Lapre started his business in 1990, based around credit repair. Soon after he began selling booklets, helping people receive a FHA insurance refund after their mortgages had been paid. This led to his first big moneymaker, when he started an infomercial stating people could make $50,000 a week using his strategy which was based around “tiny classified ads” in newspapers.

Lapre’s first trouble with the law came in 2005, when the FDA accused Lapre of making false promises about a vitamin he was involved in selling. His business claimed the vitamin would assist against diseases such as diabetes, stroke, heart disease, insomnia, cancer, and arthritis. He would receive two warnings from the FDA before finally taking “The Greatest Vitamin in the World” website down.

Lapre would come to be monitored by consumer watchdog groups, claiming Lapre was selling false get-rich-quick-schemes online. On June 8th, 2011, Lapre was indicted by a grand jury for selling worthless internet businesses. He was accused of scamming 220,000 victims out of $52 million. On October 2, Lapre died from what appears to be suicide, but his death is still under investigation.

On his site DonLapre.com, there are photos of Lapre’s house and family along with a lengthy goodbye message.

I tried to create the best product on earth, paid out millions, made very little trying to make it a success, had attorneys review my entire company, paid out millions in refunds, tried to make the commission and products better every single year, and in spite of all that, I have been accused of something I did not do. I did not have the perfect company but never once did I allow one thing to be done that would violate any law. Nevertheless, because the majority of people did not make money, in spite of everyone of them being able to make as many $1000 checks as they wanted, I am left to fight a battle that will for sure destroy what energy I have left inside… I hope the pictures below motivate you to take a chance in life and try to do the impossible… It did not work out for me with my vitamins but I believe that being willing to fail is part of having a chance at success…. Never stop dreaming and for all those who sent me testimonials of what you did because of some of my help, I am grateful I made a small difference in your life…

The first pick for online marketer of the Year was Chris Hughes who ran the online side of the historic victory of president elect Barak Obama and co-founded Facebook. “The campaign relied heavily on social media outlets to reach out to potential voters, increase their knowledge of Mr. Obama and rally their votes.” Hughes is also the youngest person on the list.

Hughes ran the online campaign that got 1.5 million volunteers registered on myBarackObama.com and gathered $600 million in contributions online. He also built a database of 3 million mobile phone numbers. To do that they promised supporters that they would be notified of campaign news before the media (steal this concept!).

Guy Kawasaki is the next person who was noted. And at #23 is our own Andy Beal. Andy talks about reputation management and has an excellent reputation. Online marketer Lee Odden, also nominated, said he nominated Andy because “[he] is a digital marketing pioneer recognized by many for his SEO and online reputation management expertise. He’s a published author (Radically Transparent), blogger, public speaker and consultant.” Mike Moran said he “writes the terrific Marketing Pilgrim blog and oversaw development of Trackur this year.”

Acceptance speech Andy? When’s the ceremony?

Also, where are all the women in this industry? Greats like Adriana Huffington, Anita Campbell, Wendy Piersall, Liz Strauss, and others made the list, but they’re way outnumbered.

Comments

Here is a recap of the SES Chicago posts in case you missed any:

• Meet the Web Analytics Players
• Igniting Viral Campaigns
• Keynote Speech – Rodney Dangerfield School of Search Marketing
• Keynote – Seth Godin & 14 Trends to Avoid a Meatball Sundae
• Big Site, Big Search
• Actionable Social Media
• Usability and SEO
• Are You Ignoring the Power of Images?
• Snowy & Festive at SES Chicago
• SEO and Development – Get It Together
• Personalization, User Data & Search
• Podcast and Audio Search
• Strolling the Exhibit Floor at SES Chicago
• Images and Search Engines
• Managing PPC For Multiple Clients
• So You Want to Be A Search Marketer?
• Landing Page Optimization Clinic
• Kevin Ryan Unplugged
• Do Your Keywords Account for Local Vernacular?

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Tag:

Tanya writes:

I am a student at

San Diego

State

University

and I have used Facebook to promote to my fellow classmates new programs and activities for Campus Recreation. It is very inexpensive and easy to use. I think it cost me $20 to target 20,000 students or something.

Sincerely,

Tanya Cottrell

PS. I think Yahoo should allow niche marketing for their yahoo groups because I know some could be targeted by different industries too. Ex. I am on the Yahoo CIU Italy group which is designed for students who will be studying abroad at the University in Italy and any traveling industry business should promote on this group page because they have a captured audience.

