Act Now Before All the May Grads are Taken!

May Interactive Grads Doing Well in the Marketplace 

This is the happy time of year when my students are reporting daily that they are accepting jobs and internships with interactive agencies and client companies.  +Rebecca Mensing  is going to work at Resolution Media and both +Taylor Staus  and +Brittany Sarkisian were accepted into the Dotomi management rotation program.Thanks to board member +Neil Brown for hiring former IMB student board President +Mike Glassberg for an internship.

Post Your Job on Huskies Get Hired

Sorry there is not time to mention everyone.  If you are still looking for an intern-to-hire or a full time grad versed in social media, SEO and SEM, and other aspects of direct and digital marketing, check out the Interactive Marketing Portfolio on the NIU Huskies Get Hired web site.  You can post your jobs there as well.  Since the semester has ended, this is the best way to reach out to recent graduates and the close to 300 program graduates we have.

Spotlight on Kevin Simon: Interactive Generalist with Psychology Minor

One student still seeking a job with the best fit is this week's guest blogger, +Kevin Simon .  Kevin writes that he just received "a Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing, a certificate in interactive marketing and a minor in psychology from Northern Illinois University. I was accepted in the Marketing Honor Society last semester which was a great honor.

In addition to my academic studies, I have been a member of the Sigma Nu Fraternity for four years. I have held three positions within the fraternity, one on the Executive Board for the past two years.  These leadership roles allow me to communicate with other members on a daily basis and improve my charisma and delegating abilities. I held the alumni relations chair position for two years maintaining a database of almost 500 alumni, designing and editing semi-annual newsletters, and updating our website.

I also just stepped down as the treasurer of the Circle K International community service organization which has allowed me to learn money management skills as well as earn over fifty hours in community service not including opportunities with the fraternity. I have also had many opportunities to work with other groups on campus including the Campus Activities Board, Financial Management Society, as well as many intramural sports.  These diverse and well rounded roles have helped me develop excellent communication and teamwork skills."  

Kevin is seeking a full-time position in the interactive marketing field after graduating. His Interactive Marketing classes have helped targeting specific areas he finds most interesting.  He would like to find a generalist position in interactive marketing where he could use his psychology minor and his leadership and planning skills.  Good fits would be online marketing research, social media management, website usability and testing.

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

Scholarship Awards Ceremony Honors Interactive Marketing Students

At our Scholarship Awards Ceremony last Saturday, April 13, 2013 at Barsema Hall at Northern Illinois University, we honored a number of graduates in our Interactive Marketing program.  Recipients of the Interactive Marketing Board Awards were +Sarah Harant and +Nicole Gault (shown above with +Dave Henkel and +Debra Zahay-Blatz.   The Zahay-Blatz Family Award went to +Sekou Noriega.  Joe Glaser from Glaser Direct presented his award, targeted for those interested in B2B, to +Nick Kochetta.  The Johnson & Quin Award was presented by President +Dave Henkel to +Amanda Forneck, who will be beginning a full-time position at Johnson & Quin in the Fall.   Thanks to the generosity of our Corporate Advisory Board members for these Awards.

These awards were given for scholarship and dedication to the Interactive Marketing Field.  Look for these talented graduates to make substantive contributions to careers in Search (SEO and SEM), Social Media, Email, Website Usability and Testing and other areas that are a focus for our Interactive Marketing Program.

Interactive Marketing students also receiving scholarships were +Jason Conklin and Allison Greco, recipients of the Michael T. McSweeney Endowed Direct Marketing Scholarship. Interactive Marketing Student Board President +Mike Glassberg received both the Marketing Achievement Award sponsored by the Department of Marketing Faculty and the Top Marketing Achiever Award. Student board member +Antonio Garay received the Always be Contributing Award.

