Our next seminar in our Content Matters series, Building Functional
Websites, is October
17 at the Catalyst Ranch in Chicago, and you need to register by October 6 to get the discount rate.
In this full-day seminar, you will learn how to build, optimize and
maintain great websites that drive the business results. The morning
session reviews the fundamentals, followed by an afternoon of
interactive breakouts covering our most popular and highly-requested
topics: Information Architecture and Online Marketing.
This is a working day - expect to come away from this workshop with a
plan that will assist you and your company in launching your online
marketing project. Breakouts will be led by our team of experts, but
case studies will be provided by you. This is your opportunity to ask
questions, get feedback specific to your unique situation, and break
through the barriers that may be keeping you from taking that first
step to getting your online project off the ground.
I’ve just
returned from Virginia
where I attended The New New Internet conference. I flew out because of it’s focus on “Web 2.0
for the Enterprise”
a subject that I will be covering at our next Content Matters seminar on
October 17 and at the Technology Executives Club IT Trends Forecast on December
13.
Web 2.0 has
lead the buzz parade for the last couple of years, ever since Tim O’Reilly
coined the term, and we are familiar with the poster boys of this new
order. What is different about Web
2.0? How about 225 Million Internet
users in the US
alone. This has created the opportunity
for The Long Tail and the rise of social networking in sites such as Digg,
YouTube, and Flickr.
What are
the key tenants of Web 2.0 according to Google?
- Simplicity for end users
- Better tools for efficient development
- Elimination of barriers to
information
- The power of the cloud
I will
cover these in more detail in a later post.
But what about the enterprise? Is
there anything more to Web 2.0 then blogging or wiki’s behind a firewall?
There were
a number of good talks including Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, (fully
covered by Jason Goldberg of Jobster). I
was most impressed by talks from Rajen Sheth of Google, and Andrew McAfee from
Harvard who provided some answers to the question such as -
- Web 2.0 is NOT about technology, it
is a way of interacting with customers.
The technology doesn’t matter; it’s what you do with the technology that
matters. For instance, Ajax is an approach that lets you re-center
around the user.
- Web 2.0 is about involving your
customers and for the enterprise, involving the employees.
- Web 2.0 is about information (you
can’t have too much) and transparency (make it accessible to the user).
- Web 2.0 is about keeping things
simple with a focus on the average user.
- Web 2.0 is about hosted services
that allow you to focus on your business rather than your infrastructure.
But what does this mean for the
enterprise? McAfee said that because
knowledge work is essentially unstructured work (with structured data), they can truly benefit from Web
2.0 approaches. He felt that something
will bridge the gap between emergent technologies we use on the web and the
structured data of enterprise content.
(We all know there has to be a better way to manage corporate knowledge
than giant email boxes on everybody’s desktop.)
McAfee said “The enterprise has
always been about central control and structured content, while Web 2.0 is about
unstructured content, so there are bound to be collisions…This is not a
revolution, but a transformation”.
For almost 5 years I’ve been managing search engine pay per click ad campaigns. You’d think I know what there is to know about pay per click advertising management. So it may come as a surprise that I am looking forward with giddy enthusiasm to a full day at the LocalLaunch Google AdWords seminar being held at Catalyst Ranch in Chicago, October 10, 2006 (also being held in New York, October 17 & Miami on October 24).
Don’t know anything about pay per click advertising? This definitive guide to managing your Google AdWords campaign is targeted to both new advertisers as well as grizzled search engine marketing veterans like me. In the morning sessions, everyone will get the details on bidding, optimizing & troubleshooting. The advanced afternoon session will delve into advanced bidding, tracking & managing your campaign. And if you are truly a grizzled vet, you can show up for the afternoon session only ($149).
While I have no doubt the seminar will be content-rich, the seminar leader, Brad Geddes, is most definitely the secret sauce in this event. I’ve worked with Brad as my AdWords mentor and have first-hand experience with both his knowledge and common sense. This guy has a strong search marketing pedigree including presentations at several Search Engine Strategies conferences and as contributing technical editor for the definitive Google adWords book, “Winning Results with Google AdWords”.
All this for $249, which is, quite frankly, nothing. In other words, it is not at all about what this seminar costs. It is entirely about what it will SAVE you in bad bidding practices and what it will GET you in incremental leads, sales or whatever it is for which you want to be found. If you are running, managing or anticipating a pay per click search marketing advertising campaign, miss this event at your own peril.
I was a panelist at the Crain’s Chicago Business “Doing the
Web Smartly” seminar earlier this week and enjoyed it very much. Expertly moderated by Thomas Mucha, co-panelists were William
Furlong of Search Channel, Bill McCarthy from ShopLocal
and Melissa Giovagnoli of Networlding.
We started out talking about the marketing value of blogs – and
when I asked how many people in the audience regularly read blogs, less than
10% of the hands went up. I was frankly
amazed by this – and it helped to ground me for the rest of the session. There is so much information available on the
web, much of it for free, and so much of it nowadays comes from bloggers
focused on their particular niche. It is
a perfect tool for a small business to establish their brand, and drive
business opportunities as well (as perfectly described by Jim Coudal in his
Crain’s interview).
We covered email marketing, which still has a lot of life
left as long as the message is RELEVANT to the audience. We talked about
websites, and the importance of CONTENT over design. We answered questions about search marketing
and PPC.
But what stuck with me as I left the room was Nike’s slogan “Just
Do It”. Getting an inexpensive $50/month
site up is better than nothing at all.
Download an eBook and set up a Blog.
Create an Adwords account and buy a couple of keywords. Get into the game – because it is only then
that you will begin to learn about the new ways of marketing on the web.
