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Speaking Publicly on Online Marketing

Lee Odden — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 03:25:54 +0000

They say you should face your greatest fears head on and public speaking has been one of mine since I was a kid. Being shy didn’t help during those school speech assignments one bit. Anyone with me on that one?

Having worked in the search marketing/web dev business since 1997, it was only 2 years ago or so that I began to speak at events about SEO, marketing with blogs and online public relations. I think there were 3 speaking events that first year. This year it looks like 16 and there are already 8 events booked for 2008. Things can change quickly in internet time.

My first presentation on SEO was in front of a local interactive marketing group (thanks to Kristina Halvorson) 2 1/2 years ago and now it’s a situation where decisions need to be made about which events to do and which to turn down. The number of paid speaking engagements has risen significantly as well.

Providing companies a 1/2 day workshop on search marketing and online PR is literally a brain dump of information. The goal is to give as much practical advice and value as possible. People often ask, “Why give so much away?”. First, that’s what they’re paying for and second, nearly every one of these situations has turned into a long term consulting engagement.

This good fortune can in part, be attributed to the kindness and risk taking by people like Heather Lloyd-Martin for including me in DMA events and Brett Tabke for Pubcon. Even Danny Sullivan warmed up after a few years. Peers and friends in the industry like Greg Jarboe, Jamie O’Donnell, David Berkowitz and Peter Himler nudged a few doors open as well.

Speaking publicly about various aspects of online marketing in combination with blogging, social networking and developing good distribution channels for messaging has been instrumental in building our credibility and visibility. This combined effort accelerated what might have otherwise take many years to achieve. That is the power of the web and social networking – both online and offline, something TopRank does both internally and for clients.

However, there’s still a ways to go. We have many goals to reach as an organization including staffing. Right now we’re hiring for several positions including an Online Marketing Manager, viral marketing specialists and a web designer/developer position. The way our teams are developing and stepping up to the plate when they need to is really amazing.

One of the exciting things in development is a project and contact management system for scaling search, PR and email marketing campaigns through a single application. No more about that – at least for now. There’s a lot changing in the way we do online marketing and that’s reflected in the systems we’re developing and the topics of the remaining conferences this year.

Speaking of conferences, coming up later in November and the first 2 weeks of December is a short marathon speaking run. Things start out with the Advanced PR Technology workshop in San Francisco on November 30th with a panel on driving search traffic to corporate web sites with myself and Bill Barnes from Enquiro. Then a session at the same conference with Jamie O’Donnell and Sally Falkow on press release optimization.

After San Francisco it will be Pubcon Dec 4-7 with the “Search and Blogging Reporters Forum” which includes Andy Beal, Michael McDonald, Rand Fishkin, Loren Baker and moi. Now THAT will be a fun session. This will be followed by the “Press and Public Relations Campaigns” session with Robin Liss and Joe Beaulaurier from PRWeb. Due to the time conflict I won’t be at SES Chicago, but many people will. In fact, there are quite a few people trying to go to BOTH!

Pubcon is a great way to end out the year but MediaPost is hosting the Search Insider Summit in Park City, Utah at the Stein Eriksen Lodge. Part conference, part networking event and part fun in the snow, I’m looking forward to doing a panel session on Universal/Unified Search. Lots of brands and top level agency execs at this event make it a perfect mix of smart networking and strategic insight.

Facing fears and taking risks is part of growing with your business and without that, there’s little reward. Being able to work in such a dynamic industry that keeps moving, changing and evolving is very satisfying especially with the new and interesting problems we get to solve for clients. Thanks to tackling the public speaking thing, (but certainly not mastering it) the rewards have been far more than I anticipated. Have you faced any fears in the search marketing biz and realized unanticipated rewards?

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When Social Media and PR Work Together

Jim Tobin — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 22:16:19 +0000

I’m speaking tonight at a panel put on by Business Wire. If you want to come, please do so, and be sure to say hello. The topic is on social media generally, but more specifically looking at using social media for enhancing your news value.

Two points come to mind:

1) There is no question in my mind that social media can, and should enhance your news value. And I had a great example of that yesterday. But….

2) There is also no question in my mind that most PR folks are looking at social media as if it’s a press release distribution outlet. So they are doing it wrong and not getting enough out of it (mostly because they haven’t put enough into it.)

I spent last week working with the Associated Press on an exclusive for my client, Gilbarco Veeder-Root. They are the world’s largest maker of gas pumps. Did you see yesterday’s story that you can get Google maps on the Gilbarco pumps? Thanks to AP, it was everywhere. From MSNBC and CNN to Yahoo, Engadget and TechCrunch. The Engadget article as of this writing has 649 Diggs, and made the home page of Digg. It’s now everywhere.

