Marketing Pilgrim

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about how to measure the value of blogging, including in B2B organizations. Forrester Research recently released a study entitled “How to Derive Value from B2B Blogging,” and it contained many valuable insights into the state of B2B blogging and its adoption today.

Some key findings from the report include:

• While adoption of corporate blogging has been growing over the past few years, the number of new blogs established in 2007 took a nose dive.
• Corporate bloggers can’t seem to keep the conversation going. The challenge for many B2B marketers seems to be that writing for a blog is often more conversational, while many B2B marketers have been trained to write with a strictly business or technical focus.
• Because B2B marketers aren’t trained to write for blogs, many blogs read like press releases. And let’s face it, that’s no way to start a conversation on your blog!

Click here to continue reading...

Recently, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to a generational gap I’ve seen become more evident over the past few years separating traditional marketers from online marketers. I’m 36, and I can tell you that with a few noted exceptions, most of the marketers I know over the age of 40 don’t really seem to understand the cutting edge of online marketing, much less the basics.

Yesterday, Mike Grehan over at Clickz wrote a great article entitled: “Search and the Changing Face of Public Relations”. In it, he addresses how public relations is changing today with the advent of technologies like social media, blogging and more. And the unfortunate reality is that MOST public relations firms are not adapting to bring these new technologies to their clients.

Click here to continue reading...

Whether you’re an in-house SEO or an SEO consultant, you’ve likely faced the affects of search volume fluctuations on your website traffic. So how can you explain these search volume fluctuations to your boss or a client?

Many times, I’ve found that clients do not correlate news events with search volume. I’m not sure why this is a difficult concept to understand, but a look at Google Trends or the Yahoo!’s Buzz demonstrate a very direct correlation between news stories and search volume. For instance, on Monday, Martin Luther King Day (or Lee/Jackson/King Day in Virginia — that’s a whole other blog post for later…), “Martin Luther King” was the top searched term. Two days later, however, it’s “Heath Ledger” that’s on everyone’s mind.

I’ve used both the Google Trends and Yahoo! Buzz to try to explain the correlation to clients. It can be confusing for them to see spikes in traffic in their analytics and not truly understand why — or why that traffic doesn’t continue.

Click here to continue reading...

Now, you won’t hear me trumpet Google’s praises all that often, but I will say that I’m really thrilled to see Google lead the way to help students learn more about search marketing. Google has partnered with professors across the world to introduce college students to search engine marketing with the Google Online Marketing Challenge. It’s a win-win for Google — it potentially exposes new companies to Google AdWords and it exposes the next generation of marketers to Google AdWords.

Over a three week period, students will have a $200 budget, provided by Google, to use towards the PPC advertising for their selected client. The competition has three main components: 1) the pre-campaign strategy, 2) campaign management, and 3) post-campaign analysis. Students will create and manage AdWords accounts for their selected client, selecting keywords, writing ads and monitoring clicks. Google, in turn, will evaluate all of the challenge teams on a set of 30 criteria (many of which are top secret), including measurements like click through rate. There will be global and regional winners; the grand prize is a week-long trip to the Googleplex in Mountain View, Ca. (Now I want to enter! I need a vacation!)

Click here to continue reading...

I just had to share this image today because it gave me a good chuckle. I did a search for “google adwords editor” today on Google to ensure that I had the latest version downloaded, and the following AdWords ad appeared:

I swear that I did not alter that image in any way. I can only assume that the editors at Google are either: a) just too backlogged to have even noticed this yet or b) laughed their pants off that someone actually wrote an ad like this and just let it go. Either way, it’s still funny.

Americans get dumber every year. It’s true. If you doubt it, just watch an episode of the gameshow “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader.” Most people, frankly, aren’t.

But are we getting dumber or just more dependent on technology to remember details for us? In this month’s issue of Wired magazine, Clive Thompson examines how we’ve allowed machines to remember so much for us, possibly allowing us to focus on other human thoughts and even accelerate intelligence by sharing thoughts online.

I personally embrace the lifestyle where computers can remember the details for me, and when needed, I can pull out that data from its source. In essence, a computer can act like a secondary hard drive for my brain, allowing me to focus on thoughts and ideas that only the human brain can. No matter how advanced a computer may be, it still lacks compassion, emotion, and free will — all components of human thought.

Click here to continue reading...

