List of Minnesota Marketing & PR Associations, Organizations, & Groups
Posted on 05. Mar, 2012 by Lee Odden in Blog, Interactive Marketing, MIMA, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
Sometimes it feels like I spend more time on the road than in Minnesota, but the Twin Cities has a fine digital marketing community that includes advertising, direct marketing, interactive, B2B, search, PR and communications groups that serve the needs of marketing and communications professionals in the region.
Networking locally can be incredibly important if you’re new to the area, want to connect with other professionals in your field or are in search of professional development and job opportunities. Below are a list of Minnesota (primarily Minneapolis & St. Paul) marketing and communications organizations that offer a range of opportunities for networking, education and industry involvement.
Please check them out and if you’re a member or if you’ve had experience with these organizations, please be sure to share in the comments. We’d like to feature 5 or 6 in the coming months for more in-depth posts about regional associations and the role they play.
BMA Minnesota - Business Marketing Association of Minnesota is the only organization in Minnesota formed exclusively to help business-to-business marketers and communicators stay in touch and keep on top of the latest trends, products and strategies. @bmaminnesota
MIMA - Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association is the oldest Interactive Marketing Association in the U.S., and currently serves and inspires more than 1,300 members from agency, corporate and freelance environments in content development, design, experience design, marketing, media, product development, promotions, publishing and usability. @mimatweet
SMBMSP - Founded by Rick Mahn and Mykl Roventine, Social Media Breakfast Minneapolis St. Paul is a regularly occurring event where like minded social media folks across the Twin Cities of Minneapolis & St. Paul get together to share & learn about social media. Membership in SMBMSP online has grown to over 2,300 professionals from all different disciplines and industries. @smbmsp
MN Search - The Minnesota Search Engine Marketing Association is a non-profit organization dedicated to the progression of search marketing and strives to help businesses and individuals keep a pulse on the latest news, trends, tactics and tools. @mnsearch
Minnesota PRSA - Minnesota Public Relations Society of America is the 10th largest chapter of the PRSA and seeks to advance the profession of Public Relations throughout Minnesota. @minnesotaprsa
MN Women in Marketing Communications - Minnesota Women in Marketing & Communications aims to transforms careers and confirms the power of marketing and communications for members and community by fostering collaborative relationships, offering diverse networking and educational opportunities, promoting marketing and communications’ roles in business growth, and championing women communicators as integral to successful businesses. @mwmcorg
IABC Minnesota - International Association of Business Communicators in Minnesota, named International Chapter of the year in 2011, brings together professionals who want to excel in the communications field. It provides lifelong learning opportunities by giving members the tools and information they need at any stage in their career. @iabcmn
MDMA - Midwest Direct Marketing Association offers members opportunities to keep up with new activities, ideas, trends and techniques and encourages high ethical standards within the industry. @midwestdma
MN AMA - Minnesota American Marketing Association supports the marketing community with events, sponsorships and an in-depth community of members, helping students and professionals alike expand networks, get the latest in marketing communication strategies, and find new opportunities that fit their wants and needs. @mnama
SME Mpls & St Paul - Sales & Marketing Executives of Minnesota is a leadership organization focused on providing a condition for open sharing and learning centered around the issues members face daily and provides opportunities for business and professional growth by the exchange of proven business strategies and methodologies in a peer-to-peer environment. (No Twitter Account Found)
AdFed MN - The Advertising Federation of Minnesota is a non-profit, professional trade association serving the local advertising community offering networking opportunities, seminars and other events. @adfedmn
AIGA Minnesota - The AIGA professional association for design offers education and professional development programs, competitions and shows for those working in design and related fields that promote excellence in design and opportunities for students and professionals to network. The acronym AIGA used to stand for American Institute of Graphic Arts @aigamn
I am very curious about your opinion on these organizations in terms of the value they provide for networking, education and industry involvement? Are you a member of any? What do you like best? Which would you recommend? Which would you like us to profile more specifically?
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© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. |
List of Minnesota Marketing & PR Associations, Organizations, & Groups | http://www.toprankblog.com
SEO Considerations in a Connected Consumer World
Posted on 20. May, 2011 by Jolina Pettice in Blog, Connected Consumer, Mike Grehan, MIMA, MIMA Seminars, Search Engines, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
On a sunny, warm day in Minneapolis, marketers gathered near one of the city’s best attractions – LakeCalhoun – to learn about “Search and the Connected Consumer”, a view of how people retrieve information online and what that means for the future online and search engine marketing.
Hosted by MIMA, the event featured Mike Grehan, Global VP Content, Search Engine Watch, ClickZ & Search Engine Strategies.
Mike started by educating the audience on the history of the World Wide Web and the Internet (note: they are not one in the same).
The idea of collecting information and making it available to the masses was on the minds of intellectuals/scientists long before it came to fruition into the World Wide Web. For example, in 1945 Vannevar Bush – a prominent scientist and a key person behind the creation of the Atomic Bomb – argued that as humans turned from war, scientific efforts should shift from increasing physical abilities to making all previously collected human knowledge more accessible.
