Can a good search presence improve an offline marketing campaign’s results? You may be surprised to hear … ABSOLUTELY! Offline and search campaigns are actually very symbiotic in nature. See the proof abreviated in graphical form below, but also be sure to check out the full study.

The Proof:

Courtesy iProspect

The Cudos:
The study was commissioned by iProspect and was performed by Jupiter Research. It was titled iProspect Offline Channel Influence on Online Search Behavior Study. Check it out! Our industry needs more of these studies performed. Google, Yahoo, ermmm MSN … please step up!

Its true! The image below is a link to a web site! Its not to be clicked on though … its an offline link that needs to be photographed from a mobile device to be activated. In this case, it may reside on a billboard, a poster on a telephone pole, an ad in a men’s washroom, or a tile on a train station floor. But make no mistake … it is a link to a website!

So Google blew past it’s numbers last week but it seems it still may have a ways to go in monetizing YouTube.

Not so, for Simon Cowell. Yes, that Simon Cowell of American Idol fame.

For those of you who may not know, Cowell is also one of the judges on the UK series Britain’s Got Talent.

Enter Paul Potts. Paul who? Paul Potts. Think Pavarotti. Think phone salesman steps up to microphone, blows audience away with Turandot’s Nessum Dorma, winds up with an instant career faster than you can pour boiling water into a coffee cup and over 40 Million YouTube views. No, seriously, 40 Million YouTube views.

When I was writing my piece on “Search and the Pareto Principle” (aka the 20/80 Rule) last week, I was playing around with Sphinn (a Digg types news submission and sharing service for those in the SEO/SEM/SMM industry) and found some really interesting information that I thought might be worthwhile sharing.

Here are some of the findings as of yesterday:

1) there were 4371 profiles on Sphinn … that’s a large number of people engaging in seo/sem/smm to one degree or another

The Pareto Principle, also known as the 20/80 Rule, is an interesting phenonenum that has many implications for those practicing search and social media. The concept is losely defined as; for many events, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Its a truism so to speak, though its the rough concept that is important and not the absolute numbers. Some real life examples of this concept in action are:
a) in general, 80% of a hockey teams goals, will come from 20% of the players
b) often 80% of a company’s revenues will come from 20% of its clients
c) 80% of a country’s wealth will be held by 20% of the population
d) 80% of the postings on Spinn/Digg, etc. will be by 20% of the total number of posters
e) 80% of most tasks can be completed in 20% of the time

The use of the Internet keeps growing in China. The country now has more than 160 million Internet users and at least 1.3 million websites. But the promise of free expression and information has been nixed by the Chinese government’s online censorship and surveillance system.

According to Reporters Without Borders and Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a Chinese Internet expert working in IT industry has produced an exclusive study on the key mechanism of the Chinese official system of online censorship, surveillance and propaganda.

I was tagged recently by Shana Albert (author of a great post recently on Social Media being the New BAD Boy … its a fun read) at AllWorkAtHomeIdeas for a Blog Improvement Meme. Personally, I’m a fan of anything that forces my hand. If it takes a blog improvement meme for get me to finally make some much needed improvements to our blog, then so be it. I’ll take that task to hand … well maybe next week.

Establishing a strong Social Media Profile necessarily means establishing networks of (professional) friends/relationships online (aka online professional relationships … OPR) that can be called upon to help you when needed. In some cases, your goal will be to befriend individuals that are influencers in a given sphere; when needed you can count upon them to use their powerful sites and networks to drive traffic and/or business to your site. In yet other cases, your goal maybe to enlist your network to stumble or digg particlar articles. Your effectiveness at each of these efforts is a function of the strength of your OPRs … since many require different levels of trust given the potential risk to the OPR. And yes, risks do exist! Accordingly, the remainder of this post will discuss our SEP interpretation of the stages of online professional relationships, and what OPR efforts can be expected at different stages.

Social Media Chaos

The services included in the screenshot above constitute some of the A-list social media services we use today. Keeping up with so many different iterations of what is essentially the same concept of viral and user generated media is not only difficult, but nearly impossible while juggling the many hats of an internet marketer.

While submitting your stellar and ’social media worthy’ content has become increasingly easier using multi-submission tools such as SocialMarker and OnlyWire, it is significantly difficult to track the results of a social media marketing campaign. Hats off to uber social media plugins such as Social Media for Firefox for summing up the popularity/results of individual articles or posts, but what if you wanted to know your social media saturation in its entireity?

So here you stand, a virtual newby to the world of social media, and it appears that you have the monumental task before you of scaling this towering mountain called developing a professional network online … developing your social media profile. But where do you begin … “my god this mountain is high” you think to yourself. There are so many possible paths up the mountain.