Marc Ohmann’s Blog

I just spent 45 minutes watching an interesting screencast from Salesforce.com called Marketing In the Google Era.  The presentation was actually fairly interesting.  No real new material but a well presented overview of good practices that all companies should be following.

The interesting thing is that it seems Salesforce.com doesn’t understand their own material.  I found out about the presentation through an email from Salesforce.  I clicked the link in the email to view the presentation and was presented with this screen.

Everyone knows about the most common search engines such as Yahoo, Google, AltaVista and Dogpile.  These are considered generalized search mechanisms.  They gather all kinds of content from the internet and reference said content using keywords.

But – there are literally thousands of search engines available to web users that specialize in topical content.  It would be impossible to list all of these search engines, especially as new ones are added on a daily basis, but let’s review a handful:

• Entertainment Searches.  You can use Media Channel to find Internet Television and Video sites.  Find that YouTube video you’ve always wanted to watch or the latest internet television schedules.

When meeting with clients who want to get started taking advantage of some of the latest new media communications formats, we are consistently asked the question, “How often should we publish a new post or podcast“.

Generally this depends on the audience, content and resources available.  But most importantly is should depend on content.  New media is not television or radio.  It can often work better to not create a strict schedule to try an follow but instead publish when quality content comes to you.

What is your formula for attracting the attention of your audience online? What if you target audience was technology professionals in the Internet space who tend to be male and under 40? Would you create hype by attempting to purchase Superbowl commercials for $2.5M a piece and having them rejected for their content. When your cleaned up version is finally accepted your unedited versions are spreading like wildfire across the Internet. $2.5M spent to run one ad results in countless commercial views online and brand impressions for years to come.

Yesterday I was in a meeting with a partner from a mid-sized insurance firm here locally.  We were discussing all the exciting aspects of Internet marketing, social media and most importantly public relations online.  Jeff Rabkin from Wowza was in the meeting also and was discussing his recent experiences with Mattress Giant.

For anyone who doesn't want to read the article.  The gist is that a Google search for Mattress Giant displays a negative review from epinions.com as the second organic result.

In our meeting the insurance company partner was amazed that negative results could show up and that Mattress Giant was trying to improve their image online. 

Over at Copyblogger there is a great article on Marketing With Tutorials .  I posted a couple of months ago on the importance of providing your visitors with alternate media types depending on their preferences.  We all know how accessible web video has become during 2006 and how everybody will have it in the palms of their hands in 2007.

Video Testimonials and Video Case Studies are a big part of our marketing plans for 2007.  We even canceled our 'Your Business 2.0' seminar series for next year and opted to webcast the presentations instead.

Yesterday on the SalesforceWatch.com Blog it was pointed out that the new Successforce.com site includes a very digg like voting system for content.  I believe this will be the first of many similar instances across large organizations in 2007 where social media concepts are integrated into the enterprise.  It's gonna be a fun year.  

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Since I will never have time to read all of Lee's 256 Must Read Blogs (which leaves me with 330 in my reader), I figured to put all this knowledge to best use all the sites should go into a custom search engine.

Creating the CSE would have only involved a quick Perl script on the OPML file but thanks to Feedburner, it's not that easy.  So anyhow incase anyone wants it, here is the file listing every site included .

Here is the link to the actual search engine page or you can make use of a search box like the one below.

Today I was cruising through Guy Kawasaki's Blog and found Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn. Besides doing an excellent job of writing an effective blog post and headline, Guy points out early in the post that:

"All 500 of the Fortune 500 are represented in LinkedIn. In fact, 499 of them are represented by director-level and above employees."

Now if you are in sales or just generally want to advance your career you can't ignore the potential that exists in finding out who you know that knows someone who can help you.

Stomping on the grave of Google Answers . There seems to be a lot of activity in the answer category by other Internet powerhouses and Web 2.0 shops.  Included in this is the new LinkedIn answers section.

Below is a screenshot from the new section.  As you can see from the first question there are a lot of great answers to be found  

Also jumping on the answer bandwagon is Amazon with Askville . 

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