A highlight for me was the fact we honored +Dave Henkel as an honorary Alumnus of the Department of Marketing at Northern Illinois University   Dave's company, Johnson & Quin, has recruited on campus most years out of the last 20 and has hired closed to 30 people out of the IM program and it's predecessor program in Direct Marketing.  Dave said the association with NIU is a good fit because our students are hard-working and come in well prepared.  Program graduates don't have to be taught the basic vocabulary of the direct and interactive business because they have already learned in in their Marketing classes and Interactive Marketing classes in particular.  Dave has been a corporate board member for almost ten years and this award was well-deserved.  Thanks to Dave for his service to NIU and the IM program and congratulations to all on their awards.
By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

NIU Interactive Students Bridge Theory/Practice Gap

We strive to create opportunities for our students to interact with companies and create real-world experience for our students.  The picture above shows a student actively networking at our Spring 2012 Internet Marketing Conference.  Last semester our Marketing Technology students worked with real-life clients like Ideosity, a web development company specializing in manufacturers with large online product catalogs to manage,  Allworld Machinery Supply, Inc. and the Department of Marketing at NIU to plan, develop and implement Paid Search and Social Media campaigns for these clients   Former Students Kalli Bravos and Tim Yapp are working at Ideosity and Allworld respectively and they wanted to come back and work with the students and learn something themselves.

We always take a strategic view of these issues, so after analyzing the competitive environment, search trends and the company's unique positioning and core strengths, the students last semester made practical suggestions to improve their clients websites.  The clients really appreciated the feedback and made changes almost immediately so they could benefit from the advice. Students then developed AdWords and social media campaigns which they implemented and measured.

Our class was even written up on Yahoo! News for our efforts.  All the clients were so happy that they agreed to come back this semester for more help and insights.  In addition, the students are helping out our own Interactive Marketing Program, which offers a Certificate in the area and teaches students paid and organic search, social media, email marketing, web site usability and testing and other real-world digital marketing skills.

This semester we are taking things a step further.  Each group right now is working on a targeted paid search campaign with a custom landing page linked to Google Analtyics as well as AdWords.  So the students will be able to provide even more analyses of their campaigns.  The students are learning how to work with IT departments to get custom landing pages put together and how to get the code that Google Analytics needs on these web pages.  I am sure they will find these skills valuable in their careers.

The second half of the semester, students will write a comprehensive social media plan for their client as well as a personal campaign for themselves, particularly highlighting how they will use Linkedin to help them in their job search.  I was just listed in the top 1% of all viewed profiles of Linkedin, so I hope this shows I am qualified to teach this material.  Of course, there are two million other people in the same category!

 Stay tuned for more news about our class and let me know if you have any questions or want to know how to hire our well-qualified graduates.  Our Internship and Job Fairs are next week and I have included a link to more information if you want to sign up.  Over 175 employers will be attending the Job Fair alone and our Interactive Students popular (we have an 85% placement rate) so don't delay getting to know these talented folks.

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

Content Marketing Makes Sense of Social Media

I recently attended a webinar on content marketing hosted by +Tim Ash of SiteTuners and featuring +Joe Pulizzi.  Joe says marketers are not only publishers, but teachers and story-tellers as well.  The graphic above illustrates Joe’s concept that marketers are all story-tellers now and tell their stories across channels. Joe gave the example of one of the first content marketers as John Deere.  That company had a new concept, a steel-tipped plough versus iron and created its own company magazine, The Furrow, to get the word out.  That magazine now has 1.5 million subscribers in 14 languages.

Contemporary examples of those doing content marketing well include Red Bull, which has its own media house within the company.  Red Bull has a record label, its own video magazine and a content pool of sports, culture and lifestyle material that  that includes a full media catalog, “plug-and-play web clips, documentaries, news pieces, photo shoots, the latest interviews, and accompanying editorials.”  The content pool contains over 50,000 photos and 5,000 videos alone.  Also, The Coca-Cola Company has four full time writers and a team of forty freelancers devoted to content marketing and has documented its strategic plan for content marketing on YouTube as it moves from ‘creative excellent’ to ‘content excellence.”

This trend toward content marketing is not restricted to large consumer brands.  

Emarketer reports in a recent survey that content marketing is the top concern of client-side marketers for 2013, having tied conversion rate optimization and vaulted ahead of social media engagement.  Fully 39% of marketers surveyed indicated that content marketing was their top concern in 2013 and the Content Marketing Institute indicates that 91% of marketers are using content marketing in some form.

