Marty Weintraub will be speaking about “PPC for Social” at SearchFest 2010, which will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.
1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I’m president of aimClear, an Internet-focused Advertising Agency with offices in Duluth, Minnesota. We provide traditional & social pay-per-click (PPC) management, natural search optimization (SEO), social media/feed marketing (SMO) and online reputation management (ORM) services to national clients. We are interesting in that we and audit in all service categories.
I’ve had the pleasure of writing for SearchEngineWatch, SearchEngineLand, SEORoundTable and other blogs. My “home” publication, aimClear Blog, is an AdAge Power 150 publication, which I"m proud of. I’ve gotten to speak at a number of Search Engine Strategies (SES), SearchMarketing Expo (SES), PubCon and (of course) SEMpdx. BTW, SEMPdx was the first conference I ever spoke at and the Portland search marketing community holds a special place in my heart and annual calendar.
Our clients have included cherished enterprise publishers including WashingtonPost properties, MarthaStewart.com, SecondLife, MerchantCircle and Blue Cross Blue Shield among others. I’ve been into Internet marketing experience since-like 1992, the dawn of interactive.
Before- my career sort of spanned traditional and online channels. I’ve worked as an A&R rockstar Executive for PolyGram International Publishing in Burbank, Creative Director for a Minnesota CBS Affiliate, and founded a record label–which I helped run and sold after 5 years. Industrial video and music clients have included Northwest Airlines, CBS, Pizza Hut, General Mills, Dayton Hudson, Planters Peanuts, Sony Publishing, and quite a few others. That was another life.
A musician by trade, I spent many years recording dolphins, wolves, loons, water environments in the wild and setting them to global acoustic music. I love camping, travel, fine wine, fishing, listening to music of many genres and I’m a total Law and Order junkie.
2) You’ve cleverly posted how somebody might “influence” personalized search results in their favor. Can you share the highlights of that?
Sure: Personalized search was inevitable. Whether anyone thinks it’s good or bad, obviously there are inherent difficulties for SEOs. A great way to attack the the problem is to influence users in how they use search engines. Find ways to get users to search Google for your content, discover your organic "ad" and then click. The old approach AOL used to use, "Search AOL: Keyword XYZ" is a great approach for Google now. Users click on your organic results. Over time the tactic causes your site to rise higher in you fans’ personalized SERPs, customized just for them by Google.
Search engines s will never be able beat the approach of optimizing users pre-click behavior instead of only web pages.
3) Everyone thinks social media is cool but companies are demanding ROI from social media initiatives. How can that best be shown?
First, I know first hand there are incredible next-gen’ tools coming our way to measure reach & ROI. There are many levels of social media KPIs starting with branding which is of course, somewhat intangible to measure.
For reach we look to PostRank, which measures on and off-page engagement. We think SMO is a winning deal if we can document building long term friendships with key authority users. I’m rather fond of emerging metrics like "total unique friends," "second degree of total unique friends," reach of distribution networks and retweets. One fascinating way to measure social media success is by how viral reactions offset and dillute the CPA of marketing by other channels like PPC and SEO.
Never forget traditional metrics: return visitors, conversions, subscriptions, data mining, time-on-page/page-views, engagement and…of course, participating in beloved conversation.
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.