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October was a very hectic month for online marketers.  A lot of changes are upon us that should introduce new challenges and new opportunities in the final quarter of 2010.  Recent topics of interest seem to indicate the need to define the future of search by exploring a renewed emphasis on hyperlocal SEO, the race for social media + search integration, and new opportunities in the gadget space. …continue reading Online marketing news in review October 2010

Disclaimer: This post was originally written for SearchEngineWatch.com.

If you’re spending money on anything these days, you need to know what you’re getting out of it. That includes your company’s involvement in social media. If you can’t see it, you can’t track it, so you might as well turn it off.

Unfortunately, many marketers will leave the quest for cash and true ROI to faith by saying things like “we just need it,” or “it’s a branding effort” or “I can’t show ROI because of XYZ.” Although some of these may be true, smarter marketers will use correlations between web analytics metrics as signals indicating inevitable downstream revenue. …continue reading Social Media ROI: Show me the money!

It’s not everyday that Google re-engineers their search results pages — every 6-8 months, sure — but rarely does this retooling ever result in a potentially significant change to the way marketers do business on Google Adwords.  With the introduction of Google Instant, advertisers in the United States, and additional countries in the coming weeks, should start to see marked differences in ad impressions and click through rate for their PPC campaigns in Adwords.  Why?  I call it the “new 3s rule” and it has nothing to do with eating food off the ground. …continue reading Google Instant: new 3 second rule, implications on PPC

Following my interview with Chris Boggs, I realized that an important tangent eventually got paraphrased and edited to fit in a neat little editorial package.  The concept of user generated content isn’t new, you have user generated content everywhere you look: forums, blogs, social media platforms, ecommerce sites, review sites, YouTube, etc.  It’s been a long-lived belief that any UGC, whether it’s flattering or not, should be predominantly positive, and that’s just not true. Negative feedback is perhaps the single most underrated opportunity for reputation management the social web has to offer, so don’t delete your negative reviews. …continue reading User-generated content: don’t delete your negative reviews

I often get bombarded with interview requests about a week prior to SES San Francisco, and with all the coverage I do on the show floor and sessions, it’s tough to make time.  However, this year I made an exception for a thought leader in SEO, Chris Boggs of Rosetta.  For those of you that don’t know, Chris is a veteran in the search engine marketing community, and this year was a panelist in a session entitled “Digital Asset Optimization.”  I had chance to sit down with him one-on-one after his session for a little Q&A. …continue reading Digital Asset Optimization with Chris Boggs

Was I dreaming?  Was I still hungover from various parties on tuesday night?  I know I was late into BJ Fogg’s Keynote session, but I could swear I saw a lego man walking around the red light district of Amsterdam giving pennies to Lady GaGa.  To make matters worse, the photos of BJ using Olay products in his bathroom kind of reminded me about… well, nevermind.  Needless to say that SES San Francisco had some interesting moments, not the least of which were some stunning sessions from very smart people indeed. …continue reading SES San Francisco Day 2 Impressions, Black Hat White Hat, IM Charity Party

“Disruption” is Jeff Hayzlett’s middle name, and boy, did the crowd at day 2 of Connected Marketing Week and SES San Francisco sure need a good wake-up call.  You may know Jeff from his days appearing alongside Donald Trump in the Celebrity Apprentice while he was still CMO at Eastman Kodak.  His success in steering the iconic Kodak brand to once again lead the industry in photography and imaging cannot be denied, and from his presentation, it’s obvious that causing a disruption was his primary M.O. …continue reading Jeffrey Hayzlett rocks the house at SES San Francisco

Are you ready for the most intense week of online marketing discussion ever?  Connected Marketing Week is starting today and will kick off a full week of informative sessions, networking events, lively discussions, and after-hours partying on the grandest scale of them all in San Francisco.  This is the one event that draws experts from all fields of marketing including SEO, PPC, web analytics, social media, online news, mobile, email marketing and more.  With so much going on, it’s hard to keep it all the events in perspective, so I put together a handy list of events that cannot be missed this year at Connected Marketing Week: …continue reading Events not to be missed at Connected Marketing Week

Lots of great content out there this month as it relates to search, social, and analytics. So much so that I’m beginning to worry.  Doesn’t anyone go on holiday anymore?  With all that great info out there, coming down to a handful of favorites was tough, but here it is, your online marketing articles of the month for July 2010. …continue reading Online marketing news in review, July 2010

CNN is arguably an online marketing success story like no other.  CNN.com, a division of Turner broadcasting and a Time Warner company, had what it took to succeed when many other “traditional” news outlets struggled to find a foothold in the digital media space.  My guest today is a guy that “get’s it”: Topher Kohan, in-house SEO coordinator at CNN, who was responsible for a 17% increase in search traffic year over year for various websites under the CNN umbrella.  He stops by to discuss optimizing news for search, and his guest panelist appearance at SES San Francisco and Connected Marketing Week. …continue reading Optimizing News for Search with Topher Kohan of CNN