In the afternoon, partners split up into separate tracks: Search Partners and Integrated Partners. Here are a few highlights from the afternoon sessions:
Follow these informative digital marketing events in person or online
Below is an extensive list of upcoming search, social media and marketing events around the globe taking place in September 2010, with descriptions provided by the sponsors. We’ve included the Twitter pages and hashtags where available, so that you can follow chatter from the event organizers even if you can’t attend in person.
Know of any we missed? Please feel free to share them with our readers in the comments section.
iMedia Brand Summit, US Date: September 12-15 Where: Coronado, CA Twitter: @imedia Cost: (request invite) Event Description: The iMedia Summit provides a rich environment to chart your company’s digital future among peer-level executives, industry thought leaders and select publishers and service providers.
Search Engine Strategies (SES) Hong Kong Date: September 13-14 Where: Hong Kong Twitter: @sesconf Cost: $895-$995 Event Description: This conference will be packed with sessions covering PPC management, keyword research, SEO, social media, local, mobile, link-building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization and usability, plus networking events, parties and more.
Ad Club Leadership Breakfast Date: September 14 Where: New York, NY Cost: $65-$275
Join Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo!; and Peter Sachse, Chief Marketing Officer of Macy’s, as they discuss the importance of understanding today’s consumer and the best ways to connect with them. Sponsored by Yahoo!.
Yahoo!’s CEO to discuss today’s biggest marketing challenges
Will you be in New York City on September 14? Then clear your morning for a little VIP networking with Carol Bartz.
Yahoo!’s CEO will join Macy’s CMO Peter Sachse at a program called “The Power of the Consumer: Understanding today’s complex audience,” sponsored by The AD Club of NYC. The event is the first of a three-part Leadership Breakfast Series and will feature a panel discussion moderated by Michael Learmonth, Digital Editor of Ad Age, that promises to:
Explore the needs of today’s consumers
Reveal how to emotionally connect your brand with an elusive online audience
Discuss how to build effective campaigns and create meaningful consumer experiences
“The Power of the Consumer” will be held at the New York Athletic Club from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. Tickets are $65 for AD Club members and $95 for non-members. Seats are limited.
Video: Industry Experts Share Tips for Targeting Women Online
Listen to key insights from The Women Connectonomics Study
Did you know that women will control $28 trillion in annual spending globally by 2014?
We did. That’s why Yahoo! researchers surveyed thousands of women to create The Women Connectonomics study. It’s a definitive look at the needs the Internet fulfills for women, why they turn to certain online channels and how receptive they are to advertising messages on various sites. Key study findings include:
The top needs for women revolve around personal growth and their interdependencies on others.
Women’s lifestyle sites like Yahoo! Shine and special interest sites fulfill the most needs for women.
Women are three times more receptive to marketing messages on lifestyle, specialty and review sites.
The study was released in late July at a Chicago event attended by industry leaders like top bloggers, CMOs, and key agency executives. Check out their expert tips for helping your brand connect with women online.
A sneak peek into the new Yahoo! Content Syndication Exchange
Speaking at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco, Wendi Sturgis, Vice President, North America, Business Development and Partnerships Group at Yahoo!, talks about what’s being called (for now) the Yahoo! Content Syndication Exchange—a new platform that will allow publishers to draw down Yahoo! search and other content, content from our vast array of partners, from Associated Content, from Facebook, Twitter, and more.
Tough choices between PPC and SEO, and how to become a search marketing pro
Lee Odden, Mike Grehan and pals at the Black Hat, White Hat cocktail party
Day three of the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco was, admittedly, a bit of a graveyard. We reckon that, after the Yahoo! | Bing cocktail hour on Tuesday and the Black Hat, White Hat Un-conference soirée on Wednesday, people needed a bit of a rest. But the future goes to the hearty and the hearty showed up. So here are a couple of final tips to live by in the digital marketing world.
Do you have to choose?
