When Twitter first heard the news, fans of the late actress took to the boards with excitement.

All a girl really wants is for one guy to prove to her that they are not all the same. -Marilyn Monroe

— Megan Fox (@ReaIMeganFox) February 8, 2012

Marilyn Monroe ‘officially’ joins Twitter (CNN): Share With Friends:|| Business – Markets – Stocks Stories, … feedzil.la/w7GZyg — IH stock traders (@IHStocktweets) February 8, 2012

A Woman We Love: Marilyn Monroe picture on VisualizeUs whrt.it/AoqOjm — Cindy Dean (@cindydean92) February 8, 2012

Marilyn Monroe ‘Officially’ Joins Twitter: Add one more venue where the legend of Marilyn Monroe lives and her voice… on.wesh.com/wWEy8Z — WESH 2 News (@WESH) February 8, 2012

tweets from the beyond? RT @KITV4: Marilyn Monroe ‘Officially’ Joins Twitter: bit.ly/zrb7R6 — gina (@twnstar2) February 8, 2012

“Just because you fail once, doesn’t mean you’re gonna fail at everything.” – Marilyn Monroe. — ins0mniac. (@annikaparamore) February 8, 2012

That Marilyn Monroe hoe is an iconic hoe. Known by hoes for being a hoe. That hoe set the hoe precedent.

— Street in Manhattan (@Dull_Antsy) February 8, 2012

“Your clothes should be tight enough to show you’re a woman but loose enough to show you’re a lady” ~ Marilyn Monroe

— *Glenwood Exclusive* (@ALL_MACHO_PITS) February 8, 2012

Rank20 ” Marilyn Monroe ‘officially’ joins Twitter: Add one more venue where the legend of Marilyn Monroe lives … adf.ly/5KcEP

— Top 100Users (@top100user) February 8, 2012

View more infographic round-ups here.

Paid, Earned and Owned Media:

Conversion In a Social World:

Tech Germs:

Interestingly, corporate bloggers were least likely to blog about brands and products (lawsuit anyone?), and hobbyist bloggers were second least likely. Technorati defined hobbyist bloggers as those that blog for fun. They don’t make money (and only some of them want to, which I think is awesome). Instead of brands and products, they mostly share “personal musings” (53% of hobbyists), and 76% blog to speak their minds. 72% of bloggers fell into this category.

“Part-timers” were most likely to mention brands and products. They blog to supplement their main income. 15% of respondents, most part-timers blog to share their expertise or attract new clients.

“Self-employed” bloggers, 9% of the survey respondents, blog full time for their own company or organization. (Corporate bloggers, 4%, blog for someone else’s company/organization—including their employer.)

Despite the focus on products and brands, bloggers felt that the free goodies weren’t the most important benefits from their blogs—gaining visibility (individually or for their business) and bringing in new business were the top two benefits cited by bloggers surveyed.

What do you think? Do you blog about brands? What benefits have you seen from blogging? Which group do you fall into?

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The internet is fast becoming a "cesspool" where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted.

"Brands are the solution, not the problem," Mr. Schmidt said. "Brands are how you sort out the cesspool."

"Brand affinity is clearly hard wired," he said. "It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component."

The key to understanding the above is to appreciate that not only do the large brands have more money and more exposure, but they are less likely to be policed if they do the same thing that a smaller webmaster does. It is why a billion dollar company’s affiliate program passes PageRank and my affiliate links do not.

Simply put, big brands should spam. Smart people like you, who read the algorithms as a profession, already knew this, but a large segment of publishers think search is mostly trickery and voodoo.

Build a brand and buy links. If your brand is big enough you most likely will not get policed out of the search results. It has been that way for years. If only the AdWords support team or Matt Cutts spoke with Mr. Schmidt’s level of clarity!

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Eduardo Llach saw how well a branded keyword strategy worked in the context of global beverage giant, Coca-Cola. The chief marketing officer of SearchRev said not enough brands follow Coke’s example.

After optimizing for a brand keyword campaign, Llach said conversion rates and click-throughs increased. This happens because the campaign closes the loop on marketing to an audience through its various methods.

Coke is a high-profile example of this, with some of their terms going to American Idol, or for Heidi Klum’s awareness promotion of women’s heart health at the Oscars. Advertising inspires an act by visitors, Llach said.

But when a brand already ranks #1 organically, the decision makers may wonder why they should pay for the traffic they already receive for free. Llach suggested buying branded keywords leverages a campaign better.

