GoogleWorld: In Case You Missed It. . .

Me & our speaker from Google, Sean Daily!


Sean Daily and Joe Laratro


SFIMA President Joe Laratro


Getting ready to hear the presentation.


A packed networking room!

Wow! What an event this was! Sean Daily, Google's SEM Evangelist was overflowing with great information and tips on managing your Google campaigns and search listings. He touched on everything Google from Adwords to Analytics, but mostly focused on tips for managing your Google listings while saving time and money.

He also came prepared for anyone who missed the event or, even if you were there and missed a slide or two of his packed presentation:

http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/domorewithless/index.html

Here are some of the highlights from the notes I took:

Search Marketing in a Down Economy - or - How to Speed Up in a Slowdown and Save Time and Money


Google has many free products to help interactive businesses during this time.

* Google has a new search based keyword tool.
* Inside Adwords Blog
* Adwords Agency Blog
* Webinars: http://google.com/events/nationalagency

This economy is both a challenge and an opportunity:

25% of senior marketers would increase online spending in a recession 13% would not.

Sean gave us 7 Search Strategies to Implement Today

1. Focus ads on low prices and savings.
2. Use Value Related Keywords i.e. "fuel efficiency" "cheap flights"
3. Make sure your ad groups are targeted and relevant.
4. Don't waste money on irrelevant clicks. Use search query performance reports and negative keywords in your campaigns.
5. Make it easy for customers to buy. Small changes can result in huge ROI. Test small changes such as the color of buy buttons, etc.
6. Leverage all your assets. Have specific keywords and make sure that they land on THAT page.
7. Now more than ever: DATA beats opinion.

Using Google Analtyics

The minimum, at least check your bounce rate and have goal funnels.
The maximum, motion charts.

Google Website Optimizer

6 different tests to try with Optimizer:
1. classic A/B
2. classic multivariate
3. split path
4. multipage multivariate
5. linger
6. do anything

Sean gave us live demos of:
1. http://google.com/sktool
2. Google AdPlanner
3. Google Trends

Check out Google's affiliate program, now featuring CPA in network. And Sean recommends looking into Google TV ads.

It was certainly an informative evening and we had some great networking ahead of time along with drinks and the great buffet of food supplied by Jungle Island. They also showed up with a special guest. Many of us took pictures with a baby kangaroo, she is only 4 months old!








Pictures Courtesy Eric Soto http://ericsoto.net

Your Landing Page Hamster is Dead

ion interactive President Scott Brinker wrote a very amusing blog post the other day that I wanted to share with our SFIMA audience. And yes, it has everything to do with hamsters and landing pages. It amazes me how Scott can elegantly link enterprise post-click marketing with a grade school classroom pet.

Of course there is an analogy to be made, and Scott asks two very poignant questions we should all stop and think about. How many changes to your search campaigns did you make last month? And how many changes to your landing pages did you make?

Check out the blog post and share your thoughts: http://www.ioninteractive.com/post-click-marketing-blog/2009/1/19/your-landing-page-hamster-is-dead.html#comments

And of course, look out for SFIMA's upcoming educational event on improving your conversion rates.

This Blog Post is From:

Susan Delz

Marketing Communications

ion interactive, inc.

Next SFIMA Educational Event: SFIMA IDOL!

Thursday, 2-12-2009

SFIMA Idol: Peer to Peer Open Forum Networking Event

This event features you! Our Peer to Peer networking event is about sharing the wealth of expertise, experience, and knowledge that makes up our South Florida Interactive Marketing Association. The open forum will be lead by our former president, Mark Evans. He will moderate this session where you can ask questions of the audience or provide your insight on other member's questions.

The SFIMA board will be available to answer questions on the following subjects: copywriting, internet law, search, email, print, social media, analytics, event planning, surveys, ecommerce, Web design, and more.

Please submit questions in advance. These questions will be posted on the SFIMA Blog and the answers will be summarized after the event.