Content marketing to me finally makes sense of social media marketing.  Although social media marketing no doubt has some value, firms still wrestle with measurement, how to provide meaningful content, and how to get away from what I call “Groupon Syndrome,” or focusing on short-term promotion versus brand building and engagement.  Enter the concept of content marketing and now the marketer can focus on telling the brand story across channels; add the Integrated Marketing Communications concept of telling a consistent message across channels and it is no wonder marketers are starting to see the value of content marketing.

Content marketing means every brand is in the publishing business now, creating meaningful content to tell the brand’s story and engage the consumer.  Telling the brand’s story cuts across channels and involves not only social media but SEO, Lead Generation and other channels. The content we are talking about is media owned by the company, often times re purposed for many types of marketing communications.  Branding is more important now than ever as the web gives us access to so much information that products and services are in more danger than ever of becoming a commodity.

Part of my job as a professor of marketing is to help make sense of marketing trends and create meaningful frameworks to explain and describe them.  Although social media is fascinating and fun, social media marketing cannot operate in a vacuum.  Content marketing makes social media make sense as a natural vehicle for telling the story of the brand and allowing customers to engage with the brand.  Seeing social media in the context of content marketing, where the same stories are deployed through other media channels, to me legitimizes social media marketing and puts it in context of other media channels.  What do you think? 

 By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

Internet Marketing Impacts B2B

One of the most important and misunderstood areas of interactive marketing is the broad area of business-to-business Internet Marketing.  For example, Oracle estimates B2B ecommerce revenue is about one and a half times as large as business-to-consumer (B2C) revenue.  Yet the submissions to the journal I edit, The Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing are primarily studies involving business-to-consumer (B2C) issues.  It appears from what is being published in other journals that the situation is the same.  Practitioner sources are of ten the same, emphasizing B2C examples.

The B2B sales area is positioned to be transformed by Internet marketing in at least the following four areas, all of which would be candidates for further examination by both practitioners and academics:

      1) The search process.  Business customers, like most customers, are relying heavily on the internet when   making purchase decisions.  Business customers conduct searches, visit industry social media sites and blogs (increasingly on mobile applications), talk to their colleagues and have a lot of information at their fingertips when the salesperson arrives at the door.  I have tried to illustrate what is happening in the graphic above, which shows all the places the B2B customer can collect information before the salesperson arrives.  In fact, I have seen estimates that the salesperson might now be only involved in two percent of the sales process.  Certainly it is time to explore how we might redefine the B2B search process and to consider extending the concept of the buying center to beyond the limits of the firm.

      2) The role of the salesperson.  This trend toward collecting more and more information before the salesperson arrives diminishes the critical role of the salesperson as the provider of information but potentially increases his/her role as consultative advisor and service provider.  However, lead nurturing systems such as those provided by Marketo now make automated decisions and hand the lead off to the salesperson at the exact right moment to close the sale http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2011/11/08/death-of-the-salesman-marketo-is-automating-sales-relationships-and-growing-like-crazy/

The relative effectiveness of these automated and their impact on salesforce size and structure are issues that need to be discussed in industry.

3) The role of content marketing.  The role of content marketing is another under-researched area of business-to-business internet marketing.  B2B marketers tend to rely on presentation and downloading of content for nurturing relationships.  The suggestion is that effectively placed content on a web site can lead the prospect through the sales process, educating and answering questions along the way.  However, many questions need to be answered about content marketing, including what types of content are most effective in each stage of the customer lifecycle.  For example, the relative effectiveness of webinars versus whitepapers and which content is most effective in what context.

4) The role of social media.  Business-to-business marketers are successfully using social media but the role of these new media is also largely unexplored in academic research.  We know intuitively and from practitioner studies that Linkedin and Twitter are more likely to be useful in B2B contexts than Facebook but we need to understand why and in what context each type of social media marketing tool should be used.  What companies like IBM are doing with internal social networks could also be productive areas of study and replication.

I want to close by noting again that there are also a lot of opportunities for growth and research in the area of B2B internet and interactive Marketing and ecommerce beyond what we have time to mention here. 

Reference:

Oracle White Paper (2012), 2012 B2B E-Commerce Survey:  Results and Trends.

