What happens is, is that you show up at work and you sit down and you don’t just immediately begin working, like you have to roll into work. You have to sort of get into a zone, just like you don’t just go to sleep, like you lay down and you go to sleep. You go to work too. But then you know, 45 minutes in, there’s a meeting. And so, now you don’t have a work day anymore, you have like this work moment that was only 45 minutes. And it’s not really 45 minutes, it’s more like 20 minutes, because it takes some time to get into it and then you’ve got to get out of it and you’ve got to go to a meeting.

People are different and are productive in their own way. Some people can crank out a ton of work in the morning. Others like to get in and relax, check email, then organize their tasks for the day. A Meeting might fit into one person’s schedule, while it hinders the other people involved. I once had to attend an end of day meeting with my entire team. We’d just present data and talk for a moment or two about the information. Of course, we’d each spend all morning preparing and compiling data and then one person would have to collect the data and compile it. It was a huge time suck. A better approach would have been to have each member compile a daily report showing a few key metrics and upload the information to a dashboard. Then when we’d come together we could hit key discussion points. I really didn’t need to know 90% of what the other members of the team were presenting and the information that did have an impact on my role, could have been easily accessed through a dashboard.

Meetings do need to occur, but they need to have rigid guidelines.

A few of my suggestions for a well-run meeting:

• 30 minutes or less
• A clearly defined goal
• No straying from discussion of the set goal
• As few people involved as possible
• A set start time
• No laptops or phones allowed

The recent hot topic in marketing has been retargeting. Google recently pulled their retargeting offering out of beta and available in all accounts. While retargeting is an effective advertising method, there are a few things you can do to make it even more effective.

Add cookies to different pages on your website and target those visitors in a unique manner. A person who hits an informational page should be retargeted differently than a visitor who was in your checkout process and left your website. There shouldn’t be just one banner ad for all retargeted users. The creatives should be unique for each tactic.

The NHL does an AMAZING job reatargeting visitors to their ecommerce section. I visited the site and was looking around at some items I was interested in. I left the website without buying and a few clicks later I saw this ad.

The item shown was the exact item I was looking at. The NHL attempts to grab visitors who were looking at specific products and send them back to the site by showing an item the visitor was looking at as well as offering a discount. I spoke with a few people involved in the retargeting process at the NHL and they indicated that the tactic was amazingly successful.

Retargeting is a great tactic, and if the time is taken to implement properly, can increase sales and even provide a better ROI on paid search, or other online marketing tactics. For example, if a visitor came to the site via a paid search ad, then left, the retargeting could entice that user to return a few days later. This allows that paid search click to have even more value even if the sale didn’t occur to much later.

Think of your retargeting as a key element of your online marketing and not as an add-on.

Apple is expected to ship 2,000,000 iPhone 4s at launch on the 24th. With projections of that many orders, you’d think that Apple and AT&T would have had a solid pre-ordering plan for the iPhone 4. I’m not sure who is to blame, but once issues were occurring Apple and AT&T should have made a statement and gave customers an update on when ordering would be available. If the iPhone 4 pre-ordering process was this bad I can’t imagine how bad things will go on the 24th.

A few other items of note:

- The AT&T site was charging $35 for shipping and not waiving the upgrade fee.
- The ordering process failed at various points.
- While I was in the Apple store I heard an employee tell a woman, “if you want to just surf the web you don’t want an iPad as it wont show flash websites and over 75% of websites use flash.”
- I’m using a launch iPhone, so I’m due to upgrade.
- Why was the white iPhone 4 not available to pre-order?

I hope that Apple or AT%T updates customers on what is happening with the pre-order process soon. With so many other phones catching up, will the iPhone lose customers to other carriers due to ordering issues?

In fact, THE NEXT WEB is reporting that the AT&T store was so broken this morning that some accounts were breached and personal information was exposed. I’ll be adjusting my password today and I hope none of my data was exposed. As the day has gone on, the Apple iPhone 4 pre-order keeps getting worse.

Best Buy is supposedly offering pre-ordering tomorrow (and possibly Radio Shack). It will be interesting to see if the iPhone 4 pre-order failure extends to 3rd party retailers.

The RavenTools team was in attendance and kept a running blog of each speaker. (My PPC session). I was lucky enough to have Benjamin Rudolph, David Kyle and Kate Morris present during the same session.

