Nearly 100 members of the Arizona Interactive Marketing Association gathered to hear Anderson disperse such tasty nuggets of tech-geek goodness like:

• About 925,000 mobile devices are activated every day
• Mobile-specific adwords campaigns have seen click-through rate increases up to 11.5%
• Retailers with optimized mobile sites are increasing customer engagement by 85%
• 61% of users will not return to your site if it is not mobile enabled

Clearly, the theme running through the 45 minute presentation was to mobilize your web site, if you haven’t already. Anderson provided several tips to AZIMA members to do just that, including keeping the layout simple; design for thumbs, not mouse clicks; prioritize your content; use uniquely mobile features, and make it easy to convert.

Among the AZIMA members attending included interactive marketers from Vertical Measures, Mint Social, Empire Cat, Gannett Local and other Valley marketing companies. Anderson’s talk is just one of the benefits to members and guests that AZIMA brings to the Valley’s Interactive marketing world every month.

Every month, AZIMA brings a guest speaker to offer new insights and challenges to some of the best interactive marketers. To find out more about becoming a member or reaching this targeted tech-driven audience, contact our board members to learn about exciting opportunities for 2012.

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Arizona Interactive Marketing Association is a nonprofit organization created to help you better understand interactive marketing through education tools, events, and networking.

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The August AZIMA event featured guest speaker Neal Schaffer of WindMill Networking and author of Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales & Social Media Marketing, who spoke about the power of social media, and in particular LinkedIn, to drive results for your company and your career. Neal reinforced the importance of businesses needing to not only participate in social media, but embrace it throughout their organization. A few years ago, social media was viewed as a fad – but now its here to stay. According to Neal, more time is spent online than watching TV, especially among 45-54 year olds, so it’s critical we shift our marketing focus there accordingly.

Neal broke down social media strategy into something easy to understand and act upon. According to Neal, the average marketer or company goes through three stages of understanding social media:

• It’s scary and has no ROI – let’s ignore it.
• Maybe we should consider it – after all, other companies are doing it, maybe even our competitors!
• How can we do more social media? Social is great, lets do more!

Once marketers move to third stage and have fully embraced social media, Neal recommends the PDCA approach. What’s that, you ask?

• Plan – plan your strategy & define your goals
• Do – execute your plan
• Check – monitor your results
• Act – revise your plan based on the results you checked

In the end, you’ll realize just how critical the role of a social media marketer is. Neal believes its so important a community manager should truly be a 6 figure job!

Neal also shared some tips for LinkedIn with the audience – Neal was one of the earliest adopters of LinkedIn and known as one of the original “LinkedIn Lions.” He was part of the open networking movement and built his connections to be as large as possible, generating tons of business leads, consulting gigs and job prospects. Neal encourages marketers to be open & connect with each other on LinkedIn as a great way to generate leads and connect with others.

In addition to the presentation and usual networking hour, we gave away a free Kindle to one lucky attendee, as well as a few copies of Arnie Kuenn’s new book, Accelerate!, which just debuted recently on Amazon and can be purchased here.

Thanks to all that attended!

Nick Roshon

Nick is an SEO Strategist at iCrossing, a global digital marketing agency owned by the Hearst Corporation that helps brands find and connect with their customers online. He's also an active blogger, amateur race car driver, and loves all things social media.

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Everyday social media users use these platforms to network with likeminded individuals, keep up with friends and family, make professional connections and more. The possibilities are truly endless.

But how can the businesses and other organizations make lasting impressions on users who participate for personal reasons?  By being genuine, transparent and real.  Businesses and brands win over social media users when the brand personality is consistent across all channels – especially social media networks.

Businesses are give an opportunity to connect with customers on a very personal level through social networks, but many fall short or miss the point completely. And you don’t want to be one of those businesses.

That’s where Neal Schaffer comes in.

Schaffer is an internationally recognized speaker on social media and President of Windmills Marketing, a social media marketing strategic consultancy.  Schaffer helps businesses of all sizes and industries with their social media strategy and implementation, and he will be sharing the secrets of social media strategy at AZIMA’s August event.

Join us as Schaffer shares how businesses can begin go create a social media strategy.  Learn which people in your company should be involved in social media, as well as how to decide what networks are important for your business to participate on.

Here are the details:

Business Social Media Strategy: From Blogs to Tweeting, How & Why

Speaker: Neal Schaffer

Event Location: Scottsdale Hilton (6333 N. Scottsdale Rd., Scottsdale, AZ 85250) A light dinner, and one drink is included.

Time: Doors open at 6:00 p.m. for networking. Dinner served at 6:45 p.m. and presentation will begin at 7:00 p.m.

