Search Engine Marketing: Key Questions to Selecting a Vendor Partner

We recently went out in search of a partner / vendor for our pay-per-click activities, and we decided to enlist the help of local provider of search engine marketing services, Topside Media.

They keep a nice blog on their site, and they recently posted a nice list of the “Twelve Questions to Ask Providers of Search Engine Marketing.” It’s a great list, and it also shows off a key reason I decided to work with them: transparency. In fact, Topside was forthcoming enough to bring up most of these topics on their own, and the list is a nice one, so it merits sharing here as well for all of you to review.

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Marketing to the “Inner Animal”

It amazes me to see so much dry, ineffective marketing out there, much of it brought to market with large budgets and huge teams of professionals executing on it. And really, it’s quite easy to fall into groupthink when so many cooks are at play in the proverbial kitchen.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying you can’t execute effective marketing messaging, campaigns, etc. with a team-based approach. Quite the contrary, I’m actually saying a couple of things.

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Fantasy Sports: Why I Love Opening Weekend

In honor of the Major League Baseball opening weekend, I decided to take a moment today to reflect on why I love the start of the season in each of the sports that has a fantasy game I enjoy.

By this point in time, the vast majority of fantasy leagues have completed their drafts and are waiting in anticipation of the first pitch. While this may seem like the time that fantasy sports games start to the casual observer, that is far from the truth.

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Search Engine Marketing: Using Google AdWords As A Research Tool

Please enjoy the following guest post written by my friends at Top Side Media.

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In our experience with search engine advertising, one of its unique aspects is that, in addition to directly generating online sales or leads, its robust settings provide an excellent tool for business research and planning. In the creation and management of search engine ads, the campaigns, ad groups, and more granular settings gather a great deal of useful data. This is particularly true for Google AdWords. When specifically set up for testing, the potential is a marketer’s dream. For example, we control the following primary variables:

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Twitter URL Shortener: Good Response to Phishing

The news sort of came out a bit under the radar, but Twitter announced a very interesting change they are implementing on their blog (March 9, 2010). Positioned as a response to phishing, they will be changing URLs in Direct Messages to their own twt.tl shortened redirects. Essentially, they can then track for bad behavior and block the URL altogether if the target web page is found to be malicious.

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Information Security & the New Generational Gap

Since the RSA Conference is happening this week, I thought it would be different to do a piece that hits on both Real-time and Information Security. The following blog post is my own original work that appeared on The Network View, the official blog for Anue Systems, on November 12, 2009. It highlights some important sociological differences between the various generations of today’s adult population, and looks at how changing work habits and security need to find a workable balance.

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Fantasy Sports: Social Networking or Time-Wasting?

Most of you likely looked at the title of this post and wondered, “Tommy, what the heck are you talking about? Fantasy Sports is not social networking.”

On the surface, it’s easy to see why the game could be viewed that way. But I’m here to tell you that fantasy sports are as much a vehicle for social networking as Facebook, Flickr, and even foursquare / gowalla.

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