I was recently interviewed for the Business Leader Daily Report radio show. Host Wade Taylor and I spent an hour chatting about Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click advertising for businesses, ranging from the basics to new developments in search marketing and social media. The interview is broken up into four segments for easy listening. To listen, go to Business Leader Daily Report and scroll down to the 8/15 date.
Prominent Placement has been named one of the Top 300 Small Businesses of the South by Business Leader Media. Thirty companies from Atlanta were honored, in addition to businesses in other southern cities. The companies were chosen based on a combination of factors, including percentage of sales generated in their local market, revenue growth, business achievements and civic contributions.
Top 300 Small Business of the South Winners: Amy & David Mook of Centergy Group, Stacy Williams of Prominent Placement, Nancy Bailey of Hire Profile
Since 1989, Business Leader Media has focused on providing regional business profiles, business news, leader profiles, and best practices to C-level executives and business owners. Business Leader Media develops magazines, Web sites, e-newsletters and events that support the critical local market information needs of business leaders. More about Atlanta’s Top Small Businesses.
Some of our favorite Vert & Search Discovery folks
The food is always awesome at Park Tavern!
This is the third and final post on our notes from the AiMA/SEMPO Social Impact on Search event. First up is a very interesting account from the VP of E-Business for Newell Rubbermaid, followed by a summary of the Q+A at the end of the event.
Bert DuMars, Newell Rubbermaid
It’s not common for brands to allow reviews on their websites. One example from Newell Rubbermaid’s experience was working for two years on a product launch which allowed customer reviews to be posted to their site. There were seven immediate responses; five of them were negative. While this was an uncomfortable start, he said it really helped them make immediate product improvements. Another learning was that by providing users a forum for writing their own product descriptions, it helps prospective buyers to get beyond what product managers want you to know to what actual users are saying about how they use the product.
Read more…
AiMA and SEMPO Atlanta separately hold fantastic events – they’ve teamed up to present an event together on how social media impacts search marketing. Don’t miss it! (Full disclosure: I’m on the board of SEMPO Atlanta.) Here’s the official info:
Social Media and Search Marketing are colliding into what is termed “Social Search”. Come learn about the Social Impact on Search and how you can influence consumers to engage with your brand through techniques on Google +1, Bing and Twitter and see how a large corporation in Atlanta executes Social Search to build their business. Dave Williams of BLiNQ Media will moderate the top notch panel and field audience questions. Read more…
If you’ve got 30 minutes next week to learn about best practices for “Pulling B2B Buyers Through the Funnel” using search engine marketing, please tune in to my webinar. It’s being broadcast by Online Marketing Connect as part of their Search Focus Week. Click here for the agenda and to register.
Search Focus Week will be playing SEM-related webinars the entire week of May 9, and it’s all free of charge. My webinar will be broadcast on Tuesday, May 10 at 11 am Pacific time / 2 pm Eastern time. Just click on the big, red “Register Now” button and you can watch any or all of the webinars, either live or “on demand” at a later date.
There are some well-known speakers covering really interesting aspects of search marketing – I know I’ll be tuning in for several of these webcasts!
Update 5/10/11: My slides are now posted on Slideshare. Warning: the conversion into Slideshare format goofed a few things up, and there’s no audio. You’ll have a better experience listening to the webinar on demand through Online Marketing Connect.
Our coverage of SEMPO Atlanta’s Mobile Search event continues…
“Putting Mobile Into Action”
By Elliott Nix, Senior Account Executive, Google @google
So what are mobile users really like, and what do they want?
- Are they rude or really engaged? 90% have witnessed people using mobile phones in the bathroom, so yes, they are rude.
- They’re also engaged. 61% will call a local business, 59% will visit the business they called, and 44% will make a purchase. The “clicks to bricks” holy grail is reachable.
- It’s always on. One out of five check their phones before getting out of bed. For the most part, phones are within 3 feet of people 24/7. It’s a very personal device!
- It’s immediate. On this past Super Bowl Sunday, where GoDaddy is a big advertiser with Danica Patrick, GoDaddy’s website traffic was 38 times higher from a desktop PC than usual, but 315 times higher than normal from mobile.
- It’s used for shopping comparisons. 53% buy what they’re searching for within one day. 48% find promotions and coupons. 49% compare prices. Even given this, 79% of large online advertisers don’t have a mobile site, so they could be losing a large part of this audience post-click.
Elliott also presented three quick case studies: Read more…
Our coverage of SEMPO Atlanta’s Mobile Search event continues…
The audience at SEMPO Atlanta's Mobile Search event
“Mobile Search – Local Relevance”
By Andy Chu, Director of Bing Mobile Product Management, Bing, @bing
Bing on the PC has experienced 65% growth since its relaunch two years ago, and mobile Bing has grown by 344%.
Consumers’ behavior on mobile is very different as compared to on a desktop PC. Mobile is more task-centric – 70% of tasks are completed in an hour or less, whereas many tasks take up to a week on the PC.
Key trends for mobile: Read more…
Our coverage of SEMPO Atlanta’s Mobile Search event continues…
Host Matthew Pritchard of Google (& SEMPO Atlanta's VP of Sponsorships) thanks this year's sponsors
“Mobile Insights & Advertising Strategies”
By Paul Cushman, Senior Director, Mobile Sales Strategy, Yahoo!, @yahoo
While this particular audience probably didn’t need convincing as to the power of mobile, the data that Paul shared was attention-getting. Papa John’s sold $1 million worth of pizza less than 6 months after implementing their mobile strategy. eBay generated $2 billion worth of mobile sales in 2010. Mobile commerce is expected to grow by 875% in the next 5 years.
Paul let us all in on a dirty little secret…mobile is the Internet, only smaller (shhh!). People want to do the same things on their phones as they do on their desktop PCs. So we can stop making this overly difficult. In fact, if someone tells you that you’ve got to have a mobile website…do you really? Think about it – it’s a phone – they can call you! Read more…
SEMPO Atlanta’s meeting last Thursday on Mobile Search was rated five stars by every attendee that rated it. Detailed, up-to-the-minute data and insights were shared by four experts in the mobile search space. They presented in Google’s Midtown Atlanta offices to a packed room, and the event was simulcast in Boston and New York to those local SEMPO groups as well.
Paul Gelb, Paul Cushman, Andy Chu & Elliott Nix at SEMPO Atlanta's Mobile Search Event
Special thanks to SEMPO Atlanta’s fantastic sponsors: Search Discovery, Google, Yahoo and Bing. With their help, this event (including food and beer/wine) was free to all attendees.
The event was moderated by Chang Yu, Group Media Director, 360i (@360i). We’ll spend the next four days covering each presentation. First up was Paul Gelb. Read more…
I wonder if they lined up the speakers in that order on purpose. The panelists were (left to right):
- AOL: Jim Norton, VP of AOL Advance
- Google: Jay Bowden, Head of Industry, Retail
- Facebook: Mike Haynes, Regional VP of Sales
When these gentlemen were introduced, it was with the note that they were seated in order of company longevity (16 years, 12 years, and 7 years respectively). Perhaps not coincidentally, the novelty and excitement of their presentations (or lack thereof) could have been predicted by the age of their companies. In Internet marketing, of course, companies can age even faster than “dog years.”
We were at last week’s “Best Bets for Digital Marketing for 2011” event put on by the Marketing Technology SIG of the American Marketing Association (Atlanta chapter). It was hosted by Google, who graciously opened up their fun Midtown offices for the event. The topic was new media marketing platforms and technology.
AOL
I’ve got to hand it to Jim Norton – the man can spin like nobody’s business. Read more…
