Marty will be speaking about “Online Reputation Management” 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.
After a long and delightful career as a musician and 9 years as an in-house & solo Internet Marketing pro, I’m thrilled to be president of aimClear, an Internet focused Advertising Agency with offices in Duluth and Minneapolis, Minnesota. We’re a full service SEM firm, offering traditional & social pay-per-click (PPC) management, natural search optimization (SEO), and social media/feed marketing (SMO) services to regional and national clients. I’ve written for aimClear Blog, SearchEngineWatch, SearchEngineLand and have had the privilege of speaking on the SMX, SES, PubCon and other SEM conference series.
2) How can a new search marketer get noticed and accepted by the greater search marketing community?
Players in the SEM universe are amongst the most giving, willing to share and lovely people I’ve ever met. If you want to become a better search marketing professional, information is as close as SearchEngineLand, SearchEngineWatch, SEOmoz and a plethora of outstanding publications. Read a lot (hours every day), lurk, participate, give, share and get to know the players from luminaries to newbies. Go to as many SEM conferences as possible and blog.
At the end of the day, the search marketing community responds to sincerity, consistency, style, verve and great content. How much do you study? How committed are you to the community? Are you willing to share information you find (almost) unconditionally. Will you give cool shit away?
I’ve always taken the position that anyone cool enough to truly compete with our company, is likely to discover the pathway to success with or without my revealing tactics and techniques. Therefore, I’d rather be supportive, share what aimClear has learned and be friends with our competitors. Also, there’s SO much work out there that being territorial has little merit. Give to get and you will be rewarded by fellowship, community and paying work.
BTW: Being a bit of a rabble rouser is a great method, provided stands-taken are informed and backed up by true passion, as opposed to trouble-making-focused motivations.
3) How important is the concept of “integrity” in social media promotion? Integrity is everything.
Don’t pee in the pool! Responsible social media marketing has everything to do with the integrity with which a marketer brings him/herself to the communities in which promotions are levied. Gaming social media sites might work in the short term, however ultimately dilutes communities and pisses off the neighbors. Whether representing-yourself straight up, by a pseudonym or even a hybrid avatar, (the theory of which tends to cause hellish firestorms no matter how holistic and true you are), operate to lift up the communities by bringing them content that matter to the individual and collective.
I like the way Li Evans thinks about things: “Social Media is about conversations and the opportunity to share experiences through those conversations. Links are merely a by-product of a great social media campaign, and search engine rankings are merely a by-product as well.”
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.