Data Marketing

More Retweets Lead to More Twitter Followers, Right?

Being a moderately analytical marketer, I should be pretty smart about assuming a correlation between two events that might not necessarily exist. And yet, for the past few years, I’ve foolishly done the opposite. Below is a chart of my Twitter follower growth from Followerwonk over the past 60 days: The spikes are probably days when I’ve sent some awesome…
Marketing Psychology

The Missing Narrative

I love the Green Bay Packers. I love the history of the team. I love that the town of Green Bay’s (population 107,00) residents own the team rather than a billionaire in a big city. I love the stories of struggles and near-bankruptcies they faced in their history and how the sale of shares that would never be repaid nor…
Data Marketing

10 Lessons Learned from Avinash Kaushik’s Magnum Opus on Facebook Marketing

Earlier this week, Avinash Kaushik, who’s certainly among the most brilliant marketing minds of the generation, wrote an exceptional piece on Facebook Marketing. It’s a lengthy read, but a worthwhile one, and I urge anyone who reads this site and uses Facebook to reach an audience to spend 30 minutes to fully parse what he’s put together. (from Avinash’s post)…
Marketing Psychology

Two Psychological Triggers that Make Viral Content More Viral

I was particularly impressed last week with the political quiz website ISideWith. If you haven’t yet taken it for a spin, I recommend doing so, not because it’s likely to change your political affiliation (we might even have a genetic predisposition there that no evidence will be strong enough to overrule), but because it’s an excellent case study in effective…
Marketing Startups

Growth Hackers: The Ninja Rockstar Pirates of the Marketing World

I really enjoyed this article from Layered Thoughts: “Growth Hacking is BS. It’s All Just Marketing.” But, it did make me reflect on my adoption of other terminology over the years. In the early 2000s, I liked the term “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) over “Search Engine Placement” (which some people still use) or “Search Engine Marketing” (which now means SEO+PPC…
Marketing

Google Search Quality is Smart to Be Messing with Link Spammers

In case you’ve not yet read about Google’s patent on rank modifying for spamming techniques, check out SEO by the Sea and SEOptimise. It’s a clever system from the Google folks designed to dissuade spammers (particularly link spammers) from being confident of their results. The basic premise is simple – after observing rank improving behavior on a page/site (either spammy…
Marketing Startups

Manufacturing Serendipity

I’m on the road ~100 days each year. When I’m in Seattle, I have at least 30% of my days filled with coffees, calls, and communication to folks outside the company from whom I’m seeking absolutely nothing and where my goal is merely to be helpful. I do most of this in the name of a process I now call…
Marketing Moz

Mozcon Feedback & Erica’s Letter to Speakers

I’ve written before on this blog about how we’ve been working to make Mozcon a remarkable outlier in the field of marketing conferences. Today, I received my feedback scores from Erica McGillivray, who (along with Charlene & Jen) did most of the organization and speaker wrangling for the event. I wanted so share that letter here on the blog, as…