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!

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.

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.

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!)

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.

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.

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.