Search Marketing Expo 2007 New York Archives

The SMX Social NY 2007 conference is just about over, and our session coverage is now complete. You can read the complete nine-session coverage at our Search Marketing Expo 2007 New York Archives.

Huge thank you's go out to Kim Krause Berg for covering a ton of the sessions and Tamar Weinberg for covering the rest.

Here is the recap of what the Search Engine Roundtable covered:

1. Social Media Marketing Essentials
2. Linkbait - Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
3. Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites
4. A Marketer's Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging
5. Keynote Q&A: Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us & Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon
6. Effectively Leveraging Social Networking
7. Evangelist - The Marketer's Role in SMM
8. Micro Communities
9. Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers & Answer Sharing

For the global recap, check out Search Engine Land.

Web users rely on community-contributed-content sites such as Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers. These sites enable you to communicate directly with an engaged audience. But contribute to the conversation with care. Too much spin and you're credibility will be shot-and your brand damaged. You'll come away from this session knowing how these influential sites work and how to participate constructively.
Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Lise Broer "Durova", Administrator, Wikipedia
Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, Hochman Consultants
Matt McGee, SEO Manager, Marchex
Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts
Don Steele, Director of Digital & Enterprise Marketing, Comedy Central

Matt McGee!!!!!!!!!! is up first and he says that people can use it for their expertise and knowledge for businesses, not so much for people who are providing widgets and the like.

What is Yahoo Answers?
A simple Q&A site that is incredibly busy. There is a constant stream of questions and answers.

Like any social media site, you can create a profile with a link to your website (nofollow, sadly). Therefore, it's for traffic building, not for link-building. It is the #2 reference site behind Wikipedia.

They know that people are using it to market their business. In fact, they encourage that to build credibility and to create a positive brand image compared to other types of social media.

It is also okay to drop links as long as you're providing a helpful answer to someone's question. If you're a good member of the community, go for it.

Yahoo Answers gives him a huge jump of referral traffic: highest source of new visitors and the lowest bounce rate. Shocking!

Also, it gives a great amount of search traffic. It does not come close to Wikipedia but it still gives good traffic.

How to use them:
- The interface is easy to use, and there are a lot of categories so it's inundating to browse. They have RSS feeds for every category on the site and every subcategory.
- Sort wisely. View by date or view by number of answers. Matt says that it's better to sort by date and then he finds questions that are about to expire so that he can provide a more meaningful answer so that he can get points. If you sort by number of answers, if you sort for most answers, those are answers that get a lot of traffic and it helps to get eyeball exposure rather than point exposure.
- Sign your name when leaving a question or answer - why? Spammers don't leave their names, so you don't want to be construed as a spammer.
- Don't spam!

Next up is Jonathan Hochman, Wikipedia administrator. We all want him to take Wikipedia down, but alas, we cannot, or Jonathan won't be an administrator anymore.

Wikipedia has a tremendous amount of traffic share over Digg and delicious. In a way, I am happy about the Digg part.

Here's what you can do as a marketer:
- Answer questions, interact with editors, donate images/media with an appropriate license, report problems, request changes via talk pages. Build goodwill.

Don't be a dick. Don't spam, etc.

Here are some newbie mistakes:
- Don't pick a promotional username - those are called role accounts that are not allowed.
- Don't violate copyrights.
- Don't edit stuff that you have conflicts of interests in.

Don't start stories for yourself. Don't write about something you're close to. Don't spam or you'll hit the MediaWiki spam blacklist and you don't want to get there. IP addresses are not anonymous, so be careful when making edits. The actions can reflect poorly on the company.

Reputation management issue: there was a company that was called out as a spyware distributor (they did, apparently, but they don't anymore). Fortunately, they do the right thing and talk with the Wikipedia administrators to prevent page vandalism.

Keep in mind that Wikipedia information spreads virally, especially images (they're licensed by creative commons which means you need to link the page when you borrow the image). Participation can improve your reputation.

3 links
- Wikipedia Business FAQ
- Wikipedia Conflict of Interest
- Wikipedia Search Engine Optimization

Up next is Stephan Spencer who covers Wikipedia from an SEO standpoint.

Become a virtuous participant: build edits that stick (clean up spam, fix typos, adding to the value to the site that is clearly noncommercial). Develop that profile over a period of time and you get street cred. Then you can possibly be awarded (Barnstar award) that acknowledges your contributions. You can change your User page and Talk page to remove some anynomity. Over time, you can become an admin like Jonathan.

Incorporate content edits when adding a link. It makes it harder to revert your edit.

Communicate with the main editor (the guy who makes the most edits) to negotiate with them regarding changes.

If you add links as references, it sticks better becasue references substantiate claims made in the document. If you substantiate claims, you're adding value.

What if you wanted to create brand new entries?
- Be logged in with a virtuous profile. Wikipedia mantra is that you're guilty until proven innocent.
- Be careful - you can be deleted: AFD (articles for deletion) or the speedy delete. AFD is a discussion; it's not a vote. People discuss why to keep it and here's why, versus other people wanting to remove it.
- Use lots of references: clear the notability hurdle. Get press mentions. (People, write about me.)

Notability:
- Don't put press releases to establish notability.
- Discuss this with people through the talk page if it's related to your company.

How do you make sure your investment isn't reverted? Social networks rely on friends. Make sure that they are on top of these changes - work with the people in the community.

Wikipedia has its own politics: Jimmy Wales doesn't like being "co-"founder of Wikipedia so his friends try to make the edits. He also wants to bury his history in the porno industry. But the rest of us know - or we do now.

As new tools get developed, you may be found out if you're manipulating the content.

Next up is Don Steele who has spoken so many times about Comedy Central's success with Wikipedia. Instead of regurgitating and tiring my fingers, I'll link you to my past coverage:
Wikipedia and SEO: August 23, 2007
Wikipedia and SEO: April 12, 2007
- He talked about South Park (which I've written about too).
- He talked about the lawsuit between Viacom and Google (he works with Viacom). He can't comment so he won't involve himself.

Finally, Lisa "Durova" is up. She's another Wikipedia administrator who has written for Search Engine Land. Her presentation is about Humans 1.0. She gives accolades to Comedy Central for being involved in Wikipedia in a positive way.

A lot of people come to Wikipedia follow advice that they think is good because it's in mainstream sources. However, they are not publishing for you - they're publishing for themselves.

Virgil Griffith is the WikiScanner guy. That is a tool that automated IP lookups for Wiki edits.

If you have a conflict of interest, declare it upfront. Don't do it behind their backs. A company called Melaleuca made some changes that looked like advertising copy. Two Wikipedians noticed this and they were caught. But the guy denied the involvement - however, this is not the first time that people have done this. Don't make an article conform to your company branding. If you get banned, don't post from a different IP address isn't from your company headquarters. We know when you're using proxies. We know when you're asking your friends. You're not fooling us. Now, you can't edit this company's page. The page is protected to new edits.

SMX Social Media, Wednesday 17, 2007
1:15pm-2:15pm

Pick an interest area, and there’s probably a social media site that’s serving a community around it. These sites might be "micro" in size compared to some of the large, well-known services, but they have passionate members who might also be a more targeted audience that you wish to reach. This session tours some of the many smaller communities out there.

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speaker:
Liana Evans, Director of Internet Marketing, KeyRelevance
Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-founder, SEOmoz

We've had lunch downstairs and discovered where they put the uncomfortable chairs from yesterday.

Danny is up. "If you're from NY, do you like Huey Lewis or hate him?" Frank Sinatra popular? (yes) He's joking around about sharing rides to the airport after the conference and how this is a way of "being social". Everyone is freezing. The room is either too warm or too cold. At the moment, we're very cold. Next up are Liana Evans and Rand Fishkin.

