The digital landscape has transformed the way people communicate, share information and receive their advertising. Digital marketing can be integrated into all traditional methods of advertising and PR, making it an engagement marketing essential.

When the physical world taps into the digital world, the “phygital mashups” that are created can really hit your audience in a deeply engaging way. When people interact with a brand in a personal way by participating and engaging, they are far more likely to become brand advocates and word of mouth marketers.

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Phygital Marketing engages us by tying into things we do, see and interact with in our everyday life. The London Eye projecting Twitter sentiment about the 2012 Olympics was a great example. The amount of negative and positive emotion in Tweets referencing the Olympics was reflected in a nightly light show during the games, with yellow as positive, green neutral and purple negative.

I still love what Fiat and Leo Burnett Madrid did last year with their Fiat Street Evo app. The app recognized traffic signs as if they were QR codes, and associated each sign with a car feature. Thousands of prizes were hidden behind random signs, but you had to get out on the streets and capture the signs to find them.

A retailer in Brazil recently began in-store real-time Facebook “Like” feeds on clothing hangers for specific products. The intent is to help potential buyers with their purchasing decision by showcasing just how great so many real people think the product is with a live stream. A clever way to bring offline online? Or maybe just a way to find out what everyone else is wearing so you can make sure you don’t buy it if you don’t want to show up to the next happy hour sporting what three other guys are wearing?

There are many ways to acquire customers and keep them engaged. Technology and a sound creative/communication strategy can personalize the marketing experience and keep customers coming back. What out of the box and innovative ways are you using to engage your customers?

Do you think Phygital Marketing is going to continue to grow and become the norm? I know I do.

Phygital Marketing: Where the Physical and Digital Worlds Converge is a post by SEO expert Julie Bazgan Martinez. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Rhea Drysdale, @rhea at Outspoken Media, began her presentation on ORM by announcing that it makes no sense that she does online reputation management because she tends to be crude and outspoken! I enjoyed listening to what she had to say and her delivery, and I have a few takeaways to share.

She asked the audience two questions to get everyone thinking:

1. Your CEO just got caught embezzling funds. What are you going to do and are you prepared?
2. You represent a really large consumer products company and your product just hurt a lot of kids, what are you going to do? What about your search results? How long do you think it will take to recover?

It takes six months to one year to recover your search standing and three years for your brand to start to recover. You never know if or when you will be hit with the unimaginable. Companies need a long term strategy that will allow them to effect true organizational change.

Brands don’t have insurance policies, but there are things that can be regulated and implemented to ensure that you are covered in the event of a reputation scandal.

• Social media policies
• Community management
• Use listening tools
• Brand development
• Customer service
• Affiliate management (have policies in place for what your affiliates can and can’t say)

In the next 10 years there will be 21% increase in PR jobs. This is in direct response to businesses and government agencies needing to respond quickly to news and information that moves rapidly on the Internet and in social media. Crisis management/communication is not new, we’ve always had disasters happen. ORM works to fix the problem rather than treating the symptoms.

Organizational change requires trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results. This is where most companies fail, as most ORM issues are due to a problem in one of these areas. And, the most common reason for an ORM problem is poor leadership. You can prove that there’s a business case for implementing online reputation management:

• Identify your organizational allies & threats (SWOT analysis)
• Do a needs assessment (look at Autocomplete results in Google, just don’t hit enter!)
• Look at search results
• Monitor social mentions (socialmention.com)
• Customer feedback (GetSatisfaction.com)
• Understand customer loyalty (know your Net Promoter Score)
• Look at conversions
• Do competitive analysis (look at branded queries, purchase related queries with Google search suggest)
• Audit corporate communication (socialmediagovernance.com database)
• Audit customer communication

ORM is not magic, it’s just SEO. Are you prepared? We can’t insure or replace our brands. We can protect them. Be brave and care, start implementing!

MozCon Day 2 Recap – Online Reputation Management is a post by SEO expert Julie Bazgan Martinez. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Jen Lopez at SeoMoz just finished talking about Community as Inbound and how to make it happen. Inbound marketing is what a lot of people are talking about this week at MozCon 2012. Here are a few takeaways from Jen’s @jennita presentation.

Social, content marketing, blogging, email, UGC–Community is what makes all of these things take flight. Think about it this way… your community is your brand advocates, your content generators, your content sharers, your link builders, your customers, your searchers, your biggest critics, your biggest fans, your forum participants, even your site uptime monitoring service. Community is IMPORTANT.

So what can you do to develop and grow your community? Here’s what SeoMoz did. They created a taskforce—everyone in the entire company has a stake in their community. They realized that likes/followers/subscribers do not generally happen overnight and it takes time. It’s a constant team effort with everybody thinking of their community. They live by the TAGFEE Code (be transparent, authentic, generous, fun, empathetic, exceptional). One of my favorite lines of Jen’s: Creating community is not easy, but if you can make it a priority, you can get rainbows, unicorns, and cupcakes, aka, Inbound Marketing.

Tips to make it happen:

• It’s a team sport (if you are making a tech-focused post, ask your developers, “How do I say this in 140 words?”).
• Test, test, test. They posted a photo of MOZers watching soccer and it was their was most viral FB picture ever–who would’ve thought? They’ve been testing promoted posts and sponsored stories with great success, and they’ve recently changed the timing of their blog posts and tweets as a test.
• Turn a critic into a fan. Ask your critics questions and get them involved in finding solutions.
• Delight them.
• Give a s%&#. Care. Go the extra mile.
• Be proactive. Identify your target community and engage them, gift them for sharing.
• Give ‘em props if they’ve written something awesome.
• Use Google+ Search (if people are talking about your keywords, go there and search them out). Google+ Search is  great way to find and reach your community members.
• Listen and Act (a SeoMoz member requested a feature and they built it and let them know about it).

If you want to increase your inbound, and you want your SEO, Social and Content to be great, the the easiest and best way to do that is by developing, nurturing and sustaining your community.

MozCon 2012 Recap – Community As Inbound is a post by SEO expert Julie Bazgan Martinez. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.