We receieved an email from a friend asking for a few SEO resources, and it seemed to make sense just to throw them into a blog post. Here they are...10 of my favorite SEO tools:

Continue reading "10 Great SEO Tools and Resources"

Merry Christmas everyone!

At this point, I'm probably drinking frothy eggnog (except I'm lactose intolerant), eating chestnuts (except I'm allergic to nuts), and singing Christmas carols (....) back in Michigan with my roots.

Anyhow, Qui Diaz wrote a great article on Mashable last week regarding using social media (and the internet at large) for social good. She called it, DIGITAL CHARITY TOOLBOX: 50+ Ways to Get Your “Give” On and I just wanted to pass it along. This holiday season, if you're looking for a few ways to support a charity using the interwebs, this post should get you started.

Cheers, and a very Merry Christmas.

If you have a blog, or if you have a client who has a blog, I'd like to offer some suggestions on how to measure that blog's success. As a disclaimer, much of this post (but not all of it) is about how to use Google Analytics to measure blogs. So if you don't use GA, I hope you still find value; but the last two paragraphs might not make sense. I've decided to include these suggestions in a seriees and I shall call it, "Figuring Out Your Traffic So You Can Blog to Your Audience So That You Can Garner More Traffic and Engagement And Feel Better About Yourself So You Can Go to Awkward Social Media Events and Talk About Your Blog In Real Life Because That's Really Cool."

Today is part 1 and I'll be covering: the basics, identifying goals, and new versus returning visitor segmentation.

Continue reading "Measuring Blogs Success - Part 1: The Basics, Goals & Visitors"

Looking for another new year prediction?  How about this - Facebook Connect is going to be big in 2009.

Maybe huge.

(If you don't yet already know what Facebook Connect is, VizEdu has a simple demo explaining the service.)

There are five big reasons why I'm excited about the potential for Facebook Connect:

Continue reading "Facebook Connect Gives Digital Marketers Huge Opportunity in 2009"

Like many of our peers in the media "middle," we've been doing a lot of thinking about 2009. So, we kicked off this month's Middle School Marketing meeting talking about our online marketing predictions for the new New Year. Rightfully so, this week there's been a lot of chatter about what's to come: Peter Kim's compilation of social media predictions, eMarketer's article of what lies ahead, and Clickz's What Next piece, to name a few.

Like many of our earlier MSM meetings, we talked about the utility, usage and future of Twitter. Lisa mentioned that she was surprised to learn over Thanksgiving that many of her high school and college-age relatives had never heard of Twitter. Dispite the 1.3 million users, how many of them are active, and what's the demographic breakdown? Even within our small group, there were various use cases: keeping up with current events, networking, RSS feed, following friends, following clients, and networking with other industry types. In the end, Twitter is simply another medium which can be used to broadcast message... in 140 characters or less, of course.

Continue reading "Middle School Marketing - Reflections & Predictions"

Last week, Viget hosted the December Social Media Club DC event at our Falls Church headquarters. Our good friend Justin Thorpe with Clearspring Technologies gave a presentation on How Sharing Can Help You Reach More Users Online. For those who couldn't make the event, I've provided a quick recap below:

People are spending more time in social networks and online communities. While this may seem obvious, Justin drew upon a relevant dinner party analogy to drive the point home. When spending time with friends, family and co-workers in social situations, we converse on an array of topics ranging from what we've been up to and what's interesting to us to current events and television shows. People love to share. Social media tools have made it easier to share online - and folks love it! Widgets make it easier for individuals and companies to "share"  - to take content from one place online and put it somewhere else (usually on facebook, iGoogle, or blogs). The succesful widgets tend to focus on simplcity. Justin gave a couple of great examples, many of which can be found on his Favorite Widgets blog.

Continue reading "Social Media Club DC Recap"

As digital marketers strive to deliver value and meaning for consumers, the widget is increasingly becoming an essential part of the overall marketing mix. Brands, content publishers and just about everyone in between are discovering entertaining or useful opportunities to launch branded applications for their customers. Nike, InStyle and UPS among others have all created widgets to connect with customers in a way that is direct, sharable and interactive. (We even relied heavily on a widget strategy for promoting singer songwriter Martin Sexton.)

Bob Garfield writes in AdAge that the widget fits nicely in the post-advertising age, and quotes Contagious Magazine's Jessica Greenwood who says that, "the widget's value is 'like a basic unit of utility. The marketing becomes part of the product."

But how does a brand figure out where to start with widgets? For that, I turned to Justin Thorp, Community Manager at Clearsping Technologies, whose widget platform earned 332 million unique visitors worldwide in October. Here is Justin's take on where to begin:

When should a company consider launching a widget strategy?
I think the question is, “When should a company consider widgets as part of their overall communications strategy?”  If you’re publishing any type of content online, you need to develop a strategy for how you’re going to get your content in the hands of existing and potential users.  Because they’re portable and can move all over the Web, widgets are a great mechanism for doing this.  We recommend widgets for content publishers who want to extend their reach beyond their domain and who hope to reach the hard-to-reach user on the Social Web.

Continue reading "Getting Started with Widgets"

It's the consumers' media world - we're just marketing in it.

