Marketing Tom - Internet Marketing

WOMMA - Word of Mouth Marketing Association Conference in Chicago

WOMMA stands for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, if you're not already aware. In Chicago on July 13th, it will be holding the first-ever conference, called Measuring Word of Mouth, on measurement, metrics, and standards in word-of-mouth marketing. I must admit that I wasn't that familiar with the organisation unil I had an email from one of their people - Ben - asking if I could mention the event.

According to their website, WOMMA:

is the official trade association for the word of mouth marketing industry. WOMMA's mission is to promote and improve word of mouth marketing by:    

• Protecting consumers and the industry with strong ethical guidelines    
• Promoting WOM as an effective marketing tool    
• Setting standards to encourage its use

Judging by their line-up of speakers and subjects it does sound like it could be quite an interesting event to attend. There are speakers from the Harvard Business School, Future Now, Brand Dimensions and Nielsen/NetRatings. WOMMA claims that attendees will learn 5 things from the event:

1. Measure and Track Word of Mouth
2. Prove the ROI of WOM
3. Create a WOM Media Plan
4. Discover Why Messages Go Viral
5. Understand Why Customers Talk

Some of the talks and presentations that caught my eye were:

Optimizing WOM: Which Words Work?
Why People Talk: Consumer Behavior and Word of Mouth
"A Case For Using The Internet To Track Offline, Organic Word Of Mouth"
"The Blog Universe: Influencers, Early Adopters and Online Tenure Rolled into One"
"Customer Evangelists are Not Loyal Customers"

If you're interested in going to the event, please send me an email and I can send you a $50 discount code.

Twingine - Comparing Yahoo! and Google Search Engines

John Battelle picks up on a post by Russell Beattie regarding Twingine, a Google/Yahoo! comparison search engine. Simply type in your search terms and Twingine will display your Google and Yahoo! results side-by-side within your browser.

It's quite interesting to see what he actually has to say about Yahoo! results:

I should be eating our own corporate dogfood more at work and doing my web searches at Yahoo! Search instead of Google but old habits die hard. Yahoo! Search is easily as good, but for some reason I've always got this nagging doubt in my mind of whether I'm seeing the absolute best search results or not. So I end up using Google a lot to ease my suspicions.

I have actually been thinking the same about the results that Yahoo! throws up. Recently, I have ended up down dead alleys with Google, whilst Yahoo! has offered me far better results. Why not try out Twingine and see what you think?

Tailored Destination Page

On carrying out a search for "Movable Type Tutorial" I got taken to this weblog by Rick Klau, which welcomed me with the following message:

Talk of tailoring web pages to mirror search engine search words!!

High Percentage of Advertisers Would Advertise on Blogs

Here's an interesting story from ZDNET regarding blogs and advertising. Quoting a Forrester survey they state that :

"64% of respondents to Forrester's survey said they are interested in advertising on blogs, 57% through RSS".

Marketing Sherpa Lists Their Top 10 Blogs for 2005

Marketing Sherpa has just posted the results of the Marketing Sherpa 10 Best Blogs for 2005. I am not sure what's more interesting - the results of the survey or the fact that of the 173,000 who were invited to cast their votes, only 2,065 people actually did vote - that's just 1.2%. Anyway, here are the categories that people were invited to vote on:

Best individual's blog on the general topic of marketing and advertising - actually won by Seth Godin
Best group weblog on the general topic of marketing and advertising
Best PR-topic blog - Interestingly, Paul Rubel of Micropersuasion didn't even get a mention!
Best B-to-B marketing-topic blog
Best blog on small business marketing
Best blog on online marketing
Blogs on Search Marketing
Best Blog on Niche Marketing
Best non-English-Language Blog
Top readers' choice write-in vote

All the winners and 'honorable mentions' can be found on the Marketing Sherpa site.

Spyware Daily Blog

I have been helping a Canadian Anti-Spyware company, called Pareto Logic, develop a corporate blog over the past couple of months. The blog, Spyware Daily, aims to "tackle issues relating to Spyware, Adware, Internet Threats and Other Important Technology Issues". It has certainly been an interesting project and we are almost at the point where we feel confident that we can spin it out to the Internet community.

However, before the PR engine is cranked up and we start letting people know about this anti-spyware blog, I thought I'd invite visitors to take a look at Spyware Daily and let me know what they think. I'm interested in all comments, from the banner header and navigation style to the content and side bar modules. I would appreciate all comments (but don't make them too nasty!!). Please feel free to email me at alun@marketingtom.com with your thoughts.

Search Engine Strategies London

I just came back from my first Search Engine Strategies conference in London. And I must say that I really enjoyed it. It  was good to finally listen to some of the SEO gurus - Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman, Shari Thurow, Ammon Johns - instead of reading what they have to say. At the heart of most presentations was the simple idea that you need to focus on your target audience and use the language that they use; everything else just spins off this - page titles, web page introductions, web site navigation, etc.

For me the most enjoyable presentations came from Shari Thurow and Heather Lloyd-Martin. Shari was given her own slot to discuss Search Engine Friendly Design, whilst Heather shared hers with David Mill of MediaCo and discussed Writing for the Search Engines. I must say that it was quite refreshing to listen to 2 speakers who were not only passionate about their subject but were also able to instil some passion into the audience.

Another discussion I found interesting was entitled Integrating Search Into Other Marketing. Marshall D Simmonds , VP of Enterprise Search Marketing for the New York Times, told the audience how his team tries to bring together the different divisions within the company - IT, Marketing and Finance - to work together om an integrated approach to marketing. It was interesting to hear him say that writers are more or less being taught to 'unlearn' their previous copywriting skillls in order to dael with both search engines and the online audience and that they now have to think very carefully think about how to introduce their keywords into headlines, page titles, content and anchor text.

All in all a good event.