Pricing:

Student $25 (Enter “STUDENT” promo code)

Members $35 (Enter “AZIMAMEMBER” promo code

Non- Members $45

At the door $55

Register today!

Abby Gilmore

Abby Gilmore is an Interactive Media Analyst at Ryland Homes and a member of the AZIMA Communications Committee. She enjoys blogging, connecting with others via social media and volunteering whenever she can. Follow her on Twitter @abbygilmore.

Both days have jam- packed agendas! If you haven’t already gotten your tickets there are limited seats available! As always, OMS covers key topics critical to your success as a marketer – social media, search, email, demand generation, analytics, usability and integrated Marketing, brought to you by industry-leading authors, academics, brand marketers and online innovators. I’ll be there. How about you?

Redlincook

Elise is the eMarketing Specialist at Empire Southwest, an authorized Caterpillar heavy construction equipment dealer which also offers top brands of used machinery to clients across the United States and Mexico. She specializes in content strategy, content marketing, search and social technologies and has been on the AZIMA Board of Directors since the very beginning.

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Hole-in-the-Wall restaurant is within the Pointe Hilton Squaw Peak Resort at 7677 North 16^th Street, Phoenix, AZ 85020-4434. The rustic cowboy-inspired historic building is now revamped into a low & slow BBQ joint, complete with an outdoor grill and vintage smoker. Parking is ample on the north side of the resort, adjacent to the restaurant.

RSVP: “Happy Hour” to 602-953-6795 or rsvp@olsoncomm.com

Redlincook

Elise is the eMarketing Specialist at Empire Southwest, an authorized Caterpillar heavy construction equipment dealer which also offers top brands of used machinery to clients across the United States and Mexico. She specializes in content strategy, content marketing, search and social technologies and has been on the AZIMA Board of Directors since the very beginning.

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• Online Marketing Boot Camp: Choose from 12 intensive, interactive workshops offered the day before the main OMS conference. Each workshop earns credit towards certification from the Online Marketing Institute.
• Social Media Masters Workshops: For the experienced PR and Social Media professional that’s ready to take social media marketing to next level. Offered the day after the main conference.
• Integrated Marketing Content: New workshops and an entire conference track are dedicated to help you learn how to bring it all together.  Learn how to integrate the various online marketing components into your overall marketing mix and form a cohesive strategy.
• One-on-One Expert Labs: Receive a one-on-one consultation with experts in analytics, search, usability and email. Don’t miss this opportunity to ask the questions that will directly benefit your website’s and marketing performance.

As always, OMS covers key topics critical to your success as a marketer – social media, search, email, demand generation, analytics, usability and integrated marketing, brought to you by industry-leading authors, academics, brand marketers and online innovators.

Register with promo code IMA15AZ, as a friend of AZIMA and  save 15 %.

Redlincook

Elise is the eMarketing Specialist at Empire Southwest, an authorized Caterpillar heavy construction equipment dealer which also offers top brands of used machinery to clients across the United States and Mexico. She specializes in content strategy, content marketing, search and social technologies and has been on the AZIMA Board of Directors since the very beginning.

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Vanessa Fox of Nine By Blue visited the monthly Arizona Interactive Marketing Association social event a few nights ago.  As a previous employee of Google she was a driving force behind the development of their Webmaster Central and she continues to spread her search marketing knowledge through many speaking engagements and her writing. Though a search marketing strategy can be daunting to some people, Vanessa offered a refreshingly simple approach in her “Blueprint for Search” presentation and gives us the following key points.

Why care about search?

Vanessa mentions that she could have shown some slides highlighting many stats about how much people are using search engines, but instead asks the audience “Who uses a search engine?” All hands in the room go up.  Generally speaking, we should care about search because virtually everybody is using it. Especially your audience.

Your audience searches

Search engine usage is becoming more a part of our day-to-day habits.  Vanessa talks about how people are drawn to use a search engine after they see something interesting on TV.  Using Google Trends she presents data during the 2011 Super Bowl that showed people searching for “Chrysler”-related terms immediately after the airing of the Chrysler Super Bowl commercial. Another interesting stat was that after the announcement of the death of Osama Bin Laden earlier this week, searches related to ‘Osama’ increased 98,000%!

A quote that Vanessa shows from Slate Magazine sums up this search-response mechanism very well:

“For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. When we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about driving meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing.”

In a very real psychological sense, people are eagerly using search engines to find more information about a subject that is currently interesting to them and we need to make sure that we understand how to provide them that information.

