Social Media Questions For Lee Odden
We are really excited that Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank® Online Marketing, a Minneapolis, Minnesota search marketing agency has agreed to be the interviewed in our social media optimization series.
Lee is very active as a blogger at industry conferences including: ad:tech, Search Engine Strategies, WebmasterWorld Pubcon, ACCM, DM Days and the annual DMA conference.
TopRank has been recognized as a leading SEO firm by TopSEOs.com and PromotionWorld and has been included in Marketing Sherpa’s guide to SEO firms for the past 3 years.
We broke the interview into two parts because of its length. In the first part Lee discusses how TopRank uses social media tactics to distinguish itself in the market. In
the second part, Lee talks about how TopRank’s clients are using social media to grow their business online.
1. Lee, you were one of the early evangelists of blogging when you launched your blog in 2003. Can you tell me about your decision to launch a blog for TopRank? Online marketing?
After working for a web development and online marketing agency from 1996 to 2000, TopRank was founded in 2001 with minimal industry involvement.
That changed in 2003 when we decided to start documenting links to search marketing resources and news items though the creation of Online Marketing Blog. Having a search marketing blog enabled more industry visibility, but soon there were many other SEO news blogs covering the same industry news.
To distinguish Online Marketing Blog as a unique and useful information source that also supported our TopRank brand, we started focusing on mixing news with tips and articles and then started incorporating interviews with well known search marketers as well as coverage of search marketing industry conferences.
The interviews were very well received and the conferences provide abundant opportunities to create content in the form of session coverage, photos, videos, interviews and after conference party coverage. For some reason, when we cover search marketing conferences, people seem to be most interested in reading about the festivities. ?
After a year. we moved the blog to it’s own domain name, toprankblog.com and to WordPress as a blog software platform. Our “blog guy”, Thomas McMahon did a great job redesigning the blog, adding plugins and creating some very viral blog marketing tools: RSS Button Maker and the Social Bookmarks Tool.
We continue to make enhancements to the blog as well as provide a variety of coverage ranging from weekly polls to maintaining a list of about 400 search marketing blog reviews updated each week. We also continue to post unique articles, interviews and cover industry conferences.
Currently, our RSS subscriber count is around 7,800, but we’d really like to get it over 10,000 so feel free to post our RSS feed for those that would like to subscribe! http://feeds.feedburner.com/onlinemarketingseoblog
2. How has your blog helped you generate new business?
Online Marketing Blog has been instrumental in promoting the TopRank brand as an authority on topics related to search marketing and public relations. We consistently get inquiries from very desirable clients that say, “We’ve been reading your blog for X number of weeks or months and would like to hire you.”
We’ve put a substantial amount of effort into the blog as a marketing tool, so understandably it is the best source of new business over any other marketing initiative we’ve ever engaged.
The blog has been an excellent tool for improving TopRank’s thought leadership, reputation and credibility in the industry and subsequently, with potential clients.
TopRank provides blog consulting services for SEO, online marketing and public relations purposes and those clients sincerely appreciate the fact that we “walk the talk” with our own blog efforts. For example, Online Marketing Blog is ranked in the Technorati 100 “favorites” and top 120 “most popular” blogs out of 80 million and has been recognized by various rankings of top marketing and social media blogs.
3. One of the main features of your blog is strong use of video. Tell me about your decision do to so many video posts?
While waiting in line for the bus to the Google Dance at SES San Jose in 2006, I shot a short video of Mike McDonald from WebProNews. After posting the video to Google Video, I noticed it received quite a few views. I also posted short videos of Barry Schwartz and Jim Boykin from the same conference.
Since then, it’s become a sort of tradition to do short video interviews at industry conferences with people in the search marketing industry that I think our readers will find interesting. Using videos as another media type for promotion allows us to make better use of social media as a marketing channel.
We haven’t been doing many videos lately, but I suspect we’ll get quite a few during the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose next month. Recently I’ve been experimenting with posting videos on Facebook about certain blog posts I think are worth discussing.
TopRank is fortunate to have some exceptionally talented marketers as part of our team and we’ll be incorporating their presence on video in the coming months as part of our own online promotion and prospective client education programs.
4. You have created your own channel on YouTube. Does video search actually generate qualified business inquiries for you? Or is it just high school kids who think you’re cool?
I’m pretty sure there aren’t any high school kids who think I’m cool, but I’m pretty sure my 4 year old daughter does. ?
Posting videos to YouTube is part of our social media distribution process. Lately we’ve been far more active at promoting client videos on YouTube than our own.
5. Some companies are posting videos on YouTube to help with recruitment. Have you seen prospective employees mention the videos during the interview process?
We do get a good number of inquiries about working at TopRank, but I don’t think anyone has mentioned seeing a video specifically. Posting short interviews with employees last year on YouTube was in part, an effort to present some information about what it’s like to work at TopRank. We were hiring for a number of positions then so we wanted to try other media.
Speaking of hiring, we’re currently hiring for an Online Marketing Manager position and I think we might just have to create a video specifically for that purpose. Thanks for the idea!
Stay tuned for part two tomorrow!
Filed under Brand Marketing, Interviews, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (7) : Jul 30th, 2007
July 30th, 2007 at 6:53 am
Great Interview, Lee always gives good and detailed responses!
July 30th, 2007 at 10:17 am
Thanks for the opportunity David! You’re doing a fine job of coveringthe social media optimization and marketing space.
July 31st, 2007 at 2:08 am
Thanx for the kind words Glen.
July 31st, 2007 at 2:09 am
Lee
Thank you for taking the time to provide such in-depth answers to my questions.
Enjoy your vacation.
David
July 31st, 2007 at 8:19 am
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January 28th, 2008 at 4:40 am
very nice artical abt social media optimization