Bruce returns to the office after a week in the Midwest attending ad:tech Chicago. He discusses his experience at the digital marketing event with Susan and Virginia. Offline-online integration and audience engagement were two major themes at the conference, while there was little awareness of search engine marketing and optimization. Bruce noticed a disconnect in the way that people apply their traditional marketing knowledge to the online sphere.


Dr. Ralph Wilson, editor and publisher of one of the largest resources for Internet marketing and e-commerce information, Web Marketing Today, has been developing, studying and applying Internet marketing best practices since 1995. He talks to Virginia about holistic online marketing, small business e-commerce marketing, the challenges of PayPal, as well as his recommendations for e-commerce marketing for the holidays.

Wrapping up the show, Paula Allen makes her SEM Synergy debut. Paula, Virginia and Susan look at some of the Internet marketing success stories of late. Twitter, ever the source of creative marketing campaigns, shows how community engagement can work online. A recent trend to bring viral marketing strategies to traditional platforms like TV and print, such as that seen in the SnakesOnACane.com campaign, has been controversial. Only time will tell how well such viral marketing might work in the long run.

The winter season is always marked by holiday shopping and people continue to turn online to get their shop on. Today’s show is all about online marketing considerations for ecommerce sites. Bruce, Susan and Virginia take a look at why you should establish a presence in all parts of the buying cycle. By maintaining a presence in a variety of channels (not only online but offline as well), a person is more likely to turn to your familiar company when they are looking for a service you provide. The concept of creating a circle of presence around your company through multiple channels is called halo media.

Gregg Banse, president of Web strategy and development company 7thpixel and moderator of Webmaster World’s ecommerce forum, talks to Virginia about how ecommerce sites fared this holiday season. According to what Gregg, online sales were not as high as expected despite growth over last year. Gregg also explains how online retailers are carefully entering the social media space, and rightly so. He says that while necessary to have a social network presence, the commitment of time and resources is often underestimated and should not be approached haphazardly.

Then Susan, Virginia and Bradley consider common pitfalls and areas of needed improvement that often occur on ecommerce sites. Poor crawlability due to session IDs and multiple dynamic variables in URLs, unfriendly content management systems that don’t allow adequate customization, and using catalog content online rather than the actual words a searcher might be looking for are all easy mistakes to make in the realm of online retail.