Online Marketing Blog

Central to the notion of social media is the ability to create, publish and share content. The sheer volume of information on the topic of social media marketing makes filtering and prioritizing what’s most important to a specific organization a challenging task.

There’s a lot of excitement from marketers and companies but not everyone is exactly sure how to go about it.

I think it’s important to focus on the key components of what it takes to deploy an effective social media strategy individually and as a whole. By understanding the social web as it relates to fundamental marketing principles, tactics, tools and best practices, you can create a framework for the development of a working strategy.

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Social Media Smarts Interview with Shonali Burke

I first ran into Shonali Burke right before she presented with Katie Paine at the PRSA International conference, “True Tales From the Social Media Measurement Trenches”. We had not met in person before but were connected on Twitter. Social media will do that - facilitate real world connections.  Based on her PR and social media metric savvy, I thought it would be interesting to do an interview as part of our Social Media Smarts posts.

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There are more companies blogging now than ever. How do you measure results? Measuring the social web is a different thing than what most web analytics packages offer. It can be easy to start a blog, but making it successful requires an excellent feedback mechanism. Blog analytics is one of those sources of feedback to know what’s working and what’s not.

We’ve listed interesting blog analytics tools of various types before, but now’s your chance to vote for (up to two) of the best software focused on measuring what happens on blogs. 

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The thing about internet marketing is that there is no “one right way” to solve a single problem. So much of the advice and commentary about content optimization for search engines at conferences and on blogs is tactical. Five tips for this and 10 ways to do that. We do it too, because people that are new or just dipping their toe into the stream of internet marketing knowledge need information packaged in an easy to understand and actionable format.

Between the changes and improvements that happen on search engines, adoption of new web technologies/applications and changes in the way people use search, tactical advice can get outdated pretty quickly.  

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Recently I had the task fo creating a resource for direct marketers on social media marketing and print books are something many people rely on as a portable source of information. The challenge with print sources on internet marketing related topics of course, is that they can become outdated more quickly than other topics.

As a result, I tried to focus on books that would retain thier usefulness to readers over time. The following list was researched from the stack of books on my desk, from the good Tweeple following @leeodden on Twitter and a few private recommendations. Fortunately, we’ve interviewed almost half of the authors on this list, so I’ve included those links as well.  Enjoy!

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One of the opportunities from speaking at the Pubcon conference in Las Vegas recently was meeting many client side social media marketing practitioners. Jessica Berlin, one of my co-panelists and social media manager from Cirque du Soleil, offered excellent insights into online reputation management and social media. I’ve invited her to take part in our “Social Media Smarts‘ series of interviews with social media marketing practitioners.

Jess has worked with Cirque du Soleil as a publicist and now as a social media marketing manager. She’s active on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and has received kudos from social media kingmakers like Chris Brogan, who offers an insightful perspective on Jessica as a “trust agent” for Cirque du Soleil and a great story on what to do with 100 bloggers in Las Vegas.

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TopRank Online Marketing is pleased to announce a parternship with The Direct Marketing Association to develop and present a series of 2 day workshops on social media marketing for direct marketers. 

On December 4th in New York the new course entitled: “Social Media Smarts: An Introduction to the Social Web, Tools and Strategies” will introduce participants to the marketing and communications channel opportunities of social media through practical demonstration of social media tools, case studies and exercises. The first 3 workshops will be held in New York, Chicago and then again in New York.

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Editor note: In order not to overwhelm readers with posts during Pubcon, we’ve saved a few additional sessions for posting this week. Enjoy!

Content is king. In spite of all that has changed in the online sphere since its inception, content is still the critical element to a compelling website. Providing relevant, fresh content on a regular basis can increase site traffic and improve search engine rankings, which in turn increases ROI. Yet delivering well-structured content of interest to your audience can be difficult. In Real-World Winning Tactics for Content Creation, three content experts gave their tips and advice for effective content creation, from blogs to mobile websites.

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Over at Junta42 Joe Pulizzi has announced the quarterly update of his Junta42 list of content marketing blogs. I’m happy to say Online Marketing Blog was again included in the list. This time in a slightly improved position as you can see below. I must say, being included on a list with Brian Clark, Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Solis and David Meerman Scott is very humbling.

Lists are always controversial by nature as they exclude and include based on criteria that rarely satisfy everyone. But we’re happy to be included all the same and a BIG THANKS goes to the TopRank team that’s been liveblogging conferences over the past two months of consideration for this list.

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Have you considered developing content specifically to drive traffic from social media sites? Have you also considered what you want from that social media traffic, and what to do with it once you have it?

In a session titled, “Earning Big Bucks with Social Media Traffic“, Social Media Marketing advocates including Rank Fishkin, Vanessa Fox, Michael Gray and Alexander Barbara gave some great tips to drive traffic via social media channels and how to monitize that traffic.

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Universal search has been touted as the biggest change to happen to search in recent years. Certainly universal and personal search have altered the search landscape to an extent, however to what extent is up for debate. In Universal & Personal Search: This Changes Everything, panelists moderated by Jake Baillie brought differing perspectives to the adjustments SEOs should make in light of universal search.

Brian Combs of Apogee Search began the session with an overview of Universal search. The biggest change, according to Combs, is that search is no longer just about text. Now images, videos, and local results can all rank, and rank highly, for any given keyword term.

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The last regular session of the day I decided to attend was on In-House SEO and PPC which was moderated by Melanie Mitchell and included Jessica Bowman, Dan Perry, Ana Schultz, Allison Fabella and Jill Sampey. The issues that in-house search marketers experience are the same issues that SEO agencies experience when performing enterprise SEO and PPC programs.

I walked in at the start of Jessica Bowman’s presentation who was talking about roadblocks to internal search engine marketing efforts:

• Adds projects to man hours
• Inconsistent with other goials
• Goes against existing progrtamming standards

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