B2B Marketing views, news and interviews.
Steve Rubel reports today that Wikipedia entries now appear in Google OneBox results. Just add “info” or “information” to your query and the first results will be from Wikipedia if there’s a match. Will an entry in Wikipedia be what a DMOZ entry used to be? Perhaps in more ways than one.
For a great resource on how to take advantage of marketing opportunities via Google OneBox, I recommend reading Brian Mark’s blog, The OneBoxer.
Note from Lee: Another contributor to Online Marketing Blog, Karen Sams who also writes her own blog at Media Relations Blog, makes her debut in this post about the ongoing challenge to gain original content for clients. Fresh content isn’t only necessary for making web sites attractive to search engines, but it’s also a critical component for marketing efforts in any channel – including Karen’s specialty: Public Relations. Read on to find excellent tips on how to make the most out of limited content.
One of the biggest challenges I face as a PR professional is eliciting content from clients. When I do identify valuable nuggets of information, I know that I need to leverage every aspect of that nugget across an array of tactics, including:
Marketing Sherpa published their “Marketing Wisdom” report for 2007 today. 110 marketers and agencies contributed nuggets of marketing wisdom which were compiled into the report.
Every time I get the pitch from Marketing Sherpa to suggest a marketing tip, I save the email for later and by the time I’m ready to reply they’ve published the guide. I guess I’ll have to speed up my response time.
There are a variety of marketing topics and tips including: email, blogs and RSS, social media, search marketing and more.  Download the pdf here.
About a month ago, I did a post about a fellow who is working to raise money and media attention in order to secure a sponsor for a marriage proposal during the Super Bowl, “One Super Proposal“. My freind, Joe Morin is helping this guy out with media relations as is Greg Jarboe on the PR side of things.
Joe told me last night he posted an announcement that “JP” will be doing a segment on “Good Morning America” tomorrow morning. JP’s identity will be disguised so as to not tip off the lucky lady he plans to propose to. For those of us working during that time, I hope Joe and JP will be posting a copy of the show to YouTube or Google Video.
You may have noticed some tagging going on around the blogosphere today. Not the SMO kind of tagging but the “tag you’re it” kind of tagging. Marshall Sponder over at Web Metrics Guru got me yesterday, but I just noticed this afternoon.
Jeff Pulver started things off with this Holiday version of Blog Tag and this is the way it works: Once you’re tagged by another blogger, you write five things most people don’t know about you and then “tag” five other bloggers.
If you’re a regular reader to this blog, you’ll know I’m not one for many (if any) “cat posts” so it will be pretty easy for me to hit on a few things most people don’t know about me.
This was an open discussion session where users submitted their sites to get the Google ad copy critiqued and the landing page looked over for quality and usability. Tips included:
As I am writing this, Rand Fishkin is interviewing Vanessa Fox for WebProNews right behind me. Rand is asking Amanda about sitemaps, duplicate content and links.
P.S. Rand also calls Dave Naylor cold and smelly. Wait, I mean he described the experience of having Dave Naylor throw a beer at Rand as cold and smelly.
Wow, talk about blogging a conference in real-time!
Watch for the interview to be published over at the WebProNews Video blog soon.
The vendor spotlight session covered alternatives or additives to going with PPC campaigns from companies like Google and Yahoo. They discussed how pay per call was more effective and available in more areas like TV and print than pay per click was. It also doesn’t suffer click fraud and clients like it more as it’s closer to a sale.
Tools for managing your pay per click and pay per call accounts were also discussed. Zanox offers a one stop shop for managing all your accounts including Google PPC, Yahoo PPC, click per call and more. Since it’s available worldwide, it can even help you with international accounts and search engines. Lycos spoke on how there offerings and how they can be customized for verticals and you can even become a publishing partner to use Lycos tools while running your own ad network with your own look and feel. Both companies trying to make it easier on the end user and increasing ROI.
“Google to Jump Head-First into the Long Tail of Commerce”. Google Base will be incorporated more into regular Google search results in a move that will put it in direct competition with eBay. via Micropersuasion.
I’ve seen examples of Google Base within regular SERPs already with certain phrases such as, “search engine optimization services” where a “refine your search” box appears with drop down menus for skills and service type above the regular search results. Greg Niland mentioned seeing this earlier in the year, “Google Base Added to SERPs“.
I’ve heard that in the coming months, Google Base will appear much more often in natural search results and that the line between Google’s various services and the search engine will become more fluid.
Read/WriteWeb has posted an excellent review and comparison of the major social bookmarking services. Digg was not included as they are considered a social news service. The bookmark services reviewed include: BlinkList, Blogmarks, del.icio.us, diigo, Furl, Ma.gnolia, MyWeb, Shadows, Simpy and StumbleUpon.
The result? Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon were the clear winners. I seem to remember something a while back about how StumbleUpon Rocks. 🙂
Personally, I like tend to use del.cio.us the most for work and StumbleUpon for more recreational surfing. But I have found some excellent resources for work that way.
This information is pretty handy for when you creating your social bookmark links.
Unless there’s any doubt, I am a linking fanatic. I appreciate links like they’re gold. When I talk about link building with our team, I can never stress enough the importance of linking for traffic and SEO. To me, the best way to learn about link building is to get out there and do it.
However, if you’re new, you can save quite a bit of time learning from the wisdom of others’ experience. Here are three recent posts and one bonus link on link building I highly recommend:
Rand Fishkin presents his thoughts on why email is still king for link building.
Jim Boykin has a great post about the quality vs quantity issue with link building.
Eric Ward dispells a common myth about .edu links in his post: “.edu link fallacies dispelled“.
With all the buzz about social media optimization the past week, I thought it would be timely for us to present two updated tools for encouraging the sharing of and linking to content as well as distribution. These are concepts that are fundamental to the notion of social media optimization or SMO.
The first tool is one we’ve received excellent comments on and it’s called the Social Bookmark Creator. In order to make it easy for readers to save a blog post or a web page for reading later or to aggregate resources using a social bookmark service, we’ve created a tool that allows you to add a social bookmark menu after each post or on a static web page.
