Search Marketing Gurus | Online Marketing Professionals Give Search Marketing Tips, Advice, Strategies & Tactics

Using Social Media to Research Customer Service Experiences

By Li Evans

Think that people don't care about conversations about the customer service experience your company provides?  Think again!

According to a recently released study from The Society for New Communications Research on Customer Care, a lot more people are using Social Media to investigate Customer Service experiences dealing with companies.  In the study 91% percent of the respondents said they used some sort of Social Media either "Always", "Often", "Sometimes", or "Rarely".  That's saying something, and companies should start taking heed.

Truth in Marketing - Customers Demand It, Even Online

By Li Evans

Social media is fast becoming an integral part of marketing campaigns.  The more the internet pushes the boundaries of communication and how fast it can deliver multimedia such as videos and photos, the more it becomes ingrained into the very essence of everyone's day to day activities.  People communicate in much broader ways now than they every have.

We used to have the pony express, then it was the telegraph, then the phone brought us even closer even though were hundreds of miles apart.  When the computer started to be a way to communicate (think ARPANET here), that's when things really started to expand - emails, message boards, then instant messenger soon came along.  Forums & message boards never went away, they just began to morph into communities, soon enough you had intricate profiles, as well as blogs and now even multimedia can be added in.

So where am I going with this? 

Conversion Rate: What's Your Website Tracking As A Conversion?

By Li Evans

When you  hear the word "conversion" do you automatically think "shopping cart", "secure server", or "SSL"?  It's O.K. if you do, most people think along those lines when they hear talk about converting visitors to buyers.  When people first started talking about successful websites and how to measure the success of a website, conversion rates went hand in hand with retail sites.

The world of online marketing and being held accountable for the bottom line has advanced quite rapidly in the past few years.  It is no longer the retail site that is concerned about the "conversion".  Just about every site on the internet can track some kind of conversion.  Now you are probably scratching your head and thinking "what's she talking about"?  Well lets take a look at the different types of conversion rates you can track - and help to prove the success or the failure of your online marketing efforts.

• Purchase Conversion:
  This is the type of conversion that most equate with the term "conversion".  This is where a visitor comes to your website or web page and then eventually, either in that visit or a subsequent visit depending on your analytics tracking, purchases a product or service that your website offers.  This type of conversion is pretty clean cut as you can clearly tie back advertising spend, resources and product/service costs to the conversion.
  
  
  
• Email Sign-Up Conversion:
  Signing up for an email newsletter is a conversion?  You bet!  You have engaged the visitor enough for them to check that box, fill out that form and hit the submit button.  Although not quite a clean cut to tie back resources too, some companies assign a specific value to each sign up, in order to be able to track the success or failure of the campaign.
  
  

What a Bon Jovi Concert Can Teach You About Internet Marketing

By Li Evans

This past weekend, I treated myself as well as my sister and my friend to a rather sweet indulgence.  For anyone who grew up loving "hair bands", Bon Jovi was the ultimate hair band.  Now, some 20 years later, the band doesn't quite have that 80's hair (most of you probably are saying Thank God!), but they still put on a great show.  As I explain it, Jon Bon Jovi is the only man above 40 legally allowed to wear leather pants in public.

For some reason, I always find myself looking at things from a marketing perspective where ever I go.  I could be in the grocery store, at Cold Stone (shhh!), or even just driving and see a bill board and I get inspired.  Sunday night was no different.  I came home and jotted a few notes down that have turned into this post.

What a Bon Jovi Concert Can Teach You About Online Marketing:

• Get Your Message Heard and Understood
  Is your message coming through, can your audience really hear what you are saying? 
  
  While we had awesome seats, near the stage, we found it really tough to understand anything that Chris Daughtry (the opening act) was singing, since he didn't use the same sound system as Bon Jovi.  The three of us knew maybe 2 of his songs from hearing them occasionally on the radio, but felt "lost" because we really couldn't understand the words to the songs he was singing, since all of his speakers were facing the front, and we were on the side.
  
