This is an event (in Miami February 24th-26th) that’s near and dear to TopRank’s marketing consulting services which are made up of: search, PR and email marketing. Out of those three “legs”, email marketing is by far the most productive in terms of ROI and conversion rates.

What’s great about this conference is that it’s all about email and nothing else. Sliced and diced into 3 tracks (BtoB, Advanced BtoC and Operations) as well as 5 general and 36 breakout sessions, there’s “something for everyone”, as they say. There’s also an opportunity to get “certified” as an email marketing expert through a package that includes both the Summit and an online course.

If you’re hungry for email marketing goodness sooner than later, here’s a tasty snack: Marketing Sherpa’s 2008 Email Marketing Benchmark Guide. There’s also an upcoming teleseminar to review the guide’s findings:

December 19, 2007 – 2:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. PST),
Led by Stefan Tornquist and Tim McAtee Senior Analyst at MarketingSherpa and lead author of the 2008 Guide
More info and registration

Here’s a previous post from TopRank’s resident email marketing guru, Julie Brue with a few of her practical email marketing tips.

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Christian Delhaye, worldwide head of maps and guides for Michelin, said, "It was a mistake" that it was briefly made available on Michelin’s Web site. "It was only up for a short time."

French chef Joel Robuchon’s Las Vegas restaurant received the only three-star rating, which is described as "exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey." "One of our patrons called me," Robuchon told the Los Angeles Times. "He looked on the Internet site and saw all the results of the guide. There were rumors circulating, but nothing official. I’m really happily stunned."

Los Angeles area restaurants that did well in the Michelin ratings include Wolfgang Puck’s Spago in Beverly Hills, which earned a two-star rating, along with French restaurant Melisse in Santa Monica and the 10-set Japanese restaurant Urasawa in Beverly Hills.

"I am very happy about two stars," Josiah Citrin, chef and owner of Melisse, told the Times. "This isn’t just L.A. two stars, this is two stars across the world. Americans might not know how hard it is to have even one star and how few there are."

The guide describes a two star restaurant as one that serves "excellent cuisine, worth a detour, with specialties and wine of first class quality."

The Michelin guide has been published by the French tire company for more than 100 years and covers 21 countries. Its three-star rating is viewed as the highest honor in dining around the world.

Twitter has become so popular that it has, by its own nature, become a verb; "twittering" or "tweeting" is the act of ‘telling’ the world what you are doing at any given moment via instant messaging, mobile texting, or emailing.

When I first heard of Twitter I had much the same reaction as many of my friends and colleagues… "why would I want to send meaningless notes about my daily activities on a regular basis? It seems not only invasive but a waste of time and energy." Well I have to say that my reaction was more likely the result of social media startup overload than having put much thought into the marketing aspects of such a utility. The fact is that Twitter has become quite a marketing tool that is worth using if you are up to the task; I started using it today.

So how is Twitter a marketing tool? Well Jennifer Laycock noted a great example – CNN. CNN uses Twitter to publish news stories as they occur so that their Twitter community can be in touch with the latest events; a powerful tool for building and maintaining credibility. From my standpoint I plan on using Twitter to tell all which articles I find most interesting throughout my day and to perhaps post quick tips or links to articles we just posted on our blog. The trick to remember is that Twitter only allows 140 characters per ‘tweet’ so you have to be short and sweet; tweeting or twittering is aptly described as micro-blogging.

If you would like to learn more about Twitter then check out Caroline’s Twitter Guide – it is a great introduction.

