Li Evans will speak at Search Engine Strategies: San Jose
If you’d like to catch her words of wisdom, here’s her schedule and topics:
Social Media: Managing Conversations and Reputations When the User Is In Control on Wednesday from 2:30-3:45
Extreme Makeover: Live Twitter & Blogging Clinic on Thursday from 12:45-2:00
Images & Search Engines: Getting the Full Picture on Thursday from 2:15-3:30
In the ancient days of yore (January 2009), T-mobile produced a spectacular video.
A flashmob suddenly starts dancing; and just as suddenly, stops. The dancers disburse leaving astonished onlookers to call, text, or share cell phone videos of the event with their friends and family. Fade up the tag line: “Life’s for Sharing” and you tie together the amazing event we’ve just witnessed (even through video) with the company and the message you want to send. They gave us, the audience, a gift that seemed so genuine that we didn’t even mind that they branded it at the end. Absolutely brilliant.
Next in late March a Belgian television program repeated the stunt using “Do Re Mi” from the Sound of Music, bringing the experience of a musical into modern day life. (Plus who doesn’t love Julie Andrews? Ok, you’re right, the Nazi’s weren’t big fans, but other than them?) [View Entire Article]
Too many marketers take a ‘good enough’ approach when it comes to their Google Adwords campaigns.
I recently had a phone call with a client who had over 4,000 words of unorganized content on his landing page and couldn’t understand why no one was purchasing his service. When I encouraged him to change his landing page, he quickly interrupted, insisting it was a waste of time and consumers “will get the gist.”
Web visitors are not your friends and family. They are the most fickle, impatient bunch that will ever come in contact with you or your brand.
Web users, in mass, seem to have one enduring mantra: when in doubt, click out. And why shouldn’t they? Your website is not the only circus in town. In any industry, it’s possible to have between 20 and 20,000 competing sites. This puts a premium on creating tight, well organized, and engaging content that will lead customers to the call-to-action.
You don’t have to be a wordsmith to create compelling content. You don’t even have to speak the language.
I used to work with a software company managing their English speaking campaigns. After producing very positive results, I mustered the courage to see if I could handle their overseas campaigns as they were heavily engaged in Germany and France.
They were slightly confused by my request (I speak neither German nor French), but I quickly explained that despite speaking neither language, it was quite obvious that they were making some serious mistakes. [View Entire Article]
One of the biggest complaints about social media, or rather reasons companies give for not getting involved in it, that I hear time and time again is that they are afraid of what people will say about them, and fear they have no control over that. Unfortunately for these companies what they don’t realize is that this is going on whether they are involved in social media or not. The problem really isn’t that there is something bad being said about them. The real problem is that they (the companies) aren’t listening to what’s being said.
Right now I’m on vacation in Key West. I say that not to make anyone jealous, but more to give a background to this post. See I booked my hotel based on the establishment’s response to some “negative” reviews on a Social Media site called TripAdvisor. I’m staying at the Palms Hotel on White Street here in Key West. I was looking for a quaint hotel, closer to the heart of Key West, but not amidst the busy happenings of Duval Street. I searched through reviews of a lot of hotels and B&B’s when I came across the listing for the Palms, I noticed a few negative reviews. But I also saw the owners, actively engaged in responding to those reviews. [View Entire Article]
Last week Li Evans had an article posted on Search Engine Watch entitled What Are Your Social Media Goals?
Li discusses some ways to measure social media involvement and how to set appropriate goals
A couple of posts ago I wrote about a gentleman from the UK who had made some mistakes that had been captured and spread across the web. How did he get caught up in his situation? Two men were masquerading as a woman online, basically sitting behind a fake persona. Is this ethical? No it’s not. Yet people do it. On the internet you don’t have to be who you are in real life. You don’t have to be a spotty 16 year old with a weight issue, you can be an unquestioned expert on lepidoptery.
But what about companies? Is it fine for them to have employees not identify themselves as employees, or take it even further and pretend to be a member of a different demographic to subtly push the agenda of the company? Again, no it’s not. There’s even a term for it – “Sock Puppets”. What tends to happen is that Brad in marketing slips up when posting as “Brenda, a 58 year old grandmother from Arkansas”, and the community gets suspicious and outs ‘Brenda’.
It’s true that Brad could keep up his persona, indefinitely, and be a ‘secret agent’ for the company. Yet he could still be found out, especially if he’s posting from work (most forums log the IP address of posters, and it’s a simple process to do a reverse lookup to see who owns that IP).
Recently we’ve had a number of clients who’ve come to us wanting to evaluate their current web analytics package to see if it’s still the right package for them. Sometimes they’ve done a bit of research on their own and have a basic understanding of a few options and the capabilities of each. In other cases they don’t know anything about the differences between the packages. One aspect that seems to be true for all of them, however, is that they all want to know about Google Analytics.
They know it’s free and that can be very attractive to a company that is cutting costs to try and weather the recession. What they don’t know is if it will fit their needs and that is a critical question to ask when choosing a web analytics package. The topic is often brought up in forums and written about across various blogs. Sometimes the posters or bloggers view Google Analytics in a positive light and in other cases more negatively. What is constant is that there can often be information that gets put out there that may not be completely accurate. The folks over at Google Analytics have been following these blog posts and forum threads and decided that it was time to put out a post of their own. The post aims to debunk the top ten myths about Google Analytics.
The post definitely addresses many of the issues that get brought up regarding Google Analytics and can certainly be used as a reference if you’re going through the process of evaluating the right web analytics package for your company. If you’re not sure how to go about the process of choosing a web analytics package or just simply don’t have the time then contact us. We can help guide you through the entire process from choosing the right package to correctly implementing it so that it properly tracks all the metrics that tie into your site goals.
At IM Spring Break our very own Li Evans spoke with Robert Garcia of Ecom Phenom about branding.
Check out the interview for some best practices on building your brand.
Over at Takeitinhouse.com we have an interview with Melanie Mitchell, VP of Marketing at Folio Investments, Inc. She discusses her nearly nine years in search marketing, points out some great reasons for educating the entire company about SEO, and shares insights on in-house search marketing teams and their role in the company.
At 2:15 today Nan will speak during the annual Specialized Information Publishers Association Conference. She will present on Blogger Relations and Linkbait – Identifying the Influencers and Finding the Right Hooks with Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder of SEO-PR. Please check out www.sipa2009.com for more information on Nan’s presentation and the conference as a whole.
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