Recently I was studying a client’s competition, reading industry forums and gathering insight into how to generate more website sales. During my research, I noticed something really interesting about how people react to different shipping promotions.

Lured by the $400 advertising credit Google was giving to anyone willing to try out their new radio program - called Google Audio Ads - I went ahead and ran a campaign during the last week of August.

SMS: I would like to talk to you, Bill, a little bit about supplemental results and what’s going on with that in regards to partitioning, indexing, and extended indexes. There has been so much talk about supplemental results in the last couple of months. Everyone seems to be posting on how to get out of the supplementals – and I was one of them – but now everything’s changing.

Bill: Right, and if you talk to somebody from Google, like if you were to talk to Matt Cutts, what they would tell you is that you shouldn’t be upset because you’re in the supplemental results. You should actually be happy, because otherwise that page wouldn’t be indexed at all. It’s just an additional set of databases where they may not capture as much in relevancy information, positioning information, and stuff like that.

I am fascinated with the art and science of communication. It simply astounds me how human beings with all of our differing experiences, knowledge and emotional baggage that filter what we hear and how we interrupt, can ever effectively communicate with each other.

Because of this fascination, I bought the book, “Words That Work” written by Dr. Frank Luntz to understand how to more effectively communicate. I haven’t finished the book yet, but here are some powerful insights that are worth paying attention to:

Back in the early 1980s, my parents decided to try to get into mail order. Specifically, I believe they decided to sell a pumpkin pie recipe by advertising it in magazines. To make sure they had the marketing down right, they purchased a book about mail order advertising.

Sadly, the pumpkin pie empire they envisioned never materialized, but when I saw the book gathering dust on my Father’s bookcase, I had to check it out and see if I could glean any nuggets that would be applicable to online marketing today.

In my last post about social network advertising, I spoke about reasons why social network advertising is a rapidly growing trend in online marketing tactics. Today, in this follow-up to part 1, I will be delving into the nuts and bolts of making the most of your social network advertising.

Bringing all the posts together, here is the coverage of SES San Jose 2007 for all four days:

Did you know that 45% of adult internet users have created online content or “user generated content”? And that MySpace gets more traffic than Google.com? And 77% think that blogs are a good way to get information about a company or product? Well now you know and you can formulate a plan on how to get in the conversation and measure success. Companies don’t own their brands anymore, so the time has come to join that conversation. This session was a great follow up to the earlier Social Media Optimization (SMO) and Marketing session I attended, since this session quickly reviewed the basics of SMO and how to track the buzz you will soon get from your efforts.

I have to admit that this was one of the sessions I was most excited about attending for a few reasons. First, is that I’ve heard Rand and Todd speak before and always walk away with new ideas and energy and couldn’t wait to hear what they’ve been working on. Second, we’ve been doing more and more SMO projects for clients and I know our team has been enjoying educating clients on the practice of SMO and becoming their own brand evangelists on social media and networking sites. This is fun stuff!

Shari Thurow, Founder and CEO of Omni Marketing Interactive reviewed the pros and cons of using CSS. Pros of CSS are the ability to control design parameters and change the look of a site quickly and easily, all while decreasing download time for a page. Usability pros say that a page should download within 8-12 seconds (on a 56k modem), while Yahoo reps are a bit more forgiving and allow for 30 seconds or less. I’m impatient and would prefer 7 seconds myself.