First up, Rand Fishkin:

Micro Communities in Social Media - why important, how to pursue them? Asked if we liked Rebecca's talk yesterday. Vertical portals are based on our hobbies, interests. Micro communities help you promote your brand. Can be done underground or via marketing. Why go mirco? These are different from Digg, Reddit, and all the bigger SM sites. Micro's are smaller. You can reach who are your peers and who are interested in what you have to say. Accessibility is easier because your voice can really be heard. Sometimes you just need to contribute on a regular basis to get people to recognize you. Those people are also connected to other micro communities.

How do you find these MC's (micro communities)? Search engines. Ex. Search for "artists community" and "handmade goods" bring back broad results. Communities don't come up in first results in those examples. However, if you run broad searches and begin to see site names over and over again, you can tell these might be good places to check out, or join. As your MC grows in size, it's more pervasive.

There are SM discovery blogs. This is a good way to find MC's. Uses SEOMoz.org blog as an example. Find lists of communities, and "web 2.0" lists. "Read/Write Web" (http://www.readwriteweb.com/) has lists. Recommendations and networking are other ways of finding MC's. If folks are talking about certain communities, you can follow up on this by following the link.

How to determine if an MC is right for your business? Membership numbers is one way. You can find this on About Us pages, for example. Forums also show the number of members. Or use search engines. Topical focus and relevance help determine value. Look for conversations on the web. Can search on these using keyphrases. Care2 is an ex. of leveraging features.

You're looking for others in your field rather than people to sell to in many of these communities.

Try these communities: (You can find URLS for these via a link at the bottom of this post.)

Care2 - they connect non-profits to other non-profits; they work with a lot of large companies
WebMD - They also have a community, a little over a year old. You can tag there. Create blogs. Talk about your own brand.
Library Thing - share and review books, great for authors and publishers; you can market books there
Yelp - A local reviews community; it's vertical but huge. 15 million reviews in it so far. If small or local biz, you can control your own description and manage your own information.
Trulia - For real estate, make blogs, news, network with other real estate people.
Peer Trainer - online trainers, mentors for body building and fitness, gym members. You can connect with local people there.
Donor Choose - education oriented, idea share, students read the site, you can blog there, leave comments.
Think Vitamin - for web developers, put up guides, content, launching point for your blogs to get readers
Minti - For parents. Photo share, blogs, advice, connect with other members, discussion threads.
Real Esate Voices - new site, it picks up links from other blogs and discusses them there.Handles news.
DeviantArt - older established site; has new social stuff link portfolios comments recruiting getting your works out there to show people.
SportsShooter - very active sports site; polls, networking community, leave comments on photos
Threadless - You submit designs of your own t-shirts
Cork'd - for wine lovers; blog, comments, reviews, wine industry
Imbee - "Facebook for kids", not for adults to market to kids; large membership;
Virb - Web design, video, music; creative site for artists; create content, comments, tagging
Wayfaring - create maps and share them; used for parties, map out Halloween route, create, share, explore, connect by creating and sharing maps
CouchSurfing - kinda like hitchhiking; you put your "couch" for rent, other folks can come to your house. Groups, good for travel industry.
Wikihow - How to content; these do well in search engines; you can mention your brand, write how-to lists
Helium - writers contribute content, knowledge share
Etsy - shopping, ebay for handmade goods, not an auction. Great site search. Product sales, network with other who make things.
Avvo - new site for lawyers, link to your site; networkin
(He's out of time and runs by these quickly...)
Urbis
Bakespace
FoodCandy
Sphinn - for search marketers
The Stranger - local for Seattle
Ebay - now is getting into SM; there is a community there now

Next up,

Liana:

Marketing to Your Audience - How can you take your clients and apply MC's to your marketing strategies.

Remember the "old days"? The marketing space is becoming more crowded. There are more ways to market now. Highly competitive markets are crowded. Where else can you get traffic in these markets? CAse study - diet client, diet foods. PPC was done. SEO is very hard to with ranking. Tough market. Client only ranked for brand name. PPC campaign spent 40,000 in 3 months, less than 50 requiest, no return, $800 per lead. Very bad. They looked at micro communities.

You have to start the conversation. Feed the community. Give information. Give a reason to talk. "Fish where the fish are". Go where they buy your products. They targeted at "Fat Blogging". They looked at networks, boards, communities. It's more than Digg and Facebook. She mentions Cre8asiteforums (yeah). They identified bloggers they wanted to talk to. Look for reach, depth, reliability, readers. Gauge fit for the client. Theme of blog.Attitude. Personalize the communication to avoid being salesy. Don't toss out just pitches. They read the blogs they targeted before approaching. Start small. This limits the negative reaction. Refine your approach. They wanted to follow WOMMA, to be ethical and being honest, due to bad marketing campaigns by companies in the news.

Let the conversation happen. One blogger tried the free trial, she was featured on MSN. Her response triggered viral, word of mouth. Accept the feedback and don't try to control the message. Accept both good and bad. Listen to your audience. If a bad review, you can suggest another product or alternative to the person leaving comments. 98% of people drank the free product that was offered. 308 trials delivered. Traffic increased, SEO improved.

Look at the communities you want to use. If blogs you can email them to see if they will test a product for you. This worked really well for this diet food client. Far better than PPC did.

For a list of the URLs to the list of sites that Rand listed, check out Marty's coverage of this session in AimClear

Want to be really successful in social media marketing? You need to be an evangelist and activity participate in communities, forums and blogging. Leave this session knowing how to evolve from community observer to community participant and influencer.
Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Sarah Hofstetter, Vice President, Emerging Media & Client Strategy, 360i
Rob Key, CEO, Converseon
Adam Sherk, Search/PR Strategist, Define Search Strategies

Rob Key is first.

We're here because social media is subversive - it subverts traditional distribution content channels. Why are we here? Why do we talk about social media? 12-24 year olds find that community is the heart of the web experience. This is why the community should become part of a marketing strategy. There are virtual worlds and each of them are starting to have emerging cultures that are a bit different.

Mass media has been the glue for shared experiences and helps us understand things. Marketers haven't been invited to the community. They're really for consumers to consumers.

In communities, different language evolve: you see stuff within delicious that differ from Second Life or Wikipedia. What's the role of a marketer? It's about being a bit of a cultural anthrpologist.

You can be exiled or told that your language is not the same language. Wikipedia has its own culture and it differs greatly from Second Life. (RTFA on Digg!)

As marketers and brands increasingly penetrate social media communities, backlash will occur. But we advocate (for ROI) that you need to think differently as marketers. Think about what you can do for the community.

Participate in the community. Make friends with the community members. Understand and respect them. Lead with altruism - come bearing gifts. Discover a community need. Learn the linguistics. Value and cultivate relationships. Leverage appropriately ... over time.

We did an initiative in Second Life (they are very anti-marketer). It's the beginning of the 3D web with over 7 million users. The problem is that surveys show that 72% of surveys were disapponinted in real-world company activities in second life. Regular companies are unimaginitive and are boring to the community, they say.

Our approach: we became active and started understanding the community ethos. We spoke to elders and asked what to do with the community. We learned that environmentalism is important so we started a virtual tree initiative. He shows a video about "Second Chance Trees" which explains the program: you can plant a tree in Second Life and they planted the same tree in real life in other ecologically sensitive regions throughout the world. You were able to see the tree in a Google Maps mashup. The accolades came in from the global community and the Second Life community - they took ownership of it in their own way. People started to do things with programs that we haven't even fathomed. Let people start to own it. They started talking about dedicating trees to people who passed away in their memories. It became viral. Fifty thousand pages were indexed in search. American Express Member's Project selected this as a finalist.

The mainstream media picked this up and it won the OMMA award because we really understood and took advantage of the community. It's hard to do for some companies but you should start to asking yourself "what can I give?" and you will get your return.

When you put together your strategy, you realy need to go through a process and should listen to the community. You shold understand the policies and go through the planning and infrastructure and take it from there.

Adam Sherk is next.

When you talk about social media, you need to be nimble and flexible and react to current events. That doesn't work with big brands - these are huge ships that turn very slowly. You've got marketing and PR who are concerned about reputation management. You have the SEO team thinking about inbound links and improved rankings. You have the IT department who has to make sure your server can handle this. When you have huge sites with millions of pages, you can't always change them as often as you want. The legal department is also afraid of issues and backlash.

