Fionn Downhill, Elixir Interactive, interviews David Dalka, Dalka Consulting Strategies, on the subject of selling search to chief marketing and chief executive officers of large companies. Content and communication is constantly changing, according to David, hence it’s a mistake for companies not to adopt new strategies, in particular, search marketing, to help boost revenue and ROI. David offers three tips to CMOs and CEOs on how to integrate search into their business strategic model. Fionn then asks the question about why most colleges don’t yet offer digital media as part of their MBA and/or marketing programs? David says colleges and educational institutions don’t have good role models and case studies to draw from in order to incorporate digital media as part of their curriculum. David says organizations today need to be radically redesigned to fully integrate search marketing as a central component of business strategy. The job spec of the CMO needs to be totally redesigned so it includes search, according to David, and budgets need to be reallocated, org charts and get the convergence to work together. Until these changes occur, educational institutions won’t be able to respond effectively. It the responsibility of search marketers today to drive that change within organizations and educate those institutions so they are not turning out more outbound marketers who don’t understand the importance of search marketing. To learn more about David Dalka, please visit …
Byron Gordon, SEO-PR, interviews Mari Luangrath, Foiled Cupcakes, at SES Chicago 2010 on selling cupcakes online and the ‘touchpoints’ she uses when interacting with her customers. Mari says Foiled Cupcakes engages in relationship-building with its customer’s right from the start. This includes following up with a phone call confirming the order placed by the customer, along with an email. Each customer gets a handwritten thank you note. Mari goes on to explain on she began using Twitter to look for potential cupcake prospects for her business. But Mari did not engage these prospects with a sales pitch. Instead, Mari engaged them on the subject of shoes, having reviewed what it is these prospects tend to tweet more about. Mari concludes with some advice for young entrepreneurs and businesses that might still be on the fence about using such social media applications like Twitter and Facebook, about how to jump in to social networking. For more information on speaking at SES, please visit: www.seschicago.com
Byron Gordon, SEO-PR, interviews Ashley Weakland, American Express OPEN, at SES Chicago 2010, about the launch of SearchManager, a new PPC product for small business owners that simplifies search engine advertising, an increasingly important way to find new customers and drive sales. SearchManager streamlines the way business owners can manage their online advertising and is powered by Clickable, an award-winning developer of online advertising solutions. Ashley says SearchManager acts as an aggregator of both search engine marketing and social advertising all on one interface. Business owners can manage their Google, Bing, Yahoo and Facebook ads using SearchManager. Ashley says small businesses using SearchManager will save on time when managing all of their search campaigns using a single interface. SearchManager offers a free a 30 day trial of its software and more can be found by visiting www.searchmanager.com To learn more about exhibiting at SES Chicago, please visit www.searchenginestrategies.com
Greg Jarboe, SEO-PR, interviews Maile Ohye, Google, at SES Chicago 2010 on the subject of Google TV. Google TV brings the Web and television together as one. On Google’s Webmaster Central blog, Google announced how it can help customers optimize their site for TV. With Google TV, marketers can reach users who watch television on average five hours a day (called the 10 foot UI, according to Google). Consumers can use a remote as well when using Google TV. To learn more about optimizing sites for TV, go visit: googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com
Byron Gordon, SEO-PR, interviews Jeffrey Hayzlett, SES Chicago 2010 keynoter, ‘celebrity CMO,’ and best-selling author of The Mirror Test on what marketers must consider when pitching their brand. 8 seconds is the average attention span of an adult, according to Jeffrey. 110 seconds is the time of the average elevator ride in New York City from the time you press the button, wait for the doors to open, step on, ride up, ride down, and get off. Jeff also chimes in on the idea that business owners, marketers, and leaders do enough of setting expectations, or setting the conditions of satisfaction. Jeffrey concludes with the notion that Kodak created emotional technology, or a product that a person was willing to run into a burning building to save. For more information on speaking at SES please visit: www.searchenginestrategies.com
Byron Gordon, SEO-PR, interviews Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist, author, and keynoter at SES Chicago 2010. Avinash describes his love for using tag clouds to help visualize tons of keywords and cites the example of the LDS (mormon) Church, which features great diversity in its keyword terms to attract a great deal of Web traffic. LDS church ranks in the top 3 on Google for the term ‘church.’ Avinash says search marketers can learn a lot from the seo work done by the LDS church to its website. Next, Avinash talks about the overemphasis companies place on the head of search rather than the tail. Companies spend too much time fixated on just 10 terms instead of on the magic that long-tail keyword terms provide. To use advanced visualization techniques can help companies bring all of the necessary data on a single page and give them success in identifying those keyword terms that will boost their SEO. Finally, Avinash stresses how companies need to move away from the traditional model of revenue and conversion rates and judge SEO in terms of the economic value it provides. Economic value is quantifying what value was added to the business for every job the site is trying to do. For more information about Avinash, please visit his blog: www.kaushik.net To learn more about speaking at SES, please visit www.searchenginestrategies.com
