Red Bricks Media’s News Blog

Come visit us at Search Engine Strategies, New York!

Ed Kim, our CEO, and Craig Hordlow, our Chief Search Strategist, were recently invited to speak at the Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo in New York City March 17-20, 2008.

Ed will present in a panel titled “Igniting Viral Campaigns,” a session focused on helping marketers understand the newest buzz channels and how to apply these learnings towards their own marketing campaigns. In this session, Ed and other notable marketing experts will “unveil the secrets of Web 2.0 techniques and technologies that enable companies to stand out and be talked about.” Ed has presented on similar topics for Search Engine Strategies Chicago, MarketingSherpa, the Baptie Conference, and the Vodafone Summit.

“With the emergence of social media, brands can leverage viral marketing now more than ever as an extremely effective way to reach its audience with measurable results,” comments Ed.

Craig Hordlow will present in a panel discussion on “Search Engine Friendly Design.” This session will educate its audience on best practices for search engine friendly design. Craig will present a practical approach to the oft-encountered challenge of integrating flash design with SEO-friendly techniques.

“Marketers have pressured their developers to minimize flash content, but flash is a perfectly acceptable development application for both humans and search engines if the proper precautions are taken,” he says.

Search Engine Strategies and Expo is the leading conference and expo series for the latest news and developments in optimization, search engine advertising, and search marketing issues. The New York City conference is a four-day series of workshops featuring presentations from industry leaders, as well as major search engines. The conference runs from March 17-20, with Ed and Craig’s panels occurring on March 17th and March 18th, respectively.

by Jacob Morgan, Search Strategist

Just came back from the Google VIP party and I must say, it was great. After attending events like these, you start believe that Google is not a search engine - it’s really a relationship management platform. Matthew Dolan, the relationship manager for the National Agency Team, was eager to speak with myself and my co-workers before we even got there. As soon as I walked in and introduced myself to someone, they immediately said, “Matt was talking about you and, he’s looking forward to meeting you.” Now that is called building and maintaining a relationship. Great job Matthew and thanks to you and Google for hosting a great event.

The event was held at Sino in San Jose, a very nice restaurant with great food and drinks. Google really made everyone there feel like a VIP.

I met a lot of smart and interesting people and engaged in an interesting discussion with David Szetela, the owner and CEO of Clix Marketing, a PPC firm based in Kentucky. Of course, David believes that PPC is better than SEO, and he did make some valid points. PPC does have greater accountability and allows for the targeting of specific landing pages per keyword - if you use dynamic landing pages that is. His argument was that SEO IS PPC, but for natural search. This rings true to a certain extent.

While PPC is restricted to specifically search engine advertising, SEO can be applied across a wide spectrum of marketing channels, such as PDF’s, videos, blogs, etc. I believe a chasm exists between the different types of SEO, and I’m not talking about black hat vs white hat. There are SEO’s who seek to “game” the system. They believe in driving traffic and in ranking in that top coveted spot on search engines and see SEO as just a rankings tool. They are the ones who spam social media sites just to get some extra links, and these are the guys who stuff keywords in their title tags to try to rank for as many search terms as they can. This is not SEO. This is spam marketing.

On the other hand, we have SEOs who believe in SEO as a marketing tool. That is, instead of worrying about traffic, they focus on conversions and on targeting the people that matter. SEO spam is equivalent to t.v. advertising - a lot of money spent and not a lot of results delivered. SEO is about delivering a consistent marketing message via multiple channels to the people that care and to the people that matter. Why was the Youtube series “you suck at photoshop,” so popular? Why do millions of people watch the CEO of Blendtec blend random products in his blenders? It’s not because of spam and it’s not because of SEO. It’s because these guys targeted the right people, and those people did the rest of the marketing. I consider myself a marketer not a spammer.

I know you are waiting for me to say that SEO is better than PPC, but I am not going to. Instead of saying that either PPC or SEO is better I will say that they work well together and can share their learnings. In order to dominate search, you have to have a solid understanding of PPC and SEO, and you need to understand how they can work together to provide an overall integrated approach to search marketing.

Thanks for the great party Google, and thank you, David, for engaging me in this lively discussion of PPC vs SEO.

This article is cross-posted from Jacob’s blog.

by Beth Morgan, VP of Operations

Two recent related stories point to the continued flux in the mobile search market:

1. To the surprise of no one who has paid the least attention to the hype, the iPhone has increased its share of the US smartphone market quite rapidly for such a new entrant into the market. It is now the number 2 smartphone in the US, with a market share of 28% (compared to market leader RIMM/Blackberry with 41%). It also has a reasonably strong share of the global market; it comes in #3 with 6.5% (market leader Nokia has 53%). The iPhone is popular and its popularity is increasing; more importantly, the clamor over its user-friendly interface is having a big effect on overall smartphone design. And that brings us to:

2. Google has revealed that it gets 50 times the searches from the iPhone as from any other mobile device. That’s right, the iPhone represents a 98% share of Google’s mobile traffic. And since Google gets about twice as many mobile searches as Yahoo (according to an iCrossing report from May ‘07), that means that the iPhone is pretty much dominating mobile search. This is no surprise to anyone who has ever tried a search on an iPhone and on another smartphone; the iPhone’s intuitive interface makes searching easy, while with other phones you’ve got to really want that info.