Over the course of the last day and a half, we've learned that many people don't always have a strategy (banned accounts, etc.) There is a lot of ignorance - people try stuff and get kicked out. There's lack of support/resources. They are never true members of the community. We find a lot of companies that are enthusiastic but don't have a strategy set so they get themselves in trouble. There's poor coordination.

Here's a problem: everyone in the same room (on the same IP address) vote up the same article (okay, guys, I hope you realize that this doesn't work) - you'll get banned.

There is a path to success: selling upper management the concept, getting buy-in from all key departments, instilling a "give to gain" philosophy.

The top executives need to give the blessing to these strategies. You need to find the right people to manage the effort. Give them what they need to be effective.

Then test, do oversight, and measure results.

Adam mentioned my name saying I'm an expert. I'm flattered.

More to consider: the messages change over time. You need to adapt. How will you sustain your efforts over the long term? What happens if your brand ambassador leaves the company? What about employees with their own personal profiles? How do you deal with negative reactions?

We work with Hearst magazine. Most of their content doesn't appeal to the twentysomething male that is typical of these other social news hubs. They can interact on other niche sites. They subjectively found stuff related to environmentalism as well - they interviewed the top greenest Digg users (I remember this article! yay!)

What about Good Housekeeping on the first page of Digg? We created content about how mothers could dress up their pets in star wars costumes. It got 998 Diggs. (I just want you to know, Adam, that I read Good Housekeeping and the content there rocks. Thanks.)

TV Guide: there's a full time brand ambassador, regular monitoring on social sites, full transparency within communities, networks of partner sites developed for publicity efforts, and efforts tied to SEO/online marketing/print marketing, Special promotions developed around exclusive content.

TV guide wanted to test something so they tried High School Musical 2 - they came up with exclusive content for the film and they featured it in an article. They spread the word through Facebook, etc. The success was far-reaching because it was what people wanted and it was exclusive. There was unprecedented user engagement.

Next up is Sarah Hofstetter.

How do marketers influence the influential? It's a matter of finding where the places that marketers can place smartly across social media so that they can be evangelists. What are the assets that you can use to promote your brand? You can't just say "my brand rocks." Offer something different: widgets, CD-ROM, etc. Align assets with interests.

She presents a few case studies including NBC's Heroes. Now I like Heroes - a lot. So it should be doing well all the time. Let me note that Diggers really like Heroes.

One of the things that we look at when we do outreach is what they link back to. We analyze and see that they're linking back to a certain page (e.g. MySpace instead of NBC). Why MySpace? In one instance, there was a contest that showed that you can win a trip to Universal Studios on MySpace. But that contest wasn't on NBC.com. They added the conest there and the landscape shifted.

Another case study was to figure out how to drive awareness to politically related stuff on Comedy Central as well as unique content. A lot of these guys have a nice following online. Comic book bloggers loved an analogy we used about the Green Lantern and started linking to it - they also became controversial about it. These intense relationships that were developed with these bloggers is important. Feed their hunger. They are always looking for interesting things to write about.

We were able to find out who is linking to what and where the traffic was coming from - it came from the blogosphere - word of mouth marketing.

She says that you should harness the opportunity. People use interns in order to do it because they think it's not rocket science. However, if you use interns or people who don't know your brand, you can screw up the opportunity. If those interns get your brand, use them, but if they don't, don't use them! Look at Craigslist and see how many links ask for interns to manage blogs and pitches - this is bad!

Do: Find people who will write aobit you. Create something worthy for them. Write a customized message. Keep an updated database of all influentials.

Don't: Just hope that whatever you have is blogworthy. Mass email press releases. Pretend to be "joe consumer." Let interns do the job (yes, like she said). :)

This session was cool. Thank you. Adam, thank you too.

SMX Social Media, Wednesday 17, 2007

9:00am-10:20am

Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter and others allow people to connect with others and foster networks of friends or colleagues. Participate appropriately, and your company will find "friends" interested in what you have to say (and sell). Cross the line and the mob may turn on you and reject your message. In this session you'll learn to network and participate in an acceptable and effective manner.

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Cindy Krum, Senior SEO Analyst, Blue Moon Works
Dave McClure, Entrepeneur & Startup Advisor, 500Hats
Helen M. Overland, Director, Search Engine Marketing, non-linear creations

Good morning! After an interesting evening of networking and later, dinner at Uncle Jack's Steak house, that we walked to, rather than taking a cab...I'm here, awake and ready to deliver you another day of sessions from SMX SM. The schedule for SERoundtable today calls for Tamar and I to share the sessions, with me starting off. She's here though. She's only person I know of (so far) who can make a NY cabbie crack up. I've made friends with the guys at the sound desk, so that every time "Eminence Front" by Pete Townsend comes up, they turn up the volume. Feel that power? The room is full again. The highlight of this morning, first thing, is that Danny followed through with the complaints about the "butt numbing" chairs, and they've been replaced by a room of white ones with a bit of better cushion and stronger back support. Free breakfast again. Incidently, lunch was covered yesterday, as well as free drinks at The Elmo, for the networking event. (How do you network in a dark bar with blasting music?)

Notes: I had the wrong date in yesterday's posts. I figured this out veryyyy late last night, but a reader comment prompted Barry to repair this boo boo. I also neglected to link to Matt Mcgee yesterday (now fixed), and 345 other people. Tamar has the list and we can fix this too. Bandages for my fingers and pain killers for my back are welcome gifts.

Ah! Danny's here. Time to start.

"Second day is casual day. Hope that's okay," he says. Tells us the chairs are the lunch chairs. He's disappointed that nobody has "Stumbled" Vanessa's live blogging for SELand. No del.ico.us traffic either. He's teasing the audience that they're learning how to use SM but nobody has applied their lessons to promote the conference.

Within SM, there are categories or "silos". People use them to make friends, make a date, network with business folks. He just signed up for "Hatebook". Other people who hate you can sign up."It's gonna be big." He's introducing Dave McCLure. He'll talk about Facebook.

Dave:

Gauges the room to see how many people use Facebook and how often. He's showing a page from Facebook. He's showing the "Status" and how its used to market by inserting URLs into it. The Newsfeed shows all the shared activity that you and your friends are doing. You can see videos, comments on walls, applications your friends are using. The real trick is setting up your network appropriately. Tag your content. You can reach people this way, via people who are logged into Facebook.

Tags: Shows people who are tagged in videos, under "My Videos". Your friends will see this, if friends of those who are tagged. "My Photos" does the same thing. You can change photos to logos. Some people change their photos very often in their profiles. However, he was playing with it and can insert logos there too. If you tag someone (he demos how), the person tagged will be notified they've been tagged. This can be shared through the messaging system in Facebook. He's doing this "live", to show how tagging is carried through. There's the "mini-feed", which are your actions. These appear on your profile and show the history of your actions. Your friends can also see this, if they visit your profile. Some "very powerful" people are in Facebook. You want to connect to them, tag them. This gets you or your company out there...noticed. You can "push" content by sharing it via Facebook. "Seven Steps to Graphing your Facebook Strategy" in Techcrunch is an article he wrote. Follow up if you wish. (article date Oct 3). You can share pages using the "Share" function in Facebook.

You can create "Groups", for people you share interests with. People can join, you can add and invite people. It's visible to all the people in your friends network. You can add videos, links, photos and messages there. The feeds will pick up on all this and fan out to your network. You can create moderators and admins for Groups. A member of the audience is asking questions about Groups set up. In the background, Danny is demo'ing a Group, in which he set up a SELand profile. This is a company account, rather than a personal account. Non-profits also do this. Facebook is not encouraging this but it is being done. A company profile would have its own profile, status, history, etc.

Next up...

