Searchlight

It's interesting how aspects of our lives come into play. Prior to joining this Web revolution, or evolution, depending on your point of view, I worked in the world of consumer packaged goods. I developed and managed some of the office products that most of you probably use everyday. I became fairly familiar with even more products that I didn't manage, but was naturally exposed to. One of these was the Rolodex brand card file products after that parent company was acquired.

Even though I didn't manage the product line, there was always something intriguing about the products. In this highly electronic world we live in, business cards continue to change hands every day. At some point or another, I'd guess that nearly every TV sitcom has someone pulling a card or looking up contact information from a card file; or at the very least, one is seen prominently on someone's desk. It just lends credibility and is something we've grown to expect.

By no means do I see business cards disappearing anytime soon--so pull those boxes back out of the trash. But, keep in mind that even business cards can only take you so far. Beyond business cards, everyone (and every business) should make sure that they are adding LinkedIn.com to their marketing mix.

While there are a number of services that can help keep you up to date with your contacts--probably better actually--the mix of features as well as the huge and continued adoption of LinkedIn by professionals makes it a worthwhile Web marketing venue.

So how can LinkedIn fit into your SEO and Web marketing mix? Here are three key areas to focus on.

Links & Linking

Every LinkedIn profile is able to add three links to other sites. These could be anything--perhaps to your company home page or to your blog. What many may not realize is that these links are live, direct, and not "nofollowed" on the public profile page...which is the page that is openly available to search engine spiders.

Rather than using the default choices that LinkedIn provides when adding links though, select "Other:" to add relevant anchor text to your links. Of course, you also need to make sure that your public profile is set to actually show these links within the Web site section of your profile. Since these public pages are accessible to search engine spiders, they'll also pass PageRank and contribute to overall link popularity.

Now that you've added links, be sure to link to your public profile URL from other sites when appropriate. This way you'll drive a little traffic to the profile, and depending on the link, also flow a little PageRank through the profile page to your chosen Web site or sites.

Answers

SEO of course has a strong focus on-site and in regard to search engine spiders. But SEO is also part of the much bigger picture of search engine marketing (SEM). This becomes especially clear when looking at the social media arena. And no where is this more evident than in the LinkedIn Answers section.

The Answers section provides members a forum for asking as well as answering questions posed by other members. While search engine spiders may index and even return these pages, more importantly, these pages are seen everyday by real live human beings who may well be potential customers. Participating within the Answers section is an ideal opportunity to demonstrate thought leadership within your industry, draw additional attention to your Web site (since you did of course add a link to it from your profile as discussed above), network, and further build your brand image.

Optimization

Did I mention that your public profile may be seen, indexed and more importantly, returned within search results? What this means is that you have one more opportunity to rank, and not only rank, but rank via content that you control. LinkedIn is a great reminder that optimization is mostly focused on-site, but we should never lose sight of opportunities to optimize content we can control, residing on sites that may lead visitors to our site. And actually, LinkedIn may provide even more than one opportunity to rank since every employee's profile within a company may be one more potential search result.

Now this isn't a license to spam your LinkedIn profile. What it does mean is that it may be beneficial to give a little more attention to the summary information that you provide. Write it intelligently but also incorporating strong keyword-rich signals that are related to your brand, industry and Web site that you wish to be found for.

Best of all, even if LinkedIn decides to "nofollow" all links within profiles, or even block search engines from indexing member profiles, LinkedIn will still serve as an online marketing and networking channel to connect you and your business with potential clients and customers, which in the end, is what SEO is really all about.

But as I said earlier, don't go throwing out your business cards, or your card files. Who knows though, maybe in the future, business cards will look a little differently than they do today, and perhaps something more like this:

Brian R. Brown
http://www.linkedin.com/in/brianrbrown

Certainly allows for plenty of white space.

Blendtec's Will It Blend?

(Credit: YouTube.com)

Apparently, blenders aren't just for smoothies and margaritas anymore.

Ever try blending golf balls? Light bulbs? Cell phones? A rake handle? An iPod? I bet not, but I have a sneaking suspicion that you have watched Tom Dickson from Blendtec blend some of these things on YouTube.

A few months ago, I used the "Will It Blend?" campaign for an article on Marketing Profs.

Since then, the campaign has continued on (Tom blended an iPhone this summer, for instance) and is now arguably one of the best examples of YouTube-based social-media marketing (SMM) to date.

The YouTube-based promotion is the brainchild of George Wright, marketing director at Blendtec, along with Tom Dickson, Blendtec's founder and CEO. Various common objects are successfully run through a Blendtec blender without breaking it--even marbles. These videos are funny, addictive and brilliantly adept at demonstrating the power of Blendtec blenders.

The results for Blendtec were almost instantaneous. For their initial investment of less than $100 on the first videos in the series, the company drove more than 6 million visitors to its WillItBlend.com Web site in less than a week. It is the stuff of marketing legend, like Apple's "1984 Macintosh" campaign or Wendy's "Where's The Beef?" advertisements.

But the game is a little different now than it was in the television-dominated world of previous decades; YouTube is now more popular than all the sites of the TV networks combined.

YouTube offers brand visibility when the campaign is well-executed, but it offers more than that. Marketers must also know how to take advantage of the other parameters of social media. Here are three things to consider:

Links
YouTube and other social-media platforms can provide links to a company's corporate or home Web site. The key is to associate your video or other media with that site, both by using textual links and by branding the media.

Blendtec, for example, has watermarked its Willitblend.com domain in the lower-left corner of every video, from beginning to end. Even if someone takes a screen capture of the video, the site is represented.

The more interesting your content is, the more likely that people are to link to it. But they have to know where to link.

Branding and online reputation
Social media is more than just traffic and links. It works as well or better than any medium to create both online reputation and, through that, brand awareness. The fastest way to a popular and respected Web site is some combination of interaction and entertainment, and social media is both.

The Blendtec videos have made their blenders hip--and they may very well be the only hip blenders out there. Not only have the videos brought their brand to the forefront of many minds, through which thoughts of blenders might never have passed, but it's even been added our modern speak.

References are now made to "will it blend?" to denote the question of whether something will be successful, much like "will it fly?" or "is it a go?" Every time someone utters that phrase - at least for the moment - they will also think of Blendtec.

Sales
This one's basic: sales of Blendtec blenders were up 43 percent in 2006. They continue to be up in 2007. On top of that, companies using Blendtec blenders are paying thousands of dollars to have Blendtec promotions, and ads at the end of Blendtec videos are earning the company tens of thousands of dollars a year.

The avenue for this sort of promotion, SMM, is wide open. I wonder who the next Blendtec will be. If a company doing something as seemingly boring manufacturing blenders can pull it off, surely some sexier companies can too. For example, imagine what the celebrity-watching fashionistas at SeenOn could do with a bit of YouTube-driven SMM. This is surely a space to watch.