AdWeek's 30th anniversary edition appropriately captured the theme of this month's Middle School Marketing event here at Viget. More than ever, consumers media consumption habits are radically changing, and marketers are struggling to keep up. Matt Smith of SmithGifford kicked things off this morning with a similar message - media fragmentation is the marketer's biggest problem, and it takes more than a savvy media planner to overcome the dilution of consumer's attention. 

Continue reading "Middle School Marketing: One Big Idea, Many Fragmented Markets"

Last week, Josh and I had the pleasure of spending 3 days at Google HQ with other GAACs learning about new and upcoming features and tools, as well as how our peers are utilizing all that Google as to offer. Some of what was covered is now included on the GA site and our blog, and other stuff is, well, coming soon. Sorry... can’t blog about the super secret stuff.

It was easy to see why Google was ranked the best place to work. Free food (everywhere), the gym, dogs at work, and onsite oil changes are all great perks. Josh and I especially liked the communal bikes! This is post, however, is really about what struck me most about our time at Google:

Continue reading "Hooked on Google Analytics"

Today, I gave a presentation regarding Social Media Marketing at the Women In Technology event, "Intersection of Marketing and Media." Other panelists included Matt Goddard (R2integrated), Susan Kearney (Smith|Gifford), and Brian Reed (BoxTone). My content wasn't earth-shattering (I only had 7 minutes!), but I got a lot of requests to post the slides - mostly because I included a case study about the Motrin Moms drama that broke over the weekend. I've inlcuded the slides below.

Shout outs to other bloggers whose content I read and re-purposed for my presentation. This includes, but is not limited to: Jessica Gottlieb (the mom who started it all on Twitter), Jeremiah Owyang, Laura Fitton, and LadyBug Landing (the women behind the backlash video). Lastly, props to the folks who got involved in the conversation (I guess that's me, now), and reminded a lot of people and one company of how quickly a groundswell can spread through social media. Not only did Motrin miss the mark with an out of touch ad, but they missed an opportunity to quickly respond to the rising crisis through their Twitter account (no mention at all of the issue!) or other available social media tools.

Barack Obama earned a new title this past week, but you may not have noticed that in addition to now owning #44, Obama also was named Marketer of the Year. Awarded at the Association of National Advertisers' annual conference, Obama beat out a few brands you might be familiar with – Nike, Apple and even the much-loved Zappos.com.

And rightly so – the effectiveness of his campaign has set a new benchmark for all advertisers and marketers, especially those in the digital space. His online campaign for change was a grassroots movement on steroids. The seven million names on its lists (email addresses, mobile phone numbers, Facebook and MySpace pages) represent a staggering 11 percent of the approximately 64 million votes the President-elect received. The Obama campaign was an impressive orchestration of on-message brand discipline, social media marketing, networking, user-generated content and direct marketing that built a fiercely passionate movement.

Continue reading "Digital Marketing Lessons from the Obama Campaign"

Like all great musicians, Martin Sexton has a passionately devoted group of fans around the country. Blending soulful lyrics with a bluesy acoustic guitar, Sexton relishes the freedom to craft a unique sound that continually captures the spirit of the people he meets along the way during his epic tours across the country.

But being an independent musician means going it alone in today's already fractured music scene without any major label support to reach new fans. So to to help promote his new album, Solo, we worked with Martin to create a social media marketing strategy that helped Martin tell his story of life on the road and reach a new audience.

Continue reading "Under The Hood - Martin Sexton Gets Social"

Google Analytics just rolled out some pretty amazing features that anyone who is into web analytics can get excited about.

The new features:

• Custom Reports
• Advanced Segmentation (Soooo good)
• Motion Charts (sort of blew my mind)
• New Dashboard and User Interface
• An API! (this, this is just amazing. Dios mio)
• Integration with AdSense

Let's just go down the line and give a brief recap on a few of these tools (with a few videos for those of you who are already spacing out), and why they matter to you -- even if you're not a data nerd.

Continue reading "Google Analytics Just Got WAY Better - API, Segments & Reports"

Recently, a client posed this question:

“Some of the people with whom I work think we should collect email addresses from colleagues, friends, and associates who are affiliated with our industry. They want to add these contacts to our email newsletter mailing list. We work hard to make our newsletter content relevant to anyone in our industry, so they feel the contacts wouldn’t mind receiving the mailing. What are your thoughts on this strategy of growing our list?”

In my response I tried to go light on shaming her for even thinking that adding people to an email marketing list without their permission is appropriate. Instead, I wanted to emphasize that something of real value is at stake when they take this approach to list building. I also pointed out that there are better ways to ‘take advantage’ of colleagues who MAY enjoy their newsletter. I summarized my response to her below; let me know if you have a different take.

Continue reading "Build Email Relationships, Not Spam Lists"

It seemed natural, given that marketing and social media are all about relationships, that our Middle School Marketing discussion for October spent a fair amount of time exploring commitment – and it should be no surprise that the darling of social media marketing, the corporate blog, was the center of conversation. Ryan Moede threw out the commitment question. Paraphrasing: “How do we set expectations around the level of commitment inherent to social marketing?”

Continue reading "Making the Commitment at Middle School Marketing"