The March 26th edition of The New York Times carried a story about Twitter and how celebrities have turned to ghost writers to put out the 140 character text messages. The article cited examples, and quoted celebrities and consultants (i.e., ghost Twitterers) who explain and defend the "ghosts" in Twitter as acceptable. Basketball star, Shaq and cycling great, Armstrong, were the standouts in their opinion that it is pitiful if someone, even a busy celebrity, couldn't regularly string together 140 characters conveying their own thoughts and opinions to their fans and followers.

So, what should we make of this? Does it even matter?

It definitely matters. In this age of information overload when messages are being created, re-transmitted, ... Read more...

I was excited by the large turn-out at the Q&A session I hosted in Santa Clara at SMX West—the popular conference for online and search engine marketing experts. Leading up to the SMX conference what weighed on my mind was the obvious—our collective anxiety about the recession and the ubiquitous pressure to do more with less. Focusing the Q&A on strategies and spending choices across PPC, SEO and Social Media Marketing must have struck a chord because we covered more questions in greater depth than I anticipated. The savvy search marketers at SMX zeroed in on questions like “PPC advertising–Technology or Human Driven?” and “Social Media Marketing for brand reputation monitoring and brand healing?". Folks wanted to hear about Ford's Scott Monty ... Read more...

To the uninitiated, PPC appears very simple: buy a few keywords, serve up a few ads and close a few deals. The reality is that professionally managed and optimized keyword campaigns are actually very complex business processes that touch many facets of an organization and require many skill sets to execute properly.

The following are recommended steps for initiating, managing and optimizing PPC campaigns:

• Narrowly define product and/or service offerings

• Define market(s) for each offering

• Set measurable objectives (KPIs) for each service/market combination

• Use empathy with your prospects
  • By service/market combination, to determine keywords prospects will use when searching for your solution

• Generate keywords: thousands of them

• Cluster keywords into campaigns

• You need at least several campaigns

• Write multiple ads per campaign
  • You need at least two ads/campaign
  • Ongoing: Optimize ads ... Read more...

We hear this often from prospective clients: “We need to be on twitter ASAP!” While this may be true, our response to this exclamation is something along the lines of, “What do you expect as an end result of this?” There is a lot of hype about social media marketing and many wonder where to begin.  First, a definition is in order. Position2’s definition of Social Media Marketing (SMM) is having a conversation with self-selected communities that share a common interest and fit the profile or demographics that you are trying to reach or influence. Successful SMM campaigns are iterative processes that constantly evaluate, monitor and analyze hypotheses around:

• Audiences

• Messages

• Mediums

After performing numerous SMM projects for clients, Position2 concludes that there are five possible primary ... Read more...