Masters of Business Online 2009
On Wednesday, I attended the Masters of Business Online put on by Jim Brown of EverEffect. First, I have to give Jim absolute kudos on this event. While one-day industry events costs thousands of dollars in Chicago, New York or San Jose… this event was one of the best Online Marketing Conference I’ve ever been to at a fraction of the cost.
There were three tracks, Planning and Measuring, Engaging the User and Beyond the Website. As someone who’s intrigued beyond the website, I mostly attended Track 3 with the exception of David Castor’s presentation on The Legal Landscape of Corporate Blogging. David and his firm is helping me to write my chapter on the legalities of corporate blogging (coming next year!).
Jeremy Dearringer did an amazing job of educating the audience on external links and their weight and impact on search engine ranking. Jeremy’s firm has been working for one of my key clients on improving their ranking and their work has been nothing short of amazing. I know I tout Indy businesses quite a bit, but Slingshot SEO is well known as a top contender in the country when it comes to their knowledge of search algorithms, on-site and off-site optimization. I’ve invited Jeremy to do an upcoming post on poor backlinking and how it can negatively impact your search ranking.
Jim Brown did a presentation on Proving and Improving ROI in paid search and I finally figured out why I’ve been pouring money down the toilet with pay-per-click marketing. Limiting content to only search engine result pages, setting hours for ads to run, applying negative keywords, and writing an ad that compels people to click were all in this incredible presentation. Jim owes us some posts here at The Marketing Technology Blog and we’re going to explore many more conference opportunities together!
Susan Delz was in from Florida for Ion Interactive. Ion Interactive has an incredible niche in the market – building high conversion landing pages for companies. Some of their results are absolutely incredible and, at times, counter to some of the advice you’ll hear from industry leaders. I don’t have Susan’s latest deck, but here’s a presentation from earlier this year:
I closed out the day being the antagonist on a panel with Thomas Heed from EverEffect, Jacob Lefler from the Basement, Duncan Alney from Firebelly, Chris Lucas from Formspring and Kyle Lacy from Brandswag. At times, I just simply took the argument side (spam = good, wasted visitors = good, insincere social media participation = good) but I couldn’t get a rise out of anyone but Thomas Heed! I thought it was supposed to be a debate… perhaps Doug did a debate fail!
If you were in attendance, I’ll make some things clear:
- I still think getting a lot of bad visitors, visitors who don’t convert, is better than getting no visitors. Exposure to your blog, your brand, etc. is always a good thing. I don’t know that there’s such a thing as a bad visitor. My job as a marketer is to improve the targeting and the conversions of the audience coming to my site… but I’ll never work on avoiding visitors.
- I don’t like working with companies that fake social media and I believe they put their brand at risk. However, if they want to buy crappy third party content and post it on their corporate blog and it increases conversions and traffic, who am I to argue? My only advice would be that companies who sincerely participate in social media will get genuinely better results than those who don’t.
- I said it there and I’ll say it again, Social Media is not the cure-all. Someone got a chuckle out of making a Yellow Pages joke there… some people still use the Yellow Pages to find businesses. In fact, I’d go out on a limb and say for some very specific industries, the Yellow Pages may outperform social media. Different strokes for different folks.
- Internet Marketing Consultants should not be selling technology, they should be working hard to identify the core problem. If social media can alleviate some of the problems, then finding the right technology for the problem is the answer. Too many online marketers sell their technology first… and ignore the problem. At times it’s like bringing a box of band-aids to a car crash.
I invite all my social media panelists to throw a blog post up here on their experience at MBO. I thought it was a homerun!