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

Andrea Mulbrandt's IM Career

Andrea (Andi) Mulbrandt recently wrote me about her experiences in IM. "My first job out of college was selling radio advertisement. I learned a lot in three months at the radio station. I wasn't happy selling just radio to clients. I was always an advocate of an integrated marketing plan that pulled from all types of medias. I was limited in radio to truly advise my clients accurately. I met Kim, the Imagin8 Maketing sales rep, while I was at the station.

Kim approached me in October about an assistant position at a rapidly growing marketing firm. I was thrilled once I found out more information on Imagin8 Marketing. Imagin8 Marketing was created to help companies, organizations and even individuals to help promote themselves by using integrated marketing strategies such as blogging, email marketing, networking, reputation management, social sharing as well as traditional medias. The firm also specializes in website design and SEO. My position was to be an assistant and social media coordinator... It quickly turned into office manager, project coordinator, social media coordinator, and much much more. Imagin8 Marketing has grown rapidly since I started in October of 2011.

Jim Tome, the owner, had been running this firm in his basement since 2008. He was very comfortable with his small, one man business. He brought Kim on as a his first partner. Kim was so great at bringing in business, that they quickly needed more staff. Which led to me being hired. In less than a month after I started, we had an office space in downtown Sycamore and four more employees. We hired two designers, a blogger writer and a programmer.

Imagin8 Marketing is continuing to grow rapidly. We are expanding into all types of industries; medical, home builders, flooring, collegiate sports, etc.

Now, you asked me for my job title; each employee/partner of Imagin8 Marketing has a unique title. This is just another avenue to demonstrate our creativity. The owner, Jim Tome is "The Man Behind the Curtain." The sales rep, Kim Lamansky is the "Social Butterfly." The designers, Meagan Schoenrock is the "Creative Pantoner" and Laura Smoltich is the "Design Hipster." The blog writer, Joeye Davidson is the "Ghost Writer." My official job title is "Trusty Sidekick."

This is a very busy and exciting time for us at Imagin8 Marketing. We have our ribbon cutting tomorrow and open house next week! I appreciate your help in finding quality interns."

NIU grad is walking testimony for 'networking'

Kevin Cunningham, who graduates in May of 2011 with our Interactive Marketing Certificate and an undergraduate marketing degree reports:

"I came in contact with an alumnus of the fraternity that I am a part of as I knew that he was in the marketing field. As I became more and more familiar with what he did, I became more and more intrigued with the position available at Covalent Marketing.

Since that Covalent Marketing is such a small company, my first interview was with one of the two partners who is also the CTO. After that, I moved onto interviews with the CSO and the CEO. I was soon offered a position as a Solutions Consultant; things move so quickly and dynamically in a smaller company! The primary clients of Covalent Marketing are Fortune 500 companies and higher.

Covalent Marketing consults in the areas of the interactive marketing department taught here at Northern Illinois University: SEO, SEM, social media, web analytics, and email marketing are all "hot topics" that I will have the chance to learn more about and ultimately impact clients with immediately in the business world. Covalent Marketing also uses many business intelligence (BI) programs and marketing resource management (MRM) tools to help solve client needs.

Established in 2007, Covalent Marketing began when its founders started talking about the state of database marketing in today's CRM (Customer Relationship Management) world. Very quickly, they agreed there was a major void in how many organizations conduct their long-term marketing strategies. In today's marketplace, where the ‘marketing awareness' of the individual has progressed, so have the ways in which organizations can communicate with customers. The founders deeply believe that the next evolution of database marketing resides in building better, stronger relationships with your customers. Needless to say, I am extremely excited."

Congratulations on your new position Kevin!!

Okner Symposium highlights IM grad's success

I talked a few months ago about Will Johnson, who is an Internet Marketing Specialist at Uline, managing several major search campaigns. Dr Labrecque and I attended CADMEF's Okner Symposium at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater last Friday with our Internet and Marketing Technology classes and were delighted that Will was featured on the career panel for recent graduates.

Upon reflection, I think what distinguished Will in his job search was that he was focused and directed and that he explored all possibilities. Will did not just look online. He attended job fairs and networking events and contact targeted companies he thought would be a good fit.

