Biznology

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The search engines have evolved a great deal in the last fifteen years. They’ve gotten a lot smarter, meaning that it’s not easy for a website to get a good search ranking. Back in the day, website owners would cram lots of keywords into the meta title, description, and keyword tags in the code and get noticed by the search engines. Now it’s not so easy. In fact, stuffing keywords anywhere can get you penalized. The search engines don’t pay all that much attention to meta data now. They are much more focused on content quality, relevant links, and social data when determining a search engine result page ranking. So this raises the question, does meta data even matter anymore? The answer is, yes it does. While it may not play such a huge role in ranking as it did back in the day, it’s still considered to be an SEO best practice to include it.

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Oftentimes we learn the most from the simplest interactions that directly impact our own lives. We can then tell others of our experiences more clearly because the experience we had was quick, concise, to the point and not cluttered with much of what we see in today’s world. Here is how I experienced something from a marketer when I needed it, when I was in position to receive it and it was about a problem I needed to solve (at least it was a problem to me). Read the remainder of this entry »

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It’s been seven full years since O’Reilly Media organized the first Web 2.0 conference, and a handful of years since terms like Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business were introduced to our business jargon. However, the reality in 2011 is that the internal use of social technologies in large enterprises across the globe still faces an interesting situation: while most large companies have already gone through some 2.0 experimentation, I would dare to affirm that very few of them–or none at all–have made a complete transition from the so-called 1.0 way of communicating and collaborating to the promised land of pervasive internal use of social media-like channels. Even those companies who started this journey early are still seeing a vast majority of their population communicating and collaborating pretty much in the same way they did in the early 2000s. Does that mean that the Enterprise 2.0/Social Business nirvana is just a pipe dream? Will that ideal of an efficient marketplace for information fueled by social interactions ever be realized within the Enterprise? Oddly enough, my answer is “yes” to both questions. To understand why, we need an understanding of the built-in Return-on-Investment (ROI) framework most of us rely on most of the time, and a trip to a not-so-distant past related to other game changing technology.

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Celebrating at a funeral is in bad taste, so I’m sure the folks at B&N had to think carefully about to address the contacts they got from a recent acquisition of Borders customer data. Too friendly and cheerful would come across as celebration; too mournful and sympathetic would appear inauthentic or worse.  Barnes and Noble recently acquired the customer list from Borders in the sale of assets last week at bankruptcy court. There was some concern from thoughtful persons about this, as though such a list acquisition was equivalent to inheriting your best friend’s Little Black Book and proceeding to work your way through the conquests listed. I don’t think it is a creepy ploy though– if the customers are approached respectfully, it seems like common sense that people who used to buy books at a bookstore might be interested in buying books from another bookstore. Read the remainder of this entry »

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Last week I asked my management team if what we do at Abraham Harrison is inbound marketing. Sara Wilson, my COO, told me yes, that our digital PR strategy of identifying thousands of topical blogs and then pitching them on behalf of our clients with the goal of securing hundreds of earned media mentions is surely the definition of inbound marketing–and maybe even the way that God intended. Or at least the deities who wrote the Cluetrain Manifesto, where markets are conversations. Read the remainder of this entry »