Matt McGee recently reached out to a number of industry bloggers to be involved with a blog content award he’s calling “The SEMMYs“. Even though the SEJ SEM Blog Awards just happened, I thought I could at least be a judge – Matt being a good guy and all. If you read Small Business SEM, you’ll know that Matt picks the best blog posts of the week or so on a regular basis. He’s taken all of those posts from 2007 and categorized them to be voted on. This includes a few good posts from OMB like”Evaluating Client Search Marketing Readiness” in the SEO category.
Now a panel of 20+ judges are tasked with reading or in most cases, re-reading the posts and picking 3 finalists for each category. Many of the judges have also had their blog posts included in the judging, so Matt has been careful about assignments to avoid conflict of interest issues.
The posts for the two categories (Social and Viral) I am judging include some really great content. When reading these posts, I decided to make things a little more interesting and take a look at some metrics besides the actual content including the inlinks reported by Yahoo Site Explorer, the number of comments and also whether the posts were submitted to: Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us or Sphinn.
Here are the posts for the “Social Media Marketing” category and I’ve also taken a screen grab of the top 9 posts sorted by Inlinks and number of comments. Click on the image or here to see a screen grab of all 37 entries in the Social category. It’s pretty clear Muhammed Saleem is kicking ass and taking names when it comes to Digg front page appearances.
I would note that the Inlinks metric is really not very good as for some posts, especially the first 2, it counts sitewide links from other fairly large blogs. The reason for the screen shot is more to show the Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Sphinn numbers. Be sure to click the image to see the full image.
Here are the posts in the “Viral Marketing” category.
Keep in mind, this is not a “Best Posts for all of Search Marketing 2007” sort of thing. These posts come specifically from Matt McGee’s personal interests and selections over the year. That said, Matt has pretty good taste and there are plenty of excellent resources in this list. I know it was very informative to review many of them causing me to take notes and send reminder emails to our team.
Once 3-6 finalists in each category are selected, then they will be posted to the SEMMY site Friday January 18th for open public voting to decide the winners.
The judges and the categories they’re picking finalists for include:
- Rae Hoffmann: Small Biz, Rep. Mgmt.
- Barry Schwartz: Local
- Tamar Weinberg: Blogs
- Christine Churchill: PPC
- Loren Baker: Viral, Rants
- Vanessa Fox: Metrics, LOL
- Jennifer Laycock: Online Mktg./General
- Lisa Barone: Google, Rep. Mgmt.
- Rand Fishkin: Google
- Bill Slawski: Links
- Todd Malicoat: Small Biz
- Andy Beal: SEO
- Stoney DeGeyter: Online Mktg./General
- Deb Mastaler: SEO
- Aaron Wall: PPC
- Lee Odden: Social, Viral
- John Andrews: Links
- Eric Enge: SEO, Tech
- Andrew Shotland: Small Biz
- Jeff Quipp: Social
- Simon Heseltine: Social
- Brad Geddes: Metrics, Local
- Chris Winfield: Google, LOL
- Andy Beard: Tech, Rants
- Michael Gray: Blogs
