Last night’s MITX (Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange; www.mitx.org ) titled, The 2008 Digital State - Social Media: the Opportunities and Implications for Marketers, was packed. This is not surprising given the incredible buzz that surrounds “social media”. The speaking panel included:

• Tom Arrix, Vice President of Sales, East, Facebook; www.facebook.com
• Pauline Ores, Senior Marketing Manager, Community & Collaboration, Global SMB Marketing, IBM Corporation; www.ibm.com
• Juan Fernando Santos, Chief Creative Officer, StudioCom;
• Suzanne Skop, Director of Sales, MySpace;
• Jeffrey C. Taylor, Chief Executive Officer, Eons

I enjoyed the panel and it was great to hear the enthusiasm although some of it should be taken with a grain of salt. It is always great to hear people passionate about what they do and what they sell, but that is one of the tenets of a good sales person. It they told you the challenges and the road blocks they faced, you might not be quite as impressed.

The most poignant question was brought up by the moderator, Larry Webber (W2 Group Inc., www.w2groupinc.com ), “What is the new ad model for these social networks?” I did not hear a straight answer. There were statistics on how many people are joining up, that they are connecting and creating content, and how display is the “old” model. There was, however, no real discussion of how to use these new contributors as effective marketing tools. So the question remains, what is the ad model for these networks? How marketers are are going to purchase and assess effectiveness of this new consortium of content contributors is the question we all want to know…

Labels: eons, facebook, ibm, larry webber, mitx, myspace, social media, studiocom

I was in my accountant's office the other day and as we were wrapping up our meeting, he started asking questions about SEO. Apparently his site had suddenly dropped into oblivion for no apparent reason. After further investigation, I quickly found that there were about 2000 keywords hidden at the bottom of each page and that he had 5-6 domains all mirroring the same content. Over the next week we were able to get the spam cleaned up and submitted a reconsideration request to Google. In less than a week, he back up in the top three for his core keywords.

I don't think that this is a rare situation for small business owners as it there is a lot of information flowing around in forums and from eager web designers looking for quick and easy ways to confirm that "Yes, they do build optimized websites". Now in this case, my accountant had read a couple of forums and this seemed like a fine idea; Search engines look for keywords, so if there are keywords at the bottom of my page, it should help my search rankings.

I think that very often it is not understanding the big picture of SEO that can be a problem. No one technique or approach to SEO will yield long-term consistent results. When your SEO strategy is based on one single technique, you leave yourself vulnerable, at best to constant fluctuations, and at worst to penalties and even blacklisting.

When planning your SEO strategy, understand all factors that search engines look at and address many of them. Like a financial portfolio, this will hedge against short term fluctuations and will yield strong, consistent results over the long term.

Labels: reconsideration request, search engine optimization, SEO