weeks Reader Poll question:

MyBlogLog has been growing leaps and bounds since it’s launch about 6 months ago. Rumors and then confirmation of the acquisition by Yahoo didn’t hurt their visibility either. You don’t have to visit too many blogs not to notice the familiar array of headshots and avatars of people who have recently visited a blog - a widget powered by MyBlogLog.

SoloSEO, a search engine optimization project management software service has released a set of tools called the “The Missing MyBlogLog Tools” to help you get more out of MyBlogLog and to help with building your network. For their efforts and release for use on MyBlogLog, SoloSEO only asks for 1% of the acquisition price or a free trip to Yahoo.
Here’s a breakdown of the tools:

Kauffman eVenturing is featuring several new articles focused on helping entrepreneurs evaluate different aspects of online marketing, from search engine optimization and key word advertising to blogging, online publishing and using eBay as a distribution channel. A few of the articles:

Giving Online Marketing a Greater Share - Chris Topping (Brick and Mortar/Online Retailer)
Honing Pay Per Click for Targeted Results - Jerry Kenefake (Online Retailer)
What MySpace Means for Marketers - Zachary Rodgers (ClickZ)
The Rise of the Participant Economy - David Sifry (Technorati)

Articles from retailers can be pretty insightful but many don’t want to share what they’ve learned in the same way many marketing consultants don’t give away the best info at conferences. However you can often find nuggest of great information in articles like these.

ad:tech Chicago is coming along nicely. Coverage of the conference by Online Marketing Blog as well as DMNews and iMedia Connection is keeping those who were not able to attend well informed. Here’s the next installement of our coverage:
Any discussion about social media and social networking is going to involve MySpace. This session did exactly that with some aspect of MySpace being included in just about every speaker’s contribution to the session.

Rather than a presentation format, moderator David Carlick of Vantage Point Venture Partners introduces “Social Media: The Dynamics of the Genre and the Opportunities for Marketers” as a Q and A session.

Carlick starts things out talking about MySpace as a way to explain social media and social networking. He shows a MySpace news clip: MySpace most popular site over Yahoo and Google. The challenge with MySpace is how to leverage advertising.

The one session that I was able to blog at the ACCM show this week in Chicago was, “Top Three Search Marketing Opportunities for Merchants” which combined blogs and social media with paid inclusion and shopping search engines.

The session was moderated by Heather Lloyd-Martin, who opened up with: “There’s no secret sauce in search. But there are things that catalog marketers might no know about. There are things they can leverage.”

Heather asked the audience, “How many of you have B2B catalogs?” About a third of the audience raised their hands.

First up was Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit.

The Consumer’s Dilema:

More products and more marketing channels have not resulted in greater customer satisfaction.