Helen:

Marketing on LinkedIn...asks audience who uses it for recruiting, updating profiles. It's a professional network site. Connect with friends and coworkers. You can reach 15 million professionals. Ave income 140k. Do you want volume of contacts or trusted contacts? Trusted is better. It's not like Facebook. You want to reach who you can sell your product or service to. You can have both volume and trusted contacts. "Linkedin Open Networkers" are trying to get a lot of contacts. Pick a few of them, and connect and you get their first levels of contacts. This instantly increases your contacts. Use Linkedin to:

Increase branding and visibility
Generate sales
Traffic and support SEO

Linkedin Answers - answer questions there. This increases your brand visibility. Display your expertise. This starts a conversation. Announce your web site or service by looking for feedback on something, or asking for referrals for certain things. You can drive people to your blog post if you answered a question there. You can get your service recommended by getting recommendations.

Barack Obama asked a question there and got almost 1500 answers.

For sales, use search to find contacts or potential partners. You can respond to service requests in "Answers". Say "I can help you out" or get someone to refer you. Get your service recommended. No "nofollow" at Linkedin. Links are indexed. Your can drive traffic to your website from there. You can create a vanity URL in your profile and add keywords to profile your URL. Have employees link back to your website. She shows an example of someone who asked a question needing help with an artice he was working on. Case study of "organic" marketing. People from Linkedin spent more time on sites they visit from links from there. You can reach your target market.

Cindy:

MySpace Whoas and Woes...MySpace has been getting bad press but it still reaches certain demographics.

Whoas - Flying Dog Brewery is example. They sell beer. Demographics are skiers, snowboarders, drinkers. They created a profile to create sales and traffic to their company. Establishes voice and personality for company. Creates a community about their brand. Notifies users to events and news via feed. They send out flyers. Change your profile picture by putting in a logo or in their case, a copy of the flyer. They put up images of their beer. Shows the labels. "Edgy". Helps people relate to the brand via the visuals. The have photo albums too. Album full of logos. One is of party pictures at the brewery. One is about founders and employees of the company. One is a cool stuff section, acting like an online catalog. They have travel pictures. They have an events listing. Searchable via zip code. Shows maps, costs, times, comments, rsvp. Can see if your friends are going. People can blog about the event. They use their blog to send out bulletins to all their friends. They notify of contests. They have a "Weekly Treat". They offer discounts to Facebook friends. They show a company video of employees having fun. Their profile out ranks Wikipedia because they're using MySpace so well to market their brand.

True is another company. Online dating site. Younger demographic. Snazzy profile page. They're trying to create a relationship with their people. Creates brand awareness. They offer tools and games. Lots of visuals."Sexploration Test" can be shared with friends. Some of the icons used are funny (we're laughing). These icons encourage you to interact with "potential mates". They have fortune cookies you can open up, send, create, copy and paste and share with friends. To keep people on their MySpace page, they create things to do. They have games. "Create a date" game. "Date-a-Rama" engine is another. It recommends times and places for dates based on criteria you enter. It has a sense of humor in the results. "Heartbeats" mixer. You can input data, on what you're looking for. Takes users to the True website.

Woes - Westwood College is the ex. Private college. They wanted to leverage MySpace. They wanted to create community online. They created a profile to communicate with students. It wasn't a quick setup. It takes CSS. MySpace has a tool to help with layouts. Cool Profiles have to be updated frequently. Profiles can't be static. Have to create meaningful content and reasons to come. Some people who friended them were not what the college desired or who they wanted to target. This was a real learning experience for them.

You have to manage friends. Some are not the most "savory" characters. Some clients are particular about which friends to accept. Only students? Anyone? What if pictures aren't acceptable? How does what we put up affect our brand as a college? They chose non-offensive content. They learned profile pictures can be changed. One "Friend" had to be banned because he changed his picture to something offensive after joining with a non-offensive picture. If Friends change, you may have to notify them. What blog communication is appropriate? Who is going to respond to all the email? What happens if you make a mistake? Who handles chats? What are appropriate topics? You can leverage groups. Do you participate in groups? What if someone says your company sucks? How to handle?

AutoEurope is a rental car broker. Another client. They wanted to use Facebook to help with linking, targeting world travelers. MySpace encodes links, profiles groups, forums and classified. She shows example of text vs html links. Link to a page within MySpace,not encoded. Blog posts, no. No news articles. No for events. So links within Myspace are fine (not encoded). Use Flash verison 9 and action script 3.0 only. Links in Flash files just won't work. MySpace cvoncerts HTML into preferred Object Format before saving. This can cause problems for creating widgets. Widget development for social networks is more complicated. May not work in MySpace/IE AND MySpace/Firefox.

MySpace might launch a new dev platform...rumor. Will allow widgets better network interaction. Ability for 3rd parties to market their widgets.

Before I copy and paste my liveblog from Notepad, I'm going to say that it rocked to meet Garrett and Josh because I admire them so. That is all.

Now, here we go:

Keynote Q&A: Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us & Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp and del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter head up two of the most important social bookmarking and discovery services on the web. In this session, the two will talk about trends in social media, where the future may be heading and entertain questions from attendees.
Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Garrett Camp, Founder & Chief Product Officer, StumbleUpon
Joshua Schachter, Founder, del.icio.us

These are two of my favorite social sites. I have been super-excited for this keynote. Now we're going to hear from Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon, a service that rocks, has over 3 million users, and was acquired by eBay for $75 million.

Garrett introduces SU. He says that he started it when he was in school but then got funding. He says that SU is not about search but about getting information based on friends' recommendations. There's such an explosion of content so you need filters to get through the extreme content to bring the best content to you. SU wants to create something that learns as you go to give you the best experience.

Joshua Schachter started del.icio.us in 2003 as a hobby. He is going to introduce his site as well. Key elements of delicious: tagging (social value of labeling). Delicious, has about 3 million users.

Joshua talks about how he created delicious in 2003 but it stemmed from a single-user creation he started in 2001. It's very hard to find things that you've seen before. You can go to a search engine and type it in, but delicious wants to make it easier for you based on other people's bookmarks. It's an interesting phenomenon because the attention of users is crystallized: people can recover what they've been looking for. A lot of people use delicious for personal memory but they also want to access what people they know have saved. Very little of the site is generic, unfiltered, 0-context social connections. However, the network pages (social connections) helps you see what other people bookmark where you can bookmark the same thing - you can see what's important to other people. It's an interesting way for people to have memory. It doesn't have to be you that recovers the item; it can be what other people have found. In that way, it's a social memory platform.

Now we're going to have some Q&A:

Danny: How would you define the line between social media marketing and spamming?
Josh: A bookmark means "I pay attention to this" but it would look a lot different than something that is "Please pay attention to this." The community is less tolerant to that kind of behavior. It's not here for marketing; it's here for people to remember things.
Garrett: We don't mind people marketing on SU but we have created a system to do that. Generally, if you have good content, you don't have to do much work. If it's not that good, people give a thumbs down, and it stops the story from being further promoted.

Danny: Both of the services have been sold to larger companies. How do you maintain the smallness?
Josh: We have 3 million users so it's a big community to navigate. We want to make sure people have a pleasant interaction with the system. I don't think I could have gone this far without Yahoo. The infrastructure is far beyond what we could have built as a startup. To a significant extent, it is good pairing.
Garrett: It's a relatively new thing. We try to keep the same team and we've maintained the same atmosphere in the office and things have been really good. When we get bigger, we will try to integrate additional resources.

Danny: What kind of role do you think these services will play in search?
Josh: There's a lot of opportunity. Search has been in stasis for awhile. There's a lot of opportunity for exploring in dimensions and that social metadata is an important part of it. There's a lot of territory to be covered and a dozen things we can do from here. The partnership with Yahoo will help.
Garrett: There's a personal social relevance. We want to shift from quantity to quality.

Now the audience polls the guys. I'm sad that they didn't ask my question.