The session “PPC vs. SEO” was set up as a debate to determine which is the more effective method of getting traffic. Melanie Mitchell, the SVP of Search Strategy at Digitas, argued that paid search allows you to “own the presentation,” as Toyota effectively did during its period of bad PR in ’09 and ’10, using PPC ads to push down the page news items about recalls. She also showed how Delta Airlines’ tickets sold and incremental revenue rose and fell as the company increased and decreased its PPC spend on brand keywords. In the end, Mitchell said, “PPC and organic don’t cannibalize each other, and using both together results in significant lift for both, as it enables you to reach the entire search audience.”
Quantity over quality: As a devotee of SEO, Rand Fishkin, the CEO of SEOmoz.org, stated that while PPC has a 20% higher conversion rate than SEO, SEO gets 7.3X the clicks that PPC does. Paid search providers also enforce a bunch of restrictions on ad copy, where as what you put in your meta data is your own choice. Still, he admitted, PPC is easier to use and easier to test, but that fact increases the number of competitors you have. In other words, a lot of firms get scared off by the work required for effective SEO.
Become a search marketing pro
Appropriately, the last session we attended at SES covered advanced paid search tactics, giving the audience a slew of useful takeaways. David Rodnitzky, Founder and CEO of PPC Associates, offered seven tips for getting your campaigns to the next level: 1) Use the right engines (have search and content keywords in different campaigns and optimize each separately); 2) Use the right keywords (the “long tail” is highly overrated—do “keyword sculpting” by creating targeted landing pages, copy, geo-targeting and dayparting); 3) Use the right bids (you can’t “set it and forget it”); 4) Use the right ad copy (engines’ maps, shopping and other features to gain more real estate); 5) Use the right landing pages (test headlines, buttons, conversion funnel, video, benefit statements—this can provide more lift than anything else); 6) Use the right tracking (purchase latency can be as high as 60%); and 7) Use the right targeting (it can turn bad keywords into good ones).
After the opening day of the Search Engine Strategies 2010 conference in San Francisco, Yahoo! and Bing got together to host a little—well, big—cocktail reception in the exhibition hall. We can assure you that there were shenanigans. Among these was the Yahoo! Photo booth, where conference goers were encouraged to don silly costumes for candid snaptshots. See the Flickr slide show below.
Innovation the name of the game at the 2010 Yahoo! Partner Summit, Part I
Did you know that, in addition to 621 million users each month, Yahoo! has more than 1,700 active partners in nearly every corner of the globe? These partners include content, search, advertising, toolbar, mobile, local, broadband and more, in a relationship that embraces openness and benefits advertisers and consumers.
You’ve heard the old adage, “competition ensures quality.” Well, at Yahoo! we believe that cooperation can also help ensure quality, while open dialogue can help spur innovation. That’s why August 16, we invited 140 of our partners from 17 countries to come together at our Sunnyvale campus for the 2010 Yahoo! Partner Summit to share knowledge, get a sneak peak of the innovations coming down the pike, do a little networking and have some fun.
Here’s just a smattering of what was shared during the first half of the Summit:
SVP Raymond Stern and VPs Wendi Sturgis and Finnegan Faldi kicked off the proceedings. Raymond noted that this was our first truly global Yahoo! Partner Summit, while Wendi said that this year’s summit, much larger than any previous, showed how Yahoo! is “evolving its focus on partners.” Citing our 400-plus search partners in the U.S. alone and 860 worldwide, plus our more than 500 integrated partners in North America alone and many more around the globe, the group demonstrated how partners are critical to Yahoo’s raison d’etre. Faldi talked about building trust and transparency between Yahoo! and its partners, deepening those ties and and expanding collaborative initiatives.
CEO Carol Bartz took the stage first and was later joined by EVP Hilary Schneider for a Q&A. She talked about Yahoo!’s commitment to innovation. “We spend most of our time,” Carol said, “trying to figure out the future paradigm of the Internet.” Carol touted the Today Module on the Yahoo! frontpage, noting that the module serves up 32,000 different permutations at any given moment, 1 million per day, doubling the frontpage clickthrough rate.