  Bon Jovi was a little better, but both acts would have benefited from having another speaker or two facing the crowd that was "behind" the open stage.  Then everyone could have fully enjoyed the songs they sang.
  
  So, stop and think, is your audience understanding your message?  Is something hindering them from truly understanding what you are trying to relate.  If you have a high bounce rate on your website, you might need to "re-tune" that message so your visitors understand what you are trying to convey.

SES London 08: Video & Podcast SEO

By Li Evans

Speakers:

• Amanda Watlington, Owner, Searching for Profit
• Onil Gunawardana, Vice President / General Manager Advertising, blinkx
• Tim Gibbon, Account Director, Elemental Communications
• Joseph Morin, Partner, Boost Search Marketing and CEO, Storybids, Inc.

Moderator:  Anne Kennedy

Amanda Watlington
Adding video and audio is compelling for brand marketers.  Helps to create engagements, loyalities.  Search marketers are challenged to create results with this medium.  This creates a direct medium to connect and communicate with the audience.  You can convey emotional content that you cannot do otherwise.  An approachable means to relating the approachableness of the company.

Video presents challenges.  Most users don't know where to look for it.  YouTube grabs the most attention.  Professional competes with consumer generated video. 

Tips:  offer in multiple formats, use tags, individual landing pages, user rss to distribute.  Create video with branding in it.  Avoid pop up players.

Podcasting:  success is based on planning.   is it a scheduled weekly show.  are you a full out entertainment site or just a blog?  Before you set out, name your show and research it.  Distinguish the show from the episode name.  Transcribe or abstract - transcript is better for SEO.

Come up with a keyword list before the show.  Build your infrastructure in advance.  Download and test tag editorers in advance.

Distribution is the SEO.  It's a 4 step process.  Optimising the sound (ID3 Tags).  Optimising the page.  Validate RSS Feeds.  Track and Monitor Submissions  Promote the podcasts!

Optimising Tag:  Album Name is the Show Name, Artist, Year, Episode #, Genre, Comments.
Make sure the file name is unique but makes sense, use words that make sense.

Optimising the Page:  Have a page for the show and then a page for each episode for each the episode.  Provide information on how to subscribe.  Include a player for people to listen online.

Onil Gunawandana of Blinkx
Blinkx has over 18 million hours of video.  Started in the UK but headquartered out of LA.  Public company.  They power the video player and video search of Ask.  They've had 50 million uniques world wide and 12 million uniques from UK in the past year.

When it comes to video, users expect be able to find a video easily and be able to watch it on the same page.  Goals for Video SEO
Advertising
    In-Video - Preroll or Invideo
    Out-Video - Banners, text ads like adwords
Traffic to site
Distribution for Promotional Video

They take the meta data, then speech recognition to convert the audio to text. 
SEO Tactics
    Metadata use it - sometimes it is often lost during conversion, metadata cleaning
    Key elements:  title and description.  filename.  category.  tags. 
    Sitemap / MRSS File
    Format - in format meta data
    Where to Submit - user generated video sites (YouTube MetaCafe), Video Search Engines (blinx)

Tim Gibbon:
Video is important as a marketing tool, engages with your audience, encourages interactivity.
Attracting users to your site:  make sure its RSS enable, title and keywords with each page.  Offer multiple download forms.  Allow users to embed the video on their own sites and blogs.  Have only one video per page, ensure your URL's are friendly.

Uploading to sites.  Descriptive and attention grabbing.  If the video allows you to select a still frame, ensure that it is one that captures attention.  Tags used are vital, ideally between 5-10.

Sites to use:  Blinkx, Fooooo and Truveo.  There are niche sites out there that we call gems look to find those.

You can input meta-data into the video itself.  Search Engines read the properties for video, word, pdf.  Some services allow embedded urls.  Can search on the content of the video rath than just the keywords associated with it.  Allow you to tweak keywords.

Dos/Don'ts - name properly, create video sitemaps, have only one video per page, rss enabled.  Don't stuff title, tag and descriptions.  Post poor quality and irrelevant, post pur commercials, cloak and flame your own content to boost hits, make content a one way dialogue.