Q: Based on recent acquisitions, your companies have changed - what are the positives and negatives?
Garrett: Not much has changed besides finance. Productwise, it's exactly the same.
Josh: We have a lot of technology that has helped us scale. The current engineering team that is working on delicious built Yahoo! Photos - this is an important consideration because we needed other access to resources so that we could scale for a large userbase. It's been a huge plus. In terms of direction, they bought us because they liked where we were going and haven't changed it.

Q: For Garrett - can you describe your first breakthrough? What pushed you out of this tiny idea and put you in the spotlight?
Garrett: I think it was when we moved to San Francisco. When I was in Calgary, I wasn't going to networking events and I had about 500 users. Firefox is also a contributor - we were on the top 10 list and people started downloading it. There is no one event that drove our success.
Josh: This is about hours and hours of effort for years and years. Delicious picks up more traffic in a day than it did in the first year.
Followup: How did you know you were on the right track?
Garrett: I really just built it for myself. But apparently it worked.
Josh: I did it for myself too and it worked from there. You want tight feedback from the users. When you're the engineer and the QA, you learn very quickly. If you're using it, you need this tool and the turnaround time is faster.
Followup: Is it hard to implement new changes now that you've been acquired?
Josh: The sense of it is still intact. We know where it should go. Engineering does slow down a bit however. The new delicious has been worked on for a long time - it's the same delicious I built with more patches and layers.
Garrett: As you get bigger, it will be a bit tougher because people need to get used to the new features. You can't just change something without an announcement. Get feedback from the users (take note, Kevin Rose!) before implementing any changes.

Q: If you believe in the value of the collective voting, why nofollow links?
Josh: It's too much of a spam target otherwise, but that's it. It's not collective voting when someone registers 1,000 accounts and votes. There's no easy way to enforce that. We're not about building links, so we don't care.
Followup: Would you algorithmically erase it?
Josh: If I can prove that you're a real person, maybe. But we see it being gamed too often that it's tough.

Q: What's been the biggest "a-ha" for you when you rolled this out? How did they change the evolution of products?
Josh: Delicious is very unconstrained. You can tag things the way you like. There are some people who tag things "to read" and then will access it later. People build workflow around links. People have also built chat systems around these bookmarks.
Garrett: Some people have installed StumbleUpon extreme and they hack their profiles, but we don't have an API (awww - get one please!). In the future, we intend to (yay!)
Josh: The current posting interface for delicious was some random guy and he said "you should do this" and we didn't listen. He built it anyway and it was a success: we still use it.

Danny: Your emphasis is on the bookmarking but you also have social networks.
Josh: For delicious, that's only there as necessary. If you add someone to your contacts, it may be because you want to follow them on similar interests. We're not so much about a generic social profile. Delicious 2 is the same site on a completely different platform.
Garrett: We're halfway between Facebook and delicious. We are about social aspects but we also like the content discovery. We're not going to implement changes just because MySpace or Facebook did it. (Thank you, Garrett. You rock.)

Q: I tested the paid version of SU and it worked quite well. How far are you going to take the paid program?
Garrett: Pretty far. Less than 10% of our traffic came from that system last year. We want to datamine the feedback to provide more consumer insight. We want to guide marketing efforts based on demographic interest (some cities respond better than others for particular content). We're going to track this and determine why this content arrives.
Followup: Do you have any negative feedback toward the paid side?
Garrett: Not really. The quality is pretty good. If the site is not good, we actually select sites based on the best matching ad for the user. If the advertiser has a better piece of content, they're going to be selected over yours.
Followup: Is eBay pushing you to push paid content as well?
Garrett: Nope, not really. We're doing pretty well right now.

Q from Neil Patel: From delicious, if you have a lot of friends, it hangs. Is that a database issue?
Josh: It's a Javascript error.
Neil: Can I use delicious again?
Josh: No, you're way too popular. :)

Q from Brent Csutoras: Is there a way to sign up for the new delicious?
Josh: There was a form but it's full right now. We're going to do roll it out to the public sometime this year.

Q from Brent Csutoras: For the paid submissions, if many people vote those stumbles up and the campaign ends, will SU still serve the page?
Garrett: Yes, if people like that content, then you'll do just fine. It's a way to get your foot in the door but the votes (and quality of your content) will bring your content. You won't be paid for the views beyond that point.

Q from Brian Wallace of nowsourcing.com: Any chances that we're going to see any major changes to the SU homepage such as recent Stumblers and recently popular.
Garrett: We're planning on doing that but we're really focused on the quality of presentation. Right now it's not our main focus. But we'll try to give you more of a personalized experience in the future because people have demand for it.

Q from Brian Wallace: Any plans for combining logins from eBay with OpenID?
Garrett: Not at this time.

Q: Can you talk about the concerns about private bookmarks versus public bookmarks?
Josh: When I launched delicious, we didn't have hidden bookmarks until we were acquired. People need to understand that the behavior around these systems. There's a little less privacy now that you're much bigger. You can get closer to people's brains in a very direct way. Delicious is not explicit; it's implicit. It's not publishing - it's below publishing. I had a brief round a week or two ago and I was bookmarking financial sites. People were asking me if I went back to finance. It's terrifying and useful at the same time. If you don't want your information on the Internet, don't store information on sites that are connected to the Internet. There's some loss of perceived privacy.
Garrett: With information systems, there's no scarcity until you get bigger. You may want to share stuff just with family and friends. You may want to keep things private and other things public.
Josh: People want things with a lot of features but they want it as simple as possible.
Garrett: Can you build an interface that integrates both? Yes. But it's something we might add in the future.

Someone said something about how delicious is great for collaboration. He said that they discussed podcast informaion (which I've done as well) based on delicious's tagging. It really is useful, guys.

Q: Have you guys ever thought about unifying these networks in the future where you can have one profile that can be merged?
Josh: There are a lot of things that people call social bookmarks that are not. I read Digg all the time but it's not social bookmarks. (I agree. It's social news, dudes.) I don't think that StumbleUpon is a competitor in the slightest. There are a bunch of things that are referred to the same way but they're not related.
Garrett: There are different use-cases. I don't think that one company will be able to do this really well.

Danny: Do you view yourselves as rivals in the social media space?
Garrett: We learn from each other design wise and interaction wise. We all share semantics while we figure out what makes the most sense.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007 SMX Social Media, NYC

3:00pm-4:20pm

Consumers are sharing best-of-Web content with bookmarking and tagging sites like Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. Flickr, YouTube and Technorati tap into "tagging" to categorize material, so people interested in topics can locate community finds. This session is a marketer’s guide to using bookmarking and tagging effectively.

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Guillaume Bouchard, CEO, NVI
Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service
Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services

We just had 20 minutes for a break, with cookies, which I was too busy to eat. I had mentioned to Danny that the poor quality of the chairs we're sitting on was a new topic at his social media site, "Sphinn". He checked it out and then told the audience he apologizes. SMX is still new. They'll be making improvements as they get feedback like this.

He introduces Guillaume.

He speaks to us in French and Deb Mastelar and I are having hot flashes. She takes his picture. Funny stuff. He discusses an example of a site they did that made top SM sites in 24 hours. It was about sea creatures. They were able to reuse some of the hype and get several stories from it. This translates into being bookmarked. They have a lot of friends who help them promote sites on different sites.

Social bookmarking allows you to organize inside social search sites. Not a lot of link juice because most have "nofollow" links. However, sites that don't have "nofollow" will pick up the site that you submit. Tagging is popular on these sites. Sorta like keywords. Help with organizing and cateories for your sites. Benefits include better search engine rank, natural linking, traffic, but keep in mind all the efforts not as strong as Digg. Increase brand awareness. Influence traditional media. Creates a presence in online social communities. Helps build links from alternative sources.

