Marketing Biz: Proving Social Ads Work, Enterprise-Level SEO and Social Solutions, and DIY Reputation Management

There were a few interesting and contrasting trends this week. The first was around enterprise-level solutions to Internet marketing challenges. Major brands and Fortune 500 companies are investing in solutions that can help them with both SEO and social media.

At the other end of the spectrum you have solutions for SMBs and every day people who, ultimately, have similar challenges in leveraging the Internet for their personal brand or business.

The thread through both is that it all comes down to us, the people, and what we really want and how we respond.

Twitter & Facebook share a problem: Proving social ads work

Google had unparalleled success by adding keyword-related ads to its business because people who are actively searching for a term are more likely to be interested in buying something related to that term — they are farther down the road of “purchasing intent,” in advertising lingo. But activity on both Twitter and Facebook often has very little to do with purchasing anything, and suddenly trying to hijack a conversation and turn it in that direction can have unpleasant consequences, as retailers like McDonald’s have found when their hashtag campaigns turn into “bashtags.”

I’m a big fan of Mathew Ingram and this article is one of the reasons why. Everyone is extremely interested in social advertising and there’s no question that brands are investing and testing this new channel. The industry wants social ads to work. It’s a lot more fun to talk about (and sell) the potential success rather than warn about pitfalls. But remember, ABC wanted Cop Rock to work too.

Thismoment Reports 3x Growth for 2011 as Need for Full-Range Social Content Management Systems Increases Among Global Brands

With more than 100 Fortune 500 brands adopting thismoment’s Distributed Engagement Channel (DEC) platform, the company is quickly becoming the ideal solution for all brands who want to unify their social channels and consolidate management of online assets. DEC allows brands and their agencies to simultaneously drive content engagement and customer conversation management across multiple social media touch points.

Social content management is clearly an issue. Heck, it can be hard for an individual to keep track of their personal brand and manage all of their social properties. Can you imagine a Fortune 500 company trying to do the same? Not only do these enterprise-level solutions help consolidate online assets they provide continuity through natural employee churn.

Conductor Leads the Half a Billion Dollar SEO Technology Sector With 300 Percent Customer Growth Year-Over-Year

Conductor maintains a stampede of interest by major brands as they look to replace manual and disparate tools with a strategic, enterprise-level SEO solution. Large brands like FedEx, Siemens and General Electric turn to Conductor Searchlight to optimize their natural search marketing programs. On average, Conductor Searchlight users triple the amount of keywords moving onto page-one by actively implementing the intelligence and recommendations delivered in the platform. Many customers report an increase in natural search traffic of more than 60 percent after deploying Searchlight.

SEO is (finally) big business. Paid search had always been more attractive to large brands because it was easier to implement and measure. Enterprise-level SEO solutions, like Conductor, have changed that dynamic, making SEO more accessible. You may think these brands could go further or smirk at the turn of phrase ‘stampede of interest’ but Conductor is converting the stubborn into SEO converts. That can’t be bad.

Former Facebook engineering director Yishan Wong takes role as CEO of Reddit

Wong was instrumental in building up Facebook’s engineering operations after serving for more than four years at Paypal.

Outside of work, Wong is quite prolific on knowledge sharing site Quora and is known for his often irreverent and contrarian answers — a knack that should serve him well while running Reddit.

That cheer you heard a few days ago? Those were Redditors celebrating the news that Yishan Wong was becoming CEO of Reddit. The vocal and vibrant community has flourished despite a number of twists, turns and obstacles along the way. Recent moves by Reddit seem to indicate that they want to grow even bigger and find a wider audience. I have my doubts but am interested to see if Reddit can pull it off.

ReachLocal Announces New Chief Product Officer

In his new role as CPO, (Kris) Barton will be primarily responsible for the development of new products and the ongoing optimization of the Company’s core online marketing products, including ReachSearch™,ReachCast™ and ReachDisplay™. Barton will also focus on the internationalization of these products as ReachLocal continues its expansion into new global markets.

Small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) still struggle to use the Internet as an effective sales and marketing channel. The knowledge gap here is still enormous which is why companies like ReachLocal are a necessary part of the ecosystem and will be for quite some time. Internationalization is certainly attractive, but frustration from SMBs is still high so I firmly believe that the best (most usable) product will ultimately be the difference in this vertical.

BrandYourself.com Launches Free Platform to Help Any Person Control Their Name In Google

Users simply submit any positive links they want showing up at the top of Google–their LinkedIn profile, a personal website, an article written about them, etc.–and use BrandYourself’s simple tools to help those links rank higher for their name, burying unwanted results in the process. Users can also build a BrandYourself profile, which is the only one on the web automatically optimized to show up high in Google for their name.

Reputation management will become increasingly important as people spend more time online and the amount of digital content being produced increases. The DIY solution from BrandYourself sounds interesting. The freemium service seems aimed at democratizing and demystifying the optimization process. Give it a test and tell me if you think they’ve succeeded.