SES Chicago 2008

Fancy a little trip up to SES Chicago next week? I know it’s a little short notice, but here’s the lowdown:

Now in its 10th year, the global SES Conference and Exposition Series educates tens of thousands of marketers each year, with a 98% satisfaction rate. SES Chicago, the only major Search Marketing Conference and Expo in the Midwest, will be packed with 60+ sessions, multiple keynotes and Orion Strategy sessions, exhibitors, networking events and more. We hope to see you there.

Event Overview:

  • Real-time actionable information you need to grow your business through search engine marketing
  • Ins-and-outs of search engine marketing from top search experts and the search engines themselves
  • A unique setting to network with fellow marketers and search engine industry professionals to discuss the trends in search engine marketing
  • Access to the world’s most comprehensive gathering of search engine marketing & optimization-related solutions providers and potential partners & affiliates.

What You Will Learn:

  • How search engines list web sites for free and through paid placements
  • How to get free “organic” traffic by building a site that pleases search engines and your visitors
  • How to efficiently purchase listings guaranteed to rank your company at the top of search engine results
  • How to calculate the ROI of your search marketing efforts by tracking your visitors from the time they hit your site until they buy-and get tips on improving conversion if they don’t

Oh, and Justin’s sending me off with a packed lunch as I’ve been invited to present a Tinbasher case study next Wednesday at the Blogging for Business session.

Tentative Plans for Beckley, WV in November for Next Generation Marketing

Hola mi amigos y amigas!*

Some pretty exciting news on the Next Generation Marketing front.  Well it’s not quite news yet – more like an embryonic news nugget.

Jeff, Skip, and I got on the phone this morning to plan out our next dates.  One thing that looks more or less definite is a stop in Beckley, WV in November.  We’ll post more here and on the main site when this gets locked down and we have more news.

downtown Beckley West Virginia

* I just felt like opening with some Spanish today.  Weird – I didn’t even catch any Dora or Diego this morning.  If that’s misspelled or otherwise incorrect, please let me know.  I took Deutsch in high school and college.

Heeeeeeere’s Skippy!

Guess who’s back / Guess again / Marketing Genius is back / Tell a friend / Guess who’s back, guess who’s back, guess who’s back, [fade out]

Looks like the Marketing Genius blog is back after the hijacking.  That was much quicker than anticipated.  Please continue to enjoy posts from our good friend Skip Lineberg, which resume today.

Marketing Conference Blog Changes / Update on Marketing Genius

If you’ve been following this blog for awhile, you know that it hasn’t been updated in awhile.  Please accept my apologies.  The three of us have been pretty swamped since our spring conference dates around West Virginia.  We hope to have some announcements on new dates in the next month or so and we’ll update here first.

In the meantime, I wanted to give you an update on 2 items:

1. For a time being we pulled posts from each of the travelling speakers from Next Generation Marketing.  We are no longer doing this, but still encourage you to check out each one individually:

2.  You’ll note I didn’t link to Skip’s blog.  We didn’t have a falling out – I still want to give him a great big bear hug every time I see him.  His blog – Marketing Genius – got hacked.  Really tough situation. As soon as the situation gets resolved, I’ll provide an update.

Ranked Among the Top Advertising & Media Blogs

We are proud to share news that Marketing Genius from Maple Creative is now ranked among the top advertising and media blogs in the world, according to Advertising Age. We are presently ranked #393 out of 600 total blogs. Not bad … even if you do have to scroll several times to find us on the list.

The Power 150 is a ranking of the top English-language media and marketing blogs in the world, as developed by marketing executive and blogger, Todd Andrlik. It’s really as simple as that, except that the name isn’t strictly accurate: It currently ranks more than 500 blogs written about all types of media and pretty much every imaginable marketing discipline. It’s now housed on Ad Age, partly because we thought it’d draw some traffic and links for us, but also because both Todd and Ad Age figured it was a useful service to rank and showcase all these sources of information in one place, where thousands of readers could discover them. With more than 700,000 registered users on our site and a host of daily and weekly products, we also hope we can grow the traffic to Todd’s creation and some of the blogs it highlights.

Methodology
What Todd came up with is a largely objective ranking, which is probably why it’s already gained such popularity among marketing and media bloggers. It uses a basic multimetric algorithm to obtain a final ranking based on the sum of eight sources, seven of which come from Google, Bloglines, Alexa, Yahoo! and Technorati. The last is Todd’s own personal subjective measure. In the case of a tie, individual scores for a blog are weighted in the following order (from highest to lowest):

Todd Points (1 to 15): As the only subjective measure in the Power 150 algorithm, 1 to 15 opinion points were assigned to each blog. Todd Andrlik values frequent, relevant, creative and high-quality content. The use of audio, video and graphics is also heavily weighted in the Todd Points.
Yahoo InLinks (1 to 30): Much like Technorati’s InLinks count, Yahoo uses its Site Explorer to tabulate the number of links to a particular blog. We then scale this number down to a 30-point scale.
Technorati Ranking (1 to 20): Technorati ranking analyzes the number of sites pointing to a particular blog. The more link sources referencing your blog, the higher the Technorati ranking. Similar to the Bloglines Subscribers value, Technorati ranking ranges were determined (i.e., top 9,000, top 10,000, top 20,000, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 20) that was used in the Power 150 algorithm.
Technorati Authority (1 to 20): Much like the InLinks count, Technorati’s Authority count is the number of blogs (as opposed to individual links) that link to a particular blog. This number is then scale down to a 20-point scale.
Technorati InLinks (1 to 20): Technorati tallies the number of links to a particular blog, and we then scale that number down to a 20-point scale.
Alexa Points (1 to 15): Alexa ranks sites with an algorithm that incorporates page views and reach (the percentage of all web users who have visited that particular site). For the Power 150, we take that rank and assign it a proportional score between 1 and 15 and factor it into a blog’s total score.
Bloglines Subscribers (1 to 10): Bloglines displays the number of feed subscribers. Subscriber ranges were determined (i.e., more than 20, more than 30, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 15) that was used in the Power 150 algorithm.
Google PageRank (0 to 10): Google PageRank is a link-analysis algorithm that interprets web links and assigns a numerical weighting (0 to 10) to each site. High-quality sites receive a higher PageRank. The actual PageRank number was used in the Power 150 ranking algorithm.
Collective Intellect (0 to 10): Collective Intellect is a social media analytics company that works with brands to evaluate consumer opinion, measure buzz, identify customer sentiment and manage corporate reputations at the industry, company, brand, campaign and messaging levels. For the Power 150, Collective Intellect’s authority ranking uses a patent-pending algorithm to calculate an author’s authority on a topic, including such measures as link-analysis between on-topic posts, topic density, author’s percent of contribution to the topic, number of comments and post quality.

This honor is to be shared by all of you, our entire community of marketing geniuses. It goes to show how important all of you are who comment, contribute, link to, recommend, tag and ‘favorite’ this and other blogs. Thanks! We couldn’t have done it without you.