Marketing Pilgrim

Within the mass confusion that can erupt when there is a blog controversy, occasionally a thoughtful post will emerge. Last week ShoeMoney wrote about the Death of SEO and here on this blog Greg Howlett supported that theory, while I spoke up to disagree with those opinions. Others have also been discussing the topic and Joost de Valk, has chimed in as well, after reading a blog post from one of his colleagues entitled Reactionary vs. Visionary SEO.

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Greg makes my point for me at the end of his post: How Branding Will Replace SEO.

Also, since many customer conversations take place online, your inbound link profile will improve as will your traffic and conversion rate. And by the way, so will your SEO.

I’d like to start out by focusing on why I disagree with Greg, but I also want to point out why I also approve conceptually with what Greg is saying.

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When it comes to marketing everyone is out to compose the most compelling message possible and then measure an audience’s reaction to that message. The question then becomes are measuring the tools that web marketers use reliable? I think the general consensus is that many of the tools that rely on JavaScript are less reliable than marketers would like them to be.

Stone Temple Consulting has performed a quality test showing that where one locates the JavaScript that our analytics tools rely on matters. The two things that the test showed were one that page load time matters and two that the amount traffic to a server can adversely affect page load time. They had to take both of these concepts into account when performing their test.

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Have you ever wondered what information advertisers are collecting about you? More often than not the individual advertising that you are seeing when you visit your favorite website is based on an advertising profile that has been built up over time based on your individual online behaviors.

CNET is reporting that Jeff Weiner, Executive Vice President of Yahoo’s Network Division, can already imagine a day in the not too distant future where when you see an advertisement on Yahoo, there would be an icon that would allow you to view your ad profile so you can understand why that particular advertisement was delivered to you.

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I was working on writing a comment for the latest blog post by AJ Vaynerchuk at ShoeMoney.com but it turned out that the comment morphed into something more, so I thought bringing some attention to the post as well as my thoughts on it might be a good thing.

AJ selected the names of fifty prominent internet marketing veterans and compared where Twitter and Facebook ranked respectively for their names on Google. The results were unexpected.

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Andy Beal and I have both talked some about Network Solutions and their recent policy decisions as to how they manage their domain name purchasing services. Well TechCrunch is reporting that now Network Solutions has adopted the practice of “hijacking unassigned sub domains” by placing ads on these sub domains without notifying the site owners.

This “new” practice, and I call it new because this is the first we are really hearing of it, is already affecting hundreds of thousands of sub domains. How long this has been going on is hard to tell, but based on Network Solutions recent behavior closer scrutiny will most likely be applied to all of their business practices.

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As I was roaming through the blogsphere, catching up on some of the news and notes I have missed in recent weeks, I read one of Jeremy Zawondy’s recent blog posts addressing a very similar topic. He poses the question does the convenience of having access to someone with answers inhibit people from thinking about and solving their own problems, when they know a quick email, twit, or IM will get them the answer without them having to make any real effort?

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There are a lot of different ways to approach social media marketing. Still it seems many marketers are unwilling to engage with social media services while desiring the benefits the media represents. I was reading an article this weekend by Skellie, which I am not going to recap in its entirety, but you should go read it. Skellie’s article made me chuckle and in a way also made me sad because it really shows why so many internet marketing campaigns fail.

“The most common question I get from bloggers who want to know about getting Dugg is this: should I start using Digg — is that necessary?”

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Sometimes the simplest solution is also the best solution. I was reading Marshall Kirkpatrick’s most recent blog post over at Read Write Web where he discusses turning useful lists into custom search engines. At first I thought it was a pretty cool idea and in fact I still do, but I also think it is a solution to a problem that didn’t exist in the first place.

Part of the value and effectiveness of a really good list is that a person unfamiliar with the contents of the list can quickly scan through the list and review the contents of the list in its entirety. Having that same list inside of a custom search engines, eliminates that value.

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It is smart, it is witty and in some cases it is inane. Gabriel Goldenberg has a post up at seoroi.com that provides a lot of food for thought and in my opinion also gives some poor advice. His is one of those provocative posts that encourages everyone to start thinking about the way they do their online marketing but also reminds everyone to not to believe everything they read.

Gabriel believes webmasters need to become independent from search engines and offers up five tips to do just that. But what I believe Gabriel really means to say is he believes webmasters need to diversify so that they are no longer largely dependant on Google.

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The publishers of Search Marketing Standard have taken on a new project, SEM Compare. SEM Compare proposes to provide visitors with an effective way of contributing and looking at user reviews and rating of SEM Companies.

With the site launch planned for March 17^th it appears that the project is ratcheting up its attempt to collect review data from anyone willing to take the time to fill out their questionnaire. If you would like to visit the site and share an opinion the site can be found at http://www.semcompare.com/share.php.

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Lately Twitter has become my preferred social media tool of choice. Howard Rheingold has written a thoughtful post highlighting the virtues of Twitter. He covers Openness, Immediacy, Variety, Reciprocity, Audience, Asymmetry, and multiple level of interactivity with various sources. Now I have shorted and combined a few of Howard’s reasons, but the two items that really struck a cord with me were the Immediacy and the Reciprocity. I think these are the reasons why Twitter has become my social medium of choice.

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