Other fun Bartz facts:
According to eye tracking studies, men tend to be blind to banner ads but like ads in the lower left; women and teens tend to like banners.
Provoking laughs, Carol noted that male teens are lying when they say in focus groups that they only care about games and ignore celebrity gossip of the kind Yahoo! serves on omg! “We know they do,” she said. “We have the data.”
Illustrating Yahoo!’s commitment to a global platform that meets local needs (buzzword of the day: “glocal”), Carol noted that 95% of purchases occur within 5 miles of the home, making so-called “tail content” vital now and in the long term.
Yahoo! Mail processes 100 billion emails a month while stopping 500 billion spam emails, all while serving 10 billion ads per day.
Carol noted that Yahoo! is committed to superior targeting in which advertisers will be able to buy audiences rather than mere demographics.
The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is on track and going well. Organic search in the United States and English results in Canada began transitioning this week. (For more on this click over the Yahoo! Advertising blog.)
Notable Quote: Ever provocative (just the way we like her), Carol noted that she’d gone through “one-and-a half years of scrutiny” in the media during her tenure as Yahoo!’s CEO, saying, “I don’t get up in the morning wondering what off color things I’m going to say.” (True to that, Carol’s Curse Count for the session was a mere 3 swear words.)
Deep mobile, common courtesy, spooky display and refining your campaigns
Yahoo's Paul Cushman checks his Twitter feed at SES
Day two of the Search Engine Strategies confab was, in a way, even more intense than the first, with sessions going deep into the details of mobile, search and display advertising. Here are some lessons learned.
Give their thumbs a rest
It’s one of Paul Cushman’s (he’s Yahoo!’s Senior Director of Mobile Sales Strategy) favorite truisms, invoked at the session “Getting Mobilized: Mobile Marketing Strategies: “Mobile is a channel, not a strategy.” Panelists Cindy Krum (Rank-Mobile), Sandeep Aggarwal (Caris & Co.) and Michael Martin (Mobile Martin) then proved his point, going way deep into the geek weeds of mobile SEO and usability.
One key takeaway for mobile eCommerce marketers is a simple one. “It’s a pain in the butt to enter your financial information on the phone with your thumbs,” said Krum. Instead, consider employing a payment solution like PayPal to make it easier on the user—and always provide a bail-out, one-touch phone number. After all, mobile users are on the phone, right? (Which, not incidentally, is another Cushmanism.)
Courtesy counts, online and off
At the session “Twitternation & Automation,” moderator Matt McGowan, Publisher and Head of U.S., Incisive Media, announced a surprise panelist. In addition to the previously announced speakers (Tracy Falke of Freestyle Interactive and Paul Madden of Crea8 New Media), 140Conference founder, renowned twitterphile and friend of Yahoo! Jeff Pulver would also be presenting.
Pulver gave his stock, “it-all-started-with-HAM-radio” and “Twitter is about love” speech while the other panelists patiently waited their turns. When it was time for Falke to give her talk on how she handles multiple Twitter accounts, Pulver pounced, interrupting repeatedly with quips and snide, though intelligent, remarks. During Madden’s admittedly “gray hat” Twitter automation talk, Pulver ejaculated, “You are EVIL.”
Granted, Madden pays legion of sweat shop copywriters in the Philippines $1.40 an hour to create fake Twitter personas and stories, but the effect was that of a teenager flaming others in an online forum circa 1999. It did, however, make for one of the liveliest sessions at SES. Pulver eventually backed off a little, saying during the Q&A period, “It’s evil, but it’s also brilliant, and I respect that.” Well, after all, the best panelists are entertainers and the best entertainers are insult comics.
Paul Cushman, Senior Director of Mobile Sales Strategy for Yahoo!, talks about the session he moderated, “Getting Mobilized: Mobile Marketing Strategies,” at the SES conference in San Francisco, August 18, 2010, as well as some of Yahoo’s initiatives in mobile.
