Going back to school marks a fresh start for kids of all ages, kindergarten to college. New notebooks, clothes, backpacks and various other school essentials need to be bought and tons of tiny decisions, such as Garfield vs. Hannah Montana folders, need to be made. (This year I’m betting it’s Twilight-themed supplies that fly off the shelves.)

While back-to-school shopping is generally thought of as a traditional shopping activity, i.e. at your local Wal-Mart rather than online, there is opportunity for online advertisers as well to take advantage of the increased consumer demand that the return of classes creates.

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This post was written by Chris Copeland and published in MediaPost’s Search Insider, Friday, August 28, 2009

The elevator speech.

It’s one of the prerequisites of business development. In the time you can spend with someone on a 30-second ride, how do you describe your business? For established brands, the elevator speech is not so much a speech but a word. For brands like Google, Microsoft, and Apple, you can quickly get from brand name to association in a word.

Let’s play the game together, in your head or on paper.

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If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how valuable is a video? According to comScore, YouTube has surpassed 100 million viewers, and is second in query volume among search engines. Adding to this, 99% of all Google video searches are on YouTube.
More and more, building your brand means engaging with your audience not only in the SERP space, but in social media, including YouTube. Videos create a dynamic way to interact and build a relationship with your consumer. A positive experience with your brand will help increase brand loyalty among consumers.

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Keyword research, much like national opinion surveys, can illuminate the perils and opportunities for a client or completely lead them  astray, plummeting what once was a promising opportunity to the land where poorly researched search campaigns go to die.  Let there be no mistake, everyone manipulates data to tell a story (usually a story that is favorable to your POV).  As search is so heavily data driven, it does not take a far stretch of the imagination to see how illogically concocted paid search strategies coupled with incomplete search data can result in misleading information.

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A couple weeks ago, two giant sized posters on easel-like stands showed up in our St. Louis office.  I was really busy at the time and didn’t have the brain capacity to decipher what was on them, what they meant to me, and if I really needed to even care in the first place.  Hell, they could have said the building was on fire and I wouldn’t have noticed.   I wouldn’t say I’m any less busy today, however since there is one literally beside the desk next to me, I figured maybe I should slow my roll a bit and take a look.

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