If you happen to signup for Twitter find me and join my community if you wish. I plan on having a lot of fun with it from now on

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• Unofficialseoblog
• Coverage by other SEM communities
• Images

Below is an alphabetical index of our coverage:

• A Marketer’s Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging
• Effectively Leveraging Social networking
• Evangelist – The Marketer’s Role in SMM
  
• Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites
  
• Keynote Q&A: Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us & Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon
• Linkbait – Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
• Micro Communities
• Social Media Marketing Essentials
• Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers & Answer Sharing

Coverage by other SEM communities:

• Affiliate Tip
• Aim Clear Blog
• Alt Search Engines
• Bruce Clay
• Search Engine Land
• SEO Round Table
• Search Engine Journal
• Search Marketing Gurus
• Square Oak
• Tamar.com
• Tannerhobin.com
• Top Rank Blog
• WebProNews

Images:

• Top Rank Blog

• Dennis Goedegebuure


• Hilarious pictures of Mr. Moderator

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Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers: Guillaume Bouchard, CEO, NVI

Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service

Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services

Danny introduces Guillaume Bouchard the CEO of NVI Solutions who is the first speaker of this session.

About Social bookmarking, Guillaume says it is when Internet users can store, organize, search and share bookmarks. Thanks to "nofollow" links, there is lesser less link juice. Popular social bookmarking sites are Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon and Furl.

On the other hand, bookmarking sites also use tags. This is a collaborative practice through which you can identify content in a certain way. These help in:

• Indexing your site better on search engines.
• Receiving a high number of organic incoming links.
• Creates a strong presence within social communities.
• Promotes brand awareness.
• boosts traffic from alternate sources.
• impacts traditional media.

How To tag Effectively

• Find out how people are tagging the sites you want to remember later.
• If you are clueless and doubtful, choose the tag that is most popular and relevant in the tag clouds.
• Avoid separating tags with commas.
• Set a list of standards by which you want to exchange with others.

Manual Tagging

• It should have been online for more than 10 years(hyperlinks, anchor text, keywords).
• Design your own set of tags to represent your content.
• Incorporate images, boost high participation rates by letting users personalize and make. their own tags that they associate to the given image.
• These should also be submitted to del.icio.us, stumble, and flickr.

Automatic Tagging

• Automatically, through an algorithm it extracts tags from the content
• This can incorporate different user’s users tags
• This does not grow or expand due to human creativity.
• This is all about the user experience.
• A great example is FaceBook.




• However, automatic tagging is considered more "blackhat".

Abuse & Content Degradation

• Content visibility is often created through the intentional misuse of tags
• As social bookmarking and tagging sites become more mainstream, the added incentive for manipulation will result in decreasingly reliable content unless their algorithms get a lot smarter
• Leading social marketing sites use tagging

Technorati

• A search engine for blogs that works on a tag based system. Popular blogs get ranked on the basis of unique links.
• Start a blog for your client, write several blog posts with high -profile tas, and claim it through Technorati
• If you receive a high amount of pings in a short period of time, it means you will feature in the popular section of the site for searches, blogs, videos, movies and news.

Flickr

• Submit photos that make sense to the industry that you are trying to reach.
• Select the correct tags from the list of popular tags
• If you want your images to appear in Technorati, tag them appropriately and make them public.
• Use the photostream on your blog
• Make other users link and comment on your images with the same tags that you initially selected.
• Make friends and share pictures.

YouTube

• Mashups area hit here.
• In YouTube content has more importance than the tags used.
• Use Digg, StumbleUpon and other social marketing sites to promote your video.
• Ask friends to comment on your videos.
• Pass on your video to friends.

FaceBook

• Make attractive and interesting corporate profiles.
• Brainstorm on widgets and use the application that is exclusive to your industry.
• Offer a good enough reason to join your community.
• These groups needs a moderator.
• Invite people in your company.

Next up was Michael Gray, President of Atlas Web Service who gave the audience a comprehensive tour of del.icio.us. Michael compared tags to old-fashioned Internet Explorer and Mozilla FireFox bookmarking albeit with more flexibility and community features. A really great thing of del.icio.us is its feature that lets it subscribe to tags. Michael says tags are like labels, but one must keep a check of the commas. Different groups of people will have a different perspective of your pages, giving your pages more "tags".

Obviously, you want to be in the ‘popular’ page. As this can bring in as much traffic as Digg. The benefit of del.icio.us is that it has a wider demographic reach and has less to do with techie things. Like Digg, you too can do a ‘shoutout’ in del.icio.us, this is not as powerful but is pretty effective. del.icio.us does not apply the ‘noFollow’ tag, so you wouldn’t be receiving any link love. However, there will be incoming traffic. A word of caution : Separate words should have a ‘+’ as tag delimiter and not space.

