B2B Marketing Blog - TopRank®

The “Client Agency Tango: IMC-Style” session presents the often complicated task of coordinating integrated marketing communications between multiple internal teams, outside agencies and vendors and also had nearly as many panel speakers as participants.

Underwriter’s Laboratories (UL) was in a unique situation with UL as a 110 year old company that just started marketing 5 years ago. A rebranding effort was handled by Slack Barshinger.

American Airlines offered an overview of their strategic positioning initiative handled by TM Advertising. The objective was to position American brand against low cost carriers by creating an emotional, human aspect to the AA brand. “We know why you fly” was incorporated into several channel promotions: TV, print, online, out-of-home and whyyoufly.com.

This session was presented by Jennifer Rice, a brand strategy consultant. The presentation addresses blogs, wikis and forums, peer to peer networks, but mostly emphasized blogs.

Many aspects of our society are becoming fragmented, disconnected. The web helps re-create those connections. How we connect with people is changing, social networking.

Rice gave some good examples of how blogs can be a platform for communication outside of traditional channels also discussed the notion of the connected consumer. Consumers can do many things to affect your brand in a positive way using social technologies. Examples ranged from discussion forums where expert users of your products can answer questions from newbies to distributed storefronts. “You’re no longer in control of your brand” you can direct it, but there are other influences.

This morning’s keynote included Ted McConnell, Manager Interactive Marketing Innovation for P&G and Jeff Bell VP Chrysler & Jeep.

First up was Ted McConnell from Procter & Gamble. He started out discussing the state of interactive: what’s working and what’s not working. He offers big kudos to the interactive industry for being so innovative and creative.

Last year there was a $9.6 billion spend on interactive out of $264 billion overall. That means only a 3.7% of total ad spend and interactive has been around 10 years. Why?

The underlying problem with interactive is acceptance. Interactive needs reliable, historical data to improve confidence for increased ad budgets. Engagement is the measure that can differentiate interactive. “If we don’t change we’ll never “break out” from the current level of spending.

Today is the first day of AD:TECH Chicago and I’ll be covering the following sessions:

• Keynote with Ted McConnell, Manager, Interactive Marketing Innovation and Jeff Bell, Vice President, Chrysler & Jeep Chrysler Group
• Brand Humanity: How Social Technologies are Changing the Way We Do Business
• SupahMega Trends Global in Online Media
• Client Agency Tango: IMC-Style
• Keynote – Rules for Revolutionary Marketer – Guy Kawasaki, Managing Director, Garage Technology Ventures

ad:tech has also launched a new look including a new web site. Unfortunatley, the new ad:tech web site commits SEO suicide and posts all the text and links within Flash – offering limited, if any, opportunity for indexing by search engines. It is however, very interactive with a cool promo video.

You can now test Google SMS on the web or you can try it out with your web browser enabled cell phone. Search operators include: Local, phonebook, Driving directions, Movies, Weather, Stock quotes, Q&A, Glossary, Froogle, Zip code, Area code and Calculator.

Yahoo recently announced the launch of their Online Marketing Blog/2005/07/yahoo-offers-sms-search.html”>SMS search service last week.

More info from SearchEngineWatch or from the Google SMS FAQ.

This weekend I’m off to the AD:TECH interactive marketing conference in Chicago for Mon/Tues next week. I was fortunate to be one of the bloggers selected to cover the conference on the AD:TECH Blog.

I will be blogging 5 of the sessions ranging from “Brand Humanity: How Social Technologies are Changing the Way We Do Business” to “Achieving Balance in Your Search Mix”.

While I’ve personally blogged while attending conferences such as Search Engine Strategies and WebmasterWorld Search Conference, I’ve not formally been involved with conference blogging before so it should be fun.

I am also interviewing several people in the interactive/search marketing industry and will be posting those to this blog as well as Search Engine Smarts at AllBusiness.com and Lockergnome.

Erin Bradley of SearchViews blog posted a great interview with Mark Fletcher of Bloglines covering blog search, the Jeeves acquisition and something about the Tijuana police.

Blog Search – “There are 3 key components required to deliver world-class blog search: a deep index of blog and news feed content, the capability to find and index new content quickly, and world-class search technology that brings relevant search results to users. Bloglines is the only service that has all three elements.”

Ask Jeeves Acquisition – “Joining Ask Jeeves gives us the opportunity to run with the big dogs. The benefits include access to more resources, access to amazing brainpower, and access to world-class search technologies. The challenge has been hiring as quickly as we want to grow.”

Aaron Wall of Search Marketing info has posted a good interview with long time SEO DaveN
who publishes a very interesting SEO blog. Dave’s tactics are bit more risky than most.

Topics range from disposable domain names (you don’t want to know) to what will work for most webmasters to the future of (aggressive) SEO: “SEO will become much darker as the search engines get cleverer, SEO‚Äôs will have to adopt and adapt new techniques.”

There are some good tips regarding linking, importance of algorithms and the right time to be aggressive – worth a read.

In a partnership between the Web Analytics Association (WAA) and the University of British Columbia the first comprehensive university-level web analytics program is under development. The program is called the Web Analytics Award of Achievement and will be delivered 100% online.

Learning Units will be divided between Opinions and Case studies. Course content will cover three primary areas:

1. Web Site Optimization – Usability, Search Engine Optimization, Navigation, Checkout Funnels, Visitor Paths
2. Measuring / Managing Marketing Campaigns – Creative Testing, Pay-Per-Click, E-mail Marketing, Banners / other Display ad units, Rich Media
3. Analytical Business Culture – “People issues” including organizational buy-in for analytics usage and data-driven decision making, choosing and deploying the right solutions to meet business needs, staffing and training the organization properly, and communicating information to diverse constituents.

A NY Times article today covers how retailers are using blogs to give “their stores more personality and giving customers a reason to return even when they’re not in the mood to buy.” Full article

In the past 6 months we’ve noticed a significant increase in interest from online retailers that want to use blogs for a variety of purposes ranging from brand building to direct sales via RSS feeds. As a communications channel, blog and RSS offer excellent options for retailers to augment their current marketing initiatives.

It’s still early in the game though, and many retailers will be looking to early adopters for evidence of results.

Update: Ian Turner has been found in Atlanta. He apparently had some issues with his passport. Glad to hear he’s safe. LOTS of support on this from the SEO/SEM community – well done.

Ian Turner, a SEO from the UK has gone missing after attending the WMW conference in New Orleans. If you’ve seen him, please find authority contact info here. More facts here.

I’m happy to report the “Mayan Riviera” is an excellent place to spend a week away from the search marketing business. Despite a little difficulty getting out of Mexico and lost luggage, it was an excellent trip with a minimum of Internet usage and lots of relaxation.

Thank you to Thomas who has, as always, done an excellent job filling in with timely and informative blog posts regarding search engine marketing and blogs. Be sure to check out his newest blog project, SEO Blog Marketing.