Some of the questions already submitted:
What are some tips for successfully interacting with your agency?
What are some of the new Social Sites worth engaging?
What does bounce rate mean in my analytic's stats?
How successful is print media vs. online and what should I do with my budgets for 2009?

Event Details Time/Date: 6:30pm-10:00pm Thursday, 2-12-2009 Place: Riverside Hotel Las Olas Blvd Fort Lauderdale, Fl 33301 Contact: Membership@SFIMA.com Member Cost & Registration $0 Non Member Cost & Registration $39

Pre-Shop Reviews Imprtant Factor for Online Buyers

From MediaPosts Research Brief. this article was posted earlier this month, but I felt that it had significant insight into the minds of online holiday shoppers to still post it now.

Pre-Shop Customer Reviews Important to Online Customers

Nielsen Online, studying the holiday mindset of the U.S. online shopper, found that customer reviews are an important research tool for online consumers, with 71 percent agreeing that consumer reviews make them more comfortable that they are buying the right product. 81 percent of online shoppers have read product or retailer reviews by other customers when doing their holiday shopping this year.

Evaluation of this customer feedback found that 63 percent of online shoppers indicated that it was important to have multiple reviews for each product; 14 percent looked for reviews from an established source; and just three percent sought out reviews by people they knew personally.

Ken Cassar, vice president, industry insights, Nielsen Online, said "Consumer reviews are a must-have for online retailers, especially... when shoppers are buying for others in categories they're less familiar with... consumers are looking for outside feedback for guidance."

Important Factors in Evaluating Customer Reviews
Factor	% of Respondents
The product has multiple ratings or reviews	63%
The rating or review comes from an established source	14
The rating or review comes from someone I know	3
Other	2
Source: Nielsen Online Holiday Survey, December 2008

24 percent of online shoppers have spent more than $500 so far this holiday season (12/18), with 22 percent spending between $100-199 online. The 24/7 shopping convenience of the Web was the reason cited most frequently by respondents (78 percent) for shopping online.

Money Already Spent (12/18) Online this Holiday Season
Amount	% of Respondents
Less than $100	18%
$100-199	22
$200-299	17
$30-399	13
$400-499	5
More than $500	24
Source: Nielsen Online Holiday Survey, December 2008

55 percent of respondents indicated that they logged onto the Web site of a local brick and mortar retailer before visiting the physical store. The primary reason for going online first was comparing prices between retailers, followed by checking if an item was in stock and looking for sales in stores.

Cassar continued, "... retailers should consider the online contribution to store sales, in addition to online sales, when evaluating how well the season went."

Top 5 Reasons Consumers Visit Retailer Web Site before Visiting Store
Reason	% of Respondents
Wanted to compare prices between different retailers whose stores I might shop	33%
Wanted to see if the product I was looking for was in stock	28
Wanted to find sales in the store	26
Wanted to come up with holiday gift ideas before I went shopping	22
I ordered online for in-store pickup	12
Source: Nielsen Online Holiday Survey, December 2008

62 percent of respondents said that the most popular reason to shop at a particular online retailer was having made a purchase there in the past. Search engines were the second most popular way to find an online retailer, followed by offline catalogs. These results underscore the importance to consumers of solid, longstanding relationships with retailers they trust, says the report.

Top 5 Reasons to Shop at a Particular Web Site
Reason	% of Respondents
I went to the retailer I have purchased from in the past	62%
I found the retailer through search engines	38
I received a catalog in the mail from the retailer	31
I came across an email promotion from the retailer	25
I subscribe to e-newsletters from retailers	25
Source: Nielsen Online Holiday Survey, December 2008

SoFIE Awards Call for Entries!

