A perk I enjoy most from blogging and working in this industry is getting to meet and know smart marketers. Smart + funny just takes it to another level and you can count on Ann for plenty of both. Along with the accomplishments, contributions, influence and energy she brings to our industry, Ann is genuine and grounded, plus she’s not afraid to “tell it like it is”. I appreciate those qualities a great deal.

Read on to learn more about Ann plus her tips for marketers, brands, publishers and of course what’s hot in the future of online marketing:

Besides being the goddess of marketing and diva book author, where do you spend your time?

I spend most of my time right where I am right now: Online. In this case, I’m talking to you. But I spend a lot of time writing, connecting, emailing, creating online content, on Twitter and other social channels, and exploring new platforms, also known as “indulging my ADOS” (Attention Deficit… Ooh! Shiny!).

My latest shiny object is Instagram. I’m using it personally, but I’m always thinking about how brands can use it and other publishing tools. That kind of thing is endlessly interesting to me.

When I’m not right here, in front of the computer, I’m hanging out with my family—and trying to maintain eye contact with them even though I’m dying to check my iPhone (I keed!). At the risk of sounding like an eHarmony ad, I like walking my dogs, reading books with compelling characters, and taking walks on the beach.

What would you like to be doing in 2 years?

I have the best job in the world, so it’s hard for me to imagine doing anything different. Is “more of the same” a goal? : )

I’ve had such an amazing year: Our book is a best-seller, MarketingProfs continues to grow in interesting ways, and I feel lucky to be where I am. So I’d be thrilled to have this same level of energy for my work life in two years.

Besides smarts, writing skills and a sense of humor, what are the qualities great content marketers should have?

I love this question. And I love that you included a “sense of humor,” because I do think having a sense of humor and fun is critical. I’ve been talking for a long time about what to look for in a content hire, both 11 years ago and 11 (ish) days ago!  But I think the most important qualities include training as a journalist, writer, or similar, as well as business acumen, social DNA, and an amateur’s passion. Especially that last one: Is the person you want to hire already creating content just for the love of it, and not just because they get paid to do it? Have you heard them utter phrases like, “I am soooo blogging that…!”

Marketing has changed so much since 2000. What advice do you have for marketers to stay current and relevant?

It really has. But, at the same time, the fundamentals remain. What’s new is that we have new ways of communicating with customers or prospects… and them with us. That’s created all kinds of opportunities and helped marketing evolve in interesting ways.

The easiest way to stay current and relevant is to read MarketingProfs. I know that sounds like a pitch, but I’m quite sincere: We see our mission as educating marketers on what matters. We are constantly surveying the marketing landscape and bringing our readers information and know-how on the stuff they need to know, and not just the stuff that’s cool. In other words, we pay attention to all of it so you don’t have to… Isn’t that a relief?

Of course, there are other great sources of more in-depth and specific learning—including TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog ; )

As a publisher, what insights can you share for companies that want to shift toward “brand as publisher” content marketing in terms of strategy and organizational change? Or should they?

Brands really don’t have a choice. If they have a website, they are publishers. So the first thing is, Embrace it!

Then consider what Content can do for your business by answering that Why question: Why are we going to create what we want to create? What are our goals? What do we hope to accomplish?

That sounds obvious, right? But I’ve been speaking all around the country this past winter and early spring, and this is a critical, fundamental step that most companies completely miss. They start a blog because the CEO always wanted to be a writer, or they launch a Twitter stream because their competitors are there. And they have no sense of the strategy behind the tactics. They haven’t answered that Why question.

Organizationally, companies have to deputize a content person. Content won’t just happen unless someone owns it; unless someone is responsible for it; unless someone’s job is to create it, optimize it, share it—to make sure Content Happens.

So do what makes sense for your organization: Hire an editor, a chief content officer, an editor-in-chief, a chief blogging officer, a brand journalist, or whatever. But make sure someone has some power and authority, and the necessary smarts, to get things done.

Let’s say a new business owner asks you for startup marketing advice – a B2B technology company. What are the essential marketing steps they should consider?

Wow—big question! How much time do we have….? ; )

My short answer: Know who you are; know who you are targeting, or who you want to reach along the buying cycle (and how you are going to stand out in their mind through compelling content); and figure out how you are going to measure what works so you can rinse, repeat.

That’s at the strategic level. Then, you have to create your company’s story, and learn how to tell your story well. You then have to pick your tools and create great content, of course—especially with an eye toward search and social media, to reach your intended audience.

And since we are talking B2B, I’ll throw in one more bit of advice: Don’t forget to humanize your marketing and creating your content in an actual accessible, human voice. Even in B2B marketing, you are still talking to humans. So why is it that so many B2B companies talk like robots? I suppose they think it makes them sound more official and trustworthy if they toss around jargon, buzzwords and other Frankenspeak. But it doesn’t: It makes them sound like tools.

With MarketingProfs, how do you stay fresh with content ideas and topics?

We read TopRank’s Blog and other top-shelf publications. [From Lee: Now that's a compliment, thank you!] We see what resonates on Twitter and in other social channels. We listen to what people are talking about, what our members ask us for, especially when we ask them to identify their biggest marketing challenges. I also do a lot of “social prospecting”: I find a lot of MarketingProfs contributors or uncover hot topics by trolling social channels like SlideShare, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook.