How to Expand Your Exposure

Find the type of posts that people are bookmarking for your subject. Tailor-design your content to fit popular tags. Your page should integrate bookmarking widgets and buttons, good titles, careful timing and advised tagging. Remember that del.icio.us updates its popular page every 4 hours. Time your bookmarking efforts in such a way that you can take advantage of update timeframes. Make your friends influence the suggested tags. Lastly, do not create multiple sock puppet accounts, they will get discontinued.

Last speaker of the session is Neil Patel, the CTO of Advantage Consulting Services who is here to discuss StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon has over 3 million users and brings in over 12,000 visitors per day. And the best part? The traffic lasts long. This is great for branding. The demographic of users show more men and lesser females. However, users are aged 45 and above. Meaning, they have more money to spend.

First, you got to install the toolbar in order to use it. There is a feature of an "I like" or "I don’t like" thumbs up or down icon. The more thumbs up you get, the higher the incoming traffic.

Second,Create an account, make friends and send stories to them. At StumbleUpon, titles don’t carry much weightage as here the pages are being served. However, keywords are required for StumbleUpon. Review carries equal importance as topic or tags. Sending stories to your friens is not considered spamming as it is a StumbleUpon service.

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TV Guide To Launch Video Search Tool

Paul Greenberg, GM of TV Guide Online, told Reuters that searching for video of TV shows on Google or Yahoo leads to too many choices. The new search service will direct users to free episodes available at the networks Web sites and to other professionally created content related to the show.

Greenberg said that the Online Video Guide will fill a niche that Google and YouTube are not because they are not strictly TV-focused. He pointed out that 70 percent of YouTube users are searching for professional content and not user-generated content that the site is known for.

TV Guide’s Online Video Guide will direct a large amount of traffic to network Web sites but it does not receive any revenue for the traffic it generates. "We’re talking to content holders in order to cut deals for a small slice of the advertising revenue," Greenberg said.

Users of the Online Video Guide will be able to specify that they are searching only for free content and avoid being directed to iTunes or Amazon’s Unbox.

"Part of the way we’re marketing this is, ‘Oh, you forgot to set your TiVo? Here’s the show you missed, for free,’ " Greenberg said.

A new book called, The New Influencers – A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media by Paul Gillin, was my reading companion during a recent travel experience to a search engine marketing conference. The first story Gillin tells illustrates our dream experience with social networking and marketing.

He describes how an AOL customer tried to cancel his account. As most of us who were around during the primitive Internet years can attest to, it was far, far easier to deliver a baby while jumping on a trampoline than it was to cancel an AOL account once you set up one.

One gentleman, Vincent Ferrari, is a blog owner. He recorded his phone experience with an AOL account representative. Of course, it didn’t go well, with the highlight coming when the then 30-year old Ferrari was asked to go get his father.

On June 20, the recording was broadcast via an audio file from his blog, and he asked his readers if they could report any similar customer service tales from AOL. Boy could they! An hour later his server crashed with over 300,000 requests for downloads of his audio file. Four days later, while his server continued to suffer from the strain, he was appearing on nearly every major TV news show, including being interviewed by Matt Lauer of the Today show in the USA. He made Nightline. CNN. Top blogs ran his story.

By August 1, Google presented 150,000 results for “AOL” and “Vincent Ferrari”. Meanwhile, AOL announced changes to their policy but insisted it had nothing to do with the Ferrari recording.

As the author writes,

“Vincent Ferrari may not have caused AOL to change its business model, but he must have influenced it. He lit a match that set off a conflagration of customer complaint. AOL probably new that its hard-sell tactics were unpopular, but it probably didn’t know the degree to which those tactics inspired rage among its customers.”

I love to study human behavior and the Internet. Social web behavior takes the cake. It’s a marketers’ never-ending party. Reputation management is something big business can no longer hope to control without also understanding Internet media. This new book is a relaxed, informative read that covers social media in all its various forms, including podcasting, blogs, and video.