Will delayed his graduation by a semester to take an internship at Zebra Technologies which led right to a job a Uline. Will knew that he wanted search as an initial career and at the end of his internship targeted companies that he thought would be a good fit. Will also remembered meeting Uline at a Meet the Firm night last year and, upon investigating further, saw there were some search jobs open. He was honest and said he had some experience at Zebra and then some experience from our Google Adwords Challenge last year but did not exaggerate. His focus, perseverance and integrity won out and Will is started on an excellent career. Not bad for someone who graduated two months ago. Congratulations, Will and stay in touch!

Amy Obert uses her IM skills at Dex One!

Amy Obert reports that she works for Dex One and the says the company focus is to simplify the complex task of local search marketing for businesses. Dex One publishes the AT&T Yellow Pages and offers businesses advice and internet SEM/SEO solutions, direct mail, websites, and mobile solutions as well, both B2B and B2C.

Amy focuses on working with firms as a marketing consultant to their business. By learning about the business and its focus, their customers, their needs, and most importantly the volume they can handle over the coming year, she builds them a message and program that best fits their business needs, including websites, profiles, and print.

Amy says "Dex One is able to track activity on almost all key areas of their advertising solutions so we know where people are looking most frequently for the business. Based on budget and growth needs, we place the customers message accurately and try to ensure their ROI will be a positive.

I am regularly looking at what works best in the market, staying up to date on building brand recognition, awareness, and where people are searching locally. Facebook, twitter, & YouTube, are great ways for small business to network and promote themselves and improve their customer touch points. (without extending a large amount of time) Plus, these tools extend the reach of their paid advertising programs. "

Amy provided a link that tells more about Dex: http://www.dexknows.com/info/index.asp
and says that the firm offers business seminars to help in learning good ways to stay ahead of competitors. http://kmcontent.quris.com/dex/?xL4V.HPc.HXrNUUfqkoEYLoM0s70Rho2x

Thanks Amy for all the good info. Glad to see you are doing so well.

SEO intern Will Johnson Uses IM Program Skills

Will Johnson, a current IM student writes, "As a search marketing intern at Zebra Technologies in Vernon Hills, I work with the global web team to optimize the Zebra website for search engines. During the two months I have been here, I have researched hundreds of keywords, optimized dozens of web pages, measured change in search engine rankings and organic click-through-rate, and changed the strategy based on the results.

Zebra has given me the opportunity to expand more on my Search Engine Optimization (SEO) knowledge by encouraging me to keep on current events through blogs and examining past paid search reports from search marketing agencies. Also in this internship, I have been the resident SEO expert and taught several of my co-workers the basics of SEO.

While SEO has been my primary focus, my time never seems to stay focused on one task. Projects from other areas of marketing seem to pull me in as I act as an online marketing guru. Early on in my internship, I was involved in helping to expose web analytics to a database marketer and explaining how to use the application as well as showing what revelations can be discovered through website data. Using Google Analytics and WebTrends, I showed insight into prospect behavior on the website to this seasoned database marketer. It’s a great experience to be able to help someone who has over ten years of experience in marketing to learn something new.

The information I learned from NIU’s Interactive Marketing program on Social Media and SEO helped me become a resource for the PR team as they developed a new blog focusing on the various industries that Zebra products service. I explained SEO best practices for blogging (e.g. keywords in the title, headers and body text, focusing on only a few core keywords, using semantic keywords) to the team and analyzed their past blog entries for an SEO update.
Overall I have had an amazing experience at Zebra and I’m incredibly thankful for the Interactive Marketing program’s curriculum as well as the support from the professors. Without them, I would not have even heard of this opportunity."

NIU IM Grad contributes as search intern at iProspect

It is always great to hear from former students. James Kelley graduated in May (2010) and worked hard to get a position as a Search Marketing Intern with iProspect. James writes, "I had little time to get aclimated as on my first day the company landed a big client and had to launch the campaign ASAP. The atmosphere is pretty laid back...I STILL GET TO WEAR JEANS! WOOT! I haven't been on the job for too long but have already been involved in some big projects.

I have written ad copy for the PPC Ads on Google, and am excited to think about how mwny people will see them. I have also been given a spreadsheet of over 7,000 keywords and links to check to see if the link to the landing page is relevant to the keyword. That task took a while and was repetitive but quite important. How chaotic would a search be if the landing pages had nothing to do with the ad/keywords in the search?!!