Joe Morin of Boost
Video strategy - what is it?  Video optimization is SEO too.  It's necessary to have some kind of strategy.
Google has 51% of the market with YouTube.  Comscore stated the December was the heaviest video consumption month ever.  Convergence of Online & Offline advertising.

Just having the video isn't enough.  Distribution and Syndication of your video will draw so much more traffic and brand awareness.  Make sure social media channels are in place as well.  There's video crawlers optimization and uploaded optimization.

Don't use a stand alone player that loads up in a popup.  Make use of social media tags, comments & ratings.  For best results use metadeata during encoding.

Posted - use video overlays for branding.  Many hosted sites transcode the video so metadata may be stripped ou but encode anyway this may change over time.  Use the word "video" in the title.

TubeMogul - you can upload to 13 video aggregators with one upload.  Analytics can track views, ratings and comments.
VisibleMeasures - video measures.  views, pauses and rewinds.
Ooyala - Ex-Googlers that publishing and analytics.

Video Monetization
PreRoll, PostRoll, Pay per download, Contextual, In-Video advertising
   

SES London 08: The Changing World of Search, Keynote Roundtable

By Li Evans

Moderator: Kevin Ryan,  Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch

            

Introduction by: Nick Carr, Author of The Big Switch, Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google

 

Speakers:

• Mike Grehan, SES London Co-Chair and Founder and CEO, Searchvisible Ltd.
• Steven Kaufman, SVP Media Director, Digitas
• Bryan Eisenberg, Co-Founder, Future Now Inc.
• Erica Schmidt, Global Director of Search, Isobar
• Paul Doleman, CTO & Head of PPC, iCrossing and SEMPO UK & Europe

Nick actually isn't here, but recorded a video for the audience.  Nick fell and broke his ribs and has a collapsed lung and was advised not to fly.

Kevin is showing a couple of headlines - "Microsoft vs. Google".  "Google weighs in against Microsoft".  "Microsoft to Target Yahoo! Investors".  "News Corp Joins the Yahoo! Battle".  "Yahoo Tells Shareholders They are Better Off With Current Managers".

Video from Nick Carr: 
It is a very important time in computing and history of communication.  Everyone in Search Marketing is playing a crucial role in this change.  He thinks one of the clearest indications something is going on is MS's bid to purchase Yahoo!

On one hand MS's motivation is tactical because of its lack of success in Search, and Yahoo! offers a quick fix.  Bigger story though is the change in the way computing and content is being delivered to our homes.  It use to be decentralized mode of supply, where we produced ourselves to centralized where there's a central place its made and supplied from. 

Up until the end of the 19th century, if you wanted to run a machine, you had to build your own electricity generator.  As soon as the electric grid was made, suddenly we had a new option, efficient supply at great distances.  We are seeing a similar thing happening in computing.  The world wide web is turning into the world wide computer. 

We are seeing this change quite quickly in the home and small business area.  Young people are running most of their software online, they aren't buying their own software in the store and installing it on their computers.  They are going to sites like Wikipedia, Flickr, MySpace - everything is happening online.

The software industry is starting to look like the media.  They don't make money from directly selling the software, they make it indirectly.  They have to figure out how to act like media companies, by supplying advertising to support the software development. 

On the business side, things move more slowly because of the investment into the data centers.  Also no one knows if this data model will work there or not.  However we will likely see it rise on a subscription model rather than what happens on home side.

Microsoft is still making money on the "old" side, however they are seeing this switch happening and if it wants to keep making money, they have to move to this new model.  Yahoo! gives to MS the ability to support this model.  It doesn't say it's going to happen (the merger), it says MS sees this and recognizes this and it's a world that Google is dominating this arena.

This is going to change a great deal about economics and society.  We've seen the rise of effecient companies such as Craig's List, Skype - these employ a small work forces, but serve more people than big companies that aren't on the web right now such as British Telecom. 

