TopRank Internet Marketing News

Social media’s quickly evolving landscape leaves many brands and marketers scratching their heads trying to figure out which direction to go.  Luckily, Target Marketing has tapped into the minds of TopRank CEO Lee Odden (@leeodden) and VP & CMO of Zinio Jeanniey Mullen (@jeannieymullen) for some answers.

No matter where you are on the social media spectrum, this webinar will help you decide which networks are most useful for your business, and so much more.  Do you want to know the best part?  This webinar is complimentary!

Join The Social Media Revolution with TopRank CEO Lee Odden

Social Media 2013: What Sites Are Most Important to Marketers This Year
Speaker: Lee Odden

Wednesday, February 13th, 2013
2:00pm-3:00pm (EST)

This educational webinar will take some of the mystery out of social media marketing for businesses of any size.  Not only will you receive guidance into which sites are best for your brand, but how social media fits into a larger integrated online marketing program.  Additionally attendees will learn:

Google offers more guidance on building high-quality sites. Feeling the effects of Panda? It might not be Panda that’s causing problems for your website’s visibility on Google. They’ve rolled out numerous updates recently and the big focus on quality is something website owners should pay attention to. Via Google Webmaster Central Blog.

How to Establish a B2B Social Media Benchmarking Plan. Via Search Engine Watch.

The 2nd Wave of Location-Based Services. Via ClickZ.

How Female Influencers Communicate Online. Via eMarketer.

The big shift: Moving from impressions to engagement. Via PRSA.

Stop for the STAT:
84% use mobile search to look for information on local retailers. Econsultancy.

90 percent of online retailers said search-engine marketing was the most effective source used to acquire customers. Via Entrepreneur.

As loyalties shift away from traditional media as a preferred communications channel, there will be those who approach this evolution with fear and those who approach it with an embrace.

While many consumers embrace social media channels such as blogs and microcontent as legitimate sources of news and information, public relations professionals are oftentimes fearful to make a similar leap.  Those that brave the new online landscape, however, find they are able to significantly and positively influence the public relations goals of their clients or companies.

TopRank Account Manager & Social Media Pro Adam Singer

This June, TopRank® Online Marketing will be on-hand at SES Toronto to help PR professionals make the necessary change to succeed in the new social environment:

Online reputation management is equally important for businesses, highly visible executives and even team members.  As business becomes increasingly digital, online brand reputation quickly becomes a real world reputation.

It’s been reported that over 50% of adults Google each other and over 90% of B2B buyers use search when starting the buying process.  In other words:  if your brand has online reputation issues, they will be discovered.

Below, find two proactive approaches that can help protect – and in case of emergency – defend your brand:

1.  Own your brand in the SERPs (search engine results pages)
By building out your web presence on a variety of external sites, in addition to optimizing your own site, you can own your brand’s search engine presence.  By building this presence, you make it difficult for one negative blog post or article about your brand to grace the first page of the search engines.

Following the birth of real time search, the proclivity of search engines to prioritize rankings based on new, newsworthy and social content, is real time Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

So what type of content can businesses develop to take advantage of real time search?  Below, find three types of content TopRank® Online Marketing helps develop to support traditional and real time SEO programs for its clients:

1. Optimized Press Releases: More and more, search engines will quickly position newsworthy content atop search results.  News and press releases, optimized for search and published through authoritative newswires, can help companies both achieve higher rankings and ensure positive messaging is found atop search results.
2. Blog Posts: Much like an optimized press release, a blog post can represent an example of thought leadership and newsworthy content. Each post also represents a new webpage that can rank and be found quickly via real time search.

Today’s 24-hour news cycle means, more than ever before, journalists and bloggers turn to search engines and social media to quickly find stories and sources.  Despite this, many media placement and article syndication companies guard content behind lengthy log-in processes.  The five minutes it takes a journalist to log-in is, oftentimes, five minutes spent finding a more convenient source.

