I recently posted on 360 Digital Influence’s group blog, How Search Engine Marketing Can Help Measure Word of Mouth.  I talked about the importance of defining and measuring goals when conducting an SEM campaign to promote Word of Mouth efforts, or the illusive request of “increased awareness.”  When there is no sale taking place on the site it becomes difficult to measure ROI, and thus difficult to optimize the campaign.  After reading this great article, Bounce Rate: Sexiest Web Metric Ever?, by Avinash Kaushik, the Analytics Evangelist for Google, I think we should be talking about bounce rate. “In a nutshell bounce rate measures the percentage of people who come to your website and leave “instantly”.  This is the metric we in the Word of Mouth industry need to start focusing on.  Once we can readily adjust campaigns based on bounce rate, we can move on to loftier goals like getting people to download that widget or comment on that blog, but first we need to get people to stay on the site for longer than 5 seconds.

I will be heading to Search Engine Engine Strategies in New York for one day this Wednesday, March 19th.  I will be representing Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence team, and plan to do a live blog post on the DI group blog.  I am excited to hear Jason Calacanis speak, the Founder & CEO of the Mahalo human edited search engine.  The sessions I will be attending will mostly be on the social track in hopes that what I learn will be able to benefit Ogilvy’s word-of-mouth discipline.  Stay tuned for more…

On Wednesday night the 360 DI team of Ogilvy PR hosted a Mashable Meet-up. Upwards of 150 people attended the event, and I had the pleasure of registering people as they came in the door. It was a passionate and innovative bunch with several interesting presentations about different social media start-ups. The most notable presenter was Mixx.com, an alternate to Digg and del.icio.us that allows you to create your own blend of what you find interesting on the Web. It appears to be fundamentally the same as other social sharing sites, with tagging and user voting, but the interface is very user-friendly, and allows for a seamless switch between searching for different content formats (i.e. news, photos & video). Go Mixx it up and tell me what you think…

While I am fairly new to the social media scene, from this Mashmeet turnout it seems that DC may be becoming the east coast place to be for social media.

Tomorrow is my first day as Ogilvy PR Worldwide’s newest Online Marketing Manager.  I will be working on their 360 Degree Digital Influence team under such social media industry experts as John Bell and Rohit Bhargava.  I think my SEO background as an Organic Search Specialist at Bennett Kuhn Varner will serve me well in my role, however I expect I am about to learn an absurd amount, as I launch my career to the forefront of the Word of Mouth Marketing space.  SEO is my first passion in the interactive world, and I will therefore continue to report on areas of search engine interest, as well as experiences at work that deal with organic search; however my realm of marketing knowledge (aka blog post material) is poised to expand tremendously.  Stay tuned…