Online Marketing Blog

You don’t have to look much further than recent headlines and research studies below to see that many companies are losing confidence in traditional marketing and advertising.  

The changing trends in information production, distribution and consumption coupled with the uncertain times we live in create an unprecedented challenge for companies to better reach and engage with customers.

Whether changes in marketing direction are motivated in response to market and industry conditions, changing consumer behaviors or the need to stay competitive and cost effective, one thing is certain: companies that don’t nail down marketing efficiencies and customer retention are in for a long, cold winter.

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There are many reasons to search social media including monitoring for brand and reputation management purposes. Smart online marketers have also been using social search for other reasons including competitive research and opportunistic content marketing through social keyword trends.

Most advice on how companies should be listening to the social web with minimal cost involves monitoring individual services, which is inefficient.  Premium social media monitoring services do this much more effectively but can be expensive.  Here are 6 free social search tools that may help small businesses make their initial foray into searching the social web more productive while keeping costs to a minimum.  

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As part of  maintaining the BIGLIST of search engine marketing blogs, we’ve posted a list of the top SEO blogs that publish their RSS feed subscriber counts and on this last day of 2008, I thought I’d put up just one more.

A few more SEO blogs have been added to this list from the last two times and a few blogs have switched places as the old guard makes way for the up and coming.  Fire up your feed reader and start subscribing:

Matt Cutts

SEOmoz

Search Engine Land

Search Engine Watch

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A while back I had a Twitter discussion with a few smart Minnesota based marketers, @cbensen, @albertmaruggi and @bestbuyCMO about the importance of customer service and community building that turned to a variety of ancillary benefits. Connie mentioned that community building is a long term investment that continues to pay dividends. Albert pointed out that SEO & community building can be 2 separate tactics with SEO having nothing to do with community. Barry wanted more of an explanation, which motivated this long overdue post.

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I am happy to say that this weekend, December 28th  marks 5 years of blogging at Online Marketing Blog. From the infamous “Florida Update” of December 2003 to current, practical advice on social media strategy December 2008, TopRank has been a trusted source of information for thousands of readers.

The entire TopRank Blogging team wishes a sincere Thank You to everyone that has commented, subscribed and linked to us over the years.  TopRank’s blogging efforts have been recognized in many ways including being one of the top 50 favorited blogs on Technorati, ranked a top marketing blog on Advertising Age and endorsed by fans from The DMA, PRSA, Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo and many others.

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The entire team at TopRank Online Marketing would like to wish our valued readers a very happy holidays and a fantastic new year. We sincerely appreciate all our subscribers and all the amazing insight, comments and connections you’ve helped us make over 2008 and hopefully between each other.

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UPDATE 12/29/08:  Voting is closed and the winner, Best Podcast Social Media, DishyMix  by Susan Bratton of Personal Life Media. Congratulations Susan!

Congrats also to the runner up, User Friendly Thinking by Bizzuka’s John Munsell and Paul Chaney.

There are many ways to acquire information on the topic of social media ranging from blogs to books to Twitter. As part of our efforts to aggregate useful resources for Online Marketing Blog readers on topics related to digital PR, search and social marketing, we bring you this fine list of the best podcasts on social media. 

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At TopRank Online Marketing, we’re keen on matching content and therefore optimization efforts with the right audiences. News is a perfect candidate for optimizing by intent. Below is a presentation I did recently as part of a PR News webinar on the topic of writing for the web, optimizing online PR communications.

As part of the presentation, I included insights from a recent poll of journalists and editors from a mix of print and online publications we conducted. The poll was designed to get a better understanding about their use of search to find sources, conduct research and any other search function that helps them do their job.

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Social Media Smarts: Interview with Frank Eliason of Comcast aka @ComcastCares

Photo by Shel Israel

Twitter has become many things to many people and organizations for that matter, including Comcast.  It really says something when a company experiences the bite of consumer malcontent via social media and then turns around and becomes known as a best practitioner.  This is the experience of Comcast and Director of Digital Care, Frank Eliason.  

Based in Philadelphia, PA, Frank started with Comcast as a Customer Service Manager in September, 2007 and as you’ll read in the interview below has evolved into the social media face of Comcast through his Twitter name ComcastCares.

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Yesterday I posted “3 Reasons Why Blog SEO Fails” to help readers avoid the pitfalls of starting a business or corporate blog purely for SEO reasons  only to end up wasting time and energy. Without proper planning, oversight and passion for the topic, blogs implemented purely for SEO objectives are doomed to fail. Additionally, social media referrals and recommendations are becoming a notable competitor to search traffic which can place SEO as a secondary promotional effort in some situations.

Here are five tips for successful business blog optimization benefits in the long run:

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Yesterday I presented at SES Chicago in a session on SEO Through Blogs and Feeds with Stephan Spencer and Sally Falkow. I went first and presented the slideshow embedded below, a presentation in two parts:

1. Why blogs created solely for SEO purposes will inevitably fail.
2. Tips on how to create a successfully optimized company blog that will last.

My presentation was followed up by Sally who talked about Feeds and distributon opportunities. The final presenter was Stephan, who had 100 or so slides (joking) on WordPress SEO but got through about 20 before the Q/A which was handled by Rebecca Lieb.

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There are many benefits to publishing a business blog and improved search engine visibility is one of the most popular.  It’s pretty common advice to hear: start a blog and the fresh content will attract links, improving your search results.  Such tactical advice can be very effective.

Unfortunately, the advice gets filtered and distorted, not unlike what happens in the game “telephone” kids play. Pretty soon one or more blogs are implemented for the sole purpose and expectation of improving search engine visibility and nothing else. At least nothing else that’s accountable.

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