In Search of Interactive Excellence in So Florida; 2009 SoFIE Interactive Awards Call for Entries - Deadline Feb. 27, 2009 The South Florida Interactive Marketing Association is now calling for entries for its 2009 South Florida Interactive Excellence (SoFIE) Awards, which encourage creative, innovative and measurable digital marketing programs and reward the South Florida digital community for their hard work. Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. (PRWEB) January 28, 2009 -- The South Florida Interactive Marketing Association is now calling for entries for its 2009 South Florida Interactive Excellence (SoFIE) Awards, which encourage creative, innovative and measurable digital marketing programs and reward the South Florida digital community for their hard work. Companies based in Florida or advertising/marketing agencies with clients based in Florida, may submit interactive work produced during 2008 for more than seven categories at www.sofieawards.com. The cost to enter is $150 per submission for SFIMA members and $200 for non-members. Entries must be received online by Friday, February 27, 2009. Finalists in each category will be notified by Friday, April 3, 2009 and the winners will be announced at the SoFIE Awards Gala held Friday, May 1, 2009. Sponsors of the SoFIE Awards include World Media (premier), Razorfish and Silver Pop. The seven judging categories include "Best Online Brand Experience", "Best Use of Social Media or User Generated Content" and "Best of Show". A panel of judges will be drawn from academia, media and nationally recognized practitioners in interactive marketing. The SoFIE Awards Gala event will be held Friday, May 1, 2009 from 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm at Gulfstream Park Race Track in Hallandale, FL. The event will showcase the finalists' work, including the flash and interactive features of each entry and the program results. In addition to the awards presentation, there will also be live entertainment, a gourmet dinner, an after-party and access to the Gulfstream casino. The South Florida Interactive Marketing Association, founded in 2002, is one of 12 Interactive Marketing Associations in the US. It is a non-profit forum dedicated to the exchange of ideas, information and best practices to help members grow their interactive marketing activities and successes. The organization is the primary interactive marketing voice in South Florida. For more information, visit www.sfima.com.

Is 2009 The Year of the Tweet?

Make way for a new animal on the zodiac! Someone should really make an interactive zodiac, heading the cast of animals should be the blue Twitter bird. If you are not on Twitter, you might really be missing out on something. Not sure what that "something" is?

Check out Todd Friesen's article for MediaPost entitled The Tweet Life and learn why Todd's new year's resolution is to use Twitter more! He also highlights how you can use Twitter to enhance your local searches, find product reviews, and even keep up to date on the latest, breaking news!

Twitter can be used for business, pleasure or a mixture of both. Join the Twitter-versation and see for yourself, you will not be dissapointed, but rather delighted with the awesome folks you can "Tweet" online!

Follow SFIMA on Twitter!

Have You Ever Been to a BarCamp?

BarCamps and Podcamps are fantastic events organized by the attendees and most of them are free of charge with all event costs covered by sponsors.

Here is the definition of a Barcamp from Wikipedia: BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants. The first BarCamps focused on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats. The format has also been used for a variety of other topics, including public transit, health care, and political organizing.

If you are in the South Florida area, you may be interested in attending Barcamp Miami on Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 from 11am to 5pm at the Adrienne Arsht Performing Arts Center, Knight Concert Hall, 1300 Biscayne Blvd, Miami, FL 33132

One of the charms of a Barcamp is that most speakers are selected by attendees based on votes the day of the event!







I hope to see you at Barcamp Miami!

The Ten Hottest Strategies for Internet Marketing

Have you seen Slide Share? This is a great tool to view Power Point presentations. I recently followed a link to "The Ten Hottest Strategies for Internet Marketing" and I was pleased to see it has had over 2,000 views.



What do you think of Slide Share?

Thoughts on Social Media

It seems that everywhere you look these days you can find a link to share information on Facebook, Twitter, Sphinn, LinkedIn and the list goes on. Social media is a global phenomenon that has literally exploded in the last year and does not seem to be breaking down anytime soon. I even find myself checking my twitter grade just to see how far up the ladder and how many followers I could get almost on a daily basis, sad I know. I guess a good question to ask about social media would be, is it all beneficial? Everyone has their reasons for using social networks be it business or pleasure. For me it’s about staying connected. Staying connected with an industry that is evolving so much on a regular basis. It helps me to sort out what I feel might be important to read or not, or even just to stay in touch with worldwide news & events. All in all for me social media has been an amazing tool to keep me in touch with old friends, connect with new friends, and stay networked with those in my own industry who are willing to share important content. So if you ask me if social media is beneficial I say it most certainly is and if you are not connected you are surely missing out.