At TopRank we’re big proponents of search, social and content marketing but so many companies operate these functions in silos. How do you think marketers can improve their ability to work across channels and departments and get support for a coordinated strategy?

To me, Content is the key. You can’t have an effective Search and Social strategy without first having a sound Content strategy. (Or at least, your search and social won’t be working as well as they could for you.) Content is the glue that knits everything together. Wait. I just totally mixed that metaphor. But you get the point. : )

Eric Schmidt of Google has been quoted saying every 2 days there’s as much information created as since the dawn of civilization to 2003. How do you deal with information overload both personally and in your own marketing?

That’s why the quality of your content is so critical. That’s where your story becomes so important. As Eric points out, all of us are flooded with Content on a regular basis. So the stuff that cuts through is the stuff that’s truly great! Companies that simply repost their press releases on their blogs and then wonder why they don’t get any comments aren’t the ones that are going to succeed.

A lot of time when I refer to content that “cuts through,” companies think I mean “viral.” I don’t.

Instead, I mean content that (as Len Stein says) is “packed with utility, seeded with inspiration, and is honestly empathetic.” Content that meets the needs of your customers in whatever way resonates best with them: that is, it makes them smarter, better educated, wittier, taller, and with better backhands and smarter kids! In other words: How can you help your customers and prospects with your content?

Retargeting, QR codes, social business, curation and gamification are some of the buzzing topics right now. What’s hot on your mind this year? Next?

Storytelling has emerged as a hot topic for marketers. Which makes sense, right? If you are creating content, it helps to get your story straight. ; )

Also: Mobile generally (and QR codes, gaming, social-location platforms like Foursquare).

As I said above, I like the bright and shiny new stuff, and I love to see what’s hot and new and fun.

But to tell you the truth, I think we have so many tremendous tools right now that are being sadly underused, or used in weirdly ineffective ways. I think most marketers feel overwhelmed. There are so many companies still trying to figure out the fundamentals of blogging or other social tools… and at the same time there are companies adopting other bright and shiny objects with no notion of the best way to actually use them.

Here’s an example: The other night we had takeout pizza. There was a QR code on the box that, when I scanned it with my iPhone, opened a Web page that gave me “the opportunity” to join the pizza company’s email list.

There are two problems with that: First, the page gave me no indication of why I should turn over my personal information, other than to vaguely refer to “specials.” Really? What’s in it for me?

The second problem was this: The page had about 10 fields (including my email, full name and address, etc.) Have you ever tried to fill out a form like that on an iPhone? So even if I wanted to give them my information—which I didn’t, by the way—they made it pretty difficult for me. Why make your customer work that hard?

That kind of marketing is pretty close to insane, isn’t it? Yet I see that and similar things all the time.

We’ve reviewed your excellent book with C.C., Content Rules, but what’s your most compelling reason people should buy and read it?

The naked pictures inside.

I’m kidding, of course.

(Or am I…?)

What resources do you rely on to stay current, informed and edu-tained?

I probably read all the same marketing and social media pubs you do. Also, as I said, I get a lot of information from social sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn (especially LinkedIn Answers) and poking around SlideShare when I have the time.

At the same time, I’m a big fan of feeding my brain in other ways: I’m a fan of autobiographies and memoirs (currently reading Tina Fey’s Bossypants) because I’m inherently nosy about other people. It’s interesting to me to see the way life shapes people. I read a lot of fiction of all sorts.

I love The New Yorker (although it’s a constant source of guilt, because I rarely have the luxury of getting through an entire issue).

And I love smart humor: My latest “edu-tainment” online discovery is DearBlankPleaseBlank.com, for reasons like this:

Dear world,
I dream of a day where we can cross roads without having our motives questioned.
Sincerely, chickens.

Actually, I take that back. It’s pure hilarity. There’s nothing remotely educational about it.

Excellent, thank you Ann!

You can find more from Ann by following her on Twitter (@marketingprofs) as well as at MarketingProfs and her book site, Content Rules.

So now that I’ve had my chance to interview Ann, how would YOU like to ask her a question?  Better yet, how would you like a chance to win a signed copy of Content Rules?

Just post your question for Ann below and the best question (picked by TopRank Online Marketing staff) will be selected by Thursday afternoon and answered on Friday along with credit and a link to the winners blog or Twitter account.  So put your thinking cap on and get creative with a question for Ann Handley!

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. |
Wicked Smart Interview with Ann Handley of MarketingProfs | http://www.toprankblog.com

Wicked Smart Interview with Ann Handley of MarketingProfs is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

In this interview, Brent shares his experiences with how optimizing news content for search engines works as well as the challenges and results from training journalists on how to use keywords to improve traffic to news content.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you work with a media company or online publisher, do you train writers, reporters, editors and journalists on how to optimize content with keywords? Have you tried and had great results? Have you tried and met strong resistance?

Check out Brent’s Blog here.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
Brent D. Payne on SEO for Journalists | http://www.toprankblog.com

Brent D. Payne on SEO for Journalists is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

In this video interview, Avinash talks about the value of communicating analytics information in more meaningful ways. He gives examples of metaphors he’s used to present important analytics information that helps others better understand the meaning and implications of the data. There are lessons here for companies that report tabular data with no insight and little creativity in communicating insight.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What creative ways have you found to communicate web analytics insights? Have you had nightmare experiences with web analytics reports?

