Online Marketing Blog

[Minor edit: Be sure to read the comment thread below for a response from the agency CEO.] An employee of an  Interactive agency sent out pitches to a number of bloggers this morning promoting a “viral video” that I wanted to share. Mind you, I’m not going to share the actual video because it’s sick, racist and violent. “Man makes racist insults, gets asphyxiated and beaten to death by young Asian girls and their parents while another man obliviously chats on his Bluetooth headset nearby.” If you’re into that sort of thing you can find it on your own.

A slew of SES Chicago attendees sat in on the session - Igniting Viral Campaigns - to learn how they just might create the next Burger King Chicken Campaign, in which Burger King was able to increase chicken sandwich sales with a website and a subservient chicken.

Maybe we’re not all looking to sell more chicken sandwiches, but we are looking to take a message and make it viral.

Each panelist provided insight on what they believe to be the keys to making content buzzworthy.

Bill Hanekamp, CEO, The Well hammered home the importance of relevancy to session attendees.

Day 3 at SES San Jose found me assigned to cover the session “Link Baiting & Viral Search Success.”

Those who’ve read my previous posts should find it as no surprise that my level of excitement for this session superseded any residual aches and pains left over from last night’s “decadence based in relevance” superbash Google Dance.

(Personal Note: None of the stories you’ve heard regarding the TopRank team at this event are accurate. Except the one about how we met up with AC/DC’s tour bus afterwords and partied with them all night - that one’s true**)

So what is the coolest new viral campaign online and why? Check out www.ibelieveinharveydenttoo.com and then come back here.

There isn’t anything on the page, is there?

Certainly not that photo of Aaron Eckhart that can be found by removing “too” from the URL: www.ibelieveinharveydent.com

There’s simply a message saying “Page Not Found”.

Do you feel like me the first time you viewed this site, thinking that you must have missed part of an exciting new campaign for the upcoming Batman epic “The Dark Knight”, of which Harvey Dent, Gotham’s DA and future criminal mastermind “Two Face” would, surely play an integral role? Do you feel compelled, like I did, to search out a forum for more?

One of the blogs I’ve recently added to my blog roll is Joe Morin’s Travels and I noticed a post he made about some kind of marriage proposal during the Super Bowl he’s going to be promoting. Don’t worry ladies, Joe’s not the one doing the proposing. (800,000 women sigh relief)

SEO is constantly changing, but at the same time, the more things change the more they seem to stay the same.¬† Yesterday’s viral marketing becomes today’s linkbaiting. Despite changes in SEO tactics and nomenclature, the fundamentals stay the same: content and links. In order to keep up with these kinds of changes, smart online marketers are continuously revising tactics and execution to provide companies with a competitive advantage.

One of those tactics focuses on both content and links by promoting unique content that propagates virally through social news, blogs and network sites. This viral online marketing tactic is more commonly called “linkbaiting”. Regardless of what you call it, companies are starting to allocate marketing dollars to these tactics and search marketers are responding with new services.

Spotlight on Search Interview with Lawrence Coburn

I first met Lawrence Coburn when we presented together on a Public Relations panel during a WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference in Boston. Lawrence told a great story about being at the right place at the right time and taking proper advantage to build publicity for his web site, RateItAll.com.

At the recent Pubcon conference in Las Vegas, Lawrence presented on a panel about viral marketing where he focused on using widgets as a way to drive traffic and links. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend this session since I was presentingon a different panel at the same time, but Karen and Jolina did and they came back with excellent feedback. Multiple people mentioned this session to me actually, including Rand Fishkin in this video interview.

Last night a PR manager from the New Yorker emailed me about the Terry Semel interview, so I watched it and put up a link to the actual video. I emailed a few SEO related bloggers about it and thought nothing more. (other than the interview being great insight into Yahoo).

While the bloggers I emailed did not mention the video, a few other sites did link to the blog post I put up about it including Digg.com (front page right now) and the Financial Times.

“Why Media Buyers Must Understand SEO” by Tessa Wegert over at ClickZ addresses how blogs and viral marketing are effective linking tactics and therefore important for search marketing.

Increasingly, I am seeing the creative aspect of search marketing growing in importance. SEO grew out of IT because so many technical issues existed causing sites not to rank well. Now search engines are better at indexing a wider array of file formats and more sophisticaed urls. Off page factors such as links are just as or more important as technical SEO.