SEM Guru Barbara ‘WebMama’ Coll Warns Don’t Get Caught up in the Social Media Frenzy Just Yet
Barbara Coll, CEO of WebMama.com Inc., Silicon Valley’s premier search engine marketing company, cautions corporations not to put all their advertising eggs into the social media basket just yet.
While social media is the hot topic of the moment, paid search still makes up the largest slice of the US online advertising market at 42.5 percent(1) . “Projections indicate a similar growth through 2011 in paid search,” Coll explains, but adds “we still have no clear answers whether social media advertising will work for B2B companies.”
“Buying ads on sites such as Facebook currently has about 1/10th of the return of Google AdWords, less even than Google AdSense or other contextual networks,” Coll says, “and executing a viral marketing strategy is extremely time consuming, as well as a questionable link building tactic, and should not be a key consideration for large B2B corporations at this time.”
“I highly recommend getting involved in these sites to view the advertising opportunities first hand and certainly monitoring the corporation’s reputation on these sites is mandatory.” Coll encourages all of her clients to ‘play’ with social media. With a client list that includes the elite from the Silicon Valley Tech industry, and a calendar that is already filling up with speaking engagements just 60 days into the 2008 year, Coll’s advice and insight is keenly sought as a recognized leader in the SEM space. She is currently judging submissions for the prestigious Ad Tech Awards 2008.
Coll will be presenting “B2B Tactics” and “Selling to the C-Suite” at Search Engine Strategies New York (March 17-20, 2008), speaking at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Toronto (March 31-April 2, 2008), and traveling to the Amsterdam later in the year to speak at the Software and Information Industry Association’s, SIIA On Demand Europe, conference (May 30-June 1, 2008).
WebMama.com Inc. is Silicon Valley’s premier search engine marketing company, providing SEO and SEM services to corporations around the world. The company had revenues of $2.33M from consulting fees in 2007, and recently added 3 new team members in order to fill demand from new clients in the electronic consumer and beauty products markets. Coll was the chief visionary behind the non-profit trade organization, Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO). Read the story of WebMama.com’s journey and extraordinary growth on WebMama.com’s timeline.
The whole point of Social is to get a better user to user buzz going, where SEO is still the corporate voice. Social is a world of viral, non filtered way of exchanging consumer opinions and ideas. The challenge of Social to the corporate world is for the most part they have a limited voice at best. Either legal is holding them back from commenting, or if they do step out of the box and make a comment they have just made themselves a target. Either way it is not a field they are comfortable in as they do not control the outcome. SEO is much more predicable and controllable set of results.