Check out Avinash’s “must-read” web analytics blog, Occam’s Razor, here.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
Avinash Kaushik on Storytelling & Web Analytics | http://www.toprankblog.com

Avinash Kaushik on Storytelling & Web Analytics is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

Spotlight on Search Interview: Mel Carson of Microsoft Advertising on How Microsoft Does Social Media and the Yahoo Bing Search Alliance

If you attend Search Marketing industry conferences, you’ve no doubt run into the ever optimistic and charming Mel Carson from Microsoft.  When I was last in London, Mel connected me with an excellent Fish n Chips that the pubs around Trafalgar Square couldn’t get close to.  Mel is active as an advocate of Microsoft Advertising , especially via social media channels and at conferences to the Webmaster and search marketing community. His work is global and very interesting. With the Bing and Yahoo convergence, I thought it was time we did an interview – and he agreed.

Mel has accomplished amazing things with Microsoft’s use of social media and other large companies could learn a lot from this interview where he talks about Microsoft’s use of social media and what impact the Yahoo Bing Search Alliance will have on search and search advertising.

Welcome Mel, it’s exciting times as usual in the search engine world. Please tell us, what has changed about your job at Microsoft since you were last here?

My role at Microsoft Advertising evolved about 18 months ago as a result of the work our team had been doing in social media for adCenter. We had been building up an engaged audience on the adCenter Blog and forums for 3 years and started the adCenter Twitter account and Facebook page.  Our engagement with our customers was such a success, it made sense for someone to start using social to tell marketers about all our other digital assets. So I started the Microsoft Advertising Blog which brings our readers news and insight in what we’re up to in display, mobile, games advertising and research.

I also head up our events calendar. Last year we covered nearly 40 digital conferences all over the world, and it’s my job to ensure we have people trained to blog and tweet from @MSAdvertising at those events and really bring them alive.

Sometimes we go the full monty and come armed with a film crew and interview folks. Perhaps my highlight was Twitter founder Biz Stone at Cannes 2009 , but this year was awesome as we got backstage access to the TED@Cannes conference we’d partnered with them and the Starcom Mediavest Group on.

We featured Microsoft Advertising in a post about B2B Social Media Winners, earlier this year and I’m wondering if you can share how your group developed their approach to the social web?

In February this year we published a white paper (pdf) which outlined our story and approach. We’ve been listening to our customers since the start of 2006, way before Twitter and Facebook hit the mainstream. We got involved because it made perfect sense to use the web to communicate in a two-way dialogue with adCenter customers who were expecting best practices, tips, tricks and news to be at their fingertips.

We started slowly with a blog and forum, and built the strategy through common sense and by reacting swiftly to the needs of our advertisers. Social media isn’t the proverbial “rocket science”. It’s an awesome extension of traditional marketing and research methods which enable you to glean feedback in real-time, and help people in ways that never existed before.

What guides your social media strategy and participation?

Microsoft Advertising is an intensely customer-centric organization. It’s our advertisers, and potential advertisers, that guide us through where they go for news and information and what they tell us they need in order to be better marketers.

By investing in a team to monitor and engage with our paying customers, we hope we’re demonstrating that we’re open to feedback, want to build the best products and services we can, and are excited to provide insight through research and case studies that resonate with marketers all around the world.

What are your social media goals and how do you measure them? Or is it more accurate to say, what are your business goals that involve social media and how do you measure them?

Bit of both really. We look at growth as an indicator. Be it number of followers or fans, visitors to the site, number of answers to forum questions by other forum members, links from other blogs and news sites. The more reach we have, the more people we can tell our story to and let folks know we’re here and willing to help.

The other big ROI metric is how far we help lower support costs. It’s not cheap to have a call center, so if we can answer questions online through a carefully crafted blog post or tweeted link to the best information, we’re not incurring costs and we’re reaching more people with that information. A happy and informed advertiser is likely to spend more, so the two together increase the bottom line.

Return on In-action is another. What would people think if we weren’t operating in the social space? What would be the business implications of not having an early warning system in place?

How do you structure and manage listening and engagement?

We cover about 16 hours a day as I’m based in London and we have a team in Seattle. I’ll look after things from 9am GMT until about 6pm when it’s 10am PST and the US team takes over. We have various alerts set up on Twitter clients and monitoring tools and pretty much know within minutes if we have a problem or someone needs help.

We have rules of engagement which are pretty straightforward. We ask for actionable insight if an advertiser has an issue and have escalation paths internally to get things fixed.

Again, it’s common sense. You need a plan, you need outcomes and you need a team that can be flexible and personable.

A virtual smile goes a long way in this industry!

What listening or social media management tools do you recommend?

We recommend using lots. We trial, test and use a number of platforms, widgets and gizmos that all do different things with varying degrees of accuracy and success. The important thing is to find tools that are enablers and build a picture from the data they expose.

What challenges have you had gaining buy-in to social media projects and how did you overcome them?

To be honest, we’ve not had too much difficulty getting buy-in because we’ve always kept a step ahead by demonstrating the value of what we’re doing. I think many businesses dive into social media marketing with no plan around measurements of success.

Because we set out with the commitment to measure everything and tell compelling stories as we went, the business knows and relies on our data and successes now to be successful in itself.