One interesting point came up when we discussed Coke itself as a branded keyword. With several beverages under the Coca-Cola umbrella, product marketers for Diet Coke, Coke Zero, and Coca-Cola all want the valuable Coke keyword for their campaigns.

That indicates one of the issues facing those who would promote brand keyword buys for their company: who gets to use it? Llach said it takes work from the top marketing executives on down to get everyone lined up for campaigns, and the keyword’s role in them.

Reputation Management Advice

Basically the problem with SEO brand management arises when bad press gets into the news websites and then finds its way to ranking high on the SERPs for product and company names. If (and when) this does happen how do you combat such a thing? How can you essentially push down ranking of a pesky blogger or news web page? Here are my Top 10 Reputation Management tips:

1. Try “employing” or offering other bloggers to step up and post about the client. Not so much PayPerPost or Review Me style, but emailing or calling them one by one and doing it the right way.

2. Another idea is to join forums and other websites which require a user name and have a indexable profile page. For instance if you look up my name: “Jaan Kanellis” you will find MyBlogLog Community pages and many other websites that simply list a profile page. Of course your user name has to be the keyword/brand your going after, duh.

3. How about stock quote page? Is this client name/brand/keyword a public company? If so start linking to those stock quote pages from Yahoo and Google Finance.

4. How about getting Social Media websites to help like Yahoo Answers or Google Groups. Once the web page is created start by getting some links pointing to the answer/group page and watch it climb! This really applies to any sort of social media web page that allows you to author your own question/content.

5. How about getting news interviews, podcasts, etc on the subject of brand/keyword live online? Of course these will be primarily authored by the client and positive in nature. Getting the client to do them and making sure the interviewer posts them online is obviously important. Once live you can point to them from many different websites as a resource.

Basically the bottom line of my points above is to utilize already top ranking websites for your own brand benefit, while keeping the end user plenty happy with what they find in the SERPs.

More:

7. Buy, buy, buy domains around your target keyword/brand. Get them live with unique content and offer social interaction/Web 2.0 for visitors. They will rank faster than you can believe.

8. Create another controversy. Well this is very tricky, but rightly constructed it could over power whatever rankings are there now, that are in your way.

9. Try to avoiding the Quixtar route/press:

Quixtar Caught in Search Engine PR Battle

Quixtar Spamming the Search Engines?

10. Make sure your ruling the PPC spots. This can only help protect your brand and will help influence visitors to see who is the real website that they should be visited.

Update:

More solid articles on reputation management:

Ten Ways to Avoid a Google Reputation Nightmare

SEO as your brand watchdog

So what are yours?

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All of the top ten positions were held by food or beverage brands. The average visitor made 3.9 visits to sites within the CPG category, viewing 10.5 pages per visit, and spending an average of 9 minutes per site visit.

KraftFoods.com was the leader in the category with 10.5 million visitors (up 8 percent over last year), followed my MyCokeRewards.com with 8.6 million visitors (up from just 66,000 visitors a year ago), and Millsberry.com, a kids site from General Mills, with 5 million visitors (up 11 percent).

A number of other brand sites did well in the category during the past year. Candy sites attracted a significant number of visitors, including Wrigley’s candystand.com (up 1 percent to about 3.8 million visitors), MyMMs.com (up 79 percent to 2.3 million visitors), and Hersheys.com (up 12 percent to 2.1 million visitors).

UncleBens.com increased from just 191,000 visitors a year ago to 3.6 million visitors this year, using targeted banner ads on Oprah.com and FoodNetwork.com that attracted close to 2 million visits to the site. Pampers.com ranked as the 12th most visited site in the CPG category, drew 1.7 million visitors with its interactive site focused on baby development and parenting advice.

"To date, most CPG marketers have been reluctant to move a significant portion of their marketing budgets online because the Internet is not a primary sales channel for their products," said Carolina Petrini, senior vice president of consumer packaged goods solutions at comScore.

"However many brands have found success by attracting a wide audience online through effective promotions and site activities that appeal to consumers’ lifestyles. Savvy brand marketers are beginning to understand the importance of the online channel as a means of engaging consumers, which will ultimately lead to offline sales."

MSN jumped to 35 million users, giving it 9% market share, good enough for #2 in an area heavily dominated by Google’s YouTube. Yahoo is half a percentage point behind Google. If Microsoft can sustain big gains for a few more months, they could pull away to become the indisputed top at the “Best of the Rest”.

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Making Link Bait Work For You

In marketing, you have one central task: Get attention that drives results. Pretty simple really, at least in theory. Online, the lion’s share of this process is generating links to your website or blog, which helps to gain ranking in the search engines and to generate brand awareness.