Fast forward to 1998 and consider Google’s mission statement: “To organize the world’s information make it universally accessible and useful” and it sounds pretty familiar.
Next, Grehan spent a few minutes explaining how search engines work via the following 3 steps:
1. Crawling the Web
Most people are aware that Google ‘crawls the web’, the crawlers follow links and collect text. However, the crawlers themselves have very little to do if anything with ranking.
2. Indexing the Web
A crawler comes to a website, content is parsed out and an inverted index is created to identify what terms exist on what pages/documents. Think of an index in the back of a book – “chocolate” appears on pages 32, 157 and 256.
3. Analyzing the Web
Ranking content based solely on instances of keyword phrases on a web page quickly proved to be a flawed method because all a site had to do to improve its ranking was have more instances of the term on a page, whether relevant or not to the end user.
This is where hyperlink analysis for the web came into play as well as the idea of hubs, authorities and communities which identifies how and where different sites within similar communities, are linking and related to each other. Not all links are equal – some links are more equal than others. And some are infinitely more equal.
Hyperlink analysis algorithms make either one or both of these assumptions:
Assumption #1 – A hyperlink from page A to page B is a recommendation of page B by the author of page A
Assumption #2 – If page A and page B are connected by a hyperlink, then they might be on the same topic – they’re related
Search engines look further into link relationships to understand: If page C cites pages A and B, then A and B are said to be co-cited by C
Page A and B being co-cited by many other pages is evidence that A and B are somehow related to each other
Confused? Grehan breaks it down into this easier to understand statement:
Company websites can use keyword phrases and position themselves as the ‘Leader of Whatever’, but Google is asking ‘who else says so?’.
Links help distill the picture and identify votes of authority about your content by others.
The new science of networks and the addition of cyber communities has further impacted the need for quality, relevant links over quantity.
Other factors that influence ranking include Query Chains and User Trails.
Query Chains are Google’s ability to understand the cognitive processes a human will undertake when searching for information.
For example, if ‘enough’ people search for ‘special edition’, then ‘special collections’ and then ‘limited editions’ to find the result they want for limited edition books, Google will eventually serve the results for ‘limited editions’ when someone types in ‘special edition’ knowing what content they are most likely looking for.
Next is User Trail data which is collected by understanding what searchers click on and continue clicking links to additional content vs what they click on and hit the ‘back button’. Too many clicks to the back button for any particular search result can potentially lead to a dip in ranking position.
Now, that the audience was up-to-speed on how search engines work (or have worked to-date) the conversation turned toward the changing end user, aka “The Connected Consumer”.
In short, the end user – me, you, your prospects, grandma and everyone in between has changed and so too did the search experience.
We went from being satisfied with 10 blue links on a search results page to wanting more options and more ways to interact with information more quickly. The now ‘old-news’ roll out of Universal Search is still a significant change in the search experience if we are looking back of the evolution of search.
Images, video and now social updates appearing directly on the SERP (search engine results page) provide a quite different experience for the searcher.
So what can we gain from understanding the premise of compiling the world’s information, knowing how the search engines work and how they are changing? Better insight into how we better approach online marketing and specifically content marketing activities.
According to Grehan, to do this most effectively companies will need to transition from creating content for Google and rather focus on the people they are trying to reach (not the channels in which you try to reach them).
To do this, we need to understand user intent.
Informational
“This applies to the surfer who is really looking for factual information on the web. So they make a query like ‘low hemoglobin’ for instance. This is a medical condition. They are looking for specific info about this condition. That’s very close to classical information retrieval.”
Navigational
“When a surfer really wants to reach a particular website. If they do a query for Best Buy for example. What they probably want is to go directly to the website, as opposed to find a Wikipedia page on the history of the company.”
Transactional
“Transactional searches are when the surfer wants to do something on the web, through the web. Shopping, downloading a whitepaper, finding a service. In this case the searcher wants to find a search result that helps them complete the action or satisfies a need.”
What we do with this information is create content to help satisfy the intent of the searcher, thereby creating quality content that people will find helpful and ultimately may link to/share with their community. And this is perhaps the biggest change in search which is the shift toward information-seeking on social sites. No longer does the end user have to go Google or any other search engine to find information.
The same end user which is placing more trust in 3rd party content and reviews is also finding ways to side-step browsers and instead accomplishing goals through the Internet/Apps.
In summary, the Connected Consumer is finding new ways to discover and interact with information, placing more value in non-traditional sources. Decision makers no longer act independently of each other but are all the more connected to other consumers, to other channel members and often to brands.
In turn, brands and companies are now vying for central position inside consumer networks and need to determine how they can best create information that satisfies the user intent, is recognized as valuable by other sources and available to the audience in the formats they prefer. This is a model not unlike the Persona Discovery, Consumption and Sharing approach we promote at TopRank Marketing.
Have thoughts on the best ways to connect with the Connected Consumer? Share them in the comments below!
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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. |
SEO Considerations in a Connected Consumer World | http://www.toprankblog.com
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