Here is a list of top social media sites for 2008 found at TechCrunch:


1. Blogger (222 million)
2. Facebook (200 million)
3. MySpace (126 million)
4. Wordpress (114 million)
5. Windows Live Spaces (87 million)
6. Yahoo Geocities (69 million)
7. Flickr (64 million)
8. hi5 (58 million)
9. Orkut (46 million)
10. Six Apart (46 million)
11. Baidu Space (40 million)
12. Friendster (31 million)
13. 56.com (29 million)
14. Webs.com (24 million)
15. Bebo (24 million)
16. Scribd (23 million)
17. Lycos Tripod (23 million)
18. Tagged (22 million)
19. imeem (22 million)
20. Netlog (21 million)


Those are some pretty telling numbers. So please stay connected with SFIMA on Twitter or Facebook you never know what good information you could be stumbling upon! No pun intended...

http://www.twitter.com/SFIMA
Facebook SFIMA Group

Video of the SFIMA Holiday 08 Wine Party

If you missed it or would like to relive the fun festivities of the evening, here is the video of the SFIMA Holiday Wine Tasting Party! A great time was had by all!


See you next Thursday at the Google World Event!

SFIMA's New YouTube Channel

SFIMA has a new YouTube channel for you to check out all of the event videos and leave comments, etc. You can subscribe to the channel and then you will be alerted anytime a new video is posted. Check out: www.youtube.com/sfima

Update on SFIMA GoogleWorld Event

GoogleWorld

Online Marketing in a Down Economy:
How do you speed up in a slowdown?

Save the date for SFIMA's first exciting educational event of the New Year!

Google Evangelist Sean Daily will highlight Google's search products that can help your business, whether it's a micro business or a Fortune 500, speed up in the slow economy. Product highlights will include Google Analytics, Website Optimizer, the Content Network, Insights for Search, Ad Planner and Display Ad Builder.

About the Speaker
Sean Daily, Google SEM Evangelist
Sean joined Google in 2003 as a member of the AdWords organization. During his 5 years as an Account Executive, Sean's sales experience ranged from local 'Mom & Pop' shops to top-tier agencies and SEM's. In 2006 Sean teamed up with Google's Dublin office to build a European Acquisitions Team, and in 2007 he received Google's prestigious Luminary Award for his work with SEM's. Sean is an award-winning filmmaker, a published journalist, and he holds a Bachelor's Degree from the University of Notre Dame.

Date: Thursday, 1/15/2009

Time: 6:30pm

Place: Jungle Island
1111 Parrot Jungle Trail
Miami, Florida 33132

Event sponsor:

Time for New Year's Resolutions SFIMA Can Help!

This is the week that everyone blogs about their New Year's resolutions for 2009. Well, SFIMA is here to help you achieve your New Year's Resolutions goals!

Joining SFIMA will help you attain so many of your professional goals!

* Meet new, local South Florida professionals in the search marketing industry.

* Learn new interactive marketing techniques, best practices, and the latest industry news at SFIMA monthly educational events and quarterly workshops.

* Get out from behind that computer! Have fun networking with other marketers that understand you and what you do! SFIMA has many networking and social events.

* A chance to get involved with a GREAT organization! Volunteer to help out with our events, you are always welcomed and appreciated by friendly SFIMA members!

Make joining the South Florida Interactive Marketing Association YOUR New Year's Resolution!

2009 Search Trends

We can anticipate several shifts in search based on what we've seen over the past decade and other signs in the media ecosystem. Here are some major changes to anticipate:

Written by David Berkowitz for Media Post

Holistic -- In Every Sense

The word "holistic" should play out in a number of ways.

Search Fragmentation

While the search engine landscape continues to be dominated by one player, new complexities keep emerging as search migrates far beyond the traditional engines.