Do not underestimate that second element. The more brand awareness you generate, the more people search for you, the more it affects sales and/or leads.

Link baiting has been described as a kind of art form because, like art, what resonates with a group of people isn’t always predictable and certainly not controllable; only the after-effect – like book or box office sales – is measurable. But also like any creative endeavor, there are both guidelines to creation and case studies of what has worked in the past.

Wikipedia defines link bait this way: Link bait is any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. You might be right to equate it to viral or word-of-mouth marketing, which is attracting more and more of the overall advertising spend each year.

I hereby claim that content can be both white-hat and yet still be wonderful “bait” for links. Personally, I’d lean toward producing interesting data or having a creative idea rather than spouting really controversial ideas 100% of the time. If everything you ever say is controversial, it can be entertaining, but it’s harder to maintain credibility over the long haul.

Indeed, we should approach it positively. Controversy works, and is often called the Contrary/Attack/Evil "hook." It works like the villain in professional wrestling, or tension in great storytelling. People love a good fight, but if you’re seen as always the one picking the fight, they could sour on you rather quickly. 

Fear also works – writing or creating content with the intent of scaring people to death. People will sign up just to warn others, and you get not only the link-love, but a healthy dose of fear associated with your product or service, which may or may not be what you want.

Perhaps the most famous example that didn’t go negative – well, that could depend on your point of view – is Burger King’s Subservient Chicken. Most agree that whether or not it sold more chicken is moot. The special website was a smash success and Burger King generated a lot of attention for itself.

But my favorite (and more practical) example of a business using link bait to its advantage is the "Will It Blend" series of short videos from Blendtec, which can be viewed at YouTube, or at their homepage. The one where they drop an iPod into their blender has been viewed over 4.5 million times, favorited over 9,000 times, and has attracted over 7,700 comments.

These were two wildly successful examples, but we’ll leave you with the tried-and-true approaches developed by the link-bait experts out there, sans the negative ones. All of them are excellent ways to become part of the 3.5 billion daily conversations happening on the Web, at Digg, Reddit, YouTube, wherever.

The Resource Approach (Becoming the Expert In Your Field/Niche)

–    Create expert articles/lists/data sheets 
–    Create practical or fun tools
–    Write How-To articles
–    Create a comprehensive blog roll (give link love, get link love)
–    Compile informative news stories and articles

The News Approach

–    Get the scoop. Be first with industry news
–    Interview prominent people in your field
–    Investigate a hot topic
–    Do an exposé

The Humor/Novelty Approach

–    Post funny/interesting/amazing photos related to your industry
–    Create humorous/unique videos (Use Blendtec for inspiration)
–    Create lists; people love lists – Top 10 Ways to…; 10 Signs You’re…

But whatever you create as link bait, don’t just post and forget it. Send out emails to industry people, drop a link into Digg, post at YouTube. In short, take advantage of every medium at your disposal.

Are users actually concerned with relevance anymore? I’m going to argue that we’re not. We take it for granted. And really, we already know that people don’t judge search engine results on the fifty words below the results—they judge them on the brand. Whatever brand we happen to prefer, I think our default search engine is what we consider the most relevant. And yes, for many people, that is Google. But not everyone.

Google has made relevance so fundamental to search that it’s now a non-issue. There is so little difference among the relevance of search engines that being relevant isn’t a unique selling proposition or the distinguishing factor. Right now, it’s the brand. Google has associated its brand with relevance—and it’s a given that all other search engines will have to be relevant to compete. But MSN’s new relevance (and lack of branding) is not about to set it apart.

I don’t think that even a more relevant MSN—i.e., an MSN that is more relevant than Google—will ultimately be able to win the day. Users take it for granted that search engines return at least somewhat relevant results. Frankly, I think that the vast majority of users (including the millions looking for [ebay.com], [aol.com] and [myspace.com]) are simply not sophisticated enough to discern which search engine is presents the results that best address the query as they’ve typed it.

I’m not arguing that search engines should ignore relevance altogether. Of course they need to make an effort to understand the web pages they index. Even the most ardent acolyte of Googlism would one day have to turn away if Google began returning aphasic results (you type in [puppies] and get information on chrysanthemums). Search engines should constantly work to improve the relevance of their results—behind the scenes.

While touting the relevance of their results may sound impressive to search marketers (and really, I’m sure that that is a large part of the Live Search blog’s audience), it’s a far less convincing argument to the people you really need to convince—users. And so far, it’s not working.

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