When I was looking at who to give the exclusive to, I briefly thought about going blogs first. But AP still has lots of power, and clearly the smart blogs are watching the wires still. (The story crossed the AP wire at 12:01 a.m. Engadget had it up, with a nice picture, at 7:52 a.m. Impressive.)

So, for all the TV coverage and other hits, I was personally most excited about the Engadget/TechCrunch hits, because I know how influential they are in spreading news like this over a wide, wide area. This is just one small, tiny example of social media helping PR.

But… And this is a big but… Social media tools and sites clearly helped spread the news for me yesterday. But a PR firm that thinks a hit on Engadget/Digg means you maximized social media is kidding themselves. I had big news. Interesting stuff that these folks like to write about. It spread quickly. Good for me. Great for my client, who deserves ALL the praise for this great idea. They put me in the rare and wonderful position of not having to light up the social media sites on my own, sort of bottom up, because AP did it top down.

A better example of really utilizing social media to spread news is what Joseph Jaffe did selling his book. If you’re a PR person trying to understand this space, read that post. Too many PR firms think that social media is about press releases on PRweb.com and pitches to key bloggers that they’ve barely read. I hear that a lot.

Progressive PR folks realize that social media is not an outlet. It’s a fundamentally different way of speaking. More natural, yet completely foreign initially. Like any foreign language, the best way to learn it is immersion. Try it. There’s a whole other world out there.

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Mobile Search: Speaking Truth to Profits

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 14 May 2007 23:50:43 +0000

Millions of handsets rest in pockets and purses around the world, and they represent little foldable parts of a multi-billion dollar pie for the search engine market.

Mobile Search: Speaking Truth to Profits

Simplicity has been the trait of many successful tech-related services. Google, Digg, Delicious, and Flickr come to mind as examples. Such simplicity will be needed to make mobile search fulfill its promise to consumers and to the companies providing it.

An Opus Research report by Dan Miller and Greg Sterling said that mobile search success will start with a word:

The spoken word is the most natural way to initiate mobile searches

Irrelevant Mix07 Predictions

Robert Scoble — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 20:41:52 +0000

I’m hearing a ton of rumors of what’s coming to Mix07 next week in Las Vegas. I’ll be there Monday. Feel free to throw a piece of fruit as you head into the hall. I’ll be doing hallway cam out with Loren Heiny.

Anyway, here’s what we MIGHT see. How about you, what do you think Microsoft will show off?

1. An Amazon S3 competitor. “Ve have more datacenter knowledge than Amazon.”

2. Ruby on Rails and PHP running on .NET. Will it make Twitter scale?

3. Microsoft will announce an open source initiative. After all, why else would William Hurley be speaking there? Although likening Mix to a BarCamp made me gag. BarCamps are free, and aren’t centrally planned. No journalists need to beg to be let into them.

4. Ray Ozzie will use these terms at least two times during his keynote interview: HD. API. Widget. Decentralized Web. RSS. Silverlight. ASP.NET. Streaming video. DRM. Services. Ecosystem. Xbox. Media Center. Cross platform.

5. Mike Arrington will pitch TechCrunch 20, his new conference for new product demos, at least once. Bonus points if he mentions it three times.

6. Someone will point out that ABC TV isn’t using either Adobe or Microsoft video technology.

7. At least three companies will say they weren’t paid by Microsoft to build their apps and demonstrate them on stage.

So, what about you? Are you expecting anything new?

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Write for them, personally

Yuri Filimonov — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:33:31 +0000

When you write for your customers, you’d rather address them directly in your site copy, instead of speaking about the product, vague benefits or even your company.

Address directly

Actually, this is all pretty simple. People are only interested in them – even when they are seemingly interested in others. Oh wait. Let’s put it this way: you are only interested in yourself – even when you are seemingly interested in others.

Notice the difference?

Direct address – that’s what some linguistic geeks tend to call it – is when you speak to a person directly. It naturally prompts the person to pay attention to what you are saying. If you say something important, it makes sure you are heard.

Write for a single person

If you write for no one in particular – for your “average customer”, you’d rather be clearly knowing who you write for. The first step of knowing that is to learn who your customers are. The next one is to imagining as if you write for a single, specific person.

Sometimes, you may not have someone specific, in which case, a persona will do. When you don’t have one, you can write for your best customer. Why not for an average one? Because you’ll want to get the best business you can get without trying to appeal to everyone with your single piece of text.

The more detailed your picture of your best customer is, the more interesting, intricate and fascinating your copy will be. Obviously, the more appealing and useful it will be for your customers.

Speak about the important

Tell the most important things to your customers straight away. Don’t pollute the screen with ramblings, excessive comments or anything not related to the target of the copy/text/article. This should keep your readers interested and motivated enough to stick to the end.