The workflow starts at the search bar

Before your audience finds your website, they will type in a search query and see a set of results. Vanessa shows a slide with Google and Bing search results overlaid by eye-tracking heat maps. We see the typical F-shaped pattern in the eye movement but Vanessa how points out how the eyes weren’t drawn to contrasting details like the local map image.

One explanation for this is that when we type in a search phrase then are minds are fixated on that phrase. That is why we easily focus on iterations of that text phrase vs. other elements on the page.  This is the reason why search engines typically boldface the search query words in the results. We should be mindful of this and make sure we include these search terms within the title tags and descriptions of our pages. (This includes you, news websites!)

Solve the searcher’s problem

Using the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website as example, Vanessa points out that although their site has a lot of rich content related to ‘global warming’ but the site was getting very little search traffic for that section. It turns out that very little of this content was optimized for the search phrases discovered in the Google Trends data, making it difficult for Google to determine relevance between what the audience is searching for and your content.

Other takeaways from the presentation

• Use Google Trends data in context. If you see trends that suggest that more searchers are interested in ‘march madness’ vs. the alarming ‘government shutdown’, you should step back and realize that the intense basketball interest is primarily coming from states with college hoops teams represented in the NCAA tournament
• Every page on your site is a landing page. With organic search, every page is a potential entry point for your customers. Make sure your pages are optimized for user experience.
• Don’t use bad metrics. Would you be willing to take a higher bounce rate on a landing page if in actually resulted in more phone leads to your business? The answer should be ‘yes!’ Remember to focus on key performance metrics when evaluating your search traffic performance and not to get lost in the not-so-important metrics.
• Don’t be like Richard Branson. Even multi-billionaires can get things wrong. Vanessa shows an example of one his vacation retreat websites where there is hardly any readable HTML text (not search friendly) and has a nearly impossible method of navigation (not conversion friendly). Make sure your website is easy for the search engines and your audience to understand.

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Arizona Interactive Marketing Association is a nonprofit organization created to help you better understand interactive marketing through education tools, events, and networking.

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Register now to hear from Scott McAndrew, the VP of Strategy at Terralever, who’s Scott’s years of dedicated experience in interactive marketing helps define the focus and methodology for client initiatives. With a career encompassing the fundamentals of design, marketing and technology, Scott works to ensure Terralever’s approach is aligned with each client’s overall business goals before tapping into a wide range of both tried, tested and leading edge interactive marketing techniques. He and his team also oversee all ongoing marketing and strategy retainers in order to provide performance-based reporting, analysis and prescriptive direction to guarantee sustainable, progressive results.

Attend this enlightening presentation on Social Media ROI, Tuesday April 12^th, 2011 while seizing the opportunity to rub elbows with some of the brightest minds in the industry at the Scottsdale Hilton located at 6333 N. Scottsdale Rd., Scottsdale, Arizona with networking and cocktails starting at 6:00PM and light dinner being served around 7:00PM. This light meal and one drink is included in the cost of the event which is only $25 for students, $35 for members, and a discounted rate for pre-registration of $45 for non-members. Otherwise, you’ll pay $55 at the door so don’t wait. And, on top of all of that two lucky attendees will win tickets to the next SEMPO AZ meeting on Wednesday, April 27 to discuss Local Search with Google’s Frederick Vallaeys.  Only those attendees present at the Arizona Interactive Marketing social event will be eligible to win! We’ll see you on Tuesday the 12th of April to tackle social media ROI! Get your tickets now!

Redlincook

Elise is the eMarketing Specialist at Empire Southwest, an authorized Caterpillar heavy construction equipment dealer which also offers top brands of used machinery to clients across the United States and Mexico. She specializes in content strategy, content marketing, search and social technologies and has been on the AZIMA Board of Directors since the very beginning.

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1.) Too many goals for your content. You either have too many goals and objectives for your content marketing or you have no clue why you are doing what you are doing. There are a myriad of reasons to create and publish content such as customer retention, lead generation, establish thought leadership, lower customer service costs, open new markets, etc. but rarely can one piece of content accomplish multiple goals. Quick Fix: Pick a goal, ANY goal. Be specific about it and stick to it!

2.) Your Content is about EVERYTHING. You have no niche. You create content on the entire industry, or even worse, you create content that isn’t even related to your industry! You end up going big, and now no one cares. Quick Fix: Pick your niche. Focus on content that presents you as the trusted provider in that region for your services or product.

3.) The Content is ALL about YOU, YOU, YOU. Remember, your customers don’t care about you. They care about themselves.  You are not as important as you think you are. It’s not WHAT you sell that is important to them, it is the experience they’ll have with your product or service. Quick Fix: Focus on your customers’ pain points and create content around that.

