Melissa and Sue's Blog

Good Sunday Morning friends –

melandsue — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 16:35:14 +0000

The conference is over….I hopped a flight (Southwest – GREAT!) to Northern California to see my brother, kids and sister. I surprised my niece who turned 16 this week when I showed up at the Spaghetti Factory for her birthday dinner – the look on her face was priceless.

I never totally adjusted to the time difference so I’ve been up early ( and asleep early ) every night. (I swear to god that’s true.) I guess it won’t be so hard to re-adjust when I come home tomorrow.

The conference was really good….we got to interact and listen to the most prominent “thought-leaders” in the online marketing industry. These people are happy to share info and ideas. The fact that it’s vendor-less makes you feel like it’s safe to talk to anyone, b/c they’re not trying to sell you something.

The other thing that makes me feel good is as I look at the work our team is doing we are doing a lot of things right. Certainly there are things we wish we could take deeper dives into like SEO ( and maybe we can find a way to make that happen.) But, at no point did i sit there and say OH MY GOD, WHAT ARE THEY TALKING ABOUT?

It was good to be reminded that we need to stay on top of new technology/emerging trends, but don’t have to do EVERYTHING if it isn’t a means to achieve our business objective.

Thanks for checking us out….see you guys in a few days.

Almost forgot…a few really easy video production tips (for web)

melandsue — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 05:53:35 +0000

Plan your workflow
Determine your audience
Determine final format needs
Visual the final product first – think about the shots needed, music, vibe etc
Pay attention to sound! Bad picture quality can be ok – maybe even looks intentional, homegrown or Youtube-ish, but poor sound quality just looks like a mistake.
Keep videos on a homepage 2 minutes or less and quick product announcements should be 60 – 90 seconds max

So another OMS come and gone…

melandsue — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 05:44:44 +0000

I’ll be heading home early tomorrow morning so I’ll post these final, random thoughts from today…in no particular order of course.

1.) Who is Matt Cutts anyway? I think he’s a Google guy or a wicked smart SEO guru, but I need to find out.
2.) For our Culinary Blog on WordPress we need to look into using the Cross-Linker Plug in.
3.) I have heard sooo much this week about “Life Streams” so I did some research: In it’s simplest form it’s a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline. It’s only limited by the content and sources that you use to define it. To create one start by defining the services you want to use. Services offer the ability to track activities such as Delicious (bookmarking), Flickr (photos), or YouTube (videos). You may already have accounts on existing sites, or you’ll need to create new ones. Then determine how you want to create your Lifestream. Start with one of the many available services and once you get the hang of it, add one to your personal site or blog.
4.) Facebook is for people you used to know, Twitter is for people you’d like to know.
5.)MySpace pushes out 300M messages a day.
6.) Email marketing is like advertising in a store-front – if you like what you see then you’ll go inside.
7.) Ford Motor Co. had 90M Social Media impressions in 2008 – WOW!
8.) BUT, they had 13 BILLION impressions from display ads

What a day – my brain hurts!

melandsue — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 00:22:46 +0000

Oh my god – I don’t know if my brain can take any more. We’ve heard about so many things from email to social media to search engine optimization and I swear i heard the word TWITTER in every single session! In one session with 2 presenters who previously hadn’t known each other – they said the MET ON TWITTER!! I feel like we have to really keep our eye on this thing….it’s gonna be BIG! Here’s a few noteworthy things that I thought I’d share from today…

With regard to using online forums/posting reviews – everybodygets the idea that they can go online and pretend to be a consumer and promote their own brand anonymously. Online consumers can definitely tell the difference between authentic posts/opinions versus planting fake ( marketer’s) input.

It is anticipated that spending on online media will grow an average of 2% per year.

29% of US adults time is spent online

Organic search drives 75% to your website, 25% paid.

Search Engine Marketing ( paid search) ranks 3rd in generating online ROI – behind SEO ( organic) and email

Facebook is the 4th most trafficed (is that a word?) website in the world

Online users are “banner blind”

Page titles – make sure they are keyword focused without being SPAMMY!

Paragraph text on your website doesn’t get read at all!

Online content should be factored into the plan up front – not an 11th hour afterthought – what’s the Business Objective.

And finally….

Wait – one more thing….Writing for the web is VERY, VERY different than for print.

Recommended books:
Letting go of the words (by Ginny somebody)

Don’t make me think ( by Krugs?)

I’ll find them….

Thank God for z Packs!

melandsue — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 17:28:27 +0000

So it’s 9:15am and I just ran to the neighboring pharmacy for a Z Pack – yep, that’s right… I’m sick as a dog at this conference – getting everyone in my wake sick too… I have a nasty sinus infection (or at least that’s what I’ve told myself) so I’m hanging tough, but what bad timing.

We have an SEO lab in 15 minutes. It’s this awesome one on one session with an SEO expert. They set a timer and go thru one of your sites and tell you great tips and tricks to implement – you literally have to scribble down notes as fast as humanly possible because once your 15 minutes are up they all but kick you out of the chair!

Another great thing about this conference is that it’s vendorless and booing is encouraged! So, if a presenter starts pitching their product or service and trys to turn their time into a sales opportunity the audience is excouraged to boo! I love to boo!

It’s also great to know that I’ve made so many industry contacts that I see year after year here.

Our 10:30 session is “Avoiding the 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design” – Watch out landing pages – here we come!

We arrived to OMS!

melandsue — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 17:09:50 +0000

Melissa and I took seperate flights, but arrived within an hour of each other. We’ve checked into our hotel and hoping to ease thru the 3-hour time difference. The clock says it’s about 5:00 PM, but to us it’s night! Sessions start in the morning!

I was reading Groundswell on the plane which I got from JB, who got it from Melissa who wants it back! I highly recommend it to anyone striving to understand social media….it really breaks it down!

Cool Quotes of the Day

melandsue — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 01:27:10 +0000

“If no one clicks your title on a search then what good does it do to be #1?”

“Push your agency for a better deal.”

“There’s never been a better time to market than in a recession.” By Kellogg’s

“Conversion is a measurement of an action – not a satisfied customer.”

“Engage with customers on a friend level. Intimacy touches emotion and emotion powers conversation.”

“Content is STILL King.”

“If someone can’t find something on your website then essentially it doesn’t exist.”

Quick and interesting stats

melandsue — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 01:15:16 +0000

The Internet is 5000 days old – that sounds young?
There are 120M Blogs
There are 100B clicks per day
There are 2M emails sent per second – PER SECOND!
92% of buyers are online so why are online budgets only 10%???
36% of people think more positively about a company who blogs
32% trust bloggers opinions about products and services vs. only 14% of people who trust ads
Page titles should be 8-13 words but about a 150 character limit (Google will tell you 64)
20 – 25% of ALL Google searches end up at YouTube – WOW!
1B Internet Users
93% of Americans expect brands to have a Social Media presence
Obama has 1M friends on MySpace, 3M on Facebook, and about 137,000+ followers on Twitter

Gotta love it

melandsue — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 01:09:05 +0000

funny how this conference of Internet Marketers (over 500) started late and and within the first hour we were already running 45 minutes late! Ha! The sessions ran late all day… I love it!

Today’s Sessions

melandsue — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 01:02:40 +0000

All in all today was really great. I’m just fascinated with Catfish and what he knows about SEO. I recorded the audio for most of his session so more to come on that. I have to upload it, then I’ll share!