aimClear® Search Marketing Blog

Chris Winfield is one of the most pleasant online marketing pros in the business.  Seemingly contrary to his East Coast roots, Chris has way more of a California-laid-back swagger.  Don’t mistake this vibe for lack of intensity though.  Dude is extremely passionate, has an impressive quiver of clients,  experience, heart and business acumen to back the swagger up with action and results.

Focused on search and social media marketing, Chris’s long time company, 10e20, recently rebranded as BlueGlass. BlueGlass has been busy forging partnership deals, described as acquisitions, with respected small agencies and individuals.   Marketers involved in the BlueGlass deal are a veritable who’s who of mainstream social media conference circuit mainstays and big brand practitioners. Read the rest of this entry »

Fall is in the air and #SESChicago is around the corner. The much-anticipated Search Engine Strategies conference will be held next week in the Windy City, and aimClear couldn’t be more excited. From our team, Lauren, Alyssa and I (Lindsay) will be covering the event, and our own Marty Weintraub will take the stage to share hot tips and techniques with a hungry crowd of marketers. Read on for an overview of our upcoming conference coverage, as well as a peek at Marty’s “killer” presentation. Read the rest of this entry »

Unless you’ve been holed up in a cave this past weekend (even in Duluth it’s not quite hibernation season…) you’ve surely heard that Facebook recently revamped Groups, nearly beyond recognition. With the revamp, all 500 million registered Facebookers were instantly granted the ability to create their own Groups, to which friends can be added as “members” and then sent updates en masse. Seems to be nothing out of the ordinary. Did we mention these updates are also sent to members’ personal email accounts on an opt-out basis? Or that Group creators don’t need permission to add friends as members? Yeah – Facebook decided to forgo the whole “invitation” process. And lest we forget, the cherry on top – the little box under Privacy setting Facebookers might “check” to block friends from adding them to random Groups… doesn’t… exist… (yet).

Seeing as we frequent the Facebook platform professionally & personally, we wanted to get a deeper understanding of Groups– from the basics of creation to the extent friends’ FB experiences would be impacted as Group members. Moreover, we wanted to affirm our instinctual conclusion… that this overhaul of Groups had essentially birthed the most glaring spam loophole the Facebook platform has seen in quite some time. Read on for a run-through of the experiment along with instructions & illustrations on how to spam the snot out of your FB friends. Read the rest of this entry »

Attendees sat stunned at #SMX East as Baris Gultekin, Group Product Manager, Google AdWords, Google, Inc. clarified that the ubiquitous AdWords Keyword Tool now only provides keywords Google deems “commercial.” It’s been obvious anyway by degraded results over the last few weeks. This represents a shift of seismic proportions to those who utilize the tool for demographic research purposes, in and outside of AdWords. Here’s an overview of what we just lost and how to get the data anyway. [Author's Note 1/1/2011: The KW tool has been updated. After reading this post, head over to our coverage of AdWords keyword tool fixes.] Read the rest of this entry »