Why are these two stories so important for influencing thought on mobile search? Because with the iPhone interface mobile search is really not separate from computer-based search. The search page you come to when you search Google on your iPhone looks like the same page you get on your computer; the ads are the same as well. There is no need to create special ads and landing pages, as there is with other interfaces. To me it appears the writing is on the wall in terms of the direction mobile search is going, and it is away from the separate ecosystem of mobile-only ads and landing pages. This very fact will only increase the iPhone’s dominance as sites stop investing in mobile-only design.

For marketers, this means that if you’ve been feeling vaguely panicked because you aren’t in mobile yet, you can relax– for once waiting was the right move. The market is coming to you.

As a P.S., Google’s own press release about the dominance of the iPhone in mobile search makes last week’s announcement about their new partnership with Nokia (a distant fourth in the US smartphone market) seem a little odd, to say the least.

This article is cross-posted on Beth’s blog.

DM News recently covered our new client project with Mint.com. An excerpt from the article is below.

“Mint.com, an online financial ser­vices tool, has debuted its first market­ing campaign with a user-generated video and story sweepstakes, in a move to get the word out about its brand.

The campaign, which is a collaboration with interactive agency Red Bricks Media, calls consumers to make videos or write stories about the overspending habits dur­ing the holidays and post them on Mint.com for the chance to win $5,000. The promotion will run through March 15.

“We wanted to come up with a way to engage young people,” said Theresa Lee, creative director at Red Bricks Media. ”

You can read the full article here:
http://www.dmnews.com/Mintcom-looking-for-videos/article/105112/

By Bain Smith, Lead Copywriter

I’ve sequestered myself in the deepest recesses of the Red Bricks Media web laboratory this week, poring over mountains of data, reading exhaustive summaries of research from all over the world, and mixing beakers full of consumer behavior patterns, all in hopes of achieving that perfect alchemy known as Predictions for online marketing in 2008.

So without further ado, let’s get down to brass tacks.

1)    Social networking will continue its meteoric rise and touch more people in more places in 2008.

While “socialnetworkitis”—the fatigue from keeping up with all the social websites we belong to—is a real concern, any rumors of social networking’s demise are greatly exaggerated, and I’ll tell you why.

There are approximately two things that make the web interesting: content and people, especially people you know. So it stands to reason that social networks, whether Myspace, Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, or another as yet undiscovered network, will continue to attract zillions of eyeballs and provide unparalleled levels of “stickiness” to their users.

The difference in 2008? You create the content these social networks profit from, so expect to see new websites that pay users for their participation. I’m not saying it’s going to work, but if Web 1.0 meant paying to use something, and Web 2.0 meant you were free to use something, Web 3.0 may just mean you get paid to use something.

2)    StumbleUpon will become a household name in 2008, as more people will stop googlin’ and start stumblin’.

StumbleUpon uses collaborative filtering, an automated process combining human opinions and machine learning of personal preference, to help you explore a rich, vast variety of content you would never see otherwise, and rate it with a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down via an easily downloadable toolbar.

It leads to unexpected discoveries, and dare I say it: Fun. There are myriad features that make it even stickier, but StumbleUpon has single-handedly rekindled my love of the web.

3)    Twitter, while not for everyone, will continue to influence the influencers and make waves in 2008.

I mean it: Twitter is not for everyone. But for those who crave direct, brain-to-keypad-to-audience interaction with people they like, respect, look up to, or are just plain curious about, Twitter can be an experiential revelation, unearthing information, news and opinions literally as they are happening. Companies and others are catching on to this new info-delivery platform, and people are making a living from it.

4)    Advertising on video sharing sites and mobile devices will increase, but consumer noses will turn toward the sky in response. If you’re still in doubt, read this prescient manifesto for more on why.

Today’s consumers are not a TV generation. Video advertising is interruption marketing, and consumers don’t play that game anymore (TiVo anyone?). The same goes for mobile ads, except it’s an even more personal invasion of privacy and space.

Smart marketers, responding to the challenge, will come up with new, innovative ways to engage and “go steady” with the audience beyond sticking ads in their face. It’s already happening. While motion picture product placement has been going on forever, video and video game product placement is increasing, and mobile apps (widgets) that engage and help the audience will become more of the norm on mobile phones.

5)    A backlash occurs against obsessive, exhaustive communication, connectedness, and the glut of “gadgetry.”

It’s only a matter of time before people stop IM’ing the person two feet to their left, rest those stiff, fatigued Blackberry thumbs, remove the Bluetooths and iPod earbuds, and engage in old-fashioned, face-to-face discourse with other human beings.

Don’t forget that ultimately there is a reason they call it word of mouth marketing, because the real marketing gets going when face-to-face conversation is flowing.

These are my modest marketing-related predictions for 2008. Now back to the lab.