One company that has evolved to meet the needs of its prospect and client base is NewsUSA.  The social media and Twitter case study below details how TopRank® Online Marketing is helping NewsUSA meet business objectives by freeing up and expanding the availability of media content into channels frequented by customers and prospects.

Situation:

For more than 20 years, NewsUSA has helped its clients achieve brand visibility via copyright-free syndicated content. Much like its competition, NewsUSA entered 2009 with a requirement that users, from print journalists to bloggers, log-in to its article syndication section in order to access and publish this copyright-free content.

Twitter remains a compelling enigma for online marketers.

In a post to Online Marketing Blog, copywriter Michelle Bowles equated the delicate balance needed in a Twitter Marketing Recipe to that of a guacamole recipe where one false dash could destroy the whole dip.

Michelle’s advice to marketers seeking to receive more value from Twitter can be boiled down to two words:  be valuable. While this may read as very ‘in the box’ advice, the approach you take is what will carry your marketing efforts out of the box.

For example, when brainstorming ideas for valuable content to Tweet, does your mind automatically jump to valuable content that is available on your website?

In reality, some of the best Twitter strategies involve delivering content valuable to an audience of followers (i.e., industry whitepapers, news and headlines), unrelated to the company behind the Tweet.  This is a great way to build the trust you need to ensure followers click through your Tweets when you do have that great piece of content worth promoting.

When the world’s foremost experts on social media, search marketing and online public relations gather to attend an event, the challenge to present compelling and actionable information is clearly on. Dating back to the beginning of this decade, the team at WebMasterWorld have met this challenge again and again with the PubCon series of conferences.

This November will be no different as WebMasterWorld hosts an elite collection of speakers and panelists at PubCon 2009: Social Media, Search, Affiliates in Las Vegas Nevada. Contributing to this event will be TopRank® Online Marketing, who will be represented on three panels by CEO Lee Odden and one by Account Manager Adam Singer.

Tuesday, November 10^th: 2:55-4:10pm
Experts on PR & Twitter
Can public relations 2.0 be summarized in 140 characters or less? Don’t let the character count lull you into complacency. To break through, today’s PR efforts must be powerful, targeted and, of course, concise. Singer and his panel of social media promotion experts will take you from mid-level public relations to advanced online PR and social promotions experts in no time.

Twitter, a popular microblogging site that lets users communicate messages in 140 characters or less, has exploded in popularity. Twitter has become so popular, many companies feel they must have a presence there, if only to stay ahead of the curve.  But is this really the case?

As much as it may seem everyone is on Twitter, this simply isn’t true.  CNET reports that while 99 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds have profiles on social networks, only 22 percent use Twitter.

Both gut feelings about the number of Twitter users and statistics detailing exact numbers are fairly irrelevant to the question at hand.  What’s truly important is the percentage of your audience that is on Twitter.

For companies working in industries where customers and prospects are early adapters, such as marketing or technology, a Twitter presence should absolutely be considered in the mix.  For more traditional industries, where customers and prospects are unlikely to have migrated to Twitter, a company presence would be fairly moot.

ClickZ Online Marketing Summit
June 2, 2009 Minneapolis, MN

Coming soon is the Online Marketing Summit Summer Tour, hosted by ClickZ.  Online marketers, from novices to seasoned veterans, will gather to network and sharpen their marketing abilities.   Each attendee will walk away having learned cutting-edge, hands-on skills related to everything from social media to paid search.

On June 2nd, Online Marketing Summit will be making its  stop in Minneapolis, MN.  On hand for two sessions, including a “super panel” to conclude the day, will be TopRank® Online Marketing CEO, Lee Odden.

During the session, Twitter and Advanced Blog Strategies, Odden will introduce attendees to the Social Media Road Map.  Encouraging businesses to identify audiences and business objectives related to any social media initiative, the Social Media Road Map strategically aligns marketing with long-term social strategies that work.