How to tag. Every time you enter a site, take an hour or so to see how people are using tags. Are they spamming? What are the popular tags? When in doubt, pick the one that's most relevant. You can co-ordinate your efforts and establish a set of standards on how to tag resources you want to share with others. You can coach them. Ask them to choose certain tags. It's organizing the content - that's the ultimate goal. Manual tagging is anchor links, hyperlinks, keywords. Create your own set of tags to represent your content. Tags work best with sites with images and videos. Top SM sites feature tagging. Automatic tagging is more "blackhat". Automatically extract tags from content. Incorporate other people's tags in the automatic process. Does not benefit creativity. It's more a "usability thing". It should improve the user experience. There are problems, such as poor choices. If we abuse the tagging system, creates problems in the long term.

Technorati - search engine for blogs that uses tag system. Popular blogs ranked by number of unique links. Set up a blog for clients, write blog posts with high profile tags and claim it through Technorati. High amount of pings signals popular site. Use Digg, Reddit, Propeller, etc. If you have a new blog, it needs really good content to do well here. Field is diluted now.

Flicker - popular for photo sharing, use tags for photos. Google didn't put nofollow on comments in Flicker. Select the right tags. Use the photostream on your blog. Participate in comments on popular pictures there. Encourage users to link and comment on photos. Add links to profiles. Let friends share pictures.

Youtube - Mashups work well here. Content is more important than tags. Use Digg to promote. Share your submitted video with friends. Use your blog to promote your video.

Facebook - Create profiles, use it for corporate profiles, brainstorm on widgets and get application unique to your industry. Offer a good reason to join a group. Add incentive to join there. Moderating these groups is needed. You can use it attract people to your company.

Next up is Michael.

"Del.ico.us is not the government". Everyone laughs. It allows you to share your bookmarks with people. You enter a title. Tags are basically a label or a folder. No limits on them. This is for work, or travel or whatever. You can see how many people have saved your page. You can add notes when you save a bookmark. You can see how they inerpret your page. These are clues on what is important. What tags did they use? Tag clouds show importance, with bold words being more popular. Tracks the first person who bookmarked it. They may be an important person or leader in the field. You want to watch this. There are friend networks. You can add people there. You can subscribe to certain tags. You can get all the stories in that topic. People can send you links, but this is not effective unless someone is logged in. The homepage changes a lot. You get a bit of a preview. You can see what's popular or not and see the tags assigned to it. The homepage shows active tags on the right side. This is how to find popular tags.

Digg is young, male, tech savvy audience. Del.ico.us is everybody. You don't have to be tech related there. You can see how many people have saved your post. If you do a search on Del.ico.us, it will give back things you bookmarked first. Next, other things people bookmarked. High number shown first. You can see a list of all the tags people used. Sometimes words come up you may not have thought of. You can use plural. You can use "+" to combine words.

When you submit, enter the url, title and description. You can save just for you. It will show all the tags you've ever used for everything. IF you want to send in someone in your network, you'll see the tags they use. Tag clouds show popular tags and equals more bookmarks. See if you can apply popular tags to your piece. Look for leaders in your subject and add them to your network.

How to expand exposure. Taylor your content to tags. Make it easy to add to Del.ico.us. Suggest anchor text.The popular page updates every 4 hours. Time your submit to when you can get in there.Don't create many sock puppet accounts or you may get discounted. Your friends can help influence the suggested tags.

Neil is next.

He'll talk about Stumbleupon. Why should you care? He shows the homepage of it. There's over 3 million users. Over 12,000 visitors in 1 day. Traffic keeps coming. Great for branding. Traffic lasts for months. More males, less females. Older people - age 45 and up. They have credit cards!

Install the toolbar. You click on the Stumble button. There's an "I like" or "I don't like" thumbs up or down icon. More thumbs up, more traffic from members. You can send stories to people. Create an account.

Step 2 is to Add Friends. He added 200, and if they don't respond, drop and add more. Find content on your site and submit it using the submission page. Add a title. Can use keywords for this. Don't stuff with keywords. For review, put something like "A great resource for...." Pick topics. Add tags. Be relevant. It asks if adult site. Use the send-to feature and send a message to them. Your friends can vote. This brings in fast traffic.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007 SMX Social Media, NYC
1:15pm-2:40pm

Digg, Netscape, Reddit, Newsvine and others allow community members to share and rate news stories. They are primary news sources and influential outlets that must be considered by marketers. But don't expect to post your old-school press release and get a good response! Learn how these sites work and how to best tailor your message for maximum visibility on them.

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services
Chris Winfield, President & Co-founder, 10e20
Tamar Weinberg, Search Marketing Strategist, Rusty Brick, Inc.

More coverage at Search Engine Journal and aimClear Blog and Search Engine Land.

Lunch was one floor down, and was free. I joined a group and we grabbed lunch, buffet style. Still trying to get my laptop charged, I brought it with me and we grabbed a table by a group of wall outlets. Now, back upstairs and preparing for the next session, I've relocated to a new "Blogging Pool", which is closer to the speaker podium, and by a great set of outlets close by. Matt McGee, seeing the logic in this new choice, has joined me. Barry Schwartz, Liana Evans, Eric Enge and Debra Masteler are also next to me. Matt, Barry and I have our exit routes mapped out, so we can duck out during the Q&A session and post to our blog commitments.

This is Tamar Weinberg's debut speaking engagement. As she tells the story, "This is Danny's fault." We have a small cheering session gathered here for her, as the ambulance is parked outside the building. (Just in case she passes out or something.) Meanwhile, Liana Evans has been posting pictures. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/storyspinn/ - Look for set. We're now waiting and listening to music. "She blinded me with Science" was just on. Twice, today, we rocked out to Eminence Front by Pete Townshend of The Who (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminence_Front).

Danny is now up to the podium and I must officially start sounding official. SM is not just about Digg. First up, Neil.

Neil:

I love Digg. I'm a young kid. Most kids look at porn, I look at Digg. What is it? Why should you care? Who uses them? Shows homepage. You submit, people vote. If good, it lives, if not, it dies. There's a bury button. If tons of buries, it's no longer on homepage. Average story gets 129 links. On Digg homepage, some sites can get 10,000 in an hour. If you pay for links, per link, that adds up. As long as the site/page stays up, the link is live. Great source of branding. Neil did so well on Digg that the NY Times wrote about him. There's roughly 20% more males on Digg. You need a website. You need images and content. Or video or audio. Podcasts don't bring traffic from Digg but video does. It's a voting system. 100 votes, likely an important story. 100 votes in a 100 days is not as good as 100 votes in an hour. Some SEO's created a lot of accounts and tried to vote their own sites but Digg figured it out. No self promotion. Don't pay for votes. No spamming. No SEO's are allowed in Digg. There are sites like usersubmitter.com (www.usersubmitter.com/) that submit for pay. Doesn't recommend doing it for sites that are valuable. If someone discovered you're an seo, not a good thing. Don't be discovered.

Top 100 users control 56% of what gets on the homepage. You can pay them to get there. You can't control what people say. Not all pages get to the homepage. "Embrace the community and call it a day."

Tamar:

Digg Tips and Tricks is her topic. She's nervous and Danny is trying to put her at ease.

Overview: advice for winning content, advice for promotion as a digg user, networking, tools and lesser known tricks.

Content - viral content works well. Lists work very well. Games, quizzes, controversy, tools, breaking news, videos, pictures, technology/science are other topics. She describes an example of a controversy topic. Tools are things you can describe that help people do things. Track latest news. Describes ipod as a popular story which was Dugg by tons of people. Be on top of breaking news. Videos, try funny ones. Creative ones. Pictures.Everybody likes eye candy. Digpicz.com (http://www.digpicz.com/) is a site to try. If you label your title with pictures and people will find it there. Digg is built on a science and tech foundation. Focus on those stories to build a strong account.

Title and desc. are important. Be careful when marketing your content. The smallest mistake you make, people will call you on it. Make yourself easy to identify. Get an avatar. Don't blend in with everyone. Stand out. Provide your email IM, blog, etc. and ways for people to contact you. Befriend users and Digg their stories early. People notice who submits their stories early. Comment on stories early. You want to be funny. People will find you early. Comment early to be noticed. Digg shouts exist but use sparingly. Equates to spam and you'll be buried. Shouts are fine for promoting friends and networking. Do it privately. Get to know people off-site. Take advantage of Digg social elements to help people Digg your site. You want to use Smart Digg Button, works only for Firefox. (Digg This, for ex.) Digg Alerter. Search for "social media for Firefox". (www.techipedia.com/2007/digg-api-tools) for other tools to check out. (Her blog.)