Microsoft was called out recently as being one of the most, if not THE most social brands out there.  We get it and will continue to invest because it works well for us.

What is one great example of a social media success that like to share the most? It can be Microsoft or anyone else.

My favorite story that I’ve used in countless presentations is about how my old headmaster, who is a Benedictine monk, called me up many years ago to advise him on a search campaign to promote his website through which he wanted to recruit monks.

We set it up and 3 years later he actually did sign up one chap who found his site while searching for inspiration on the web. You can read the full story here.

Just goes to show how search and social are intertwined.

A story more close to home is obviously the Windows 7 Launch where Marty Collins and her team managed to garner 221 million impression of earned media running up to and post launch of the biggest selling piece of software ever. Check out the case study here.

If you were to give advice to a friend starting a small business on how they should get involved with social media, what would that checklist look like? What would the essentials be?

Figure out some goals and work back. Don’t think “social media” as in the tools. Think “social media marketing” as in the discipline. Research your market, find out who’s using what platform and build your value exchange around it. Make sure there are social elements in all your marketing endeavors. Have everything built for discovery and sharing. Measure as much as you can and use the data to inform decisions in other part of the business.

Oh….and don’t ever stop. Getting off the social train is not an option now it’s gathered so much pace under so much steam.

Enough of this social media, let’s talk about Microsoft and Yahoo. I know there’s the Search Alliance website and this clever little video, but can you sum up a few things for our readers who might not read Search Marketing publications?  Without any corporatePRspeak, what does the integration of Microsoft and Yahoo search mean to marketers?

It’s all on the www.searchalliance.com website. More volume with less effort. Now you’re optimizing for two marketplaces instead of three so you should see a return on time investment. More volume means we can make quicker decisions on which innovations will work best for marketers in the future.

What will it mean to consumers?

Having scale will mean speedier innovating of search results, which means those decisions consumers are looking to make get made quicker. More satisfied customers means a more loyal fan base, and as a result, we could increase share making our advertisers happy too!

What innovations in search technology (from a user perspective) are you excited about?

Bing Maps without a doubt – check out this Ted Talk with Blaise on some of the incredible innovation going on in his team.

How important is social media to the future of traditional search?

What’s traditional search these days? Ten blue links? It’s all moving so quickly but there’s no doubt that social media marketing is having an effect on search results. When you have algos associated with consumers liking content – YouTube, Facebook and others – when they’re added into the traditional mix, it makes for interesting times with optimization.

If you just take a look at what Bing has released lately in terms of social it’s obvious we feel it’ll be an integral part of how we all interact and make decisions going forward.

How do you stay current with search and social media and all the marketing, technology and communication channels that follow?

I subscribe to loads of newsletters, watch my Twitter feed and travel to many conferences around the world. We have a great ecosystem of learning and notifying here at Microsoft as well, so I pick up a lot of knowledge here internally.

Thanks Mel!

Post Script: Both Mel and I will be speaking at a new Search Engine Strategies conference being held in Hong Kong next week. Mel will be on a keynote panel, “Keynote Panel: Increasing ROI through B2B Lead Generation” and I will be on a panel about “The Business Value of Social Media”.  Here’s a video on this new event from Matt McGowan and Mike Grehan of Incisive Media.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
Interview: Mel Carson of Microsoft Advertising on Social Media | http://www.toprankblog.com

Interview: Mel Carson of Microsoft Advertising on Social Media is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

I caught up with Chris to talk about his take on SEO and social media.  He had pretty strong opinions about people who are too aggressive and not always relevant in the social connections they’re making.  This is what he had to say:

You can find Chris online by Googling “chris“. How’s that for the effect of links on search engine visibility?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
Chris Pirillo on SEO & Social Media @ OpenCa.mp | http://www.toprankblog.com

Chris Pirillo on SEO & Social Media @ OpenCa.mp is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

Click here to view the embedded video.

Of course, we couldn’t talk to someone like Dave at Yahoo without mentioning the transition of search results to Bing over on the Yahoo site. What does this mean for SEO? What does it mean for Paid Search?  What’s the fate of Site Explorer and where does it fit within Bing Webmaster Tools? Is SEO good or bad for search engines? How much of a signal does social media provide search engines? We discuss these topics and more.

Thanks Dave!

Blog: Industrial Strength SEM
Twitter: DaveRothSays

The video is available in 480 and 780 formats as well, just click on the size drop down.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
Video Interview: Dave Roth of Yahoo | http://www.toprankblog.com

Video Interview: Dave Roth of Yahoo is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

The search engine marketing industry changes often, so it’s pretty interesting to see some of the predictions made in some of those older interviews. Below are 10 more recent SEO interviews from client side practitioners or search engine employees that you can get a lot of value from in terms of understanding how facilitating SEO works in organizations, SEO and social media, resources, tools and specific SEO tips.