Search Marketers play a crucial role in privacy.  As more and more comes online by people and their personal data, the danger comes from data mining and SEO techniques.  It will eventually bring about the ability to monitor people and what they are doing online.  The challenge to Search Marketers is to figure out the standards and the ethics of what we offer up information wise while still giving people all the information they need. 

Panel Discussion:
Kevin points out Google is the clear leader, Microsoft is clearly behind.  Yahoo! dominates email and news.  Now asks the panel to introduce themselves.

Paul: He's spent 8 years at MS, 20 years in technology management.  He's currently CTO of iCrossing.  When he first heard the news he thought "at last", he doesn't think its competition for Google.  When Yahoo! and Microsoft work together, amazing things happen, he points to Flickr.  Its a small incremental growth, nothing of significance.

Erica: Global Director of Search for Isobar.  Her first reaction was "excellent". In the US its a "search game"  MS has not been able to get their game together on search.  Yahoo! has missed out too.  These two can align and maybe give Google a run for their money.  Who knows if they can actually merge these two distinct companies together.  As consumers it's good as well.

Bryan:  Co-Founder of Future Now, Inc.  His view is different.  MS has come to the realization of duality.  They know they are loosing it to Yahoo!, with Yahoo! they could be a solid "2" instead of "3".  It will be fun to watch if they can come together

Steve:  His first reaction was "wow".  How is this going to affect the search world.  Much bigger deal than search.  There's a lot of moving pieces to what each brings to the table.  It's not an easy thing to make this happen if it does because both companies are about culture.

Mike:  He thinks it would be best for humanity if he ran search so he's going to buy them both - crowd laughs.  What does it mean to the consume.  Google's like a utility, they are a technology company that can provide this easily.  Yahoo! and MS are more like media company.  If you think about Yahoo went on a spending spreee bought AltaVista,etc.  Pulling these two together culture wise is tough, but if its about search, its easy they did it before.

Kevin:  Do you think that Yahoo!'s has conceded Defeat?
Bryan:  Defeat no, that they ever will regain dominance, yes.  Their focus is on everything else but search.
Steve:  I agree, and Jerry came and spoke to us when we were there.  Yahoo! has the largest display advertising server on the planet. 
Bryan:  They are a media company not a search company
Mike:  If you take a look at Yahoo! land they are focising on social media and media, its not just about search.

Kevin:  Analyst are so ill informed.  As we look at search, Yahoo! should just outsouce search and call it a day do you agree?
Paul:  No, they should focus on giving the consumer the best experience they can.  Things can grow and form very quickly.  They can't really do it with search, maybe more with social, "web 3.0"
Erica:  Google doesn't have this ability.  If Yahoo! and MS can come together on this, they can give Google a run for their money
Bryan:  There's never been a business that has the scale like Yahoo!  There's been other leaders in the past that have come and gone.   What we're going to see in search in the future is getting on the phone and "saying" i want this and getting it.  That's an open ball game no one has captured yet.

Quetions from Audience:
Yahoo! seems like the unwilling prom date.  What about the other potential partners?
Paul:  The Fox move is interesting.  Appears to be a good fit.  But I get nervous about Murdoch.  But it's a very good fit between them
Bryan:  Interesting, but a so-so combination.  They are talking about swapping Myspace - that's a waste.
Kevin: Why?
Bryan:  Its like the old Geocities, its dying a slow death.

Erica:  Privacy issues that Nick pointed out in the video, people are hesitant to give to Google, but Yahoo! is more trusting.  People are bashing Google for privacy.
Mike:  But Google isn't evil - I saw it on their homepage!   Google can crawl a lot of different types of documents types.  Do a search for "business plan" find type .xls.  We're feeding all of this to Google.
Steve:  There's a lot of education that needs to take place.  Data isn't being used for "evil" it is fore relevancy
Bryan:  At the end of the day people just want good content
Paul:  I want to control my information, and be able to release it to the right people.  My medical records, my personal information, my shopping behavior etc.  Yahoo! has been looking at this.
Bryan:  Its all about transparency.  Lets not just focus on search, old media is looking at this too. Its across everything that touches you every day.

