Brand Central Station

Editor’s Note: This is the first guest post by a contributing writer to the Brand Central Station Blog.  Mary Ann Johnson is a member of Team Position2, experts in search and social media marketing and sent us this post on behalf of the team.  You can learn more about Position2 by visiting their web site.

by Team Position2

Social Media Monitoring has become a hot topic of discussion over recent times. A brand makes or breaks its name by its users.

With the huge outbreak in the online media and platforms like, blogs, forums, microblogs and different types of social networking sites people have an effective place to express their opinions and influence others. In the online world people own the brand. Social Media Monitoring is to keep track of all the conversations happening in the online world.

Social Media Monitoring is all about figuring on what the objectives are, listening, refining the talks, analyzing and taking action.

Social Media Monitoring and analysis can be used by a brand to improve a product, get feedbacks, customer service, market research or any marketing and communication.

(more…)

According to the annual MarketingSherpa, end-of-year survey of top online marketers, the more passive forms of lead acquisition (e.g. banner ads in e-newsletters and rented e-mail marketing lists) saw a fall-off in investment in 2007 versus the previous year. The more organic forms of list-building (e.g. excercising house lists, contextual search ads and SEO) have seen the best return and appear to be destined for larger shares of top marketers’ budgets in 2008.

Top online marketing tactics for last year (according to the MarketingSherpa research) include:

• Behaviorally targeted ads favored: Still a favorite, marketers say they will be investing more in them in 2008.

• House lists top paid search: More marketers reported success with house email lists than paid search ads — a reversal from a year earlier.

• Test, test, test again: Marketers are measuring and testing more in almost all categories surveyed.

• SEO begets strong ROI: Search engine optimization is delivering a strong return on investment, according to more than half of the marketers surveyed.

• Viral gains converts: Agencies are urging marketers to explore viral marketing and advertising in mobile phones, online video sites and virtual worlds.

A good bit of time was dedicated to discussing viral marketing, too – especially viral video.  Among the observations made:

• 93% of marketers said agencies recommend either an increase in spending or begin spending on viral video.

• 87% reported recommendations to start or increase viral marketing on social networking sites.

• 62% said agencies advised advertising in games and virtual worlds – the highest number of recommendations for a first-time budget while paradoxically attracting the highest number of recommendations to decrease spending. This confusion clearly reflects the medium’s unproven status.

• 60% saying they are urged to try wireless ads on mobile networks –- it came in second in first-time budget recommendations.

The debate about click fraud continues but our friends at the Business Pundit blog have put a new twist on the discussion by asking us to consider reverse click-fraud.

Is there such a thing?

I guess that can be a whole new debate.

In the Web 2.0 world, marketers and online businesses are focusing on user-generated and user-directed content. But in order to make the content manageable, there’s still a significant amount of automation required.

As a result, it feels (from time to time) that the result is a odd mish-mash of personal preference and pre-defined choice. Good or bad, that’s just how it is. (more…)

An instructional post from the SEOBook blog – and 101 ways to build your blog’s link popularity. (Take the lessons learned here and apply it to your other social media projects, too.)

SEO will remain an important factor (if not THE important factor) in driving the implied importance of your blog or web site. Links are the basic connector between sites and because of that search engines will continue looking for them and scoring your site accordingly.

And if 101 tips aren’t enough for you, try this.