Greg Jarboe, SEO-PR, interviews Jonathan Allen, Director of Search Engine Watch, on the subject of the four Search Engine Watch labs conducted at SES San Francisco, 2010. Each lab begins with a primer, asking the audience what issues they want to put on the agenda for the lab and then presentations and site clinics are built all around what the audience wants to learn more about. Lab instructors, including Jonathan and Greg, interact with the audience addressing their issues. SES San Francisco 2010 featured four labs on the following subjects: PPC, local, SEO and video optimization. Luminaries who took part in the SEO lab giving constructive feedback to the audience participants included, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz, Maile Ohye of Google, and Christoph Cemper of MarketingFan.com. Please visit: www.searchenginewatch.com To learn more about attending SES, please visit www.searchenginestrategies.com
Greg Jarboe, SEO-PR, interviews Harry McCracken, founder of Technologizer, participant on the BlogworkZ panel at Connected Marketing Week in San Francisco, 2010. Technologizer is a website devoted to the coverage of Web technology. Harry talks about a story he discovered and shared on Technologizer concerning the iPad. Harry found every iPad competitor and put them in one story and became a huge hit. He then published a story about these films that IBM produced featuring the muppets in the 1960′s, and embedded those videos within the post that generated a good deal of social media publicity. Harry McCracken worked at PC World for a number of years before striking out on his own with Technologizer. Harry believes the single biggest opportunity for a journalist today is to build a brand from scratch and to leverage the fact that the Web is an equal opportunity newsstand. Harry started Technologizer with no advertising and no traffic and the online news site now gets more than 400000 unique visitors a month. To learn more about Technologizer, visit www.technologizer.com
Greg Jarboe, SEO-PR, interviews George Revutsky, CEO, MyNextCustomer. George talks about the origins of his company, MyNextCustomer.com, why it was created and later shows examples of how his company’s software works using his iPad. George begins by explaining how he had been working in search marketing and had to spend 30 to 40% of his time pulling together reports for his clients; these included pulling reports from Adwords, Yahoo, email marketing, Google analytics. But pulling these reports was very time intensive. George decided that the pulling of these reports could be automated and his company developed software to do so in real-time. MyNextCustomer originally started off integrating paid search, then SEO as part of its software offerings, then moved on to incorporate ways of tracking offline marketing and came up with MyNextCustomer. MyNextCustomer is a simple dashboard that enables search marketers to pull all of their marketing data into one place, analyze the return on adspend and on the lifetime value, and tell you what is working and what isn’t and do so in five minutes. Prior to founding MyNextCustomer, George spent eight years as founder and CEO of ROI.works Search Marketing, Inc. His clients there have included Union Bank, Apple, American Capital Strategies (ACAS), Signatures Network/Live Nation (LYV), 3PAR (PAR), COIT Cleaners, Mini, and Cardstore.com. For more information about MyNextCustomer, please visit: www.mynextcustomer.com For more information on …
Jamie O’Donnell, SEO-PR, interviews Matt Malden, CEO, Yield Software, exhibiter at SES San Francisco 2010. Yield software handles three aspects of automated web marketing. It has a pay per click (PPC) bid management module that includes spending on the three major search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Second, Yield software offers automated SEO or natural search engine optimization. Using Yield software, web marketers can get higher organic search rankings and learn how to improve their landing pages, link building, on-page and off-page optimization. Finally, Yield software offers web marketers landing page optimization. Using Yield, marketers can get complex multivariate testing of landing pages, using a visual drag and drop interface to automatically implement recommendations. Yield Software is great for advertisers who want to be more effective in the search space, in particular, medium and large-sized companies. Yield Software has also been adopted by digital and interactive media agencies that are conducting bid management and email campaigns in order to help them generate better search marketing results. Yield Software delivers innovative products that automate, simplify and optimize the process of marketing on the internet. Yield empowers any organization in the world to attract high-value customers at the lowest cost. Using advanced algorithms and techniques, Yield optimizes internet marketing expenditures, attracts visitors to a web site and tunes web page …