Rand is cool, Rand knows his stuff and Rand tells it like it is.
First of all, let me join Rand in congratulating Aaron Kahlow on putting on a terrific OMS event again this year. 500 interactive marketers from all over the country says a lot about the value presented here. It reminded me of what Marketing Sherpa used to be before Anne Holland escaped to Serbia and started eating meat :-)
But Rand's point is spot on when it comes to the irrational distraction of social media by many internet marketers. As we have all said many times, as far as web activity goes, 90+ percent of all web activity is search and email. What I need is for someone to explain to me why conference agenda's are full of sessions about a facebook strategy, or building your own social network?
I saw an article about the PC volume battle between Dell and HP this weekend. Dell has lost the lead in Global PC sales, and is on the verge of losing the lead in US Market Share as well. Yet, Dell is being held up as the paragon of Social Media engagement.
I'm not saying that's not valuable or worthy, but we need to keep this in perspective. in the 4th quarter, Dell's marketshare slipped to 28.6% from 30.8% a year earlier.
And trust me, I'm doing my part. Personally I love Dell, Compendium Blogware is one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the country and we are all Dell all the time. But we can't do it alone, and no social media strategy can do it alone....
What can do it alone is a search strategy. Dell needs to sell just under 5mm PC's a quarter to keep the lead. They sell about 4.5mm doing what they are doing, so somewhere they need to find another half million in sales.
Test this for yourself, there are nearly 50 million searches around the products that Dell (and HP) sells each month across many hundreds of unique terms. Almost none of which is driving traffic organically to them. This is INTENT. 600,000 people a month type in "buy laptop" because they are looking for laptops.
If you believe like I do that relevant search traffic is driven by two things, data and content, then it becomes apparent how companies should be leveraging their blog content. Not narrowly focused towards subscribers or comments, but aimed squarely at SEO. a Corporate or Business Blogging strategy needs to be both scaled to generate the approprieate amount of relevant content and that content needs to be organizeds based on data. In this case we are talking about your keywords as data.
People often ask me: What should my company blog about? Blog about your keywords. That's exactly what your marketplace is telling you they care about. They wouldn't be using those terms is they wanted to hear about those topics. Whoever delivers a page that is full of nothing but content releveant to that topic (alone), that's frequently updated and written by real and passionate human beings is going to get the search engagement...the problem for most is how to scale this over hundreds or thousands of keywords....and of course that is where Compendium comes in.
First of all, let me join Rand in congratulating Aaron Kahlow on putting on a terrific OMS event again this year. 500 interactive marketers from all over the country says a lot about the value presented here. It reminded me of what Marketing Sherpa used to be before Anne Holland escaped to Serbia and started eating meat :-)
But Rand's point is spot on when it comes to the irrational distraction of social media by many internet marketers. As we have all said many times, as far as web activity goes, 90+ percent of all web activity is search and email. What I need is for someone to explain to me why conference agenda's are full of sessions about a facebook strategy, or building your own social network?
I saw an article about the PC volume battle between Dell and HP this weekend. Dell has lost the lead in Global PC sales, and is on the verge of losing the lead in US Market Share as well. Yet, Dell is being held up as the paragon of Social Media engagement.
I'm not saying that's not valuable or worthy, but we need to keep this in perspective. in the 4th quarter, Dell's marketshare slipped to 28.6% from 30.8% a year earlier.
And trust me, I'm doing my part. Personally I love Dell, Compendium Blogware is one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the country and we are all Dell all the time. But we can't do it alone, and no social media strategy can do it alone....
What can do it alone is a search strategy. Dell needs to sell just under 5mm PC's a quarter to keep the lead. They sell about 4.5mm doing what they are doing, so somewhere they need to find another half million in sales.
Test this for yourself, there are nearly 50 million searches around the products that Dell (and HP) sells each month across many hundreds of unique terms. Almost none of which is driving traffic organically to them. This is INTENT. 600,000 people a month type in "buy laptop" because they are looking for laptops.
If you believe like I do that relevant search traffic is driven by two things, data and content, then it becomes apparent how companies should be leveraging their blog content. Not narrowly focused towards subscribers or comments, but aimed squarely at SEO. a Corporate or Business Blogging strategy needs to be both scaled to generate the approprieate amount of relevant content and that content needs to be organizeds based on data. In this case we are talking about your keywords as data.
People often ask me: What should my company blog about? Blog about your keywords. That's exactly what your marketplace is telling you they care about. They wouldn't be using those terms is they wanted to hear about those topics. Whoever delivers a page that is full of nothing but content releveant to that topic (alone), that's frequently updated and written by real and passionate human beings is going to get the search engagement...the problem for most is how to scale this over hundreds or thousands of keywords....and of course that is where Compendium comes in.
Comments for I wish I was Rand Fishkin
blog comments powered by Disqus