We decided to invite a few of our staff over to attend this year’s training since they were having it in our back yard at the Imagination Gallery this year. @BrettPringle and @SandyCosser came through to share some time in the office and meet some of the speakers.

There was a lot of information presented, which is detailed in the individual presentations. The seminar started promptly and Will Critchlow from Distilled led the way. Below are some key aspects that I took away from the seminar:

“Advanced analytics” –Will Critchlow

Will’s presentation was fairly technical and I was pleased to find another avid user of MS Excel – probably somewhat more fanatical than I – so I certainly appreciated seeing first hand some of the more advanced formulas that he was employing. Next time I am faced with a tedious excel task I will draw inspiration from this and work out the formulas rather than just moving things around by hand! Will mentioned a cool tool from Excellent analytics that allows you to use pivot tables to graph the analytics data which can often reveal something new (like duplicate content).

As operations director at MediaVision I often need to evaluate the effectiveness of any work we do. There has been a bit of a running debate as to where we can get the best bang for our buck (or in this case our content). Do we release it to Ezines or do we hoard it ourselves?

This can be a tricky landscape to evaluate because there is so much information out there, from prominent SEO’s I might add, about the value of Ezine articles, however most of this information dates back to the hay days of Ezines (for SEO). The information is quite out of date and not necessarily correct in today’s Search landscape.

I’ve come to the conclusion that if we had retained every piece of original content that we released into ezines over the past few years, and had added that to our own content network, then it would be that much stronger today, and we would still have full control over it!

Crowd sourcing is a fascinating phenomenom that draws on the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to solve problems, find inspiration, gather information and tap into the knowledge of a select public to further company aims. It’s used quite a lot; sometimes it’s successful and sometimes it’s not. The most successful example is probably Threadless, a Chicago-based t-shirt making company that creates only designs submitted by their audience. Very simply, anyone can submit a t-shirt design, anyone can vote on designs submitted and the designs with the highest number of votes makes it to the manufacturing process – provided they get sufficient pre-orders, which goes to show that the owners of Threadless are pretty smart people.

Now that we have settled into 2009, we find that businesses the world over are focusing on online marketing as the preferred method of reaching their target market. This is because of the internet’s enhanced tracking and analytical capabilities.

So where should your marketing dollars be spent? What are the trends for the rest of the year? The presentation entitled “eMarketing Tactics for 2009” gives a broad overview of where the online marketing environment is heading and what some of the trends to look out for are.

The presentation briefly covers the following top 5 online marketing tactics for 2009:

- Email marketing

- Social media

- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

- Online PR

- PPC

There is also a brief section on marketing tactic combinations. You can have a look at my presentation here:

So, in the ever changing world of search engines, all companies are thinking about ways to improve their search engine rankings. Getting to the first page or even just highly noticed has become somewhat of an addiction for many. I recently did a presentation on one of the topics that I think will be an important ranking factor in 2009.

The presentation was on blended search and covered various points, such as:

* The types of results
* How to optimise for the main blended search factors
* How popular blended search is in search engines
* Why you need to use blended search to your advantage

Have a look and leave all positive comments below.

Corporate branding can easily be confused with personal branding online, as companies do their best to promote their profiles. While the two are not entirely separate, confusing them can be dangerous. Look at my sideshow on how corporate branding online is different from personal branding to see what’s really different between the two and where their advantages lie.

Corporate and Personal Branding in a nutshell:

• Personal Branding is “all about you”.
• You have a personal brand even if you don’t choose to have one.
• It’s about how you appear to the world and what (or what company and values) you represent.
• What you can choose is how you maintain and present your personal brand.
• Personal branding is very important for a company to give a personal touch to the company because a personal brand is the reflection of a person’s identity and values behind the company.
• More generally, Richard Branson used personal branding very successfully to foster loyalty for his companies.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time since last year trawling through the net to find statistics and figures regarding the South Africa online market. Without free resources such as Comscore and Hitwise within SA, it has become quite a task to find any substantial information about the local market here in South Africa.

Besides the standard internet usage reports and the large volumes of mobile facts and figures for South Africa, information is far and few around the actual search market share for Google and other local engines, unless you are willing to spend a few coins on the amazing reports from World Wide Worx. Last night was the last bit of compiling the bits and pieces together of all the bookmarks for this mornings presentation.

I am sure you are all familiar with local search and have seen various local results popping up in Google in the past but how many of you know exactly what local search is all about.

I have a presentation on local search that explains not only the basics but the in depth factors of local search as well. I also gave my view on where I think local search is moving to.

Some of the main factors covered:

• Factors that make you rank
• How to optimize for local
• Adding your business in the LBC(local business center)
• Different types of results and why you would want to be in a certain type

Another section that I covered was how Google needs to up their game in order to infiltrate the local search market in countries like China, where Baidui is the biggest search engine.
Have a look at my presentation and let me know if there is anything i have left out.