Searchfest 2009 Interview: Adam Audette

Adam will be speaking about “Building A SEM Business” at Searchfest 2009 which will be held March 10th in Portland, Oregon. Get your tickets now.

1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.

My background is in internet marketing, primarily beginning with email discussion lists and link development. I worked as a link builder (part time, remotely) for my father John Audette’s company, MMG (now Outrider) in 1996 or so. MMG was probably the first large SEO company, and was located in Bend, Oregon (where I live now). There’s a ton of great interviews and history information about SEO on Mark Knowles’ site: https://www.thehistoryofseo.com. Some of the best SEOs in the world started at MMG and are still working in the field today.

I ran an email list for Linkexchange while they were a client, and then worked for MSN for a few years after Microsoft bought them out. When MSN folded bCentral they gave me the discussion list, over 60,000 subscribers at the time. It’s now the LED Digest: https://www.led-digest.com.

I started a company with my father called Adventive, and at its peak we had 15 discussion lists with some of the leading internet marketers as moderators. I-Search, a list Marshall Simmonds started back in the MMG days, was an Adventive list. Then the dot com crash happened, and we sold Adventive to the founder of ClickZ.

In 2001 I connected with Zappos and began the Shoe Digest, which is a discussion list with over 40,000 subscribers: https://www.zappos.com/digest.zhtml. It’s still going strong and being moderated by AudetteMedia. My main focus at Zappos now is on the SEO front. I head up efforts there alongside Aaron Shear. I have to travel a lot, but it’s an awesome experience and there are some things we’re working on that are already proving incredibly effective. Aaron is an exceptionally talented SEO with experience working on some of the biggest ecommerce sites on the Web, so it’s an honor to work with him.

I started consulting on the side a number of years ago while I was working with bCentral, but kept it low key. Now I’m president and chief strategist of AudetteMedia, a boutique online marketing agency specializing in organic SEO, PPC, email and social media. There are 10 on the team now, all incredibly bright people. It’s a very fun and vibrant environment at our office, and we work hard: https://www.audettemedia.com.

And last but not least, I’m the senior SEO strategist for an international digital agency. In that role I work with some of the biggest companies in the world, performing SEO strategy and consultation.

2) How can marketers be convinced to market themselves in social media instead of directly marketing their products / services?

Good question. The most effective way is probably for marketers to fail trying to directly push their products and/or services in social media. Nothing teaches so well as experience. For those willing to listen, I would attempt to boil my argument down to three main points:

1. Social media is not about your company, your company’s product, or your company’s service. It’s also not about your company’s brand.

2. Social media is about people connecting with other people.

3. If it’s not valuable or worthwhile, it’s not going to survive in social media.

Keeping those three key points in mind, I hope marketers would be able to navigate the social media channels effectively. At the end of the day, we don’t care if we’re being marketed to (not really, anyway) so long as there’s *value* in it somehow. Give me something that’s worth a little to you, or ask me to contribute to your efforts or give you input. Try to open up, be transparent, and speak honestly to the people you’re seeking to engage in marketing efforts. The results can be striking.

3) How have client conversations changed since the economic downturn began?

I have at least three different perspectives on this. I’m the president of a small SEO company, and act as an in-house SEO to Zappos. I also work alongside a very large digital agency (who never lets me tell the world who they are) leading their SEO strategies. So I get to see a lot of different clients, from some of the biggest companies in the world to pure online players, to small and mid-sized businesses.

The short answer is the economy has made everyone very price conscious.

Being so wary of spending money has funneled more dollars into search, since the investment tends to be smaller and the results so trackable. There’s something very practical and pure about search marketing – it’s at the core of everything we do online. It just plain works.

There are a lot of small projects, dipping the toe in the water to test the relationship and ROI. Site audits are very common right now, as are quarterly retainers instead of annual. We’ve seen some of the companies with premium products suffer, and others excel. Liquor for instance is on a strong upward swing online, and I’m fairly certain Google’s latest decision to open restrictions to the alcohol makers was a move for them to increase revenue in this economy.

Honestly, my company is booming right now. So are my colleague’s companies and consultancies. Zappos turned out Q4 revenue ahead of predictions and did over $1bil in 2008. Amazon’s revenue was bigger than expected. Our agency relationships are busier than ever.

SEO is where it’s at in this economy, from where I’m sitting. And that feels pretty good, because we’re getting these companies results. At the end of the day, that’s all I really want to do: make a company money and the Web environment a better place.