One of the blogs that I admire most is the Influential Marketing Blog run by Rohit Bhargava. To truly understand the genius of it, you really need to look at the little things Rohit does. For example, check out his social media bio and how his blog titles are optimized for search engines.

He also wrote some great content on an emerging topic called Social Media Optimization (SMO), which I edited for my audience taking my inspiration from his original content.

I asked Rohit to do a podcast with me to better understand SMO and get his views on social media and what PR’s role will be. Enjoy …

Influential Marketing podcast with Rohit

About Rohit

Rohit Bhargava leads the interactive marketing team at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide in Washington, D.C., and is a founding member of the 360 Digital Influence team at Ogilvy. He is a frequent speaker at industry events and is a specialist in combining “traditional” interactive marketing efforts with innovative social media marketing strategy to help clients succeed in the new media landscape. His current list of clients includes Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Lenovo, and Unilever. Prior to joining Ogilvy PR, he was executive producer of the interactive team at Leo Burnett in Sydney, Australia, and he has worked internationally in several countries. He authors the popular Influential Marketing Blog and recently signed a deal to publish his first marketing book with McGraw-Hill.

It’s becoming clear to me that Web 1.0 statistics won’t work in a Web 2.0 world. Measuring “engagement” is rapidly becoming the new “black” in Web stats.

But there is no single button that gives you a clear picture of engagement. Or is there??

Engagement tends to be a much broader endeavor than marketers have had to face in the past. It reflects the need to orchestrate various media channels to capture the most precious of all commodities these days: People’s time!

After reading an article in B2B magazine entitled “How much do you really love me?” I decided to conduct an interview with the author, Jim Sterne. I asked him how to measure engagement, and some of his answers may surprise you! Enjoy …

How to Measure Engagement, a podcast with Jim Sterne

About Jim

Jim Sterne is an international speaker on electronic marketing and customer interaction. A consultant to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurs, Sterne focuses his 25 years in sales and marketing on measuring the value of the Internet as a medium for creating and strengthening customer relationships. Sterne has written six books on Internet advertising, marketing and customer service including, “Web Metrics; Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success.” Sterne is the producer of the annual Emetrics Summit and is the Founding President of the Web Analytics Association. He was named one of the 50 most influential people in digital marketing by Revolution, the United Kingdom’s premier interactive marketing magazine

“Listening is a really underrated marketing strategy” said Diane Hessan of Communispace during our podcast.

As you have told me by your responses to my content – communities are very important to you. Or perhaps you are thinking about implementing one or doing your own investigation of communities.

Well then you need to check out Communispace, a full service solution.. They build and run private online customer communities, one of the fastest growing marketing strategies for engaging with customers.

Creating a Private Community, a podcast with Diane Hessan of Communispace

About Diane

Diane Hessan is President and CEO of Communispace, “one of the fastest growing marketing and technology companies in the country, with a Blue Chip client list that would make a Madison Avenue giant jealous,” according to Advertising Age. A pioneer in creating online communities to help marketers deeply engage customers, Diane helped found Communispace in 1999 and hasn’t looked back.

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the World Innovation Forum by the HSM Group. Participants at the World Innovation Forum came away with new understanding of how businesses can pivot and become more innovative as well as plenty of insights about what the future holds.

As a blogger, and member of the virtual media, I was delighted to hear that I was welcome to interview 2 of the guest (my top 2 picks) Malcolm Gladwell and Clayton Christensen.

What follows is a very raw and unpolished podcast, because that’s the way it happened. You are getting the full experience I had at sitting down with the man himself. I hope you come away inspired by Malcolm’s view of Web 2.0 and his heartfelt feeling on how the blogosphere can act as a self regulating body.

Malcolm Gladwell discusses Web 2.0 in a podcast

About Malcolm

Malcolm is a writer for the New Yorker magazine, and the author of two books, “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference” and “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.” He was born in England, and raised in southwestern Ontario in Canada. Now he lives in New York City.

Malcolm’s great claim to fame is that I’m from the town where they invented the BlackBerry. His family also believes (with some justification) that we are distantly related to Colin Powell. He invites you to look closely at his photograph and draw your own conclusions.

Dont miss my podcast with Clayton Christensen later this week!

Go to Portland, Oregon, and you’ll find everyone there talking about Voodoo Doughnut. They talk about the caffeinated doughnut. The chocolate-glazed chocolate doughnut rolled in Cocoa Puffs cereal. Or the voodoo-doll-shaped doughnut that bleeds raspberry filling when impaled with a pretzel pin.

Then there’s Innocent. The UK company launched a campaign called “Supergran,” in which English grannies knit little woolly hats for its seasonal winter smoothies (so the bottles don’t catch a cold).

I’m not talking a couple of grannies, either. Because of the demand for the hats (and the smoothies), Innocent lined up enough grannies to knit 230,000 of them in 2006. Even better, it donated a portion of sales revenues, 50 pence per hat-wearing smoothie, £115,000 ($225,000) total, to Age Concern, a charity dedicated to keeping older people warm in the winter.

And you never thought a bottle of juice could be a conversation piece.

The point is that people talk about the exceptions or the unexpected. In B2B technology, either services or products, it’s a little hard to wrap your technologists in woolly hats or roll them in Cocoa Puffs. So we asked the expert, Lois Kelly, for her opinion on how to give your sales team more tools to create conversations. So for some tips, check out our podcast …

Want more sales? Give sales something to talk about. A podcast with Lois Kelly of Foghound

About Lois

Lois Kelly is the founder of Foghound, a communications consulting firm that helps companies more easily talk about their business or products in interesting ways. Clients have included Sun Microsystems, FedEx, and others. Previously, Lois was senior vice president of The Weber Group, one of the largest PR firms in the world. Her articles have appeared in USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Brand Week, Advertising Age and other publications. Don’t miss Lois’s new book: Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word of Mouth Marketing