10e20 Blog

Frequently I speak with Chief Marketing Officers (CMO’s), Business Development Specialists, Product and Brand Managers regarding Social Media engagements and they always ask: “How many customers am I going to get directly from my Social Campaigns? What’s going to be my CPA, my ROI and my ROAS? What Immediate sales will I get?” To this I respectfully respond: “Stop! Don’t look at Social as a direct response marketing channel.” These marketers often react in shock with a quizzical twist because they are used to hearing what they want which is: “Hey, all of our programs are going to get you crazy, mad sales dude, right away - mate.”

Yesterday, Chris Sherman from Search Marketing Now presented another webinar jammed packed with useful information. This session entitled ‘Multi-National Search Marketing: Effective Strategies for Global Marketers‘ was sponsored by iProspect and moderated by Claire Schoen.

Chris was a perfect speaker due to his experience covering search and search engines since 1994. He is the author of several books, including ‘Google Power’.

Chris started out the presentation by outlining that he’ll cover why we might want to go global, what types of campaigns work best and how to do it.

The first slide discussed the fact that a lot of people perceive that Google has taken over the earth. Yes, Google is dominant and if you are running a search marketing campaign, you understand that Google’s reach can give you that global coverage. Chris said we may ask ourselves why should we should bother going multinational since Google has a global reach. But, Chris believes there are other opportunities out there.

When Neil H. Borden came up with the Marketing Mix and Professor E. Jerome McCarthy grouped the Mix into “the 4 Ps” they were probably not considering 21st century marketing and promotion channels on the Internet.

After all, this was in the middle of the 20^th century and Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live.com search engines and Internet Social Networks did not exist at that point. Still, this enduring and universal marketing concept applies to the web.

I’m always focused on how the 4 P’s of Marketing apply to Internet Marketing. So how do the 4 P’s apply to the Internet?

The first P in Marketing: Product

Epinions.com is great site for Internet and Brand Marketers to work in. The site is a user and member driven product/service review website. It is owned by Shopping.com which is in turn owned by…..Ebay.

How and why is the site useful for marketers? Aside from helping consumers looking for information about products, it can also help SEO’s, webmasters (who dabble in marketing) and brand managers by allowing them to monitor their products and develop traffic/awareness.

Epinions is all about writing reviews and interacting with knowledgeable people to get information about products. The basic uses from the consumer side are:

• Reading product reviews for information about the quality of a product or service.
• Finding information about products and services in advance of your purchase to help you with your decision on brand, price, and features; shopping comparison.
• Connecting with retailers who have good prices on these products.

A continuation in our series on how the major presidential candidates are doing in their search marketing efforts. Here are the previous two rounds: Round 1 and Round 2.

The 2008 Presidential debate circuit, along with announcements of record breaking fundraising in 3Q, builds further intrigue in the 2008 race to the Whitehouse. Fred Thompson has entered stage-right with much fanfare yet very little energy added to the Republican side. John Edwards lags in polls, but could lurch forward in Iowa in January; a lot of unknowns at this point.

Still, Clinton, Obama, Romney and Giuliani are clear front runners and one thing is for sure – when you do name searches on Google, you can access a lot of information about these candidates. It’s my belief that name searches are going to be greater vote and election outcome influencers than are issue based queries. The name query is where the most intent lies. No doubt Google queries surrounding the candidate’s names are going to be a crucial influencer in forming opinion and votes for this race.

Last week Chris Sherman (Executive Editor from Search Engine Land) spoke at a very valuable Search Marketing Now webcast entitled ‘Leveraging All Search Marketing Channels’. This event was sponsored by 24/7 and provided pertinent information regarding various search marketing channels, both traditional and emerging.

The speaker challenged the audience to think of how many channels we are using and where we might be missing opportunities. Mr. Sherman believes the evolution of search has many parallels with television in that at the beginning there were a few big dominant players and ads were only available to big spenders. Later, as the medium developed smaller niche players and opportunities for smaller advertisers emerged.

In the world of search, at the beginning, we had three or four large search engines and now we are seeing opportunities in smaller, niche oriented markets.

Sometimes I wish I was a movie star simply because I would have more occassions to wear gowns. I don’t even watch that many movies. But if I did have a chance to wear one gown this year it would have been this one from Oscar De La Renta. I loved it when I saw it on the runway, and it still looks amazing when on a real life person too.

So lovely. Sigh….

I decided to head on over to the site to take a look at some more gowns, and it seems that the folks in charge of Oscar’s website need to rework the homepage a bit.

Round #2 of the 2008 Presidential Candidate Search Marketing Face-Off (see Round 1 here) excites as new debates and mud-slinging color each day’s top news. CNN and YouTube tore the cover off the ball with the debate at The Citadel in Charleston, S.C. No one likes Hillary’s Pink suit and cleavage, and John Edwards will never be able to get away from the ever growing costs of his hair cut; by the way, did he consult with “The Donald” on that one? And, Dennis Kucinich…well, he’s another story yet again. Is it just me or does Kucinich look like death warmed-over. Perhaps it is just that his politics are dead?

Arguably one of the most competitive niches online is pharmeceuticals (pills). There are a couple of key searches that it is a good idea to always keep an eye-on to see how the search engines are handling them. The more competitive of a niche, the more innovative & risky strategies you are likely to see.

One such search is buy Viagra. Typically the top 10 is filled with .edu sites but Google has pruned a lot of them out and currently there is only one left. So who’s ranking high now? Social network Reddit.

The #2 result is for Reddit “user” buy_viagra_online. Still need more evidence of the authority power of major social networks?

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The 2008 election promises to be an exciting and hotly contested one. Jake Matthews takes a look at how some of the leading candidates are doing in their search marketing efforts on Google in Part 1 of a four part series - and gives each one of them a grade in the 2008 Presidential Candidate Search Marketing Face-off .

There has been a fair amount of community coverage of how the leading candidates of the 2008 Presidential elections are leveraging or missing the boat on SEO and in the Social Media networks. There are interesting posts that follow the quality and strength of the campaigns. Mima looking at backlinks to Presidential hopeful sites. Further on March 13, 2007 Michael (Solo) Jensen did a great candidate SEO review on WebPro News. Rand-Moz chimed in May with insight regarding keyword rankings, missed opportunities and John McCain’s nasty SEO blunders, while Jonah from Alchemist discussed the grassroots value of the web for campaigns.