This fall, comScore and Ad Age reported that YouTube surpassed Yahoo as the second-largest search engine; within days, YouTube announced its new search advertising platform. What's more, MySpace (563 million U.S. queries in October 2008, according to comScore) is a bigger search engine than both AOL (424 million) and Ask.com (362 million). Queries on eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon combined (980 million) nearly rival MSN.com (1.04 billion).

What does all of this mean for marketers?

New Models for SEO

These other search sources don't just operate in a vacuum; they impact the major search engines, too. Search engine optimization is shifting, from a focus of entirely maximizing a site's rank in the engines, to maximizing a site's reach across all the top-ranked listings on a search engine's results page. While many consumers go directly to a marketers' site, which should be positioned as prominently as possible in search engine results pages, many more consumers reach marketers through intermediary properties. These include blogs, social networks, photo sharing sites, Twitter, Wikipedia, and countless other social sites that tend to rank increasingly well in search engines. That means marketers have to shift their mindset from optimizing their Web site to optimizing their Web presence.

Your Car Engine's Your Search Engine

The biggest change in 2009 and beyond is that the device consumers search from will start to matter even more than which engine they use.

The most obvious manifestation of this is mobile consumption. New mobile devices and platforms such as the iPhone and Google Android are focused on improving the search and Web experience. This will fuel searches from mobile devices; iPhone users enter a disproportionate number of mobile search queries, though other devices are catching up.

Marketers need to adapt their strategies to reach their target audiences on these devices, such as by optimizing messaging and landing pages, and providing more consumer value by leveraging the unique features of these devices. For instance, mobile devices support integration with SMS (text messaging), click-to-call, mobile couponing, and location-based services, all of which take advantage of the mobile platform in ways that aren't as natural for PC-based Web advertising.

Over time, this trend of searches shifting beyond the PC will encompass far more than mobile phones. Consider the new set-top boxes and television models that make it easier to search from the TV, while delivering a hybrid TV-Web experience. Then there's vehicle telematics -- anyone who's searched for a restaurant, attraction, or drug store via a GPS device on the road will appreciate how valuable that can be. With all of these examples, and others to come, the device plays a significant role in how and why consumers search.

For the full article and more great insights into 2009, see Media Post Search Insider!

Follow SFIMA on Twitter

SFIMA is on Twitter! http://www.twitter.com/SFIMA

Follow us for updates and the latest SFIMA news!

Next SFIMA Educational Event is GoogleWorld!

Thursday, 1-15-2009

GoogleWorld - Google Presents The Latest And Greatest Online Marketing Products

More information to come. One of Google's evangelists will cover some of the latest and greatest from the Google World. (GoogleTV, Placements, Beta Programs, New Analytics Features, and More!)

Event Details Time/Date: 6:30pm - 10:00pm Thursday, 1-15-2009 Place: Jungle Island Miami, FL Contact: Membership@sfima.com Member Cost & Registration 0 Non Member Cost & Registration $39

The Year in Search: A 2008 Review

The Year in Search: A 2008 Review

The year's end marks a time to reflect on events over the past 12 months. Several search engines compiled the top searches in several categories for 2008, offering a glimpse into what was top of mind for searchers. Recaps from Google Zeitgeist; Yahoo Buzz; AOL's hot searches; top search terms at Ask.com; and Lycos highlight the trends that came and went over the course of the year.

For charts and details see Click Z

And for an even more in depth view of the popular search trends of 2008 see Google Zeitgeist

2008 Year-End Google Zeitgeist

As the year comes to a close, it's time to look at the big events, memorable moments and emerging trends that captivated us in 2008. As it happens, studying the aggregation of the billions of search queries that people type into the Google search box gives us a glimpse into the zeitgeist — the spirit of the times. We've compiled some of the highlights from Google searches around the globe and hope you enjoy looking back as much as we do.

Happy New Year 2009!

Wishing you all a Happy and Prosperous 2009 filled with success and great ideas!



Note: from the SFIMA Online Content Chair: "Shari, here with one of my New Year's Resolutions: to catch up on some old posts! So scroll down to see a few new overdue updates from the last couple of months."