I have also been through the Adwords Editor and recorded the ad groups/campaigns and their ad variance. Overall I am very happy with my decision to pursue SEM and very happy with iProspect, keep your fingers crossed for me that this turns into a full time hire! Good Luck at NIU! Thanks again. James"

Web site for search engine marketing jobs

Heather Priest, a May 2010 IM grad, found the website below the other day. The website tracks and posts job openings in SEO accross the country. There are a couple jobs here in Illinois that some recent grads might find of interest. A person must be a member of the site in order to receive e-mail updates (kind of expensive), but not to see the jobs and get the information on the them. Enjoy and Good luck to those on the job search! Website for Search Engine Marketing Jobs http://www.sempo.org/jobs/

Web site design

Web site design is a complex subject because there are so many different approaches to an effective web site. As always in marketing, think about the target audience and corporate objectives first. We looked in class at some ecommerce sites that seemed busy but yet were successful because that layout is what the audience wanted to see. In general, it is useful to have the purpose of the website and any relevant offer in the upper left hand 'golden triangle' area of the site. Often this area is a good place to put a search function as well as the reader's eye will go to the upper left first. We get this information from tracking eyeball movements for many subjects and displaying them on a 'heat map.' The heat map shows where people click on the site, that cearly 'above the fold' is where eyes are resting and how eye movements also form an "F" shape inside the Golden Triangle. The heat map of a Google web search shows why people want to be in the top three or four searches. http://www.ahfx.net/weblog/79 We looked at ideas on web design from Mary Lou Roberts, Jan Zimmerman, Amy Africa and finally, Dr. Zahay! Some independent sources for good web design and customer service are Forrester.com and Bizrate.com. Dr. Zahay likes sites that load easily, use breadcrumbs, are easy to naviagate, use 2-3, clicks, and have easily available contact information. Trust is an important part of web site design because the user must trust the site to exchange information or do business with the site. Even so, the students said they do not look at Truste or other trust seals on the web in deciding to do business with the site. Again, for marketing, web site design and usability are strategic and not technical issues. Web site development is often iterative as companies find out what works and what doesn't in web site design and make changes accordingly.

SEO and SEM

We learned about Search Engine Optimization, the process of optimizing a site for Organic or Natural Search and about Search Engine Marketing, the process of using piad search. Both processes are designed to drive traffic to a web site. Many people are amazed that by a few adjustments to a web page can bring dramatic results in terms of natural or organic search rankings. Making use of the blue title, linking in and out to relevant pages, making page content relevant to the title and subject of the page are all great ways to improve ranking. I shared the story that when I came to NIU the Interactive Marketing web site did not rank that highly and that I followed basic SEO principles to get the page ranked highly with natural search. Often we recommend that companies use a PPC, pay per click campaign thru google adwords or yahoo to understand which search terms are most relevant. It is easy to see by how much it costs to be listed under a PPC program which terms are going to get the most exposure for the company. A combination of natural and paid search usually works well in driving traffic to the site. The students enjoyed watching Cary Pearlman set up a live Google adwords campaign for them and I will go thru my Google Analytics next week.

Search engine marketing & Guests

We had two guest speakers in the past week and a half. One was Gimmepleez.com, relating to our project to produce a YouTube video. The other speaker was restaurant.com CEO and President Cary Chessick. Students enjoy hearing Cary's story of how restaurant.com started and how it had changed its business model over time and has evolved to the brokerage model it uses today. I refer students in the class to links to the video on these speakers. Students wishing to work on the Professional Sales Program who did not hear Dr. Weilbaker speak in class can feel free to set up a meeting with him or talk to either of us about the project.

We started SEM, Search Engine Marketing this week and will continue with the topic on the 20th and 22nd. On the 20th Cary Pearlman will teach our class in PPC (Pay Per Click) and we will have a lab on the 23rd. I introduced the area of SEM and we looked at a sample google search and pointed out the paid ads versus the natural search results. We talked about Gooogle having 70% of the search engine market and that almost fifty percent of internet advertising is in search engine advertising spending. For this reason even though online advertising spending has dropped this year Q1 09 versus Q2 09 by about ten percent, search engine spending continues to rise. We talked about SEO being the process of optimizing organic or natural search. There is a lot companies can do to optimize their organic search efforts and get high page rankings without spending money. these tactics include a descriptive title bar, text that matches the title bar and is descriptive of the subject matter, links to and from related, relevant sites and appropriate keywords (although the latter is less important now). Search engine spiders or crawlers use complicated algorithms as they search through pages to determine if a page is a good fit with a particular search term. Images need to be tagged and spiders have a hard time with flash intro pages as well. I always enjoy teaching this topic and look forward to the rest of the time we will spend on SEO and Paid Search.