Greg Jarboe:  Stock market has weighed in.  MS's shareprice when down.  If MS would have taken that money and bought different companies rather than all their eggs in the Yahoo basket, what would you ahve advised?

Bryan:  Market is very reactive.  As far as buying 44 different companies you still have that culture issue of combining.  But investing it into the companies, yes.
Kevin:  Erica you are integrating companies very well.  Do you think these companies will have the wear with all to put a series of teams in place to orchestrate a change like this.
Erica:  Could they do it?  MS is the dinasour when compared to Yahoo!, AOL, they are very young companies.  My concern there's a culture class.  Management style - Balmer vs. Yang - completely opposite.  Yang is "one of the guys" they are pioneers of the web.  MS is an old company when you compare it to Google and Yahoo!.  They seem to try, but just can't "get" it.  They respond it's a 10 year game, but they aren't moving quickly enough and that's the issue.  That's the nice thing about Google, they buy companies and integrate them quite rapidly.  MS & Yahoo! trememdous amount of issues to get their.
Mike:  Neither one is a stranger to acquisition.  Depends on what you want to integrate first.  But going back to Greg's question, that would be a good idea.

Kevin:  Google is delving into media acquisitions.  What happens when the ad exchanges are open.  How much of the money for advertising is going to Google?
Steve:  I think the offline media doesn't have a lot of scale yet.  Its a tough sell to our clients. You get some early market learning.  No scale, but it will continue to grow.  Advertisers want to know where their brands are going to show up.  Clients aren't willing to put ads and logos where they don't have control.

Does the panel have any thoughts on if the deal went through, what would happen over the next year, would the engines remain separte?
Mike:  One of the strongest points of the deal.  Yahoo! has the bigger subscriber data - Google has users base that is higher.  Yahoo! and MS could do a good job of integrating
Paul:  MS and Yahoo! are doing it alrady with the messenger clients.

Can Search be Too Personal?
Paul:  I'm with you.  I like to search and discover new things.  But why should just one company own that shopping data?  Why can't I own it and give it to who I want too.
Bryan:  If you think there is such a thing as privacy, think again.  Credit bureaus know everything.  There are disadvantages.  They'll sacrifice convenience to not give up some privacy.  Its all about a balance.

If not Yahoo! who?
Mike:  It's just another change the industry is just evolving
Steve:  Google's not conceding any time soon
Bryan:  Who know what will be in 10 years, we don't know, roll with the punches today.
Erica:  Baidu.  We need to keep their eyes on Baidu.  They can move quickly and cheaply.
Paul:  Obama, Hillary or ... everyone just laughs now.  :)

SES London 08: Frederick Marckini Opening Keynote

By Li Evans

Fred Marckini is the chief search officer of Isobar he's traveled the world.  Erica Schmidt is his partner in crime.

When you stop doing paid search and optimization nothing happens.  Frederick shows the old Reebok commercials.  Then shows the effect that YouTube has.

YouTube - 200 million clips watched daily - 31 million users in the EU.  10 billion online videos watched in December.

Search Marketing Trends and Best Practices for 2008
Where is the money going in EU & Search.  Even split of SEO/PPC in the US.  In Europe 75% is PPC.  In Europe they did a test, 72% of the people clicked the natural results.  "It's kind of like kissing but only  using your bottom lip".

Frederick shows an example - "Yankee Candle"  asks how would people search for a candle.  Shows how people people really search for their products.  He then shows a few more examples of how companies brand with their language but how people are really searching for products.

Fundamentals are still important.  He shows an example of an optimized page.  Then shows baseline figures, and then the companies figures out  250,000,000 pounds tied to SEO, but only paid 17,500.  SEO isn't dead, its just changing.

Shows another example of a competitor took advantage of a TV advertisers.  The competitor did search optimization.  They basically "stole" the clients.  They had to stop because they had too much business.  They did a study with Jupiter - 40% of people who see offline advertising and go online with it purchase.