She then added in a subsequent email:

Something else I would like to mention I know I previous commented on Yahoo but on Facebook it is incredibly easy to create groups and invite friends to join too. For example, as soon as the fires started raging here in

San Diego

a friend of mine created a group on Facebook where we informed each other of what was happening instead of the news, since the news was spread pretty thin. It was very convenient for people who lived in

San Diego

or friends who lived outside of

San   Diego

and were worried about the situation.

Also, I am studying global marketing abroad in Italy next semester and usually you don’t meet other people going on the trip until you get there but someone opened a Facebook group for our 2008 semester specifically. With our group are able to exchange advice, meet people who are going on the trip before we even go, and a bonus is we are able to coordinate flights and meetings to travel together into

Italy

. As a person learning in marketing, it is these “niche” groups that I would seek out and advertise on. If not advertise have a company account and post comments on the pages. Ex. A tour company can leave a wall post for students with a deal on weekend tours in

Europe

. Everyday there are at least one new person added to the group and a couple wall posts.

Honestly, I haven’t really noticed any of the new Facebook ads unless they have something to do with something already in my mind set. Ex. I am planning my trip for Europe so if I see an ad that says “

Europe

” it catches my eye.

 

Do you actually have an account? You should join. You would be amazed at how many adults are currently on it and as my generation grows older I don’t see Facebook becoming any smaller. We are the social chat room generation – we will always be online.

 

Sincerely,

Tanya Cottrell

San Diego State University 2008 Graduate and Marketing Executive at VivanTech

This is a great snapshot of a multitude of ways marketers and members both can use Facebook.

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Tag:

• 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: Sarah Hofstetter, Vice President, Emerging Media & Client Strategy, 360i

Rob Key, CEO, Converseon

Adam Sherk, Search/PR Strategist, Define Search Strategies

First speaker of the day’s second session, “Evangelist – The Marketer’s Role in SMM” is Rob Key, CEO, Converseon who will talk about engaging community. Community is the crux of the entire web experience. Present are dozens of communities have people of similar interests or growing cultures. There, we can communicate better. As marketeers we haven’t been asked to be part of them. Communities are meant only for consumers and consumers. Henceforth, it should be a marketing ploy. In "2nd Life Liberation Army," a community in Second Life, there are avatars that take up commercial properties, such as Sony etc.

What’s the purpose of being a marketer? It’s all about being a cultural anthropologist. As marketeers there will be lot of backlash for trying to develop brands as we foray into social media communities.

8 Ways To Get Into Social Media Communities:

• Be an active member of the community.
• Make friends with elders in the community.
• Understand and respect them.
• Lead with altruism – come bearing gifts.
• Discover a community need.
• Learn the linguistics.
• Value and cultivate relationships.
• Leverage appropriately … over time.

Take the Second Life example:

Even at the beginning of the 3d web, there already are 7 million accounts. According to a majority of 200 respondents, they were all unhappy with Second Life’s real world company activities. Imagine, people within Second Life are agitating the sale of selling Second Life land to Starbucks.

Our Approach: Joined Second Life in 2006, understood and followed the norms of the community. Issues related to ecology are of prime importance in Second Life. This led to the launching of Second Chance Trees Islands. Through this, you could buy a tree for 300 Linden Dollars and at the same time, a real tree will be planted somewhere in the world. A Google Maps image shows the location of where your tree is planted in real life.

This project garnered so much attention that it was picked up by mainstream media. Won the OMMA award for best virtual world project and was in contention for winning an award for American Express.

The third speaker is Adam Sherk, Search/PR Strategist, Define Search Strategies. If you are talking about social media, you have to be nimble as it requires multi-department coordination from PR & marketing, to the SEO team to the IT department. A lot of this revolves around money from ads. The leggl department is worried on whether you will do anything to get the brand’s image a backlash.

Common Pitfalls include:

• Lack of strategy
• lack of support and resources
• poor coordination
• Inappropriate and unnecessary contents
• no understanding in communities
• hiding affiliations
• being excessively emotional

Many a time, those who do not understand social media can do more harm than good.

Paths To Success:

• Selling upper management the concept
• Getting buy-in from all key departments
• Instilling a "give to gain" philosophy
• Finding the right people to manage the efforts
• Giving them what they need to be effective

Building credibility in social media sites’ communities take time. Also keep a check on links and traffic.

