Well, that was my opinion up until about a month or two ago. Prior to this epiphany, I understood how Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. could be useful on both a professional and personal level… but I really wasn’t on the blog bandwagon. Why would someone want to read about my life, and take the time to read my take on things? Don’t they have their own things to worry about? Don’t get me wrong, I have always loved the online marketing world, but I just didn’t get it.

Fast forward to the present, and here I sit at Risdall, witnessing the collaborative nature between SEO, sponsored search, social media and PR everyday. It was only after I began to see how all of these elements come together in blogs that I began to be a believer in blogs.

I came to see that blogging is so much more than just writing about oneself or “eavesdropping” in on someone else’s life. Blogging is about helping people through shared experiences and opinions. It’s about sharing advice and allowing others to learn from your mistakes and negative experiences. From an SEO perspective, it’s also about linking. The more links a site has from high trafficked blogs, the higher its organic rankings will be. As you can see, blogging has a little something for everybody.

Don’t expect me to start my own personal blog soon, I’m still not convinced I have enough things to talk about, but through the wide online marketing lens I have come to understand and respect the blogging world.

Blogs, FTW!

At PubCon this week, Google guru, Matt Cutts, has shared that there is a substantial rally cry to add page load as a factor in how websites are ranked (see article at Search Engine Land). We have been saying this for years from a usability standpoint. Google agrees with us that a site that loads faster is a better user experience and that is why it wants to include it in the ranking algorithm. That is interesting…Google has always said that it wants relevant results (Google says this is, “…defined by co-founder Larry Page as something that, “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”") Now Google wants to better its results again by adding good usability to its relevant results. Way to go, Google!

What are your thoughts on adding this new ranking factor to the algorithm? Are there any other factors you would like Google to think about?

Last week’s stack of generally uninteresting vendor mail included an “IMPORTANT LEGAL NOTICE” from a company in a southern MN, near my home town.  Feeling some sense of intrigue and obligation I decided to read before filing in the plastic bin at my feet.  Turns out some folks won a settlement against Yahoo! relating to Sponsored Search and Content Match ad placement.  They claim the terms of service were violated when Yahoo! allowed these ads to be displayed on spyware, domain parking pages, pop-ups/unders, and typosquatting sites.  Naughty naughty!  After years of litigation, millions of pages and hundreds of GB of documentation provided by Yahoo!, testimony from both sides, and all that shtuff, a settlement was reached.

So, what does this mean for all involved?  Here’s the breakdown.

• General public – Yahoo! agreed to develop an “Ad Placement Option” (name subject to change blah blah blah), whereby customers can specify that ads purchased may only be displayed on Yahoo! owned properties or “Premium” distribution partners.  The timetable for the launch of this new option is “as early as the first quarter of 2010, but in no event later than September 30, 2010″, and they agree to maintain the option for at least two years from the launch … or (almost forgot about this part) until the agreement with Microsoft is finalized.  So, in theory, and legally, it may never materialize.  Yahoo! also agreed to post more information about where ads may appear on the Traffic Quality portion of it’s site.
• Class Members still in business – nothing in particular.  It’s not about the money though, it’s the principle.
• Class Members out of business – a $20 refund – the cost of a stamp.  Yahoo! indeed.
• Class Representatives – these three (also referred to as “several”, not the more precise “few”, in the IMPORTANT LEGAL NOTICE) will be awarded $10,000 each.
• Class Counsel – $4,170,000 plus expenses totaling about $100,000.  Remember, it’s not just about the money.  It’s about the principal and the resulting interest, dividends, and taxes.
• Yahoo! – total estimated outlay is $4.3 million plus the $20 payments to class members now out of business.

Learn more about the case and the settlement at www.inreyahoosettlement.com.

Great post by Adam Kleinberg at iMedia.

1) Mass collaboration is powering the new economy
Companies are taking advantage of a new collaborative world to foster innovation and grow their enterprises.

