Marketing Technology Blog

Tonight I had the pleasure of speaking to an inaugural event of Techmakers, the first industry-specific branch of Rainmakers. Having lived in Indianapolis for 7 years and slowly making the rounds of the technology sector, it was great to see this take shape.

I did a skit tonight and think it worked quite well. Doug Theis sat down with me on Friday after I shared the idea and we hammered out the script together. The skit was about a fictitious company seeking IT resources to help fix an Exchange issue. We pretended that the company sought help – first on Facebook, then LinkedIn, then Twitter and ultimately on a corporate web site.

Each visit to one of these mediums is met with disaster. Even the corporate web site, a referral, was full of marketing speak – with no content covering support of IT Exchange consulting nor any effective means of getting in contact with the company. Each response was fabulously over-reacted with the help of Lorraine Ball and Doug Theis.

The conclusion of the skit was simply me speaking to the relevant results that Google supplies, the intent of the visitor, as well as the percentage of use. People who visit Facebook do not intend to purchase, but someone searching for a product or service does have the intent. 90% of people now incorporate search into their daily Internet activities – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. combined are less than 4%.

The fact is that companies who wish to effectively get leads inbound must utilize some kind of Search Engine Marketing strategy (or multiple). Blogging for SEO is an incredibly powerful tool for acquiring leads.

• Blogs that are properly search engine optimized. Unlimited reach with great content that is ongoing – as long as you’re writing great content, you’ll be found.
• Websites that are properly search engine optimized. Limited to the size of the site and keywords optimized, SEO website is often a lost one-time event.
• Sites with optimized landing page strategies. This is a very effective strategy but costly in development and SEO practices.
• Pay-per-click. This is also effective, but limited to the exact keywords you pay for and the 5% to 15% of clicks on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

Ultimately, I believe blogging is a great tactic given the ability of the company to produce content. As well, blogs have the added advantage of RSS, allowing you to publish in those other technologies – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (with Twitterfeed), and even aggregation into a website.

Search Google for your products or services (and location if applicable). Do you show up in those results? You should! You should be in this search engine results page.

Key to many of the links I share and the posts I write on this blog is automation. The reason is simple… at one time, marketers could easily sway consumers with a brand, a logo, a jingle and some nice packaging (I admit that Apple is still great at this).

Mediums were uni-directional. In other words, Marketers could tell the story and consumers or B2B consumers had to accept it… regardless of how accurate was. Marketers had 3 channels of national television, local radio, the newspaper, billboards, conferences, the (original) Yellow Pages, press releases and direct mail. Life was pretty simple.

Now we’ve got hundreds of channels of local and national television, local and satellite radio, newspapers, direct mail, email, brochure-style websites, blogs, unlimited social networks, multiple search engines, countless social bookmarking sites, micro-blogs, RSS feeds, web directories, billboards, press releases, whitepapers, use cases, customer testimonials, books, conferences, movie theater advertising, telemarketing, mini-conferences, a bunch of different Yellow Pages, direct mail, free newspapers, mobile marketing, pay-per-click advertising, banner advertising, affiliate advertising, widgets, video game advertising, video marketing, viral marketing, behavioral targeting, geographic targeting, database marketing, referral programs, reputation management, user-generated content, ratings, reviews… the list goes on and on and on… and grows daily.

Unfortunately, Marketing departments haven’t grown with the wide chasm of mediums, they’ve actually shrunk. As well, the curriculum of the average Marketing student is years behind where we need them to be. I can’t help but wonder how wide-eyed the average marketing intern must be when they finally get in the door!

Marketers Need Help

At the same time, the Internet – aka The Information Superhighway -, has an endless supply of opinions and resources for anyone interested to sift through. The problem is that the opinions are endless – and a lot of it simply doesn’t work well.

It’s not getting easier for Marketers, so they’re constantly reaching out for help. But help doesn’t always steer them in the right direction.

Who Do You Trust?

We old school marketers learned how to test, measure, test and measure again to prioritize our campaigns and utilize the strengths of each medium while ensuring that the return on investment was consistently upheld. We learned how to automate to increase the number of touches we had with customers and prospects while reducing the overall resources needed. We’ve learned how to separate the signal from the noise, read through practical applications, and learn quickly and ferociously.

There’s a clash happening right now between the idealistic young marketing advisers of the Internet and the seasoned old business professionals, though. We’ve read the hype as medium after medium hit the market for the last 20 years. Find yourself a professional who has been through this and knows how to weather it.

Your business depends on those you trust! Ensure those you trust have the experience necessary to wade through the idealism and get to what will propel your business.

An interesting question was posed to me today and I wanted to share it with you folks to get your thoughts. Is there an easy way to tell how many blog posts a person’s blog has?

With WordPress, it’s pretty simple (perhaps too simple). Wrapping each post is a div with the Post ID. The Post ID happens to be synonymous with the number of posts. Thanks autonumber! . I’m a little surprised that this isn’t obfuscated a little.

<div class="post" id="post-2276">

Of course, this doesn’t take into consideration posts that you’ve deleted, but it’s a fairly close estimate.

With hosted blogging apps, like Blogger, it’s virtually impossible since the POSTID is assigned across all blogs:

blogID=20283310&postID=5610859732045586500

One of the easier means I use is to simply do a site search on Google. You can break down the year and how many posts are unique across the year:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:http://buzzmarketingfortech.blogspot.com/2007/

My apologies to Paul Dunay (great Marketing podcasts!) in advance. I can tell by the search, using the year, that Paul has 125 posts. He had 50 the year before and 32 thus far in 2008. Kind of sneaky, huh?

Got any simple ways where you can tell the number of posts on a blog across the other platforms?

After meeting a new social networking addict, Dr. Thomas Ho, I was drawn to one of the services he used, Profilactic.com.

The video above (click through to the post) is a widget that I constructed using Profilactic’s service. It’s a list of all of the Web 2.0 sites that I belong to… you can find it on my newly designed About page. I think I have a problem!

If you belong to any of those sites, be sure to add me to your friends list!