SEO Content Marketing Roundup, Week ending February 9th, 2011

It’s a new twist on the old theme of art imitating life – and vice versa — in this week’s latest and greatest web writing news: the boundaries between offline and online marketing and realities effectively dissolved, from a Google executive’s social media ignition of Egypt’s revolt on one extreme, to the Super Bowl advertisements feeding an online marketing analytics’ frenzy on the other.

Intermixed with it all, buzz swarmed around AOL acquiring Huffington Post – or vice versa — while fantastic posts ran rampant from SEO and search, content and social media marketing.  Strangely enough, those boundaries seemed to blur too.

First, the top highlights:

Within the confines of the U.S. Super Bowl marketing arena (and amid countless posts about the cutest, greatest, and fails), this sharp post at Mobile Marketer discusses Groupon’s ad gaffe, providing great context, history, and implications.

In the corporate field, innumerable viewpoints were shared about AOL’s acquisition of Huffington Post (or vice-versa, with its new Editor-in-Chief, Arianna Huffington).  Recommended are posts by TechCrunch, citing Huffington Post’s “aggressive SEO,” (and also noted by several other industry sources) and Forbes.

Content Marketing:

Marketing Sherpa posts an interesting case study about how a travel website successfully leveraged it users’ search behavior to trigger and drive its e-newsletter marketing.

Creating an effective content marketing mix is at Content Marketing Institute, as is usability testing to resolve internal digital marketing debates.

Can direct mail fetch copywriting customers? Interesting take on offline vs. online marketing is at Copyblogger.

Mashable released its weekly big list of the digital media posts from all its realms, from tech to social media.

Neuromarketing hosts a visual feast for the reptilian brain via a slideshow by Christophe Morin of SalesBrain.

Ann Smarty (of SEO Smarty) introduces fresh blogging blood with her roundup of guest posts at MyBlogGuest.

Finally, Ian Lurie of Conversation Marketing warns of 10 tired phrases that effectively tell your readers that your blog is useless.  Fun and worthwhile read.

SEO & Search:

An end to the content farms arms race is called for by Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis (posted at Search Engine Land), while Marketing Sherpa posts an article on how to avoid and remove Google’s content mill penalties.

Speaking of Google, Search Engine Roundtable reports that we should expect yet more big changes from the Big G soon, while Google has announced that it is now linking its analytics to its webmaster tools.

Many folks in the industry seem to be taking Google to task these days, as reflected in these candid posts at SEO Book and Conversation Marketing.

Great read on “user” considerations for web design and online marketing is at Search Engine Land, and a clever approach to keyword research is at SEOmoz.

Social Media Marketing:

New data about the impact of Super Bowl ads on social media is featured at Hubspot.

A completely different take on social media metrics as a bottom-line ROI consideration is addressed at eMarketer.

Does your social media content have personality?  Smart read at Content Marketing Institute.

Looking for fresh social media content?  Great sources are listed at Social Media Examiner.

All about Facebook:  The best Facebook Places campaigns are featured at The Next Web,  leveraging Facebook’s news feed algorithm is explored at iMedia Connection, and the story of how Facebook came to be is at Sexy Social Media.

Finally, this post at Copyblogger addresses the impact of your social IQ (or deficiency of) on your blog’s success.