Take your PPC campaigns global where your competitors are not.
Invisible tabs - use meta searches.  Basically universal search, showing how maps, news, local results are all pre-empting regular search results.  Position #1 are the "Holy Grail" position 2-3 aren't bad.  If you can move your position to the front page you can increase your traffic by 4x's.  But now, what is #1 with universal search.  Not every query has universal search.

Image the possibility of owning more of the "real estate". 
Shows an example.  Skeptical Bob - shampoo customers.  Highly saturated market for product keywords.  Nobody looks at you and says "hey nice shampoo".  They say "hair styles".  They looked at their videos the client had.  They optimized and uploaded the videos to YouTube.  The video #2 in Google, 70% organic page real estate, over 400,000 streams. 

Search is now Search Leveraged public relations.

1 million people read/subscribe to NY Times.  Google's News Tab has 10.3 million searches a month, 6.6 in the UK.  Yahoo news tab 33.7 million searches a month, 6.6. million in the UK.  98% go online daily, 92% for article research, 72% search for press release.  Simple - you need to optimize your press release for keywords (after doing research).  Google news has less competition.    Entire opportunity last 30 days in Google news.  Then it can move over regular search.  Public relations press releases are now expressed in search results.

Greg Jarboe is the pioneer in optimizing the press release, he also looks like Socrates.

Longtail is powerful, optimizing for is essential.  Shows how products are suggested.  This is powerful.  When you leverage your business' longtail content overtime you will benefit from the multiplier effect of recommendation engines and collaborative filter.  A collaborative filter is the beginning of social search.

Algorithmic relevancy has hit a wall, but will vertical search they can get better.  Amazon is a book search engine, WebMD is a medical search engine.  In the future marketers will have to not only research how people search, but where they search.  Social Media are affecting this.

Myspace, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Yahoo Answer, Yelp, Furl, Angie's List, Reddit..... and he keeps going.  Every search engine has put a stake in Social Media - Yahoo has delicious, flickr, etc.  The big sites who get is, integrate this into their sites.  Major brands are being encourage to join the conversation.

Sense of compressed time.  We crave safety and security.   We are faced with they tyranny of overwhelming choice.  Because of the growing influence of communities, brands need to participate in the community.  The brands who win, will be the customers who tell the best stories about them.  Your customers are already talking and telling stories about you and your brand.  They share these stories.

Strategy suggestion - invite your customers to photograph your product or brand.  Invite them to share.  Sheraton is using this and it is blowing out their numbers for bookings on the hotels that are participating in the sharing.

Separation. We are moving to a self service on demand society. Decoupling of content of from place.  Decoupling from platform.  The medium just doesn't matter anymore.  80% of all content will be digital by 2010.  If all content is digital, all content is searchable.  Everyone will be a searcher from anywhere.

In the new marketing world a small investment it can grow exponentially.

New marketing model.  Awareness engagement purchase   - future of marketing is search centric.

Summary:

• Frederick is younger than Mike,
• optimize your press release,
• connect your offline advertising to search
• go global to increase efficiency,
• experiment with optimizing your content of social media
• recognize and plan for the future,
• SEO is the heart of rock and roll.

Effective PPC Strategies For Political Campaigns

By Account Deleted

In a previous post on SemGeek.com entitled "Study: Search Marketing In Prime Spot To Play Major Role in Political Spending" I discussed the great opportunities that awaits for the Search Industry to get a bigger piece of the campaign spending pie. The only thing in our way is convincing the Politicians and Campaign Managers to see the value in all that the Search Industry has to offer. Especially the "high level" online strategies that can be created, implemented, tested and reported on in Paid Search. If we can convince them of that, then we will strike that "all important" commonality of getting a greater ROVP (Return On Voter Participation). However, it is that same messaging power of the web that also scares them to put more money into it. But over time, Analytics and actionable data will change their minds.

To help reinforce this skepticism, acccording to this study done by Borrell Associates which states “The jury is still out regarding the Internet’s effectiveness for reaching and targeting the undecided,” the report read. “There is a fear that their message may end up going to an unintended recipient. Consultants would need to be convinced of the accuracy of this type of direct advertising reaching and persuading the intended targets before they would find sufficient value to devote much money toward it.”