More to consider:

• How will you sustain your efforts over the long-term?
• What happens if your brand ambassador leaves the company?
• What about employees with their own personal profiles?
• How will you deal with negative responses and reactions?

Finding what works:

Hearst Magazine: An article they submitted called “The Daily Green” about the Lunar Eclipse brought in three times more views within a span of 2 days than an appearance on the homepage for the entire month.

Good Housekeeping: Good Housekeeping made to the first page of Digg, thanks to Dog costumes. The post garnered over 50 comments on a variety of points.

TV Guide: They hired a full-time brand ambassador who participates and regularly monitors social sites. There is full transparency within communities while there are network partner sites created for publicity efforts. Many promotions are created around exclusive content.

TV Guide promoted High School Musical 2. they came up with original and exclusive content for the film which was featured in an article. Word was passed through FaceBook etc. The outreach was a smash hit. Fansites and blogs picked it up too.

• 700% greater on the photo gallery
• 300% greater on Video
• 25% greater on page time
• 192% new visitors
• 1000% greater ratings and reviews

Last speaker of the session is Sarah Hofstetter, the Vice President of Emerging Media & Client Strategy, 360i.

How do marketeers influence the influential? Its all about finding a place where marketeers can smartly put forth across social media so that they can be evangelists. What are the assets that you can use to promote your brand? Th answer is more than just saying, “my band rocks”. You have to include widgets, CD-ROM, etc.

First case Study: NBC’s Heroes

A Digger favorite. As it was going on a 7 week hiatus thanks to Dancing with the stars, they had to make sure that viewers would return. For this, NBC worked with PR, marketing etc. Together they came up with prormotions, games and other fun paraphernalia that would keep the audience and viewers engaged. A word of caution: Take care when your are pitching (Read "Bad Pitch Blog"), people should be interested in what you have to say.

Second case Study: Comedy central

For this they wanted to create awareness about the politically-related stuff on Comedy Central. They already had a good following. As comedy book lovers adore the Green Lantern,we drew an analogy and linked it to the site. This stirred a lot of controversy which bred a lot of intensity. Keep giving your audience something to write about. Feed their hunger. Everyone is looking for interesting things to write about.

Third case Study: Living with Ed

For this new HGTV TV show, the aim was to attract a new set of viewers that may have not watched the channel but used blogs, communities, forums etc. The biggest problem was that the first rank of “Living with Ed” showed “erectile dysfunction” and not television show.

Comments

Tag:

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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Tag:

However, this service offers more in-depth knowledge than I’ve seen from any other competitive intelligence tool. It’s not just for snooping out which keywords your competitors are bidding on. Among other things, it identifies where their actual clicks are coming from.

Of this feature, comScore says: “One of the key benefits of comScore Marketer is the ability to perform competitive analysis of a market based on organic and paid click-thrus.” They give an example chart showing which sites get the most organic and paid click-throughs for a given keyword.

comScore states that the service will enable marketers to:

• Create more efficient and cost-effective campaigns using paid and organic search terms.
• Identify high performing search terms at a site and category level.
• Analyze searchers and the use of search terms by demographic segment.
• Discover high-potential consumer segments and pinpoint the optimal search sites and search terms to reach them.
• Find out who is competing on search terms to identify prime affiliate marketing partners.
• Maximize the ROI of search and online marketing investments.

In the press release, Dan Lackner, senior vice president of comScore, says, “The granular information on both searchers and search terms available through this service empowers users with actionable search marketing intelligence.”

Based on comScore’s panel methodology, the click behavior they observe is supposed to be a representative sample of Internet behavior at large. The MRC audit is designed to judge how accurate their measurements are against the general population, as well as ensure that they are internally consistent.

Comments

ComScore Marketer lets companies flag well- performing search terms on a site and category level along with analyzing searchers and the use of search terms by demographic segment. The service also identifies who is competing on search terms.

"comScore Marketer is a new service that gives marketers a powerful and comprehensive set of tools to assess their online marketing performance," said Dan Lackner, senior vice president of comScore.

"The granular information on both searchers and search terms available through this service empowers users with actionable search marketing intelligence."

One of the main benefits of the tool is that it can perform competitive analysis of a category based on organic and paid search Click Through Rates.

An example is the analysis of the terms "credit card" or "credit cards" for June 2007, the service revealed that sponsored links accounted for under a quarter of the click-throughs for both search terms, while users clicked 76 percent of the time on organic results.