• Five Ways Multi-Location Businesses Can Prepare For Facebook Graph Search
    As Facebook Graph Search rolls out, brands targeting local customers will start to see new opportunities to be found by potential customers and to find people who might be receptive to local marketing messages. The granular nature of Facebook Graph Search results (filters by people, places, interests, photos, etc.) will likely encourage people to use the service for local discovery. So local content (aka "keywords") and local relationships (aka "Friends") will be critical for businesses that want to be discovered. Here are five things any multi-location business can do to get ready:
  • Taking Search Marketing Further? A Look At Remarketing
    Search marketing has historically been based upon consumers seeking something, finding it, then (hopefully, from a marketer's standpoint) making a purchase. What about the times when consumers find a service or product but have their experiences interrupted or even abandon their shopping carts just when they're about to buy?
  • Marketing Machinists
    In the aftermath of the tragic Asiana Airlines crash in San Francisco earlier this month, one theory that has emerged is that a combination of pilot error and instrumentation failure caused the crash. In this scenario, the pilots - who were relatively new to flying this type of airplane - were overly reliant on their cockpit instruments to tell them if they were flying at the proper speed, at the proper height. When the cockpit instruments failed to work properly, the pilots - so accustomed to their technology always being accurate - didn't realize the problem until it was way …
  • The Problem with Corporate-Org Charts
    Last week, I talked about the chasm between marketing and sales in most organizations, with the customer left to perish in the middle. One of the responses to that column was that there's an even bigger divide between marketing and IT. The systemic problem that underlies this is that organizational org charts aren't built in consideration of a customer's requirements. The structure of the vast majority of companies is decidedly un-customer-centric.
  • Everything I Still Know About Marketing I Learned From Google
    Back in the fall of 2009, I published a series of Search Insider columns titled, "Everything I Need to Know About Marketing I Learned from Google." A few months later, I used social media to land a book deal with McGraw-Hill and, in August of 2010, "Everything I Know about Marketing I Learned From Google" was published. #still2leftinstock Unfortunately, I don't have time to write an updated edition, even though all the changes in the marketplace over the past three years have made the key tenets more applicable than ever. #humblebrag Here's a quick look at each of the "Googley …
  • Is SEO Dead -- Or Decentralized?
    At the risk of stating the obvious, SEO has become much more difficult to quantify in recent months. Many observers, myself included, have lamented Google's introduction of keyword (not provided), which restricts the flow of organic keyword search terms to analytics tools when users are logged in to Google services. More recently, Google issued warning lettersto many vendors who scraped search results in order to report on SEO keyword rank position. Google is making life as an SEO professional more challenging by the day -- a shift that hasn't gone unnoticed by those who cut checks for SEO services.
  • Back-To-School Tips and Trends
    Despite being out of school for longer than I care to admit, there remains that nightmare where I have to take a final in a class I never attended and didn't do the reading for. Marketers who don't begin their back-to-school campaigns soon are going to be feeling that way come September.
  • Marketplace Chasm: The Divide Between Marketing & Sales
    Marketing people and salespeople don't like each other very much. Oh sure, to be politically correct, they will pay lip service to the ideal that they're all part of one big happy family, working for the common good of the company. But deep down, you know what I say to be true. Salespeople don't trust the sneaky and manipulative ways of marketing people. And marketing people think salespeople are a bunch of type A prima donnas. I know --I've heard the backstabbing begin when one or the other leave the room. These are two tribes that are uncomfortable sharing the …
  • Facebook's Semantic Advertising Future
    Social networks hold a bounty of consumer information, and features like Facebook's Graph and hashtags, when combined with semantic search technology, will make it possible to unearth new connections and micro-target ad campaigns.
  • The Ill-Defined Problem Of Attribution
    For the past few years, I've sat on the board of a company that audits audience for various publications. One of the challenges the entire audience measurement industry has faced is the explosion of channels traditional publishers have been forced to use. It's one thing to tally up the audience of a single newspaper, magazine or radio station. It's quite another to try to get an aggregate view of an audience of publishers that, in addition to their magazines, have a website, several blogs, various email newsletters, a full slate of webinars, a YouTube channel, multiple Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, …
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