Who's Helping To Get This Message Out:
I have been fortunate enough to be a part of a new company called CampaignGrid which is headquartered in Philadelphia, PA where the goal is to not only educate and persuade the massive opportunities in SEO, PPC, Social Media, Analytics and Testing, but also drive measurable results that help the candidates, non-profits and charitable organizations who need help. In a nutshell, it's all about Raising Money, Advertising and Organizing Online to drive the best possible results. Results consist of online donations, capturing information from volunteers and cross channel support.

Here are just a few of the things we are doing at CampaignGrid:

• Behavioral Targeting with Interactive Video and Transactional Banners
• Using PPC to persuade voters of all parties on the candidates messaging.
• Counteracting negative campaigning tactics (which is essentially reputation management)
• Testing different messaging tactics across different Geo and Demographic  audiences.
• Creating streamlined data flow processes to maximize the effectives of all online advertising
• Implementing robust analytics tracking to provide political campaign managers with everything from the amount of donations and volunteer submissions on any given day to how effective specific PPC campaigns are doing against others.

In conclusion: There is a big perception problem with political parties that the Internet is a very dangerous playground and it's easier to spend millions on traditional media such as TV, Radio and Print. However, we can bridge that gap by simply educating the political arena that Search Marketing is not only much more cost effective, but it is comprised of "cutting edge" strategies, best practices and highly detailed analytics which allows for a greater understanding of how the campaign's money is being spent.

As an old Mentor used to tell me you need to tell clients "Fish where the Fish are!" It doesn't get any easier than that in Search.

Target Apparently Doesn't Understand New Media

By Li Evans

File this under "Stupid Responses from Public Relations Departments".  Target, apparently only deals with "Traditional Media".  Wow, talk about being in the stone-age. Hat-Tip to fellow local twitterer, Annie, for this piece.  Gawker Media has a short piece about a letter sent to Target calling them out about their latest ad campaign, and also the rather, rude reply.

Amy Jussle, who runs a blog called "Shaping Youth", blogged about and contacted Target about this ad, that's being featured in Times Square in New York City.  Whether you agree with Amy's position on the ad being subversive or exploitive, isn't really why I'm bringing it to the attention of this audience.  Target's reply is what I want to bring to the forefront.

via Gawker (emphasis mine):

"Good Morning Amy,

Thank you for contacting Target; unfortunately we are unable to respond to your inquiry because Target does not participate with non-traditional media outlets. This practice is in place to allow us to focus on publications that reach our core guest.

Once again thank you for your interest, and have a nice day."

*just blinks for a few minutes*

Target is now in for a rather rude awakening I think, they are apparently rather clueless to the online marketing world around them.  It's not the "traditional" media that's going to affect them, those pesky "non-traditional media outlets" like ummm lets say.... bloggers .....that are going to be their problem.  A few prominent bloggers have just got wind of this and well lets just say, the power of the blogosphere is a heck of a thing to contend with.  I wonder how long the PR Idiot at Target that decided to respond to Amy with that response will have their job after this?

Photo Credit: Flickr User Bennett4Senate

Best Blogs of 2007 You're Not Reading | Quiet Blogs That Make Big Noise

By Li Evans

Here at Search Marketing Gurus we have no fancy badges, nor polling going on, and no contests.  But what we do have is a huge boat load of admiration and respect for professionals in this industry and its fringes and the work they do.  I wanted to take some time out today to recognize some really great colleagues in this industry who have great blogs that just seem to be missed time & time again for recognition of the hard work and contributions they give.

There's a lot of great writing and information being shared out there, beyond the blogs that are constantly referred to, and linked to.  These folks are doing great things, sharing great insights and I'd like to give them a round of applause for their efforts and contributions, and I'd like to share the links to their blogs with all of you.

I can't take credit for every one listed here, I asked a few of my colleagues and some of the crew from SMG to pitch in with their "hidden treasures", but all of them are now in my reader, the few that I didn't have.