At a recent Atlassian Developers conference held in Berlin, a developer inadvertently entered the debate that’s been raging around the world – the sexism that exists in our culture. He put up a slide, comparing an Atlassian plugin to his girlfriend – saying both were beautiful but both: Complain a lot Demand his attention Interrupt him when he’s working Don’t play well with his other friends His intentions were probably benign – to be funny. I’m sure he thought he was being clever and he probably didn’t even realize his…

When you work with an incredibly creative team, writing a script can be a lot of fun (especially when you get to write a cartoon for kids). But as creative as you want to be, you have to approach each script with a strategy, as well. Your script can have jokes or tug at the heart strings – but what does it cause people to do? After they watch it, what action is taken? We’ve been writing television and radio commercial scripts for decades, from the live takes best parodied…

Maybe you run a small business. Or you’re part of a small team. Either way, search engine optimization is often the thing that falls to the wayside first when you’re a little fish. And I get that. You’re busy doing what you love, serving your customers and trying to grow your business. But proper attention to SEO is how you’ll grow that business and earn your visibility in your market. So don’t ignore SEO, create a plan for it. From the very beginning. As an SMB, how do you get started…

There’s a lot of talk about how we as marketers can humanize brands. How we, in this era of online two-way conversations, can make brands have personalities that our target audiences – customers, prospects, advocates, members of the press, etc. – will want to engage with. How acting “human” can actually make businesses smarter and more relevant. This conversation has become so extensive that “human” has become a bit of a buzzword. The concept has also gotten away from its fundamental meaning. We didn’t mean every brand had to be…

Last week I achieved content nirvana attending the first Authority Intensive, a two-day conference that takes a tactical approach to content marketing. Programming was broken out into four topical tracks – design, content, traffic and conversion – to ensure the full picture was being created. Speakers presented on what they knew, what they had done and what they had seen. Even before landing in Denver I was confident I’d come away from the experience with increased knowledge and things to act upon. What I wasn’t expecting was to leave newly…

When hiring an agency to help your business market itself online, you want to know you can trust that the right work will be done. You might start off with assumptions about what results you should see, how long a campaign should take, and how much you’re willing to spend. However, you should also keep in mind some cautions to make sure you’re properly approaching a campaign. Know Your Timeline When you’re investing hard-earned money into an online campaign, of course you want to see results. But you also need…

More businesses are moving their marketing budgets over to online video. And why wouldn’t they? Videos deliver a 74 percent increase in your visitors’ understanding of your product or service (compared to pictures) and increase the likelihood of purchase by a serious 64 percent [source]. The only thing hotter than content marketing right now is video content marketing. Most of us already know the power of a great marketing video. They can be used to sell products, to simplify messaging, to show your WOW moments, to highlight a kickass company…

Starting a business today requires a few things people weren’t focused on when the YellowPages were the go-to place for finding the businesses and services we needed. Is there an appropriate dot com available? Do ugly, unrelated results appear when my innocent brand name is searched? Can I create a suitable 15 character (or less) Twitter handle using some recognizable version of my brand’s name? Among the many decisions small businesses are making today is, “What social media accounts should my company have?” Because everyone’s on Facebook, right? And we…

I’ve been hearing some people in the search engine optimization industry say that links aren’t important anymore. That the search engines are moving away from links in favor of other signals. It makes for interesting conversation, unfortunately, recent moves by Google say the exact opposite is true. Just recently we saw guest blog posting once again devalued and two high-profile guest blogging communities slapped with severe penalties. If links weren’t still key, Google wouldn’t be spending the time and effort to combat them. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam…

SearchLove Boston 2014 offered an incredible array of speakers with insight on everything from technical data analysis to general branding strategies. Both the lineup of speakers and the topics discussed represent the changing world of online marketing, as it has really become all about simply doing effective marketing. Here are a few major takeaways: An emphasis on people: we need to move beyond measuring superficial “engagement” or counting clicks to identifying the behavior and concerns of the specific audiences we are reaching. Little talk of “traditional” SEO tactics: “linkbuilding” and…