aimClear® Search Marketing Blog

Welcome back to aimClear’s coverage of #SMX East 2011! Ah, the fine art of communication. In the good old days, we could all freely converse with one another. Then, some brilliant folks got the idea to erect the Tower of Babel to get closer to the Big Man Upstairs, and we all know what happened there. Now, a zillion years later, we’re at it again – but this time, we’re not bridging the communication gap between [wo]man and neighbor. This time, we’re connecting [wo]man and machine.

And this time, it ain’t no tower unifying our language. It’s Schema.org, Rel=author, and other intuitive meta tags clarifying human-created content for robot-powered search engines so that other human-users can have a better overall experience.

The afternoon of Day 2 at #SMX East brought together moderator Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land, Q&A moderator Lisa Williams, President, MEDIA forte marketing, and speakers Janet Driscoll Miller, President and CEO, Search Mojo, Topher Kohan, SEO Coordinator, CNN, and Product Management Director, Search, Google. Janet and Topher shared tip-top tactics and advice for leveraging the universal language Schema.org and various meta tags of 2010 represent while Jack was there to be grilled by Vanessa and the crowd. aimClear live-tweeted this session via @beebow. Read on for the full recap.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Amy Vernon a.k.a. The Bacon Queen a.k.a. fellow New Jerseian and IRL pal is just about as genuine as they come. With over 20k Twitter followers and the title of “top 15 submitters of all time on Digg.com (and the highest-ranked female ever),” she’s also a powerful social media maven worth paying mind to. VP of Strategy and Alliances at Hasai, Amy’s a familiar face at an array of digital marketing conferences, whether she’s on stage speaking or in the crowd pumping out lightning-fast tweet coverage.

I met Amy at last year’s #140Conf in NYC, and as we “chewed the fat,” so to speak, over U Café grub on the upper East Side, it became apparent why her cult-like following across various social media circles, from Tumblr to Facebook, flocks to her consistently. She works a seriously smooth combo of calculating community manager and super-cool social-savvy friend.

On the advent of #SMX East, I had the pleasure of sharing a candid Q&A with Amy. Topics ranged from “Who are ya, howdidja get here?” to favorite social sharing services, advice for social marketing n00bz and the battle between newsprint & online media. Read on for the full scoop. 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 »

Greetings from late afternoon @ SMX East. It struck me covering the Ad Agencies & Search Marketing panel for SEORoundTable, that this conference crowd is a bit different. Yeah, the groovy old school search community-of-origin I love is here–pioneers, bloggers, the very roots of our industry. They’re crawling all over the place speaking, hanging out, blogging for trade pubs and meeting clients.

Still, the crowd at Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on West 34th Street center is different Read the rest of this entry »