Well, I guess it was just a matter of time, but today I got my first phishing scam disguised as a Yahoo! Search Marketing customer email:

Very clever, oh devious ones! What are some of the tell-tale signs that this message is NOT from Yahoo!? Here’s what to check for:

• No “To” Address. Always be suspicious if you do not see your email address or name in the “To” field of an email header. Yahoo! Search Marketing obviously has your email address on file if you are an advertiser.
• Title Doesn’t Match the Copy. The headline of this email tells me to renew my account, but the body of the email discusses signing up for SMS account alerts that will come to my mobile phone.
• Link is not to Yahoo.com. Always a dead giveaway of phishing scams, rolling over the “Click here to activate ‘instant sms alert’.” link shows that the destination link is http://nanoyahoo.tkqlhcip.com, not yahoo.com.

Click here to continue reading...

Last week, a new Harris Poll indicated that Americans feel that search engines are doing a good job at serving consumers. Search engines ranked second, falling just behind grocery stores. Search engines outranked hospitals, banks, electric and gas utilities and telephone companies.

What this tells me is what I’ve long suspected is true of the search engines — OK is apparently good enough.

In the beginning, many businesses start with the best of intentions, essentially trying to create a better solution. But as businesses grow, they often lose sight of the initial company goals as new goals take over. For instance, when a company becomes public, one of its primary goals must be to consistently increase company revenue. It’s one of the main concerns of many small businesses as they grow. Anita Roddick, the founder of The Body Shop, wrote about this conundrum in her 1994 book Body and Soul. Her challenge was to create a company that was earth-conscious, and keep that mission as the company became a global megacompany. As new goals arise, a company’s initial purpose can be reduced in priority and complacency can set in — and OK becomes good enough.

Click here to continue reading...

Tonight the Inside AdWords blog announced that Google is going to change the ad placement algorithm, replacing actual CPC as a factor with maximum CPC.

How does this affect advertisers? Well, by Google’s estimation, this is a GOOD thing for advertisers:

Actual CPC is determined, in part, by the bidding behavior of the advertisers below you. This means that your ad’s chance of being promoted to a top spot could be constrained by a factor you cannot influence. By considering your ad’s maximum CPC, a value you set, you will have more control over achieving top ad placement.

In addition to increasing control for advertisers, the improved formula increases the quality of our top ads for users. This is due to more high quality ads becoming eligible for top placement, thereby allowing our system to choose from a larger pool of high quality ads to show our users.

Click here to continue reading...

Today iCrossing, possibly the largest SEM firm, announced its acquisition of web development firm Proxicom. The acquisition came on the heels of an announcement last week by iCrossing that it had received $62 million in funding from Goldman Sachs and three venture capital firms. This acquisition is just the latest in a string of purchases by iCrossing this year and last, including: ewGate Internet, a paid-search firm in San Francisco; Spannerworks, a search and social-media agency in the United Kingdom; and Sharp Analytics, a marketing technology firm in Salt Lake City.

iCrossing’s acquisition of Proxicom is a watershed moment in the SEM industry. To date, most SEM firms have been acquired by marketing services or web agencies, but this is the first case where a major SEM firm acquired a major web development firm. Why is that important?

Click here to continue reading...

Today we were doing some experimentation at my firm, and we came across something very bizarre with Google AdWords. We were trying out Google’s new search query reports, which allow you to see the actual search queries searchers used to find your ad. This differs from the keyword reports in Google AdWords in that these reports show the actual queries versus the keywords that you establish in your ad groups.

Why is that helpful? From our perspective, we thought they might provide some interesting data and insight into additional negative keywords we might want to troubleshoot for. Indeed the report did just that. In fact, the report yielded many new negative keywords for us to consider that were not highlighted by Google’s negative keywords tool.

But what was really shocking about this new report is that we found that our clients’ ads have been showing for keywords that do not appear in either the campaigns or the entire account. What do I mean?

Click here to continue reading...

An article in yesterday’s Washington Post follows the online reputation misfortunes of Sue Scheff, a consultant to parents of troubled teenagers. Scheff found that Google searches on her name produced many negative results from a disgruntled customer, and she didn’t know how to fight back. Scheff hired an online reputation management company to fix the problem.

Online reputation management has been around for some time. And with the advent of Web 2.0 technologies and social media, the opportunity for feedback itself outranking a website is greater than ever. Companies, and even individuals, are finding it more important than ever to outrank (or even push out for that matter) the negative results about them in the search rankings.

Click here to continue reading...