Multichannel Marketing Class June 8: Trends in Multichannel and SEO

Bob Arkema from Johnson & Quin led us in a lively discussion of how the direct and interactive industry is changing in a post financial-meltdown world. For the first time since data has been kept, direct mail spending decreased last year. Search and social media spending are predicted to grow but most other media are flat or declining. Companies are taking a good, hard look at what they mail and how much they mail. Mail is seen increasingly as a companion to other channels, such as online or email, which is consistent with the multichannel theme of our class. I have heard similar comments from other direct mail providers. Specialty houses that can do smaller print runs using variable digital printing for highly personalized communication so far seem to be holding their own, although there has been a lot of industry consolidation. It is my impression that we are living through an unprecedented change in the industry. Much of this change was driven by the collapse of our financial institutions, many of whom were heavy direct mailers.

The DMA (Direct Marketing Association) in New York itself has gone through several rounds of layoffs. I recently was nominated for a position on the board of CADM (Chicago Association of Direct Marketing) so I will get to help guide this organization through these troubled waters. In times of downturn, it always seems to me that basic marketing principles are key. Best Buy survives because it has a clear differentiation strategy and by the way makes great use of its customer data. Circuit City tried to play catch up but just could not distinguish itself in the marketplace.

Catching up from last week, we also talked about SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Search is divided into paid versus organic search. Keywords are the terms users employ when searching for something. Organic search is free. Search engines use algorithms to determine page rank. Web spiders or 'crawlers' search the web and analyze pages to determine page rank. In natural search, these programs are looking to see that the blue title onthe top matches web site content, that the content of the web site matches the keywords used in search and to some extent the keywords in the HTML code, and that there are sites linked to the site and that the site links to others. These crawlers cannot read pictures so it is important to 'tag' pictures with descriptions that match the keywords the company wishes to identify with the site.

We also talked about the importance of good writing in business communication. I will spot each group three and only three poorly constructed sentences, typos and/or grammar mistakes in deference to our short-class format. After that, it is a point taken for each problem noted by me. We talked about the proper use of demonstrative pronouns. Except in rare cases, pronouns such as this and they in formal writing need to be substituted for a proper noun or have some kind of additional noun used with them. Instead of saying "This is important in multichannel marketing,' for example, substitute "This trend" or "This concern." Avoid addressing the audience as 'you' except in persuasive communication.

What's going on in retail

Welcome to my new blog. I am Debra Zahay, the Acxiom Corporation Professor of Interactive Marketing at Northern Illinois University. We train hundreds of marketing majors each year in principles of direct and interactive marketing, including SEO and SEM, e-business principles, web design and the like. We have the largest undergraduate marketing program in the State of Illinois and over 400 marketing majors. Each week I will share with you some of the information that I am passing along in my classes and my comments on internet and direct marekting trends. If you have any questions about the program, contact me at 815-753-6215 or email me at zahay@niu.edu.

This week:

According to a Nielson Net ratings webinar yesterday, there was over a 20% increase in retail Christmas traffic on the internet over last year, with the growth rate in the prime Thanksgiving holiday week of over 100%! Contrast this growth rate with a mere 4.4% growth in Holiday Spending as reported by the National Retail Federation and we can start to see how important the internet will continue to be as a marketing channel. Most of the growth in holiday spending was in multichannel retailing, so integrating online and offline strategies, like we do in my internet marketing course at NIU, continues to be paramount.

Also, I was recently quoted in Info Week on search engine and branding and mentioned that some brands, like Wal-Mart, continue to pull traffic even if they might not be search engine optimized. Indeed, this year Wal-Mart eclipsed Amazon.com for holiday traffic spending. The point is not to ignore SEO but to also work on traditional marketing concepts such as differentiation and branding.