Often, this means speaking honestly, even if it can hurt you in one way or another. But speaking sincerely with your potential customers will win trust and, hopefully, admiration among your customers, which is high valuable.

Conclusion

In essence, you need to know and remember who you write for. Apart from knowing the needs of your customers and how to format the text, you need to make sure your message gets through and evokes a reaction, which is beneficial to the customer and desired by you.

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Yuri Filimonov is a freelance website optimization and usability consultant, who writes about improving websites to gain more visitors,
customers and profit at his blog, http://www.ImproveTheWeb.com.

It’s Like Eric Schmidt Is Speaking Through An API

Pat McCarthy — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 15:37:35 +0000

The “Conversation with Eric Schmidt” was interesting for a couple of reasons yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit.

It was the first time I’ve seen him speak, and I was fairly impressed with his poise and confidence in answering questions and discussing some of the recent hot topics in relation to Google. It also provided some good insights into how Google looked at things such as their weaknesses in partnerships and decided to attack it, and how they make a list of questions they want to answer about their business and send it out to various employees and groups for feedback. I’ll point you to Valleywag for the actual play by play of his talk.

But perhaps the best observation was from a colleague who said “it’s like Schmidt is speaking through an API”. His point was that Schmidt was very adept at speaking in a filtered way without really saying anything negative and getting himself into a trap. Schmidt managed to repeatedly point out that they aren’t competing with Microsoft Office with their new office applications, yet he also managed to stick in numerous veiled digs at Microsoft through out the talk. So, the data got to us, just in a filtered and non-quotable way to avoid controversy.

It was well polished, and he appears very intelligent and probably resonates well with all the heavy thinkers working at Google.

Related Posts:

Why Won’t Google Let Us Move Our Search Data?

Google Ads To Run On Apple Properties?

The Future of Networks

WebSideStory Acquires Visual Sciences

The Power of Good People

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Pat is the Director of Business Development at Right Media, the business unit owner for RMX Direct, and the author of the Conversion Rater blog.

Hobson’s Upcoming Speaking Gigs and Conferences

Neville Hobson — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 16:32:24 +0000

There are some great learning and professional development events taking place in Europe during the next few weeks that you might want to consider being part of.

Here are three at which I’m speaking/presenting:

PRWeek Forum, November 6-8, Meriden, UK. The exclusive networking and meetings event for senior in-house PR directors, according to organizers PR Week UK. I’ll be leading an interactive session on the role organizations can play not only in dealing with the spread of online opinion (what people are saying about you and your brand) but also taking part in the conversation.

Delivering The New PR, November 10, London. The fifth and final (this year) event in a successful sell-out conference series run by the University of Sunderland. I’m very much looking forward to collaborating again with Philip Young, Tom Murphy, Elizabeth Albrycht, StuartBruce and Chris Rushton in helping communicators figure out how to deliver the new PR. As before, my segment will be on business podcasting.

Le Web 3, December 11-12, Paris. This event has evolved out of the two “Les Blogs” conferences that took place in Paris during 2005 and is now a substantial and signficant conference sponsored by TechCrunch among others. Le Web 3 is focused on the next generation web (aka Web 2.0), mobile services, virtual communities, old and new media and other themes. I’m part of a panel that will lead discussion on the theme “Life 2.0: are digital worlds creating a virtual life better than our real life?”
If you plan to be at any of these events, do let me know.

Also, the sixth annual IABC EuroComm conference takes place in Dublin on November 13-14. I can’t be at this event, more’s the pity. As an IABC member in Europe, I recommend IABC EuroComm to any communicator, whether you’re an IABC member of not, who’s looking for an unparalled professional development opportunity that otherwise you’d need to travel to the US to experience.

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.
Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

Online Oddities: Fact or Fiction Edition

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 21:14:07 +0000

W’s AOL search records, orangutan dating site, Firefox crop circles, and Microsoft on LSD. Chalk these incongruent pairings up for what makes this week in August 2006, the best online week ever.

W’s AOL Search Records?

Slate continues the Web’s latest fascination, mining the inner sanctum of AOLers, by relating the search history of User 16006693, or as we like to call him, “W.”

Showing an inordinate fascination with free Oakridge Boys downloads and jokes about Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, but not George Bush, dagnab it, W. seeks to discover the whereabouts of Iraq and Lebanon, information about “shee-ites,” and property in Crawford, Texas that isn’t next to Cindy Sheehan.

Our personal favorite searches are for “how to run country when not really inerested” and how to resist the temptation of searching for disrobed rice. We assume the lower-case “r” is intentional.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, User 16006693 doesn’t exist. We think.