Vanessa Fox – Ex Googler, now at Nine by Blue on Marketing in the Age of Google

Matt Evans of Monster.com on Agency vs. In-House SEO

Michael Nguyen of Shopzilla & Bizrate.com on Huge Ecommerce Website SEO

Scott Skurnick of Edmunds.com on Enterprise SEO

Dan Perry, SEO Director at Turner Broadcasting on Big Brand Publisher SEO

Tim Ash of SiteTuners on Landing Page Optimization

Alex Bennert, Chief Search Strategist at The Wall Street Journal on Very Large Website & Publisher SEO

Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google on Google Webmaster Central

Laura Lippay – Recently left Yahoo for Nine by Blue on SEO at a Search Engine

Todd Malicoat – Consultant and Faculty at Market Motive on the Search Marketing Industry

Other interviews worth mentioning, albeit a bit older, include: Danny Sullivan, Tim Mayer, Mike Grehan, Matt Cutts, Andy Beal, Melanie Mitchell, Adam Lasnik, Jill Whalen, Eric Ward, Heather Lloyd-Martin, Andy Atkins-Kruger, Adam Audette, Neil Patel.

Be sure to watch TopRank’s YouTube channel for video interviews with search and internet marketers that we’ll capture during the SES San Francisco conference this week.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
10 Essential SEO Interviews | http://www.toprankblog.com

10 Essential SEO Interviews is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

Photo credit hayzlett.com

Jeffrey Hayzlett is the former CMO at Kodak and author of “The Mirror Test: Is Your Business Really Breathing?”. You might have seen him on Celebrity Apprentice with Donald Trump or speaking at a variety of industry conferences. He hails from South Dakota and considers himself a cowboy. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any photos of him online with a cowboy hat.

I connected with Jeff yesterday morning to talk about his success with social media, corporate change, Kodak, ROI and his upcoming keynote presentation at SES San Francisco.

Jeff, it was great to finally “meet you” on the Beancast recently and thank you for inspiring the idea behind a pretty popular blog post “Why Do So Many Companies Suck at Social Media” which has had well over 1,100 retweets and multiples of that in page views.

Why do you think companies are having a hard time with social media?

I think most companies just don’t understand it. There are some fundamental conflicts that they have. The biggest piece about social media is listening. That’s it. It’s listening to customers. A lot of companies just don’t get it.

Companies have outsourced everything. They’re outsourcing their contacts with their customers, which quite frankly, I don’t get. My own company that I worked for had done the same thing. I didn’t appreciate that, didn’t like that and didn’t like the way in which we did it. Those decisions weren’t necessarily mine, but I tried to impact those decisions.

I think a lot of companies really suck at this social media stuff because they don’t get the listening part. They’re afraid. Therefore, when they become afraid, they’re a little worried about giving up control. That’s what they think they’re doing with social media.

The thing is, they never had control to begin with. The customers always had control. That’s the way it’s always been. As these companies start to enter into this, they’re just not very good at listening and you have to get good at listening first.

It’s a mind shift isn’t it?

It is a mind shift. Either you’ve “got it or you don’t”. Eventually I think they can get it. I think one third of the companies will get it right away, about one third will eventually get it and about one third will never get it.

It sounds similar to leadership. Some people have it, some people can learn it and some people never will.

I think confidence is another word to use. Are you confident in what you do and how you do it?.

Photo credit: hayzlett.com

You’ve been called a Celebrity CMO by Forbes Magazine and I think it’s fair to say you’re a great example of a senior marketing leader that “walks the talk” when it comes to social media: personally, what you’ve done at Kodak and in promoting your book, “The Mirror Test”. What advice do you have for other business and marketing leaders who are deciding their own level of engagement on the social web?

I think the most important thing is just to be genuine, be real. Social media is a very transparent thing, so you can’t fake it. I am who I am and I don’t try to be anything else. I don’t try to change my tweets or do things diferently than what you see on Facebook. It’s me, it’s who I am.

Yesterday I was talking to some folks from Kareem Abdul Jabbar about an upcoming project and I said, how cool is this? My job: I’m talking to Kareem Abdul Jabbar! I grew up watching this guy and the Lakers.

I think about things like that and who I am. I think most people who are in this game, who are really good, besides the “celebrity” portion of it, a lot of folks are and that helps them to gain notoriety. But the guys who are really good at it are the people who share, who are open and genuine. You get a good sense of who they are and I think that’s very helpful. That’s who I am.

My team members will tell you, you’ll never have to second guess me when it comes to something, because I’m going to tell you exactly what I’m thinking whether it’s right or wrong. Sometimes I even say things that are incorrect, politically or just downright wrong, because I don’t know what I don’t know. But I’m also willing to say, “I don’t know. Or wow, let’s go back and change that.”

How much of a change agent do large corporate marketers need to be in order to get their companies to see the value of social web participation?

Regardless of the social web, I think marketing’s job, and the head of marketing more than anybody, is to cause tension in the organization. My former CEO said that was my main job. When he explained that to me, it made a lot of sense and I’ve really taken up that mantra. That was my job at Kodak and it led me to be the big change agent in the company, which is what I was hired to do.

Everybody else had to be change agents as well. A big part of what I was supposed to do was cause that change and tension. I think for leaders reading this, you’re job is not unlike that of a marketer, to put a little tension in between organizations, between old ideas and new ideas. Because from that tension you get a lot of good things.

There’s an old saying in sports, “No pain, no gain.” I think the same thing holds true here in business. You don’t want the pain, but you want the tension. That’s what brings about better decisions and better actions.

The blogging done by Kodak with Jenny Cisney and team has been cited as a best practice by numerous publications, bloggers and as an example at conferences. Do you think most companies should blog?

Yes, absolutely. I think they should blog. The key thing is, “who” should blog? We named the very first Chief Blogger ever. We also named the first Chief Listener as part of our social media team.

