Recent Direct Marketing News

I spoke at PubCon last week -- about How SMBs Can Use PR Campaigns To Grow Traffic and Alternative Discovery and SEO - Feeds, PDFs, and Blog SEO.

TopRank Online Marketing and the Direct Marketing Association have just announced a partnership to develop and deliver a series of educational workshops on social media marketing entitled, "Social Media Smarts: Introduction to the Social Web, Tools and Tactics."

Real estate search site Trulia has partnered with Placecast for audience targeting and dynamic messaging. The goal is to improve the relevancy of the ads appearing on their site.

Citysearch appears to be going for the jugular with its newly rebuilt site. While many sites add a little social here and a little mobile there, Citysearch is going for the three hottest trends all at once: Social, Local, Mobile.

This Saturday, YouTube will be hosting its first ever live streaming event. The broadcast will feature a music and variety show being held at Fort Mason Center's Herbst Pavilion in San Francisco.

Google has announced that it has made LIFE Magazine Images available as an archive. The images from the iconic magazine are also available through Image Search. You can view the collection here.

Yahoo! Search BOSS is now allowing developers to use a feature called Key Terms. The feature is derived from technology that is used in Search Assist.

Google AdWords has released a new keyword tool. This one lets users plug in their website and a few keywords. The tool, dubbed Search-based keyword tool, takes a look at the site and makes suggestions for keywords that may be relevant to your paid search campaign.

Marketing doesn't always have to involve using methods like search engine optimization, email marketing, or banner advertising. Instead of using expensive methods of marketing you can also market your company by giving your product away for free to select bloggers.

Many major companies continue to make mistakes with their Web sites that hurt their search engine rankings. They target pages in the wrong way, or don't craft their pages in a way to prevent searchers from leaving their site after the first page. In today's enterprise search marketing column, "SEO Dreams are Made of This," Aaron Shear says it's time for some SEO dreaming.

In the same way JFK benefitted from the emerging medium of television, Barack Obama was helped into the White House by the increasing popularity of social media. In today's building brand equity column, "President 2.0," Erik Qualman explains that his appeal to younger audiences, and need to get exposure in a primary race against an established opponent led Obama to develop his online strategy. Businesses can learn from his campaign.

Some SEOs aren't getting the message about Google's personalization of search results. Many are not seeing the writing on the wall: 2009 will likely see the end of the ranking report in SEO. In today's organic search engine optimization column, "The Future of Google's Search Personalization," Mark Jackson advises SEOs to acknowledge traffic, conversions, and ROI as the important metrics for any form of marketing or business.

E-commerce growth slowed to just 1% last month, according to comScore. This is the lowest rate since comScore began culling the data in 2001.

TNS has launched the next generation of its online advertising monitoring tools. The TNS Digital Suites combines cookie tracking with the TNS 6th Dimension Panel for what they say is a unique analysis of online ad consumption. TNS says current tools overestimate audience sizes, but that their updated online ad tool provides target audience insight with little interference to the user experience.

China Central Television (CCTV), the largest state-owned television network in China, recently ran a report accusing Baidu of questionable practices regarding medical search advertising. The accusations suggest that Baidu was allowing non-licensed medical companies to advertise while preventing some of the licensed ones from bidding on popular medical terms.

During Search Engine Strategies San Jose back in August, I did a video interview with Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team. It will be uploaded to the SESConferenceExpo’s Channel on YouTube tomorrow.