Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

Content, Search and Social: A Love Triangle

Posted on: May 8th, 2012 by Geoff Livingston 5 Comments

Caitlin Livingston & the Pyramids
My wife Caitlin “holds” a pyramid in her hands…

Experienced online marketers know there is no avoiding integrating content, search and social for a complete Internet strategy. They are irrevocably tied together, and increasingly so with Google, Bing and other search engines focused on adding social context to search.

I was reminded of this reading Top Rank Blogger and CEO Lee Odden‘s Optimize, which tackles the triple crown of online marketing – SEO, social media, and content marketing – with a deft hand. If you haven’t read it yet, Optimize does a great job of taking readers through the process of conducting research, choosing approaches, and encouraging familiar and new tactics alike to optimize just about every imaginable part of your online presence.

The dirty secret about social media was that in the beginning it was completely search driven with content and blogs sourced as primary content. Marketers began using blogs to compliment traditional marketing and trumping traditional web pages with fresh new content. Then social networks like Facebook and Twitter became entrenched in the online space. Search increasingly used social verification to qualify online content.
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What Comes First, Multichannel Integration or Social Business?

Posted on: April 30th, 2012 by Geoff Livingston 14 Comments

FUTURISTIC HOUSE by Architect Ephraim Henry Pavie
Image by ephy1

Most of the online hype about organizational social media adoption revolves around the “social business” craze. In my conversations, most businesses say they’re grappling with the multichannel integration into marketing. It begs the question, “What will come first, the full integration of social media into the marketing wheelhouse or the widespread rise of socially-enabled enterprises?”

Last January, we debated whether social business was BS or reality. It’s a good question, and one that’s still not fully answered in my mind.

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Why “The Pitch” Will Perpetuate Bad Practices

Posted on: April 24th, 2012 by Geoff Livingston 24 Comments

Perhaps you have seen the preview episode of The Pitch, AMC’s newest show about the advertising industry, which debuts on April 30. In this first episode WDCW competes against McKinney Advertising for a Subway breakfast ad campaign. While dramatic and entertaining, the episode also perpetuates several bad practices that plague the entire marketing sector.

This “reality” TV approach focuses on the tension of competitive pitching for major accounts. It assumes that winning depends on the creative that resonates most with the decision committee. In this case a Mac Lethal video-inspired campaign from McKinney out duels WDCW’s zAMbie campaign for Subway’s breakfast line.

But nowhere in the episode do we see serious conversations about the following:
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