A lot of people thought I had a lot of input into the blog, what we did, how we said it and direction, but I didn’t. I setup a Blog Communications Council. My head of communications headed it up as the publisher, pretty much like a newspaper model. Jenny as chief blogger became the chief editor and she coordinated all the other bloggers that worked for her kind of like reporters.

That’s the only structure I wanted to see happen around it, plus the mood and theme. Outside of that, I never saw a blog post until after it was published. I allowed my teams to go with the way they wanted to go, except for a few times when linking out to something risque. We still referenced it, but took the link down. We did things like that to respect the values of our employees.

A lot of companies make big mistakes and say, “I think the CEO is the one that should blog for us”. I think that’s the last person I’d want to talk to mostly in the company, because they’re usually not that exciting.

You want to think about who you want to have blogging and they way you want to do it. In fact, Kodak has a great social media policy book that’s out on how to get into all this. It’s free on their website at: Kodak Social Media Tips (pdf).

How do you define success with social activities like blogging?

You can talk about how many people refer back, visitors and so on. I’m not so interested in the eyeballs and ears. I’m more concerned about participating with hearts and minds. So building out a community that really likes you.

You can syndicate out blog content and drive more attention because ultimately you want more people to take a look at you and get a sense of who you are.

We wanted to be uplifting and helpful to our customers with hints, tips and things like that. Reflect our culture and the mood of our company and also represent our product very well. We also wanted to blog for our employees which is a big part of our community. I think employees look at your blog as much as anybody else.

There’s a lot of companies looking at social activities, blogging included. They’re considering measures of success and it makes sense, you had a goal of better engaging with customers, telling your story and connecting with employees. Obviously metrics would follow along those goals.

I think blogs should be an extension of you, not necessarily the official mouthpiece. I think blogs should reflect your personality more than the corporate position on this or that. People will appreciate that more.

The acronym ROI means something different for you (Return on Ignore) can you elaborate on that? How do you answer the Return on Investment question with large company social media efforts?

There are three types of Return on Investment I’m measuring all the time:

• Increase in sales
• Increase in margin
• Increase in customer satisfaction

Those are the three most important ROI things I’ve got to deliver and concentrate on the most. The rest of it’s just keeping track of stuff.

I said the “Return on Ignore” statement in a way to cause tension, which is what I’m known for. We spend so much time trying to measure the things we’re doing rather than the real things which is about listening to our customers.

I can’t say enough how important it is to listen to your customers because its about capturing customer behaviors that drives your sales, margins and satisfaction.

Those are the things that are the most important. How about paying attention to your customers more and less about what percentage of the customers we’re reaching at any particular time and micromanaging down to the nit on every single email campaign or whatever. People spend a lot more time than they need to on trying to figure out ROI. They want to put a dollar amount on everything you do to measure it and you can’t do it. You’ll spend your entire career and never get it done.

Your book, the Mirror Test is doing well and has the endorsement of people like Donald Trump and Christie Hefner. Can you share more about the 3 tests you talk about in the book?

There are a lot of tests in the book , but the three main themes of tests are:

Look in the mirror – Are you breathing? Does the dog eat the dog food? Does the idea that you have warrant merit? Will it breathe? Will it fog the mirror? There’s that piece of it we have to ask ourselves because passion alone is not a substitute for good planning and proper steps in terms of marketing and having a great business idea.

Looking in the mirror at yourself - Do I have what it takes? Do my people have what it takes? Looking around the business itself and does it look like a winner. Because sometimes we get caught in a rut and you need to walk into HQ once in a while and change it up.

Bottome line: Am I making money? – This is the most important one. Because in the end, it’s about generating profit. Ultimately that’s what businesses are supposed to be doing so you can do everything else you want to do in your life whether it’s personally or invest back into the business.

My conditions for satisfaction and success are: Grow wealth for my family, grow professionally and have fun doing it.

It was time for me to leave at Kodak because I had done what I was supposed to do and completed it. Now it’s time for me to go on to the next chapter and do something else. I stayed at Kodak for 4 years and 1 month. That’s the longest I’ve ever stayed anywhere and a lot longer than most CMOs out there. It was time for me to move on. Those are my personal tests myself, that I must be able to live up to.

A lot of people have said, “Why would you leave Kodak?”. You’ve got corporate jets, you’ve got this you’ve got that, and it was a great kind of a gig. I’m so grateful and I love the company. It was time for Jeff Hayzlett to do something different.

“Adapt or die” is a strong theme of the book. Those words are easier said than implemented. What advice do you have for tradition-rich organizations to see the value of change?

I think that should be part of their mantra and part of their DNA. A company like Kodak forgot that it was an innovative company. It forgot that it had 25,000 patents in the world. It forgot that it was inventing things. It forgot it took materials science and imaging science and put them together and created unbelieveable products. It started thinking of itself only as a film company.

What that did is contain itself in a little yellow box. And it was much bigger than the yellow box. What they needed was some people from the outside to remind them, no you’re really about creating the box, creating new boxes and creating things that go inside the box. That’s what you’re about.

You create emotional technology that helps people to make, manage and move images and information. That’s what you do. You’re not a film company, not a camera company and not commercial printing company. You’re an innovative company that creates emotional technology.

