Vote for Top 100 Online Marketers 2009

Recently I found out I was nominated (BJ Cook - @bj) to Invesp’s Top 100 Online Marketers of 2009. I feel honored to be on this list of people as some of them have helped shape my own thoughts and approached to marketing over the years. So like any good marketer, I’m starting my campaign trail here. Head over to the list and if I’ve contributed to your marketing insights over the year, please cast a vote for me. Hopefully all of my readers here have enjoyed my posts over the years. I'd also love to hear some feedback if you have 2 minutes.

cheers!
BJ

SEO Tactic - Subdomains vs. Subfolders

We're working on a project right now that brought up this question, which is both a technical and a business decision. Over at Digital Operative we use a subdomain for our blog in order to keep our content closer to the root domain, but also earn the SEO benefits in linking and saturating the organic listings. I was doing a little light research and stumbled upon this post from Rand Fishkin over at SEOMoz and the thread is not only informative, but there are so many scenarios that I felt it was valuable to share to see if any of you were also having the same questions.

SEOMoz post on Subdomains vs. Subfolders

Enjoy and hopefully this helps some of you readers out there!

$417 a week can get you Digital Marketing Mastery

Recently, Boulder Digital Works was born at University of Colorado at Boulder. It's described as "a project-based and accredited learning initiative focused on developing today and tomorrow's digital leaders and entrepreneurs." Just like the firms it is hoping to feed up and coming students into; it has its own three letter acronym ... BDW. I explored their website a little bit and found some interesting information, some good and some that might raise some red flags.

• Areas of Study: Interaction Design, Mobile, Gaming, Apps, Strategy, Social Media, Creative Thinking


• Specialization in Web 2.0 - Will this even be relevant in a year's time? Hopefully they update to web 3.0 or whatever seems to be next.


• Courses like Improvisation in Business - "All business is show business."


• Workshops that take the "digital" approach to basic areas like brand development, campaigns, projects, media, etc.


• Supported by some well known larger interactive/digital agencies


• Good coverage of digital landscape - web, mobile, social, search, gaming

Boulder Digital Works is as much as you'll make in your first year within any digital agency if you start in a junior role. Hopefully that $20,000 investment has a decent ROI and doesn't take you as long to pay back.

What do you think of this type of digital program?

Customer Feedback Is Here To Stay

So as many of you know or should know, one of my previous roles was as CMO for SuggestionBox.com and in that role I was able to watch a market start to form around customers. These select group of companies like Starbucks, Dell, Zappos, Comcast and a few others were paving a path for others on how to leverage customer feedback in the areas of customer service, conversational marketing and innovation. Now if you look at blogs like Customers Rock or Experience Matters; you'd think ... "Why isn't everyone adopting these best practices?" or "How can I capture customer feedback and improve my customer relationships?" I'd say the answer is as simple as installing some type of customer feedback widget (there are tons) and then responding to every single one, but you have other things to do like run your business, pay invoices, interview employees, attend events, etc. For the purpose of efficiency, I want to make a recommendation to take 15-20 minutes out of your day and explore what Uservoice is doing in this space. Their recent funding news in WSJ shows that they are on the right track and will be around for awhile.