4.) Your content is good enough: You are not just competing with your product or service competitors when it comes to content. You are competing with everyone and everything, even traditional media companies. Quick Fix: Invest in your content. Create a unique point-of-view. Make your content unique, interesting, fun (if possible), multichannel and execute. Think of creating and defining your own category.

5.) Lack of a Content Calendar. Stop thinking from a campaign mentality. If your content isn’t consistent it may confuse your reader. Creating compelling content is a promise to your customers.  Quick Fix: Create and maintain a content calendar and editorial strategy. A great rule of thumb to get started with is the 1-7-304-2-1 Plan. Also, aim for creating 10 pieces for different online distribution channels (Blog, Article, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Slideshare, etc.) from every content idea. Repurpose, repurpose, repurpose!

6.) Not Leveraging Your Employees. Your employees are perhaps your greatest content marketing assets (in a close run with your customers themselves). Quick Fix: Find the 10-15 percent of your employees that are inherently content creators and start to nurture that. Allow them to be a part of your brand message.

7.) That People will Magically Engage in your Content. Stop relying on magic to push your content along. Unless you are a rock star or professional athlete, you’ll have to work for it. Quick Fix: Find out where your customers are hanging out (use social listening to start) on the web and be active in those communities. Also, look into using offline channels like in person events, print, radio, etc.

8.) Your Content Has No Owner. With content being pumped out by marketers with fervor these days often times your content doesn’t have clear ownership. Quick Fix: Find your chief editor, content strategist, chief content officer or whatever you’d like to call them, internally or if you don’t have the resources in-house, look externally for help.

9.) You Don’t Have Content Experience. One of the greatest challenges in Content Marketing is developing great content that your audience would be interested in reading and/or sharing. Quick Fix: Instead of focusing on your benefits of your product or service try to focus on sharing value for your reader and help them get a feel for the experience of using your product or service. Use a little storytelling.

10.) You Don’t Internal Support for Content Marketing. Those brands that don’t have senior level support for content marketing are said to be 300% more likely to stink at content marketing. Quick Fix: Engage them and your chance for success drastically increases!

Interested in hearing more about this fantastic presentation from Joe Pullizzi? Check out some the wrap up post from Nick Roshon, “Awesome Content Tip by Joe Pulizzi: Create 10 pieces of Content for Every One Idea You Have,” on the night’s events or the one from Roy Reyer, “Does Your Content Stink?”. They are popping up all over the place.  He must have made an impact!

Redlincook

Elise is the eMarketing Specialist at Empire Southwest, an authorized Caterpillar heavy construction equipment dealer which also offers top brands of used machinery to clients across the United States and Mexico. She specializes in content strategy, content marketing, search and social technologies and has been on the AZIMA Board of Directors since the very beginning.

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When he’s not receiving awards, creating companies, or writing books, he speaks to groups of people all over the world about marketing, publishing, social media, new journalism, personal branding, and why he always wears orange.

Clearly a man of many talents, one can have the honor of hearing him speak as AZIMA proudly presents – Joe Pulizzi February 8^th at the Scottsdale Hilton Hotel in Arizona.

Event Details:

Date: Feb 8^th

Location: Scottsdale Hilton (6333 N. Scottsdale Rd., Scottsdale, Az 85250

Time: 6:00p.m – 8:00p.m.

Tickets: Student $25

Members $35

Non Members $45

At the Door $55

REGISTER NOW!

*Student and Member discounts available with promo codes “STUDENT” OR “AZIMAMEMBER”

Want to get up close and personal?

For an added bonus, AZIMA is now offering VIP tickets, which give you the chance to be seated as his table, and for an hour you can get all the information you ever dreamed of about content marketing straight from the man himself. For details on VIP tickets contact ljablonski@admixsocial.com .

Giveaway

At the event, you can also enter to win 2 Free SMAZ tickets! But don’t fret, if you don’t happen to be the lucky winner AZMIA offers discounts just type in promo code SMAZ4AZIMA on http://bit.ly/SMAZ4 for 30% off.

Joe started throwing around the words ‘content marketing’ back in the early 2000’s, and it has now become a philosophy driving some of the most effecting marketing programs in the world.  Now’s your chance to hear about his successful strategies, come see him speak and see what you can do to become a better marketer.

Redlincook

Elise is the eMarketing Specialist at Empire Southwest, an authorized Caterpillar heavy construction equipment dealer which also offers top brands of used machinery to clients across the United States and Mexico. She specializes in content strategy, content marketing, search and social technologies and has been on the AZIMA Board of Directors since the very beginning.

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