So, now what does that open up for you? It opens your horizons to a whole different way of thinking.

You’ll be keynoting at SES San Francisco in a few weeks. Can you give us a little preview of what you’ll be talking about?

Well, it’s going to be exciting, first of all! There’s no telling what I’m going to be talking about at this particular event because I’m always different everywhere I go.

I will be talking about transformation and change and how search engine optimization and search engine strategies fit in to that. And how you’ve got to be thinking about that as you put together everything you do.

I don’t think it’s always at the forefront of everyone’s thoughts. For marketers, for the most part it’s an afterthought, not a forethought. So imagine redesigning your sites in different ways to make sure your optimization and being searchable is better as you put things together.

So it’s going to be talking about strategy. It’s about the use of strategy and how you come up with products and services and offer them up on the web to get you noticed more. That’s going to be key, especially as we move more into video. Beyond that, is, what is this industry going to be doing around mobile?

Lee: We’re really looking forward to it.

It’s going to be a blast, it’s a great crowd, a great conference. It’s one that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time and they finally got around to calling me

At SES I’m moderating a panel called “Selling Search Marketing to the C-Suite”. Can you share a tip that I might include in the presentation that helps internal marketers do a better job of communicating the value of search marketing to business leaders?

Two things. One, I write about this in my book The Mirror Test, ways how to reach C-Level executives. I always find it interesting, people say, “I’d really like to meet with you” and so I say, “OK, so call me”.

I will tell you that the higher you get up in the organization, the lonelier it is. Even though you’re busy busy busy. Before 8 and after 5, I answer my own phones and it’s amazing who calls and who doesn’t call. And that there are people who want to reach you, but never reach out to you.

The biggest thing I’d tell you is what’s your elevator pitch? I redefine the elevator pitch in the book, The Mirror Test. It’s probably one of the biggest concepts that’s come out of the book, called the 118. And what I mean by that is 8 seconds is the average attention span of an adult. I know it to be true because I looked it up on the internet .

And then 110 seconds is the average elevator ride in New York City from the time you press the button, step on the elevator, ride up or ride down and get off. So that’s what you have to pitch me.

You have 8 seconds to hook me to get that lean-in factor, so that I want to pay attention to you. And then 110 seconds to close me.

In that 110 seconds, don’t tell me who you work with, because I could care less. Talk to me about the value you’re going to create for me, the pain points you’re going to solve. What is your unique selling proposition that stands out above everybody else. Otherwise, don’t talk to me, don’t waste my time.

I want to hear in 118 seconds or less, what you’re specifically going to do for my company. And don’t give me some generic crap that you would give to somebody else. I want you to do your homework. I want you to look at my company, find out about me and show me.

Imagine if you walked up to me and said, “I did a profile on your company and I can show you 3 ways that will add $X to your bottom line if you implement one tool. Would you be interested?”

Well, man if I head a pitch like that, it’s going to make me pay attention. It means you’ve done your homework, you’ve researched me. You’ve invested in me and gone out of your way to prepare a presentation that shows I’m not doing it as good as I could. And if I used you, I could gain. You gain, I gain. That’s a pretty good deal. I’ll guarantee you most people will not come up with that kind of approach.

Thanks Jeff!

You can see Jeff give a keynote presentation at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, August 17th at 9am. You can find out more about Jeff’s book The Mirror Test and his CEO Network on his website. You can also find him on Twitter.

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CMO Cowboy: Jeffrey Hayzlett on Social Media, ROI & SES San Francisco | http://www.toprankblog.com

CMO Cowboy: Jeffrey Hayzlett on Social Media, ROI & SES San Francisco is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

A longtime fan of the Dead, David co-wrote the book with HubSpot co-founder and fellow deadhead, Brian Halligan to share the brilliant innovations the Dead brought to the business of marketing music and building an incredibly passionate community of brand enthusiasts.

While we were both speaking at the Vocus User’s conference in Washington D.C. last month, David took a few minutes with me to do the following video interview on his new book:

Here’s a summary of the book and the lessons we can all learn about marketing, social media principles and thinking outside the “rules” of business as usual:

“The Grateful Dead broke almost every rule in the music industry book. They encouraged their fans to record shows and trade tapes; they built a mailing list and sold concert tickets directly to fans; and they built their business model on live concerts, not album sales. By cultivating a dedicated, active community, collaborating with their audience to co-create the Deadhead lifestyle, and giving away “freemium” content, the Dead pioneered many social media and inbound marketing concepts successfully used by businesses across all industries today.”

The book can be ordered on Amazon.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
Video: Marketing Lessons From the Grateful Dead | http://www.toprankblog.com

Video: Marketing Lessons From the Grateful Dead is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site

The format was a Q&A, and the following is a summary of the best questions and answers from the session.

How did you get to Google?

I studied computer science/artificial intelligence in college.  From that point on, I went into information retrieval and then joined the department of defense.  Then I took some time off, and eventually joined Google.  I’ve now been at Google for 5 years.

After a previous update, we heard a story of someone ranking #1 who lost positioning (and was previously making $10,000/month just from that one ranking).  The same thing again seems to be happening with the Mayday update.  What exactly is that it?

