Today Bruce Clay and the hosts explore the value of blogging and measures of authority online. A company blog offers many marketing advantages, such as demonstration of expertise, interaction with a community, and communicating a company as personable and value driven. Susan points out that companies don’t need to fear giving up brand control when hiring a blogger. For example, Bruce Clay, Inc. was able to transition from blogger to blogger because while the voice changed, the company’s strengths and values remained. Bruce highlights the fact that while many great goals can be accomplished through a blog, you should know ahead of time that a blog is resource intensive.


Lisa Barone, co-founder and chief branding officer of Internet marketing firm Outspoken Media, visited her former co-workers and friends at the Bruce Clay, Inc. office last week. While in town, Lisa, Susan and Virginia head to a local hangout to drink margaritas and talk about blogging and marketing. Lisa shares her method for generating blog posts and content for clients. She also talks about the importance of self promotion, explaining that promotion can be more important than the quality of content — because even the world’s greatest content won’t be read if no one knows about it.

Lisa is a trusted authority as a blogger and community builder because she has proven her expertise to the community. It leads Susan, Virginia and Michael to consider the qualities of an authority and how one can cultivate authority status. Along with having an expert level of knowledge, an authority also gives back to the community by sharing their research and experience.

Social media and its link building power take center stage on today’s show. Susan, Scott and Virginia open the show by discussing a video in which Matt Cutts of the Google Web Spam team explains the relative value of social media links. In the video titled “Has Google changed the relevancy it awards to social media?” Matt says, “We tend not to think about, like, oh, just links from social media sites. […] We tend to think about links, whether they’re useful, whether they’re not useful, and so we use that as our litmus test. We try to give more credit or more trust to the links that we think are really valuable.”

Virginia talks to Michael Streko about a new tool he has helped launch called KnowEm.com. KnowEm? searches 120 social sites to see if your preferred username has been registered. If not, they offer a service to register the names for you. Monthly subscribers will have their username registered across new sites as they launch. As username squatting becomes more prevalent across the social media space, a tool like KnowEm? is very helpful for online brand and reputation management.

Michael Streko

Scott, Susan and Virginia then consider when to avoid social media. In a recent article in BtoB Magazine, the author lists five scenarios where social media should not be used. The reasons are: if you’re a high-ticket business; if you fight with your employees; if management does not support it; if a strategy is absent; and if there are privacy or regulatory concerns. Scott, Susan and Virginia disagree with nearly every reason above, arguing that there are reasons to be cautious and strategic in your social media campaigns, however avoidance and lack of understanding is unwise.

Today on SEM Synergy we focus on branding and the Vince algorithm change. Bruce, Virginia and Christopher open the show by discussing how establishing trust, authority and quality is vital on the Web. Chris says that establishing a long-term value position of expertise among your market is the key to branding. Bruce says that a company doesn’t have to be a brand to be an expert in the field or to be relevant to a query. He thinks characteristics like longevity or fast servers could actually responsible for brands just naturally performing better.

Jayme Westervelt

Jayme Westervelt of Simply Optimized then talks to Virginia about ranking shifts she saw among her clients over the last few months. Jayme compares the changes among those sites with a strong branding focus and those that are more general in content. Among her clients, she always recommends a strategy that covers highly-targeted and more broad terms in order to cover the search spectrum and to please clients who refuse to give up on the very competitive terms.

Then Susan and Fernando debate their perceptions of the target goal of the update. Fernando proposes that changes to the algorithm may have included increasing the value of link age or decreasing the value of anchor text while raising the value of the page theme. Susan argues that trust and authority are the qualities of a brand. So even though Google said they didn’t boost brands, they did in fact boost qualities of brands.