Everybody wants to do well in Digg but its not the only site. Things to note. Be careful. Don't put SEO or search marketing ID's in title. Don't email everybody and say "Digg my story". Get a diverse amount of people to submit your story. It's hard to bring an old story back to the homepage. 20 diggs in a few hours. This is considered "natural". Anything more, dangerous. You can push up stories to give your story visibility. Check Digg/news/upcoming to check. You can't get "unburied". If you promote to Digg, also promote elsewhere. Stumbleupon is good. Digg archives show what are considered good content. Digg doesn't really have a sports readership. Top Digg submitter, requires at least 50 Diggs. The algorithm is sensitive. You can just submit content, with no intent on being a top submitter. This is fine too.

Chris:

How many people want links and traffic to their sites? He'll focus on Digg. Why business on homepage of Digg? Traffic and exposure. You can get between 10-20,000 people to your site quickly. People look to Digg for content. Digg is free links. Homepage on Digg, they'll bookmark your site to Stumbleupon, and elsewhere. Sales? Do they convert? It brings brand awareness. Know the languae. FTW is "For the Win". RTFA "Read the f...article" is another. Understand the lingo. Diggers love the iphone, Apple, shows like Heros, Ron Paul. They don't like things like "I love this or that" President Bush, don't say you like him. Press releases don't work in Digg. "Boring". Overtly selling, even if free, is a no-no. Faking it doesn't work. Sony tried this and failed. Know your audience. Blendtech knows people love Chuck Norris, things being destroyed. They used it in a video. Dove video is another example. Get featured on a popular blog. Get that submitted. This is a trusted source. You get traffic from blog and Digg homepage. Sometimes all it takes is a creative idea.

Example: Leading vacations site. They wanted brand exposure, natural links, start a conversation. It's a commercial site that sells vacation packages. Not a place for Digg. 10 Tips to a Better Disney Vacation wouldn't work there. They want something that relates to vacations and Digg audience. They did a list. They wanted to appeal to everyone. People love their cities. They played on this. Stripped out sidebar navigation, and ads. Left top navbar, so when people come they'll visit the whole site. Use "11" rather "Eleven" in list titles. Use brackets. Caps. Add opinions. Choose the right topic and submit there. They tried a lot of these and make the homepage very fast. People left comments. 20,000 unique visitors in 24 hours. It spreads to other social networks. These are where buzz is created. Links still come in. Their example was featured on popular blogs, who had never heard of them before, due to the Digg story. 1000 natural links built. 200 new email signups. 12 new bookings, and this wasn't even an initial goal. If you want to play with Digg, make sure you have good hosting.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007 SMX Social Media, NYC
10:40am-12:00pm

Attracting visitors on social media sites involves using the right bait -- link bait. Compelling content is best. Added benefit: it appeals to bloggers too. Do it right and they'll link to you, enhancing the prominence of your brand and driving traffic to your site. This session explains link baiting and provides examples and ideas to help you craft your own bait.

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Brent Csutoras, Online Marketing Specialist, BrentCsutoras.com
Rebecca Kelley, Search Marketing Consultant, SEOmoz
Cameron Olthuis, CEO, Factive Media

Last minute change in our blog schedule. I’m taking over for my blogging partner, Tamar, who was going to do this session. So…here I am. Danny is introducing Rebecca first.

More coverage at Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal and aimClear.

Rebecca:

How many people have allergies? She sounds stuffed up and feels badly.

(Time out. Need to plug in to outlet. Battery going. Will try to catch up to Rebecca. I've relocated to a wall, sitting on the floor, plugged in and listening. There's an echo and I can't see the screens.)

If you have an authoritative site, that link passes link juice. It will increase visibility of your site overall. (Time out. Needed to move again. Getting a bad echo and can't hear her well.) She’s talking about link stickiness. Target "linkerati". Anyone who is likely to link to your site. May not be your normal users. They’re important anyway. The Net is evolving. People like share. They like to share. They link to blogs. Send links to friends. You want to take advantage of that. The best thing to do is create content.

Do a search for your sector, in Digg, Reddit, etc. See what others are doing and see if you can do something similar. Do your homework. YouTube is great for research. Look at current trends on places like Google Trends, Technorati. What are people talking about this week and tie your link bait to that. Don’t neglect your industry. Your own community may have a lot of closet sites. Search on blog search engines. Linking other sites to your site helps with relevance. People may come back again if you’re in the same niche. Not always about Digg and Reddit. You can keep your own niche in mind.

Brainstorming sessions are a good thing. Ask questions from friends. Link bait can be as simple or hard as you want to be. She’s showing funny screen shots I can’t see from where I am. Shows an example of a picture used for bait. Lists work too.

Be aware of negative link bait. "Are you being brave or being an asshole?" Is saying someone is a jerk going to affect your brand? Negative mudslinging is a kind of link bait but do the ends justify the means? She has everyone laughing with some of her remarks here.

Look before you leap. Contact people in the industry to get feedback. Bloggers will help you create a buzz. Make people feel included. The first few hours are the most crucial after sending out link bait. Monitor traffic. Check server. Keep offering fresh content. Watch trends. You can take advantage of trends and hot topics with your own spin. Your goal is to attract "linkerati" but be sure you’re educated on the topic. Link bait gets links in quickly. It’s one part of the arsenal you have to work with.

Greg:

He’s a social media junkie. You want the links and you want the branding. Ways to link bait.

Categories

Top 10 lists – These types of articles are extremely effective at Digg. Digg is powerful. Don’t go with cliques.

How-to – Be helpful. Make sure you offer value. No one will link to you if you offer no value. Make it easy to read. Add some images. SM users are quick users and are intimidated by lots of text.

Current events – People are already looking for what you have. Make sure you act fast. You need to get something out there. Write it your own way; add more value to the topic. Be accurate. Don’t put out false information. Right jargon. No spelling errors.

Offbeat or extreme topics – “The smallest toilet” is an example. He launched a blog that did really well on this niche. Hardest type of campaign to sell to clients. You have to be careful with offbeats. Don’t hurt your brand. Don’t violate terms of service. You can be banned from some sites like Digg, even if you didn’t submit the link (someone else did.) Be careful.

Image campaigns – Avoid using long URLS for these. Links to long urls aren’t as valuable. People do steal images. Put it inside a post and people aren’t as likely to steal the post and will just link to you.

You need to research. Find out what worked, what was effective and what information works. You need to know what’s happening with current events. What’s worked in the past? Watch what was on front page in the past few weeks on sm sites. When you have your category, title and desc. are next. Make it simple. Be strong, Be focused. The description must back up the title with good description. If you submit just a title to a site like Digg, not enough. A description helps convey the point of the article. This helps people come to look at it. Capitalize the first letter of the first word. Avoid spelling out numbers (use numerical instead.) Keep people involved in what you want to sell. It’s a bandwagon kind of community. Make friends. Use IM to share links with friends. These people are there to help you succeed.

Tips – Relate to the community you’re submitting to. Find communities that relate to your topic. Use images. Limit ads. People have seen them. You don’t want to be selling ad content. Give summaries of what you’re submitting. Pull quotes. Make it easy for people to link to you. No spelling errors. No bad information. (SM readers have no tolerance for spelling errors.) No duplicates of something already submitted and popular. (Wait a year.) You can re-submit old favorite topics. Make sure your server can handle the load (Digg-effect). People will not wait for pages to load. He’s been kicked off SIX servers so far. Hosts don’t want that kind of pressure. Being on the front page of Digg will bring you links. Be “link worthy”. Submit at the right time. Friday eve is a no. Holidays no. Weekends no. Shoot for time when most people are online searching ("when at work", everyone laughs).

