In this Edition

Marketers and advertisers are suffering from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Think about it. There are more ways to reach consumers and more ways for consumers to reach companies than ever before. Rich media, social media, SEO, TV, print advertising, email campaign management, text messaging and good old fashion direct mail are just a small sampling of what companies can use to market their wares.

Sadly, we see far too many companies throw a few marketing dollars at, say, social media for a few months, only to jump to a search campaign or maybe email campaign management. As one particularly scattered client put it, "I'm, trying everything but nothing works anymore."

Hiring an SEO company, a web design and development company an ad agency, a social network integration company and someone to handle email campaign management and then sending them on there way is no way to integrate your marketing efforts.

With so many marketing choices it may be tempting to throw a little of everything at increasing sales revenue. Predictably, it's a waste of time and money. A disciplined, logical, integrated, highly strategic approach with social network integration is the only way to go-one that uses the best attributes of each effort individually, while capitalizing on the benefits of putting marketing tools together in the right way to multiply the effort.

We have a client who installs solar panel electrical systems who suddenly saw his web traffic and calls to his 800 number increase by 30% for about six months. While this was great news, we hadn't been doing anything new and neither had he. It turns out that a solar panel installation company in a neighboring state had begun advertising their service on a large radio station during drive times. Unfortunately for them, their website design and development company didn't search engine optimize their site and they had no Pay Per Click campaign. They were losing their leads (and sales) when radio listeners simply went home and looked to Google to find our highly search engine optimized client who showed up on the first page for solar company and solar panel installation.

We'll never know if that other solar panel company will abandon radio and switch to an SEO campaign. One thing is certain, they will have wasted money on radio as well as SEO because of a scatter shot approach.

Beware Penguin 2.0.

Google Penguin 2.0 (also called Penguin 4) was released last week. Like Penguin 1.0, this latest algorithm is taking its toll on certain websites. According to Google, Penguin 2.0 should help authority sites gain traction while decreasing the rankings of sites that provide fluff content.

There is much discussion on the web about what to do about Penguin 2.0. It's changing rapidly as discoveries are made Here is what we are doing for our clients:

Because Penguin 2.0 is looking so closely at inbound linking we are reducing the number of inbound links in blogs and press sections to two links per post. Also, because Penguin 2.0 penalizes sites with excessive inbound links that have exact-match anchor texts, we are editing some of these out. We're also making sure to remove any inbound links that have a Google Page Rank of zero and manually checking links from websites that have a page rank from one to three. If we don't like what we see, we're removing the links. That's it for now. Stay tuned for more info.