NOTE: I wrote this article for the June 2007 issue of Folio. Here is the complete, unedited version… Just when you thought you had the hang of SEO and SEM to drive traffic to your publication’s web site, along comes another acronym for you to master: SMO. Social Media Optimization (SMO), was coined by Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations in 2006 and is a set of tactics to get more exposure for your site in social media (blogs, forums, social bookmarking sites, etc.). The goal of SMO is to make it as easy as possible for others to link to your content and thus get as many...

Just received my copy of BtoB Media Business today and saw the article “Room for Vertical Search” in which I have a quote. (OK, maybe it’s a little vain to look for my own quotes in a magazine, but don’t tell me you wouldn’t do it too!) It’s the same article that I wrote about in a previous post on my blog which contains my full quote. There was an ommission in the print article that I’m sure was just because of space limitations, but that I feel is critical to the point I was trying to make. In the article I’m quoted, “Is there an opportunity for...

Marie Griffin of B-to-B Media Business (and an awesome person), asked me today for my thoughts on the recent Convera Professional Search Study. She passed along the followng data points from the study: Although 89% of respondents sometimes (46%) or always (43%) find what they want after several attempts, only 11% said they always find what they want on the first attempt. Fifty-nine percent will spend 15 minutes or less on a single search before giving up, but 24% will search for 16 to 30 minutes and 17% are willing to search for more than half an hour. On average, 47% of respondents reported they...

Vertical search is a very big topic right now for B2B publishers. It’s been covered in the business media press, covered in special sessions at media events like the DeSilva + Phillips 2006 Media Dealmakers Summit, the ABM Spring Meeting in Scottsdale, (sorry y’all, really wish I would have been able to come to that, but had a prior family committment), and several others. ABM is even hosting a full day meeting on the topic May 15th in New York. Is it really the next big revenue opportunity for publishers? I personally don’t believe it. Hear me out… It’s very...

Back in February I had the pleasure to attend the DeSilva + Phillips 2006 Media Dealmakers Summit in New York. This was a very interesting summit attended by a true who’s who of executives in the business media world. I was honored to be on a panel with Colin Crawford, SVP of Online for IDG and Mitch Rouda, President of eMedia for Hanley Wood talking about vertical search. These guys really know what they’re doing and I had a blast being on the panel with these two and answering the questions thrown at us by Jeff Dearth, the panel’s moderator. (Jeff, you also did a great job...