| I Disagree with Fred; Marketing is for Companies that Have Great Products |
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SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog >> SEOmoz, a Seattle-based search engine optimization company, serves as a hub for search marketers worldwide, providing education, tools, resources and paid services. Source: Posted by randfish One of the people I admire and respect most in the technology, startup world is Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson. A little more than a year ago, I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Fred in his New York offices, just as SEOmoz was ending a failed fund raising attempt. The writer I'd come to know and love through his blog and tweets shone through - he's affable, humble, smart and considerate. And his firm employed (at that time anyway) an analyst with professional SEO experience, who also sat in on the meeting. Today, Fred wrote a post on his blog titled "Marketing."
I strongly disagree with the statement "marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks," and I mostly disagree that it only pays to use marketing when profit margins are insanely high. As I read it, part of me wondered , "Isn't the goal of venture capital to help a company scale faster than it could without funding?" To be fair to Fred, what he calls "marketing" is what I believe many of us in the startup/tech space would call "advertising" or "paid customer acquisition channels." Later in the post, he says:
I disagree less with this point. For some startups, "free" customer acquisition in early stages certainly makes sense as the primary channel, though I'd question whether the right amount to spend is always $0.00. That strikes me as both extreme and rarely correct. At the very least, startups should be experimenting with paid acquisition channels that look compelling - ignoring them simply because they aren't free could really hurt your growth potential. My Perspective on Startup MarketingI've helped a lot of startups in various stages with marketing - through SEOmoz's old consulting business, through lots of personal relationships, through our Q+A and through events and conferences. Last year, YCombinator's Paul Graham invited me down to their Silion Valley offices for a pizza party where I talked about SEO for startups. I gave a similar talk at Seattle's Techstars a few months ago and a brand new one that I presented at Twiistup in Los Angeles just a couple weeks ago. I've embedded that presentation below:
Inbound Marketing for Startups in 2011 View more presentations from randfish I'm a huge believer in inbound marketing, which includes social media, content marketing (blogging, whitepapers, research, infographics, etc.), SEO, video, Q+A and comment marketing and loads of other free (or mostly free) channels. Inbound marketing is a powerful way to make consumers aware of your business and your products, and in my opinion, it's one in which people don't invest nearly enough. I'm worried that Fred's post will re-inforce a harmful stereotype that I see a lot in the tech startup world. "Product is All That Matters?"For the first few years that I was in the "web world," 1997-2001, there was a dangerous and obvious bias in startups toward sales and marketing - and branding in particular. But, in the past few...(Click here to read whole post on source site) |
Newsflash
| How Do Tweets Influence Search Rankings? An Experiment for a Cause |
Posted by Danny Dover Last week Rand Fishkin covered the new ways social media is impacting traditional SEO. While many SEOs had assumed this was happening already, this announcement marked the first time this new type of content endorsement (links within Facebook and Twitter) was actually confirmed as a ranking factor by search engines representatives. Although there has not yet been enough time to run a formal experiment on the impact of these type of content endorsements, I would like to get the ball rolling with an informal experiment that will both help start to answer the questions these changes have brought and at the same time promote the holiday spirit. The Experiment Disclaimer: This experiment is not like the more formal tests we run here at SEOmoz. Any results we glean from this test will only be hints at what is going on. Admittedly, there are many factors that this test simply does not take into account. Seriously guys, this is more a fun test rather than an actual scientific experiment. :-) In order to test these two ranking factors (traditional links and social media citations), we are going to need to promote two nearly identical pages using one promotion method for one and the other promotional method for the other while targeting the same keyword phrase. We can then see which page performs better in both the short term (my guess is the the tweet driven page) and the long term (my guess is the link driven page). These two test pages will need to be targeting the same keyword phrase and on the same domain. I could do this on my own domain but doing so would be disingenuous (Hey everyone, send links and tweets my way! It is for an "experiment" ;-p You wouldn't be fooled for a second and my apartment would get TPed... again) Instead, the two test pages will be on a local charity's website and target the phrase "Hunger in Sierra Leone". The local charity, SeeYourImpact, is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that sends 100% of donations to the charity of a donation makers choice. The non-profit then photographs the results and sends the photo and a story of how the donation made an impact on an actual person to the donation maker so they can 'see the impact' (thus the name) of their donation. There is absolutely no financial affiliation with SEOmoz and SeeYourImpact although we do do consulting for them on a pro bono basis. In short, we think they are doing a great service but no money is being exchanged between the two organizations. We Need Your Help! Below is the code for either tweeting or linking to one of the two pages on SeeYourImpact's website. If |
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