Bill Crowley, VP, Group Publisher, Data Center Media, TechTarget, ran this lively discussion on producing good online content for IT professionals.

Get your head around the prospect

The Heath brothers call it the curse of knowledge. Whatever way you frame it, there is always a problem when an expert tries to communicate to a novice… empathy towards the uninitiated is hard to maintain.  This is particularly true of documents produced for IT prospects: the audience may…

Ouch. I’m sure most of the Java developers I know would cringe at the headline to this post. Inflammatory or not, I think this is the crux of trying to entice this clever, often commerce-averse brood. There is often a huge cultural chasm between heads of marketing departments (who, let’s face it, as marketing operations guys we’re always trying to impress) and your average enterprise Java developer (who is often tasked with evaluating different vendors).…

This session focussing on online content at the TechTarget Online ROI Summit was presented by Bill Crowley, VP, Group Publisher, Data Center Media, TechTarget.

The core of this presentation: most technical buyers information needs change over the buying process. What is the buying process? The old AID(A) model is useful as a starting point here. To recap:

• Awareness: when buyers needs to figure out what the industry is and how it relates to them
• Interest: really…

I was fortunate enough to attend the TechTarget Online ROI summit in San Francisco recently. I can definitely recommend this event as one of the best places to meet like-minded individuals if you happen to work in tech marketing.

ROMO: your flexible friend
In the opening presentation, TechTarget’s Marilou Barsam, SVP of Client Consulting and Corporate Marketing highlighted what she sees as the big changes in online marketing to IT professionals. She brought up the interesting…

Google engineers talking openly about the latest challenges in indexing web content. Search marketers getting their heads around building promotions on Twitter.  Lunch networking sessions exploring obscure tips and tricks. This year’s San Jose SES had it all, with a glow-in-the-dark Google Dance to boot.

Although SES hosts events around the globe, the San Jose event has traditionally attracted considerable attention due to its proximity to the campuses of the major search engines. This year…

There were many sessions at SES San Jose 2008 on getting more value from SEM traffic and improving the usability of SEM landing pages. Although not so well attended (being the last day of the conference), this session did contain many useful tips and tricks for landing page optimization.

Moderator:
Anna Maria Virzi, Executive Editor, ClickZ

Speakers:
Carrie Hill, Search Engine Watch Expert & Certified Search Engine Marketing & Promotion Account Manager, Blizzard Internet Marketing…

If you have ever grappled with trying to create SEM strategies for companies with more than one business unit or how to sell in the value of SEM to upper management, then this session was for you!

David Roth did a particularly good job of explaining how he created the current SEM strategy for Yahoo (to be clear, these are campaigns to increase Yahoo’s visibility through search - he is a marketer working for Yahoo,…

I didn’t get to cover this one, but Lisa Barone for Bruce Clay, Inc. did a great job:

http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archives/2008/08/semantic_search.html

What is semantic search? A way of finding meaning in those 2-3 words you type in the search bar. Search for ‘Definitely, Maybe’, you get music-related results  for Oasis. Search for ‘Marriott San Francisco’ and you get a hotel listing with a map. You’ve probably seen a lot of this in place already. The idea is to…