Blue Fountain Media’s Gabriel Shaoolian recently gave a seminar on Online Reputation Management . Today Blue Fountain Media has released the full Powerpoint presentation, which can be viewed below:

Finger on the Pulse

Blue Fountain Media has received an advanced copy of Econsultancy & SEMPO’s forthcoming State of Search Engine Marketing Report 2010. The report is based on a world-wide survey of over 1,500 advertisers (companies) and advertising agencies across a wide range of business sectors.

SEO’s Double Digit Growth

The SEO/SEM industry grew 8% to $14.6 Billion in 2009. This year things are expected to be even better as the industry will grow by 14% to $16.6 Billion. But where’s all that money coming from?

How SEO Killed the Newspaper

Companies and agencies are increasing SEO, SEM, and Social Media Marketing budgets at the expense of other advertising spending. This is particularly true of print advertising like newspapers and magazines.

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If you’re reading this blog, you probably know that Blue Fountain Media is a leader in web design and development (even Google says so). You probably know that online marketing—including search engine optimization and social media marketing—is the fastest-growing part of the company.

What you might not know is that everyone in the marketing department, from analysts and copywriters to project managers and the department directory, started out as an intern. We’re actively hiring interns for 2010.

Are you ready?

We’re looking for enough skills to contribute from day one, plus the potential to join our team full-time. We have some exciting new projects coming up in 2010, and we’re getting ready to take them on.

If you’re interested, you should have all of the following skills and characteristics:

• An interest in online media and online marketing.
• A blog, Twitter, podcast, Youtube channel—something that shows that you’re active on the Internet.
• Good writing skills (you should be able to inform, convince—and effortlessly sprinkle your prose with high-value keywords).

You should also be able to do at least one of the following:

• Code in HTML.
• Code in PHP.
• Design in Photoshop.
• Create the kind of attention-grabbing content that finds its way to the homepage of Digg, Reddit, and Delicious.

The internship starts in January. Internships typically last for six months, after which they generally lead to a full-time offer. After the first few weeks, we’ll help you specialize in one of the major components of SEO: on-site analysis, link-building, social media, or copywriting. The compensation for this internship is $500 per month, with frequent raises for interns who demonstrate skills.

To apply, send a cover letter, resume, and a writing sample (e.g. a blog post, school essay—anything over 500 words) to careers@bluefountainmedia.com.

At the SMX East Ad Agencies discussion, a few of the panelists have discussed the problems they run into when they scale up SEO, particularly as part of a large company or a complex marketing plan.

Blue Fountain Media has approached the same problem—we work with large, Fortune 500 companies; we work alongside PR companies and ad agencies; and we often work with websites that use legacy software, and companies that face strict regulatory issues. Here’s what we’ve learned about integrating search engine optimization into larger campaigns.

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I attended a couple of great sessions this morning, most of which were focused on web analytics and how they can provide actionable data. Here are some key takeaways:

1. Keep your enemies closer, but keep your friends close too.

When you start an SEO campaign, the focus is usually on competitor research: what are your competitors optimizing for, where are they getting links, and how can you do a better job at it than them? But through Google Analytics you can also see what sites you are already getting traffic from. Well, a lot of the time, the users that come in through those referring sites ended up there because of a previous search query. Why is the referrer ranking, and what can you do to get your site on that SERP too?

2.  Exploring site search

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The BFM team is here at SMX, learning everything from the depths of duplicate content issues to the intricacies of web copywriting. Which is a great reminder that the easy part comes first: any small company can rank on page one for highly targeted searches, by following a few fairly simple steps.

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Three members from the Blue Fountain Media marketing team, Alhan Keser, Zack Sinkler, and Byrne Hobart attended the first day of the annual Search Engine Marketing Expo at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City on Monday.
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At Blue Fountain Media, we create most of the content on most of the sites we work on. That gives us the ability to choose titles, headers, content, and copy that will bring in search visitors. But many of the largest, most popular sites don’t use this model at all: Yelp, LinkedIn, and Ezinearticles have all been able to rank highly on Google even though their content isn’t controlled by SEOs.

(photo source: Jerry Luk)

Here are some of the techniques they use—the internal linking structure, the user guidelines, and the content aggregation methods they use to rank well even if they don’t know what they’ll rank for.
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(source: Jason Nicholls)

Many companies are at a point where their brand identity in an on-line environment is static in an era of chaos. Things that used to work now don’t. Traditional branding has always been built on out-branding the competition in an ever-increasing advertising clutter-filled environment, media fragmentation, and the seemingly limitless choices that are offered in just about every product category.

Why do some companies “get it” and some are being left behind in the dust? Why are Nike, JetBlue, and Zappos the poster-children for companies that “get it”, and how are they achieving their social media success? Why is transparency so important? Will these things have a positive ROI and how do you measure it?

We have to remember that social media is just one piece of the puzzle and a component of branding. The following are things you have to remember when trying to build a strong brand interactively:

Listen:

I’ve mentioned numerous times that as a brand you have to actively listen. Create ego-centric searches on as many social media platforms as you can—Twitter, Facebook, Google Blogsearch, Friendfeed, Technorati. Read blogs and people’s comments—understand what people are saying, and always ask yourself why. Why are people saying what they say?
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New York clothing store, RAG New York‘s traffic from search engines continues to rise, months after search engine optimization by Blue Fountain Media was performed on the site from April to September 2008.

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