Lee Odden - Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing

Contents

Copyright 2012 by Lee Odden. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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ISBN 978-1-118-16777-9 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-22638-4 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-23957-5 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-26427-0 (ebk)

Foreword

Its time to leave some of the old wisdom behind and develop some new wisdom.

Mike Grehan being interviewed by Lee Odden in 2007

I keep bumping into Lee Odden. All over the world, in fact. For the past four or five years, at conferences from New York to San Francisco, London to Barcelona, and Hong Kong to Singapore, weve discussed the subject of Internet marketing. These are deeply engaging conversations for one very important reason. When it comes to marketing, Lee Odden gets it.

As a classically trained marketer, Lee cuts through the clutter of the pipes-and-tubes element of Internet marketing to focus on content and customers. Already, he has a huge following on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. This is largely due to his steady transition from popular blogger and industry commentator to recognized thought leader.

Inspired by a lightbulb moment in conversation with a Google engineer, he was prompted into thinking about Internet marketing and business in new and different ways. Its a new kind of wisdom, partly based on practical experience and partly based on training his mind to see around corners.

Weve had an era of search marketing being front and center. But as we move into a new era of the constantly connected consumer with the prediction that, in a few years therell be 50 billion connected devices on the planet, it really is time to change the way we think about marketing. And this is not being driven purely by technology, its more about the change in the consumerthe new, transient media consumer.

Much of what weve learned in marketing is undergoing reconsideration. Major changes are taking place in consumer and business markets. Consumers no longer act independently of each other but are more connected to other consumers, to other channel members, and often to brands. Consequently, brands and companies are now vying for central positions inside consumer networks.

Consumers have become attracted to third-party information providers, through collaborative product reviews, ranking, rating, and price-comparison services. There are new and more complex concepts being applied to modern marketing. Lee Odden will help you craft new strategies and tactics in line with this new marketing environment.

In my capacity as chair of the SES Global Advisory Board, Im honored to have Lee as a valuable member and supporter. Ive watched him many times, either as a solo speaker or as a panelist at conferences. And without fail, when he begins to speak, keyboards begin to click as the audience takes note after note.

Its funny, but a classic movie scene popped into my mind after reading something Lee says in this book. Its from the movie City Slickers. Tough cowboy Curly (Jack Palance) holds up one finger, looks at Mitch (Billy Crystal), and says: Do you know what the secret to life is? Mitch replies, Your finger? Just one thing, says Curly. Whats the one thing? asks Mitch. To which Curly replies, Thats what you have to find out, and then gallops off into the distance.

I dont know about life, but when it comes to marketing and business, this book is about just one thing you can do to improve it: Optimize!

Preface

At a large search marketing conference several years ago, I had a conversation with Maile Ohye from Google about public speaking, noting how impressive she was. As an active public speaker myself, I shared with her how I was able to get by with good information and enthusiasm, but without much polish. What she said next hit me like a ton of bricks: Youre an SEO and you optimize websites for better performance in search engines, right? To which I replied yes. Her follow-up was, Then why dont you optimize your speaking skills?

Have you ever watched a movie where the camera is tight on a scene and, for dramatic effect, it pulls back in a blur? Thats what I was feeling when Maile made her simple, yet powerful recommendation. What hit me wasnt just that I should work on my speaking skills, but the broader notion of optimization and how it applies to a persistent effort at improving just about anything for better performance.

ADAPT OR DIE

Reading this book is a great first step toward a new way of thinking about how you can apply optimization principles to your business. The sheer volume of content created each day, coupled with the explosive growth of social media accessed on the Internet and on mobile and tablet devices, can be overwhelming. Ive spent an incredible amount of time testing and making sense of the search and social web. My hope is that youll find this book a quick study on the big-picture topics and deep on the practical resources for planning, implementing, and scaling a socialized and optimized content marketing strategy.

Millions of websites, with billions of pages and media, are indexed by search engines. Google alone handles more than 1 billion searches each day. A large number of the companies publishing information online that expect traffic from search engines have difficulty creating great content, let alone producing compelling content on a regular basis. Even companies that do create high-quality content often neglect how search engine optimization and social media marketing can expedite engagement between buyers and what the brand has to offer.