Digital Marketing, Media, PR Analysis And Insight – The Future Buzz

Recently, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine in the PR industry who was given a large client. She was telling me how she is guiding the client through their foray into social media. As she was talking, naturally I started to check out their company website, blog, Twitter presence, etc. And I had to stop her.

I like Jesse Stay (and am a reader of his blog) and wasn’t initially going to blog this. But thinking about it further, and as someone who works both on social media and SEO clients/projects, I felt a need to weigh in and not leave this conversation unchecked.

Ben Elowitz contributed an article to The Huffington Post with the unfortunate title: “Facebook’s Like Button: A Force Powerful Enough to Save Media from Google Search.” The entire premise that media needs to be “saved” from Google search is a line that has been trotted out for years. However it’s one that makes no sense. The article also glowing looks to Facebook’s like feature as somehow being a saving grace for newspapers. That is extremely wishful thinking.

Everyone is buzzing about social media marketing. You can’t turn your head without hearing about it at a conference. Marketing and PR professionals are either engaged today or thinking about how to engage tomorrow. Everyone is suddenly claiming expert status (by the way: you don’t need a social media expert, you just need a good marketer).

The social web and search results support each other and are inexorably linked. It goes beyond a mere passive connection, the two create an active, virtuous cycle growing more powerful daily. I mocked up a quick version of what I view the cycle as:

Just got back into Minneapolis from San Jose, so I wanted to share more of the coverage Jolina Pettice and I have been working on all week to bring tips, trends and presentations from Search Engine Strategies directly to you. Check out the following sessions to see what the buzz was all about at the highly anticipated 2009 event:

This is long, so I will start it with the Cliffs notes version per the request of a friend – but please take the time to read all my thoughts before commenting.

Summary:

• Cash for blog post companies potentially disrupt how search engines can properly attribute organic SEO.
• Search engines will find out about illegitimate cash-for-link disruptions and take corrective action.
• White-hat PR and web marketing initiatives may be called into question due to misinterpreting the intersection of marketing and search engines as more sponsored conversations occur alongside organic.
• Traditional linkbait campaigns may one day be worth less if search engines are forced to devalue links from bloggers (this is only speculation at this point).
• Bloggers and marketers engaging in outright cash-for-play are involved in risky behavior even with no-follow links due to halo effect of linking in viral promotions.
• Marketers/PR practitioners should not fear continuing to engage in honest, organic and ethical web marketing and PR that respects both users and search engines.

Links are the lifeblood of the web. Without links, your website or blog has zero trust in Google, no referral traffic and is for all intensive purposes invisible to anything other than direct traffic. Organic generation of links happens naturally over time naturally by creating quality content. But there are ways to speed up the process.

Many smart people have developed ultra-popular sites and created a continuous stream of fresh links not by gaming the system, but instead putting it to work to their advantage by attracting thousands of natural links from high quality, trusted sites and blogs.

Additionally, some of the strategies listed below are better than merely generating links for SEO purposes – they bring relevant traffic, they build a web brand, and they build trust and credibility amongst not just search engines, but people. I thought I would spend a little time pointing out several great linkbait and link generation strategies that work to the benefit of site owners on several levels.

image credit: jinaa

Search engine traffic is the lifeblood of many websites and blogs. If you’re not getting any of it, you’re missing out on highly targeted traffic and attention that is instead going to your competitors.

The common question people ask is: how do I get search engine traffic to my blog or to my website? There are tons of strategies for that, and at the end of this post in the related links sections I’ll point you to some great resources.

Instead of answering the obvious question (most people do know how to draw search engine traffic at this point), let’s go through the opposite so you’ll know what to avoid:

First up, full disclosure: Joffrey’s Coffee & Tea Company is a client of mine…

With that said – previously I wrote a case study on building buzz in the blogosphere regarding a viral campaign I implemented for Joffrey’s called “Joffrey’s Java Beta Test”. With the help of Wake Interactive for web design(they do fantastic work by the way, I cannot speak highly enough of them), we were able to make a lot of people happy and bring together a plethora of bloggers for something really fun.

Some highlights from the beta test were: