Search Marketing Sage

We’re excited to announce our new partnership with one of the world’s largest providers of social media monitoring tools, Trackur!

Through this partnership, Search Mojo will offer online reputation management services to Trackur customers. So, while Trackur will continue to help customers monitor their online reputation, we’ll work to prevent and repair online reputation issues.

Last night we said goodbye to one of my favorite television shows — 30 Rock. 30 Rock launched seven years ago at about the same time that I launched Search Mojo. Not only did the show provide great wit, it provided a type of business mentor in the form of Jack Donaghy.

Jack Donaghy represented a titan of industry and a mentor to the scrambling Liz Lemon. His business philosophies have been covered by revered business publications including The Washington Post to Fast Company. The Huffington Post called Donaghy “the most important and influential person of our time”.

Over these past seven years as our company has grown, I’ve taken stock in the wisdom of Donaghy. I feel as if an era is coming to an end. But fortunately, Donaghy left us with many pearls of business wisdom over those years that will serve us all for many years to come.

As the curtain closes on another year at Search Mojo, we like to take one last look back at what made our year interesting – and our blog posts here on Search Marketing Sage are an excellent reflection of that. We write about the new things we as search marketers are learning about each day so we can pass that knowledge on to you, our awesome readers. And because of you, 2012 was the most successful year yet for the Search Marketing Sage!

We’ve compiled a list of our top 30 blog posts on search marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing and content marketing for 2012. These were the most popular posts of the year, judged by your visits and feedback. We hope you enjoy these (and even learn something you didn’t know before), and here’s to a successful 2013 for all of us!

One of the perks of working at Search Mojo are the super-fun team-building days we participate in a few times each year. These can be anything from learning how to cook, to learning the sport of curling (and yes, hilarity ensued – check out the crazy curling photos here). Our most recent team-building event took place last Friday – a scavenger hunt celebrating the rich history of Search Mojo’s hometown, Charlottesville, VA – which this year is celebrating its 250th anniversary.

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.