Marketing Pilgrim

The ‘Ask the Link Builders’ session was a Q+A style panel at SMX West this year and consisted of Rae Hoffman, Debra Mastaler and Roger Monti.

Q: How do you keep link building white hat?

The general consensus was to stay away from things that go against Google’s terms of service. Debra Mastaler recommended going easy on reciprocal links, site wide paid links and not to be too obvious in what you are doing. Rae Hoffman advised the audience to avoid buying links especially from major networks and to keep anchor text in the inbound links natural. So varying the words used was a good idea.

BusinessWeek is reporting that it, along with the New York Times, Time, USA Today and others, is testing new mega-ad sizes launched by the Online Publishers Association.

The ad units are much larger than your normal 468×60 banners, but rely heavily on user interaction–meaning, you have to “roll over” the ads before they expand. Here’s a screen grab of what we assume is one of the new ad units (taken from BusinessWeek):

Here’s how BW explains the new ad formats:

A good sign that online reputation monitoring is maturing as an industry is the publication of Econsultancy’s Online Reputation and Buzz Monitoring Buyer’s Guide 2008.

The only other guide (I had seen) is published by Social Target, so a second comprehensive guide is a sure sign that there’s a growing demand for services that help you monitor social and mainstream media.

Like most guides, Econsultancy’s doesn’t come cheap at $255, but then again you do get 142 pages covering 16 different vendors–including my own Trackur.com.

Trends in this sector, covered in this report, include:

• Proliferation of content and social media means technology holds the key to online brand monitoring.
• Free tools become more widely available but vendors seek to add value to technology through human interpretation.

The headline of this post in the WSJ blog would lead one to believe yet again that the sky is indeed falling on the search marketing world. With all the talk of the bad economy, the stock market continuing its downward spiral and folks falling into a malaise it would only make sense that when SEMPO ‘slashed’ its forecasts for ’09 it would give ua more bad news.

Well, I suppose it is all in how you define bad news because despite the adjustment downward by this industry group search is still estimated to grow at a healthy 9% this year. As we have said before at Marketing Pilgrim, let’s celebrate the positives.

By Trisha Lyn Fawver

Last week, Google announced that Google Calendar will be available to view offline. They’ve already offered users the ability to view Gmail offline at the end of January, and last week’s announcement both excites and dismays me at the same time. 

There’s been a lot of talk in the last two years about the move from desktop-based computing to cloud computing with the widespread adoption of Google Documents, Google Calendar, and other online services that have slowly replaced traditional software applications for many astute marketers and business people.  In fact, taking a look at the schedule for the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco later this month you’ll see several sessions regarding cloud computing.

Is Google bringing the cloud down to Earth?

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that social networking is popular. According to Nielsen Online, it’s become a whole lot more popular. From December 2007 to December 2008, social networks or blogs account for nearly 10% of all Internet time, and the “Member Communities” category of sites surpassed the email category in Internet popularity, measured by time on site. (Don’t worry, though: search, portals and software apps still edge out social networks.)

Nielsen reports that two-thirds of the world’s Internet population belongs to a social network, though the by-country stats show a little more variation: only half of Switzerland’s and Germany’s residents are on social networks, while Brazil has 80% of its population social networking (Orkut FTW!). In Brazil, one in every four minutes online is spent on a social networking site. (In the UK, it’s one of every six minutes, in the US, it’s one of every sixteen.)