AOL Users Want to Be Free, Punk Rock Edition

The Wall Street Journal quantified the leaked AOL data to reveal that over 17 million separate searches (out of 20 million) involved the search for something “free.” Free was followed by “new,” “lyrics,” “county,” “school,” “city,” “home,” “state,” “pictures,” “music,” “sale,” “high,” “map,” “center,” and a three letter word that starts in “s” and ends with “x.”

But it may not be the demographic you’re thinking in regards to that last word (stereotyper!). AOL searches for Pamela Anderson were second to searches for Fall Out Boy suicidal punk rocker Peter Wentz, pictures of whom sans vetements surfaced on the Internet in March.

Speaking Of Attractive Primates

Orangutans serving time in Dutch zoos are looking for jungle love any which way but loose (please hold the applause for weaving in two obscure references in one sentence). Our second favorite apes, next to a certain hysterical baboon with blushing posterior, are soon to have an online dating site to aid them in propagating their species.

Poles Show Approval of Microsoft’s LSD Use

A band of Polish security researchers, known as LSD, have been given free reign to try and send Windows Vista on a bad trip. The four hackers were recently put on Microsoft’s payroll to simulate attacks against the operating system. The move is part of the Redmond, Washington-based company’s initiative to improve its security image.

Aliens Prefer Firefox?

When geek-marketing, anything X-Files can only help. Mozilla recently abused 45,000 square feet of oat crops in Oregon to produce a Firefox logo crop circle. The publicity stunt (it worked, by the way) was in celebration of a milestone 200 million downloads of Microsoft’s largest Web browser competitor.

Well, that’s the official version. But as always, you should trust no one.

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Neville Hobson Speaking at Upcoming Events

Neville Hobson — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 22:09:54 +0000

We’re well into the summer now, halfway through the really quiet period when most of Europe goes on holiday. At least the weather’s fantastic, in all senses of that word.

So it’s a good time to start preparing for participating in some outstanding professional development events coming up in late summer/early autumn:

The Web of Tomorrow: Stockholm, Sweden, September 5-6, 2006. Delivering a keynote presentation “How to prepare for the communication of the future.” In addition, I’m leading a half-day pre-conference workshop “How to produce and use a podcast,” September 4.

Delivering The New PR: Edinburgh, Scotland, September 13, 2006. Fourth in the series of one-day conferences organized by the University of Sunderland (info here on the last one in London in May). Presenting on business podcasting.

Podcast and Portable Media Expo: Ontario, California, USA, September 29-30, 2006. Participant in panel discussion “Podcast Metrics: Gauging Success With Different Audience Segments,” September 30. Plus a big social get-together with all the podcaster geeks who will be there.

Strategic Communication Management Summit 2006: London, October 18-19, 2006. Organized by Melcrum. Presentation “Using new technologies to re-energize internal communications.” In addition, I’m leading a pre-conference half-day workshop “How to use social media to create genuine employee engagement,” October 17. Download the conference brochure (PDF) here.

Let me know if you’re planning to attend any of these events – it would be great to meet up.

I’ve just updated my Speaking Engagements page including more links and a better layout of all the info there.

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.
Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

Arrington, TechCrunch, Speaking at Third Thursday

Mike Manuel — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 21:52:31 +0000

Following up on my previous post, next Thursday, April 20th, will be our kick-off Third Thursday meetup, and I’m fired up to say our first guest speaker will be Michael Arrington.

Arrington is the founder of edgeio and the author of TechCrunch, a highly influential blog about Web 2.0 trends and technology. Arrington will be joining us to talk about the do’s and don’ts of engaging the blogging community, where TechCrunch has had success working with companies, along with any insights, anecdotes, advice he might have for using new media in PR and marketing programs.

This meetup will be held at Fanny & Alexander’s in downtown Palo Alto from 6:30-8:30PM on the back patio (discussion to begin 7-ish). Attendance is free, but please register in advance via our meetup page. We plan to capture and share each meetup via the typical outlets (e.g., podcast, blog entries, photos, tags, etc.), so if you can’t make it, no worries, we’ll do our best to extend the reach of Third Thursday online. In fact, if you can help with any of this, please let me know.

If back channel interest and enthusiasm for this meetup thus far is any indication of how necessary this sort of thing is, Third Thursday should be a very valuable event for local PR and marketing folks.

See you next Thursday, the first round’s on these guys.

Related Posts:

Hello, My Name is “Third Thursday”

SF/SV PR MeetUp (Jeremy Pepper)

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Mike Manuel is the founder of the award winning Media Guerrilla blog. Media Guerrilla is an insiders take on the practice of technology public relations with a focus on the issues, tactics and trends that are specific to the tech industry.
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