quoted on adage

AdAge asked bloggers what technology in 2008 marketers should be thinking about most.

They posted my response:

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Search marketing. This includes search engine optimization, search engine marketing (also called pay-per-click), and dealing with universal search.

When Jeremiah and others say that your corporate website is less relevant than ever, they’re right. But if you ignore the basics in favor of the hot new technologies, you will fall behind those who made sure they built a strong foundation.

Are you highly ranked for your most important keywords and phrases? Have you done the research to know what those phrases really are? Are you paying attention to how you are spending money on search engine marketing? Far less sexy than Facebook ads, no question — but almost always a better generator of sales.
—–
See the post here.

Note the variety of answers people gave. Sure, they picked responses that said different things, but look at the overall variety of “most important” subjects:

branded microcontent
local search
mobile apps
last.fm
twitter/micro-blogging
SEO
storing data on the web
content marketing
search marketing
online video/tv
micro-communication
action+ethics
Keywords
content marketing
Facebook
online advertising exchanges
Blogging
video
site optimization (testing)

This says to me that, if you are involved in online marketing, you’d best have some clue about all of these, and really understand a handful.

Go read the whole article. It’s worth your time.

metanews

I blogged a bit ago about how, for Dove, Youtube had a better ROI than the superbowl. I got the info from Mike at Digital Agency.

Mike liked my entry enough to screenshot me.

Now the google page for ‘youtube beats superbowl‘ is 70% owned by the two of us. This is fair how?

somebody thinks i am special, or, how to get mentioned on blogs

Mike thinks I am worth talking about. Because I noticed and commented a bit on why his blog Digital Agency had the top spot in Google for ‘youtube beat superbowl’ when all he really said was, hey, check out this AdAge story.

I took a look at the URL and title tags for his blog post vs. the AdAge article. I made a small point, that having your topic concisely titled in the URL and title tags is a good idea.

And this was enough for Mike to link to me.

And now me and him own the top 5 spots on google for ‘youtube beats superbowl.’

Lesson #1: Interesting content is not king. As Andy said in the comments on Mike’s blog, “Yeah, but who bothers to link to AdAge these days? We’re all interested in meta-commentary.” Content is nice. Conversations are better.

Lesson #2: Comment on other people’s blogs. A lot. Savvy bloggers notice.

Lesson #3: When you comment, say something useful. If you want to say “I love you, you are great,” that is fine, but don’t expect that to do anything other than warm the blogger’s heart. Which is good. But if you want to build traffic, comment on something that will be of interest to the blogger and to their readers.

Mike and Alice at Digital Agency say they are “Advising, commentating, consulting and creating in the new marketing world of Web 2.0.” So say something worth their time to listen to.

why is digital agency #1 in google, when ad age wrote the article?

My previous post gives you the link to a blog, and that blog gives you the link to Ad Age, who wrote the story.

But if Ad Age wrote the story, why did I go through a blog to find it?

Here is the title tag and URL of the Ad Age story:
Advertising Age – Better ROI From YouTube Video Than Super Bowl Spot
http://adage.com/article?article_id=112835

The same data from the Digital Age blog entry:
DigitalAgency: YouTube beats SuperBowl:
http://digitalagency.typepad.com/digitalagency/2006/10/youtube_beats_s.html

I mentioned the story to Ian, who asked for a link. So I went to google. Did I type in “Better ROI From YouTube Video Than Super Bowl Spot” or “youtube beats superbowl”? Of course the latter- much easier to remember, and gets the point across in the least possible words.

Which is why I saw Digital Agency as #1 in google, while the Ad Age article is not in the top #30.

The title tags and the URLs matter a lot to search engines. Look at the URLs I listed- one includes “youtube beats” while the other has no relevant data.

This is why most blogging software puts the title of the blog post into the URL. To see for yourself, click on the title of this article (to get to unique page where this article is, as opposed to the main blog page.) Now look at the title at the top of your browser screen.

Something like that should not be hard for Ad Age to do, but because they don’t, I go to a blog to find out what Ad Age has to say.

Lesson: a) write news, b) when you build a site, make the title tags short, sweet, and relevant, and c) write news.