This was my first time presenting this topic, and while I felt I did well, I plan on adjusting some of the information and flow. My presentation was also radically different from almost all of the other presenters. Jason Keath’s (SocialFresh – Social Media Conference) presentation on Social Media was somewhat similar as he just used graphics and minimal text as well. Wayne Sutton didn’t even have a PowerPoint presentation. He chose to read his notes of his iPad and actually converse with the crowd. I hope to be able to give an updated presentation soon in the RTP area.

The amazing drawings in my presentation were created by Rachel Nabors She offers web design/web development services via The Pink Crow. I plan on having her add more “people” to the presentation in the future.

What has been amazing is that hardly any of these issues occur at my current employer, FTP site for business and virtual data rooms provider ShareFile.

If a user then thinks, “oh, hey. I know PING.” and then clicks the PING brand in the area between the paid and search they will then see this result:

Now the results change.

In other searches I conducted the brand that shows up nowhere on the unbranded search organically is now at the top of the list after adding the branded term via the Google brands link.

A few thoughts:

• This will make bidding on Competitors names even more essential.
• Longtail keywords will be increasingly more important than “head” words (great point by Linking Geek Brian Chappell).
• Google is caving to big advertisers who are consistently getting beaten at SEO and PPC.
• How does Google decide what brands to show?

If I’m a smaller company with a product that is just as good, or better, why can’t I have the same opportunity to get exposure in that same slot? Is a Google engineer making the decision?

This all reminds me of this Great Gatsby quote:

They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.

and this exchange as well:

Fitzgerald: The rich are different than you and me.
Hemingway: Yes, they have more money.

I could be reaching there, but hey, I was an English major. My earlier point is still valid. Google knows where there money comes from: big brands with deep pockets.

A bit more on the branded results subject from Barry over at Search Engine land

Here is another example of an SEO company using the same method.

I don’t have an issue with an SEO company having one link to their own site. The company should take credit for the SEO work they are doing (as long as it is GOOD work). What I do have an issue with is the numerous companies that use clients sites to be backlink generators for their own company. The footers should simply have one link to their own website and just use the company name as the anchor text. If the SEO discloses the fact that they will be using the client in the examples above and gives the client the option to not have the links, then I also have no issue.

The amount of links on a website that point away from a site plays a huge role in search rankings. If a website is full of links at the bottom of the page that point to other sites, the site’s SEO strength helps those sites and dilutes the strength of the numerous internal pages. An SEO company that decides to use a client’s website to help their own business and not that of their client, just does not have the client’s interest before their own.

Take a look at this post by Derek Powazek if you want to read another person’s take on the subject of SEO companies and a follow-up by Danny Sullivan.

(Please note that I adjusted the example images above to exclude any SEO company names and other information.)

Photo credit: CodiceInternet

A few thoughts about the event:

• I actually was a 6th grade teacher and had taken classes at NCCU in the same rooms where the event was held.
• I am TERRIBLE at putting a Twitter avatar to an actual face.
• While my session was about using social media to reduce paid search spend, most people had few questions about actual campaign management. I think it was due to many people in the room not being paid search managers.
• I realized that many of the people I interact with online are just as awesome offline. I think this is due to a few things. One, we have a great group of people in the area and two, that online interaction acts as a filter. I don’t follow or interact with anyone whom I “don’t Like.” If a person I start to follow or interact with doesn’t seem to be the type of person I want to associate with, I don’t keep interacting with them.
• I’d like to thank the guys who put on the event: Wayne Sutton, Jeff Cohen, Ryan Boyles, and Kipp Bodnar.
• Id like to thank my co-presenter Eric Miltisch of Auction Direct Used Car Sales
• I’d like to thanks everyone who attended my session and everyone that sent out Tweets summarizing my key points.
• I hate that I had to leave early, but we had a big meeting at ShareFile with a pretty big virtual data room client.
• I think Twitter ate all my Tweets that I sent out on Friday thanking everyone. I owe you guys. I know who you are. THANKS!

I’m looking to speak at more events in the area and if you’d like me to talk at your event, just let me know.

if you saw my session and would like to learn more about paid search, or marketing in general, feel free to reach out to me.

Photo Credit: @1918

The video

SEO for Social Media – Panel from #SMBF “Social Media: Search Engine Marketing’s Best Friend” from Alter Imaging, Inc. on Vimeo.

Special Thanks to Charlotte Web Design firm Alter Imaging for capturing the video of my session.