We tweak little things in our algorithm all the time.  Mayday was a significant update that really impacted long tail terms.  A lot of people were leveraging long tail phrases for lots of traffic but it was frequently done via automated methods.  We’ve looked to eliminate spam, and that’s been a big priority for us.  At the same time, there were people developing not quality content (not a violation of guidelines, but also not providing value).  What it does is for long tail queries, is we now just consider them queries like anything else.  We are going to put as much value in those search results as all search results.

So, you can’t just add a bunch of keywords on a page and expect results just on that.  This type of update is continuing and it’s a focus we have.  We have other projects too to help continue making long tail traffic highly relevant.

Are you saying with long tail terms, are queries getting longer?

Yes, people have evolved as searchers.  With Google when you search for over 3 terms, the snippet link increases in importance as people expect to find long queries and we want to deliver a better experience.

What’s the difference between Mayday and Caffeine?

Mayday is a pure ranking change – just looking to make the results more relevant.  Caffeine is a huge infrastructure change.  It’s the idea that we can now take our entire index and update it a document at a time.  It gives us the scalability we didn’t have before – now we have the ability to grow even bigger and better.  On top of which, caffeine is really cool because we can attach more meta data to each document.  We have all these ways to push a document out faster and get it to users quicker.

Can you talk about snippets for a second?  How do I decide what comes up in a snippet?

For most people, when you design a document you’re not thinking about what a snippet is going to look like in your document.  What we take for the snippet is the context of the keyword in the snippet.  The other place we look is in your meta description.  If you put your keyword in your meta description it’s a good idea as then you have control over your snippet.  The reason we used the meta description is it’s one of the few areas that people weren’t spamming.  We do want to give webmasters an option.

Is there a specific way people should think about creating a document?

Overall there is a strategy you need to have with your site.  What type of users do you want to attract, and what is your call to action?  And so your pages should be designed with that intention.  Think about your content and lay it out in a way that converts.  Titles are important for search engines and semantic markup is still good.  Mayday took out information that was auto-generated or not relevant.  Design each page with an intention of what you want from users.

So there’s a big shift in the SEO world.  Everyone was always focused on keywords/ranking algorithms.  Now everyone thinks about social.  Where does social fit within search?

There’s a way search is evolving, and when it comes to personalization we want to deliver results that are more and more unique.  That’s where social search comes in for us – it’s expanding a theme we really want to pursue.  For social search it comes from the social graph of the web layered on top of the link graph.  But prioritize by having a great website first, then get involved in social media.

What are your thoughts on getting better links to your website?

When you create a site, unique and compelling products or services content is what matters most.  How can you make yours different from all the other sites on the web?  Your customers will link to you when they think it’s great and that will happen naturally.  But, you can also look for opportunities for links too – not just by emailing a webmaster asking for links but expanding in the same way you’d expand your business.  I.E., forging partnerships and adding value to others.

Links are a big part of our PageRank algorithm which is a major component on the 100’s of items in it.  Links are not just based on quantity but more so on quality.  We know on a link by link basis what is valuable to what and we value them all differently.  It is done algorithmically and we also have a manual spam-fighting team.  Just because you have a lot of links doesn’t necessarily mean you are getting value.  Look for quality links not quantity.

Am I better off looking in webmaster tools for data than a third party tool?

Our mission with webmaster tools is to support webmasters within the Google ecosystem.  Our data is only relevant to Google, not all the search engines.  Our goal is to keep the ecosystem thriving.  It’s about helping webmasters regardless of the size of their pocketbook.  It’s at no cost to you.   There are other tools out there, which you should explore too if you like since our tool is just relevant to Google.

Why was site speed recently highlighted as important?

The site speed update was purely from our user metrics – we know people like faster performance.  We find that even when slowing results by half a second, they were actually searching less.  When we removed the delay, they went back up but never to the same level (this was actually a costly experiment).  This was just due to latency.  We also found in tests that conversions will increase with sites that load quicker – it’s a very important aspect of your website.  Faster sites can potentially outrank you.

Talk to us about Flash – is it really search friendly?

If you have a flash site, don’t expect Google to crawl it perfectly – or other search engines too.  It’s just not as accessible.  We’re working actively on Flash but it’s not perfect yet.

What about microsites?  Are they a good idea?

Microsites were originally created to dominate search results.  It was originally kind of a spammy technique.  I normally don’t suggest it, Mayday and future updates are only looking for quality sites.  If you want to dominate search results, you can do things like add videos/images and other data.  Microsites confuse users, there are links coming in to another site that isn’t your main site, and they are hard to maintain as now you have multiple sites.  It’s a jarring user experience; I don’t think they are going to work in search results in the future as they did in the past.

What about for e-commerce sites that are extremely large with lots of products?  We’ve seen sites with fewer items and more information on each product outranking us.

That’s what we would expect from Mayday.  Users don’t care if your site has many items, they care about descriptive content.  They don’t want to see content that is just a title and an image.  It comes down to creating unique content on each page.  We crawl what we want to keep in the index and we keep in the index what users want to see in the search results.  The drop off you are noticing is because we are focusing on content-rich pages and less on sites that are just tons of pages without value.  If you link content up and bring the link structure up, we’ll crawl that more often.  But at the end of the day, more content matters.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
Tell All Q&A With Google’s Maile Ohye – SES Toronto Keynote | http://www.toprankblog.com

Tell All Q&A With Google’s Maile Ohye – SES Toronto Keynote is a post from: How To Get Backlinks To Your Site