Search Marketing Sage

Confession:    I’ve been writing this blog post since April, 2012.  I’ve truly hesitated to publicly say these words.  I lost my biggest client, that I had for 6 years this year.  I made this client wildly successful to the tune of many millions of dollars a year in revenues attributable from natural and paid search.  I lost that client because they got fed up with dealing with multiple agencies for Branding, Print, TV, Display, Web Design, Digital Creative, Web Development, E-mail, SEO and PPC.  I’ve also lost another client that is a major national brand to the Digital Agency of Record model in the last week.  2012 has been the year of getting our butt kicked by the Bundled Services Agency of Record model for big brand clients. In both situations the direct contacts we worked with were completely against our elimination from their accounts, but their superiors forced them to let us go. I’m not a sour-grapes kind of guy and I wanted to make sure my emotions weren’t clouding my judgement if I put this out for the world to see.  Time and sore feelings are put aside and this is how I see the situation.

One Throat To Choke

The “One Throat to Choke” philosophy seems to be born (at least from what I can see online) from debate in the IT industry.  The philosophy suggests that you get all your technology and vendor support from or through a single vendor so that you have one vendor to appeal to when you have issues.   When something goes wrong you supposedly have “one throat to choke” to resolve the problem.

With the advent of the digital age, there are apparently 3 models mostly being employed by marketers with their agencies:

The first model is one in which a client selects one lead entity — at either the holding company or agency level — and grants it the power to oversee all marketing efforts and partners. The second model is one in which the client itself assumes that leadership role. And the third model is one in which a client hires a slew of agencies and tells them to go collaborate.

With prominent social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, ingrained in our daily rituals, as well as expectations for businesses, it’s hard for another social network to jump in and take off.

This year, I’ve talked a lot about Google+ and what it means for businesses from online reputation and SEO perspectives.  Google+ is inherently important for businesses because Google is important for business, and now is gaining even more data about your target audience’s online behavior. An extension of the search engine we have all grown to love, Google+ continues to define itself by its own standards, rather than comparing itself to what other social networks offer and how they operate for businesses. And while there are certainly Google+ haters out there, the latest numbers show that there are 135 million users on Google+ per month! That kind of audience is not to be ignored.

It’s been about a year and a half now since Google+ got started. Today, I’m attending the panel Getting ahead with Google+ to learn about search and brand implications, as well as the sense of community that Google can develop.

Adam Audette, President of RKG, kicked off this session with a story about a magical world called Google Land. Google Land was a happy land of wonder. Google focused on search and they were good at search. Then, along came an evil wizard called Mark. This dark sorcerer came to Google Land to steal the dragon’s fire. Mark was from Facebook. Do you follow?

Video is getting a lot of play lately as the marketing content du jour. And for good reason – video content amps up your marketing in so many different ways. Did you know:

• Videos get a 41% better clickthrough rate than text-based content on search engines?
• Shopping site visitors who watch a video are 64% more likely to buy than those who don’t?
• YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine on the web?

Video has a huge impact on search marketing, whether it’s outranking text content on Google or boosting landing page conversion for a PPC campaign. To find out more about how to leverage video content for search, join us this Thursday, December 6 at 2:00pm ET for a free webinar, Video Saved the Marketing Star: Amping Up Search with Video Content. Search Mojo’s President and CEO Janet Driscoll Miller and Account Manager Jessica Davidson will show you why you should be including video as part of your content and search marketing strategy, and share with you some useful ideas for leveraging video. This webinar will cover:

• Best practices for getting your video content ranked in search engines
• How to use rich snippets to get a higher clickthrough rate
• How to test video in your paid search campaigns
• How to measure the success of your video content

Update 12/20: Did you miss the webinar? Watch Video Saved the Marketing Star: Amping Up Search with Video Content in its entirety here! Check out the preview below:

I recently read this article from Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land about how false and spam press releases are being distributed via PRWeb, after yesterday’s big tech news that PRWeb ran a press release that falsely reported the acquisition of WiFi provider ICOA by Google. Danny’s article makes some excellent and painfully true points about the inherent flaws with both PRWeb’s internal QC processes for the press releases distributed through its platform, and with how Google News indexes news items.