Where do forward looking industries look when asked to look further? This was the core question behind the SES San Francisco panel session, 'Search - Where To Next,' moderated by Graham Mudd, Vice President, Search & Media, comScore, Inc. Joining Mudd were the following search marketing professionals / soothsayers: Brian Kaminski, Chief Operating Officer, iProspect Marc Poirier, Co-Founder and CMO, Acquisio Shashi Seth, Senior Vice President, Search Products, Yahoo!

The average conversion rate for a website is around 3 percent, but many websites convert at 10 percent or higher.  What are they doing right that you're missing? Bryan Eisenberg, NY Times Bestselling Author gave a solo presentation on the secrets of top converting websites and how you too can achieve high conversion results.   Following is a summary of his presentation. What exactly is conversion rate?  In essence,

How exactly does one become a celebrity CMO?  Jeffrey W. Hayzlett, former CMO of Eastman Kodak Company showed us as he robustly )and at times, profanely( opened the 2010 Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco, CA. A crowd of thousands, waiting in anticipation after being detained in a lobby holding area for twenty merciless minutes with only designer coffee for sustenance, were eased into the presentation via an excellent introduction by Mike Grehan.

I started interviewing people in the search marketing industry long ago )inspired by Aaron Wall ( as a way to provide access to search marketing practitioners, pundits and employees at search engines. Beginning in 2005 with this interview with  Brett Tabke from WebmasterWorld & Pubcon, interviews with search marketing types have been posted here covering a variety of search marketing topics. The search engine marketing industry changes often,

Search Engine Strategies San Francisco is upon us and marks a watershed year for this event.  For the first time the annual August conference hosts in San Francisco and integrates with Connected Marketing Week, boosting an already large happening to an all-inclusive digital marketing experience.

Photo credit hayzlett.com Jeffrey Hayzlett is the former CMO at Kodak and author of " The Mirror Test : Is Your Business Really Breathing?". You might have seen him on Celebrity Apprentice with Donald Trump or speaking at a variety of industry conferences. He hails from South Dakota and considers himself a cowboy. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any photos of him online with a cowboy hat. I connected with Jeff yesterday morning to talk about his success with social media,

One of the many ways companies have engaged their customers, gained insight into a marketplace and conducted research for a variety of purposes has been through surveys.  If you think that list of activities almost sounds like the reasons many companies engage in social media monitoring, you'd be right. About 2 weeks ago I did a webinar with our client, Zoomerang, purveyor of  online survey software on the intersection of surveys and social media.

What are the best Search Engine Marketing blogs to follow? Which are the most popular? The chart above from Feed Compare shows a comparison of the RSS feed subscriber counts published by Feedburner for: Google Webmaster Central )red (, Search Engine Land ) blue (, Search Engine Watch ) gree n ( and our very own Online Marketing Blog ) purple (. As evidence of how successful a well executed business blog can be,

Facebook Marketing is a topic we've covered for several years and with the significant increase in Facebook users there's even more interest in how to make sense of what people do there. I've seen a significant increase in referring traffic from Facebook to web pages over the past 6 months and while a lot of that lift comes from marketing activities, I don't anticipate the trend in Facebook users leaving to visit websites slowing down any time soon.

As I look at my calendar over the next month for speaking events, it's looking a little busy. Topically, these speaking opportunities are in-line with our online marketing consulting services as you would expect, but the mix is what makes this schedule worth a blog post. Plus I always enjoy connecting with readers of Online Marketing Blog whenever possible and hope to meet you at one of these events.

At the 2009 MIMA Summit I gave a presentation on the intersection of SEO and Social Media suggesting that companies become publishers in their marketing and that the opportunity for search doesn't just lie with Google, but also with social search.  At the time, Facebook's internal search emerged as one of the search engine engines tracked by comScore.

Last night I had an enjoyable conversation with Scott Monty of Ford, Jeff Hayzlett )formerly CMO Kodak(, Mike Monello from Campfire and our host Bob Knorpp of the famous BeanCast about a variety of topics including foursquare, Facebook, Hulu, social gaming and even small logos. One of the the topics that emerged from that discussion was the astute observation of how many companies "suck" at social media.