2) Constant connectivity in an on-demand world
I’m wired almost every minute of every day and so are your customers and prospects. People expect you as a company to be “on” 24/7.

3) Globalization: Making the world a smaller place
Technology has made geography irrelevant. Businesses around the world are doing business with one another and will continue to do so.

4) Pervasive distrust in big corporations
The impending financial doom this country faced a year ago had a tremendous impact on consumer confidence in America, but even greater damage was done to consumer trust.

5) A global sense of urgency to fix the problems of a modern world
Being green is a minimum standard.

5 marketing megatrends you can’t ignore

Trust has become the factor for brands, large and small. In this ever-changing economy and marketplace, trust is what brands are built on. Without the trust of its audiences – vendors, customers, distributors/dealers, partners, etc. – companies will fail. Business Week just ran an article called, The Great Trust Offensive, talking about three big brands and how they are working to establish greater trust with their customers. I would go one further and say that all your audiences must trust you and that trust is absolutely necessary to succeed. You may have a short-lived success with a new, catchy widget or service but if you can’t live up to expectations, you kill that trust with your audiences.

Trust can be built through each interaction that a brand has with its audiences. From ads to lead nurturing to SEM to delivery of products/services to customer service to social networks, a brand has many touchpoints with its audiences and thereby, many opportunities to establish trust. Here are six simple rules to follow in all your communications/conversations around your brand:
1. Be true to your brand. Create a brand that stands for something and stick to it.
2. Set expectations and make sure that you can live up to them.
3. Live up to them.
4. Engage your audiences to find out if you are living up to them and to get input.
5. Act on that input. This may require a change in product or how you do business or it may involve taking what you started with and expanding on it. Regardless, you have received valuable input and now you can build trust by responding to it and acting on it.
6. Continue to do all of the above. This is an ongoing process and conversation, not just a one-time occurrence. It is the ongoing trust relationship that you are building that will keep your audiences coming back to you time and again.

The Wall Street Journal has a great article on how Facebook can ruin friendships when online buds share too much information. For those that use Facebook and Twitter on a regular basis, personal information overload is all too common: who really cares if you’re having your (gasp!) third cup of coffee since you got to work? Unfortunately, many people don’t stop to think if their friends or followers give a hoot about the minute details of their lives. Either that, or they might subscribe to the theory that it doesn’t matter if their online friends and followers care; it’s their profile to share what they darn well please.

There’s a valuable business communications lesson here: no matter the platform or channel by which you communicate your message, always stop to ensure it’s relevant to your audience. Sure, you might want to toss in a few tweets about what’s happening at the office in order to break up the stream of industry news, trends, key messages and more, and that’s fine. Just pause before you hit “update” or “post” and think about whether or not your little bit of wit is relevant.

Okay maybe that is pushing it but you don’t see too many 10 year partnerships in the online space. The announcement which many of us in the industry have been waiting to hear for a couple years now finally came through today. Yahoo and Microsoft signed a deal that puts them as search results partners.

In the deal Microsoft’s new Bing search engine (yes, it is actually from Microsoft even if they are have done a very good job of trying to cover that up to the general public) will provide the algorithmic results to Yahoo and the technology for how the paid search results are managed, while Yahoo will be selling the premium search ads.

The move is long-awaited even for those that didn’t necessarily see the move as a good one. What it does is put the resources of the #2 (Yahoo) and #3 (Microsoft/Bing) search vendors together to compete with Google which has been maintaining a 2 to 1 share over both of them combined fairly consistently.

If you haven’t used Bing, I do recommend trying it. It was a vast improvement over their previous attempt, results appear to be better and the display/interface is much improved.

Its about time someone finally stepped up to the plate to challenge Google. I fully expect Google to react well and roll with the news just fine. But it will be interesting to see how the industry reacts and how the ad sales pick up for Yahoo/Bing. At the end of the day I’ll always say it is about the results, so if they want to break into Google’s share over the long term it will take more than a marketing blitz, but at least they’ve made a change. It was time to adapt or die.

