SEO vs. Social Media for B2B Marketing: Join us Wednesday for a TweetChat with Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank and author of Optimize

We love putting you up close and personal with the top minds in B2B marketing.  So on Wednesday, April 25^th, the Marketo B2B Marketing Book Club is inviting you to a special tweetchat with Lee Odden, CEO and co-founder of TopRank and author of Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing. This is your chance to ask one of the masters anything you want about SEO and social media.

We know your worlds are colliding. Social media and search engines were once two different spheres, requiring two different masters. In fact, they were sometimes viewed as antithetical. After all, the science of optimizing your copy for search engines could make that same content less compelling for real human beings. (Who wants to read the same keyword over and over and over?) But as social media drives more and more traffic to your website, and search engines recalibrate to account for social media links in their ranking algorithms, it is increasingly important to optimize your website for both humans and search engines. This requires you to integrate your SEO and social media strategies. After all, if people find your website, but don’t share it over social networks, you lose out. By the same token, if people share your content but others can’t find it through search, you also lose out. The goal is to create content that is found and shared by both humans and the search engines.

Search engines have one goal: to deliver the most relevant results to their users. After all, if the results stop being relevant, people will switch to other engines. This is the reason that, as Lee points out, the engines are increasingly incorporating social media into their algorithms. In 2007, search engines like Google and Ask.com began to incorporate images, books, videos, news, maps and more into their results. Today, search engines routinely consider factors such as your location or past browsing history. Late last year, Google implemented Google Search, plus Your World to refine the relevant results delivered to users. The launch of Google’s own social network, Google+, only further illustrates the overlap between search and social media.

But it’s not just that search engines are getting into the social media game. Social networks also feature search. After all, Facebook has a search feature within its network. In 2010, Twitter introduced search ads similar to Google’s AdWords, and it continues to acquire search-related companies, such as Julpan and Bagcheck. In short, the line between search and social is getting fuzzier all around.

So what are you supposed to do about it? This question is at the core of the new book for TopRank CEO Lee Odden, Optimize. He points out that the rise of B2B social media marketing has changed the way his company, TopRank, optimizes content for their customers. Now he’s going to show you how he does it. Lee lays out a framework for conceiving, implementing and scaling an integrated SEO/social media plan. We’re big fans of Lee. In fact, we employ the services of his company here at Marketo. So we asked him to participate in a tweetchat where he could share his wisdom with you. Lee graciously agreed, so here’s how it works:

1. Follow Lee (@leeodden) and the B2B Marketing Book Club (@b2bbookclub) on Twitter.
2. Starting at noon on Wednesday, April 25^th, post questions for Lee to Twitter using the hashtag #b2bbookclub.
3. Follow the conversation by searching for the other tweets with the hashtag #b2bbookclub

Need a reminder? Add this tweetchat to your calendar.