He doesn’t end there. Gillin considers how the long-time public relations industry must adapt. He works in viral marketing, tools and illustrative examples from the field to help drive his points home to readers. Beginners trying to understand all the ways the Internet can communicate information will get explanations in an easy, non-technical language. For the experienced, ideas and inspiration are worth the very affordable price for this hardcover book.

In an era where traditional journalists struggle with point persons in an effort to get the “real story”, there is now the freedom and often easy access to get to the truth of a matter simply by following clues dropped by social media sites.

You can influence change by communicating what’s important to you. Done well and creatively, you can earn money, force positive change, teach, inform, unite, fight together for causes and create new communities that stretch far beyond your present physical boundaries.

Gillin lightly touches on the future effects of social media marketing and barely gets into how it has been used to threaten and bully people.

With influence comes responsibility.

Related:

Examples of airline customer satisfaction and reputation management concerns in Airline Delays and Word of Mouth

Three people from the search marketing industry question the practices of Facebook and Digg:

Using Facebook: Uploading Your Original Content Automatically Grants Them License to Use It

Compare People Facebook App Pulls a Bait and Switch?

An Open Letter to Kevin Rose

I will be reporting on sessions at the SMX Social Media event in NYC for the Search Engine Roundtable blog next month.

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Customers of Mediacom and Insight will be able to personalize Listings2Go grid views and search their local TV listings online with 14 days of programming that includes genre, HDTV filters and detailed episode information. Listings2Go can be customized to provide users with programming information for every channel lineup in the U.S. or just a specific channel lineup.

"We are pleased to be working with Mediacom and Insight to help them bring customized local TV listings solutions for their online customers," said Tonia O’Connor, executive vice president, distribution, Gemstar-TV Guide.

"These Listing2Go launches are particularly important as they mark the initial phase of the roll-out of the My TV Guide cross-platform tools and services; including remote recording capabilities offered to TV Guide’s interactive program guide affiliates, as part of our upcoming i-Guide release."

Since Google Earth launched a couple of years ago, people have created a hobby of finding unusual or amazing things with the satellite imagery, to the point that world governments are disconcerted enough to demand a little discretion, to the point that world governments worry about terrorists effectively using the imagery to plot their evils.

And while you could make this into a hobby yourself, if you have that kind of time, there are other places to go to reap the visual benefits on somebody else’s dime.

Right at the top of the search results is GoogleSightSeeing.com, which currently is featuring the world’s largest cow, the world’s largest phallus (how’d they get inside my house?), and a Secret Service training facility.

There’s also Satellite-Sightseer.com, where users can browse by country, city, or state, and submit images they’ve found on their own. My favorite is the Asahi Beer HQ in Tokyo, with its "beer bubble" on the roof that doesn’t exactly look like what it’s called, at least not from space. They should call it "honorable swimmer."

PCWorld’s got a decent collection of images, too, 16 pics they call the strangest sights you’ll find. Though many of them are things you might see in a National Geographic – elephants and camels and the like – the giant agrarian homage to Oprah is a vision that most likely causes the aliens circling the Earth to keep their distance.

Word of its demise came from “Maps Guide Mike,” who, on the Google Maps Help Group forum, stated, “this feature was a long-running experiment, and in the end it was decided to discontinue it.”  There hasn’t been a single reply to Mike’s post, which may help explain how that decision was reached.

But Click-to-Call did have its followers.  Download Squad’s Grant Robertson calls the development “[s]ad news, as this was an innovative piece of Google’s heralded Maps service.”

Over at CenterNetworks, Allen Stern adds, “I, like Grant, liked this piece of technology.  Perhaps the GrandCentral acquisition has something to do with it?”

There are no real clues to Google’s thought process, however.  Maps Guide Mike only wrote, “There are however lots of other features we’re adding to maps in the hope of making it even more useful.  And if you are in the United States and liked click-to-call, check out a different experiment we’re doing.”  The different experiment is, somewhat ironically, GOOG-411.