Financial Times editor Lionel Barber told a UK audience this week that almost every news organization will charge for content in some way in the next year, as reported by PR Week. My question, then, becomes what value will news organizations provide that will engage readers to pay. That model was tried and failed a decade ago by many mainstream media. What will be different this time?

Traditional media have evolved and until recently thrived as the gatherers of information. Along the way, they became the agenda setters for discussion on issues with tremendous clout and must-read/see/hear status. With the explosion of online media and the ease of sharing and monitoring opinions (and the accompanying cultural shift that has people seeking this information online first), we don’t need media to gather as much; and “I can set my own agenda.” Think about it. I can subscribe to Web sites, blogs, Twitter accounts, and Facebook pages that give me only political news with my particular ideology, or only sports news that supports my favorite teams. I can ignore the rest. And frankly, there’s something satisfying in doing so for many who feel that the traditional media have abused that power in setting agendas consistent with their own personal views; not necessarily representing objectivity or the sentiment of the readers.

At the same time, the Wall Street Journal has a very successful pay-for-online content model, specifically because it provides content that often isn’t available anywhere else and goes deeper than traditional media typically report. Take note traditional media: To be worthy of my online dollar, you’ll have to do the same and offer something I can’t find elsewhere online. At a time when traditional media are shrinking their news staffs and relying on more canned wire stories, while expanding beats that allow less depth on original content, it’s difficult to see them re-inventing themselves in that meaningful way.

What do you think?

One of the biggest misconceptions that businesses make when it comes to social media is the amount of time it can take.  Companies will make comments like “We can just start a blog” or “Twitter will be easy.”  However, they do not realize the immense amount of time it takes to manage these types of efforts.  Beyond the issue of time management, creating compelling and interesting content can be an extremely difficult task.

Today I found an interesting advertisement for the new movie The Ugly Truth.  It highlighted the movie’s twitter account and offered a call to action for users to create the account’s content:

The advertisement states “Tweet your best dating advice to @UglyTruthMovie“  and “Come Back Friday (movies release date) for the top tips.”  Now we have stated before how smart it is to do advertisements that call attention to Twitter accounts, but this ad is adding a whole new piece to the puzzle.  This ad is not only informing people about the Twitter account for the movie, it is working to create content (and topics) without the administrator actually having to come up with it.  Can you say GENIUS?  The other interesting piece to the ad was the location of the media buy.  The above advertisement is currently on the middle of the first 3 pages of PerezHilton.com which attracts the exact same market as The Ugly Truth is aiming to reach (and get into the theaters).  So in a nutshell, the advertisement is targeted directly at the perfect group of people to build the account’s content, while engaging them in efforts to sell some tickets.

Do you think some of these “content creators” (and viewers for that matter) will be venturing to the theaters this Friday?

Google AdWords has a scheduling feature that allows your ads to run certain times of the day and even vary that schedule based on the day of the week.

The simplest way to do this is to turn off the ads completely on days or times that don’t convert well.  If you are running ads for b2b it is common to run them only during the business day and off on weekends.

A more advanced way is to adjust the amount that is bid depending how the ads perform at a certain time and day.

How to know the best days and times?
Run an ad performance report and summarize the data by “Day of Week” or better yet, look at the campaign’s performance with your analytics package.  Most likely there will be patterns that will emerge depending on the day of the week.  There are often weekdays that perform better than others.

What to do with this info?
Make adjustments to the ad schedule by selecting the campaign >> settings.  Scroll down to “Advanced Settings” and select “Edit” scheduling.  The screen below will come up.  Select “Bid Adjustment” in Mode.  This enables segments to be setup where the bid adjustments can be made.  In the example below bids are run at 100% of established bid from 8am to 10pm and at 25% from 10pm to 8am.

Happy bidding!!

Advanced Ad Scheduling