A lot of people miss out on what SM really is. Look at it like a real social event. Reserved until you feel more comfortable. You need to be social. He does an analogy of being social in the physical and translated that to online.

Cameron:

Digg effect example of a site that goes down. Story got buried. Talks about the importance. Link bait – information pieces, how to lists, controversial, rebuttals, ex. Is when people pick on the seo community. Make people laugh. Show funny videos. News, current events, tools, quizzes. Things that are useful to people.

Benefit – everybody wants links. Link profile, Google see’s natural linking going on. Traffic. Word of mouth. Bookmarks. People will bookmark your site or page at a later date. Immediate publicity.

Ex. Drug rehab center. Find an idea. Search the SM sites what’s out there. Use a whiteboard. List 25 topics. Create content. He uses ex. of writing a guide article. SM users have short attention spans. Give them info quick as possible. Provide lists with pictures. You need to seed the article. Submit to Stumbleupon, Digg, etc. Come up with a title. Write a review or description. Add tags if possible. People subscribe to topics. Target your articles to them. Get a “power account”. These are people recognized in the community. A great title can make a story. Look for social communities that are in your niche. (SEO’s use Sphinn, for ex.) Doing all this helped the drug rehab site perform really well.

(Needed to cut out of this one shortly before he ended due to technical problems with laptop.)

Tuesday, October 16, 2007 SMX Social Media, NYC
9:00am-10:20am

Customers interacting with brands -- that’s marketing in the 21st century. And SMM is key to fostering brand/customer conversations. This session will orient you to the world of social media. You'll learn the leading sites, the functionality they provide, and best practices for interacting in these virtual places.

More coverage from Vanessa Fox at Search Engine Land: Live Blogging: SMX Social Media - Social Media Marketing Essentials, also at Search Engine Journal and aimClear Blog.

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-founder, SEOmoz
Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services

Intro:
Welcome to SMX Social Media. I woke up at 6:30 am to get ready and catch a cab with Matt Mcgee to get to the Metropolian, where the conference is being held. Once we arrived, registered, found the speaker/press room and began munching on free breakfast, we realized we're in rooms at the Affinia, right next to each other. Matt (www.smallbusinesssem.com) is sitting to my left and Marty Weintraub (www.aimclearblog.com) is to my right. The breakfast layout is awesome. Free coffee, juice, fruit, bagels, banana bread, etc. Rand Fishkin (www.seomoz.org) and Danny Sullivan have showed up. Neil Patel, (www.pronetadvertising.com) who is also speaking in this first panel, joined us while grabbing breakfast. Michal Gray (aka Graywolf, www.wolf-howl.com/) came over and chatted for awhile with Matt and I as well. These little gatherings first thing in the morning are good for getting the brain going. I'm splitting session coverage today and tomorrow the Tamar (of SERoundtable/Rustybrick). She is far better at catching every single word than I. I'll do my best to record my sessions and fill you in as we go along here.

The room is just about full. The music is blaring, at least for me, since I'm sitting right next to a speaker in the front row. We have wireless access here in the conference room, which is nice because the press room is close by and I can push this out without having to log back in again. For this conference, I'm using a new laptop, with Vista. Already, Marty is showing me tricks and shortcuts to make this job easier with Vista.

Danny is launching into the conference. He's explaining to everyone how to access the wireless internet access. His intro was preceded by a song that was turned up and Matt and I were starting to rock out. Funny thing, at this hour. Danny is asking folks if they visit Sphinn. June 3/4 is a SMX in Seattle. NY again Oct 6-8. Website Magazine is a sponsor for SMX. A rep (Dante Monteverde) is allotted 3 minutes to give a brief promo before the session begins. Basically, he holds up the magazine and is describing it to the audience. (I get the magazine and enjoy it.) They want industry experts writing articles for them. They also have a web site and an affiliate program. They archive their content on their website. Replaceatree.org, is a green program they're involved in, being a print magazine.

Danny introduces Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz. He'll be touching on aspects of the conference to come.

Rand:

I think social is something he's passionate about. He'll show us why it exists, how to use it, what it is. He wants to give an overview of what we'll hear in the conference. The first thing people ask, what is social media marketing? Why are we in this space. It's web site traffic, conversions, sales. Page views, ad revenue, it helps grow brand awareness. Create a postive brand impression. Shows the MAC/PC commercial guys. Business dev and networking. Uses something like Linkedin as an ex. SM really can deliver. How? There's interacting with communities on the web. You can connect with millions of people. Create viral content. You take some piece of viral content and submit to Digg, for ex. Shows a map where there are more single women and men. There's single women in NYC. Someone scanned it, posted it to sm site, and got tons of traffic for showing this map. (Search for National Geog. Singles map to find it). Reaching key influencers. References the Tipping Point to understand connectors and how this works.

Why is SM valuable? Supports and brand and mind share goals. Supports search engine marketing goals. The entire domain receives some ranking benefit. The page gains rankings. SM helps with traffic and conversion goals. Branding is one way. In the social world, positive promo is something people identify with. Apple does it. ThinkGeek toys and games. Why now? Why is SM so cool now?

Shows a graph with stats from different SM sites like blogging, sm sites, forums, video, podcasts, wikis. These are kinds you can use. SM usage is still small but growing fast. June 2007Businessweek study he references. Very few users are actually creating the content. Yahoo study: Brand advocates: Have emerged as primary infuencers. They're better connected. SM is the key. Brand advocates are taking full advantage of the tools. Search for Yahoo Passionistas Report Sept 2007. User generated content is photos, blogs, videos. Shows a graph for how fast blogsophere has grown. Fast. Posting volume will spike based on social events.

Shows a graph that shows people who blog. Stats from emarketer. Shows demographics. Wealthy consumers are heavily engaged in the blogosphere. Shows a graph of what countries read blogs. The US is not #1. Japan is, with South Korea, China and the US, and UK following. Belgium is #10. 91% from Japan and 34% influencers from USA. These are people who take action after reading a blog.

How do they locate the blogs? Links on other blogs 67%. (Emarketer stats.) Recommendations, search engines, blog search engines and other. Quality of reading is the #1 reason for reading a blog. Credibility is still quality of writing. Topical focus is another. Popularity is the least noted reason for visiting a blog.

Video is an exciting space for online marketers. By 2011 86.6% of Americans will be watching online video. News is top reason. Comedy, education, music. Adult sites are the least common reason. (People giggle). How do users engage with online video? You get link from a friend. Via links, send links to other, watch with others, rate video, post comments, post video links online and pay for video.

In the early days, we had SE's that weren't too smart. Shows a slide of Alta Vista. In the beginning it was keyword focused and it was easy to spam them. Engines came up with page rank to measure popularity. SE's began to determine credibility and trust in the content. Links equal votes, if the link really reflects an editorial recommendation of one page to another. Dead a link farms, reciprocal link exchanges, directory link building, forums sig, blog comment spam and paid link networks. Links should come from valued and trusted domains. These are government and educational links, major media websites, broad and niche authority sites like National Geographic, popular blogs, high quality SM sites. On one side people will provide editorial links vs sites that require links to rank well. SM becomes a solution, in a way. Who are responsible for creating links on the web ("linkeroti"). Reddit, blogger, hobby sites, researchers, customers.

Customers don't link to your site. We must reach these people. They email their friends. SM sites. Social news portals, forums, groups, newsnet, word of mouth, links on their own sites, podcast, mainstream media and video. These are ways they can be influencers. He shows a graphic of qualities people use to want to link. Stunning design, ad free content, non commercial content, good graphics, good writing, high accessibility, authority, clear navigation are all things people like to see. No Flash, poor IA, hard to read text, forcing registration, splitting articles on separate pages, bad site search, unprofessional design, long URLs, obtrusive ads. These are things that people will not be impressed with.

Where to conduct SMM:

Social news aggregation portals - user generated content, users influence visibility, comment features, ratings. Reddit, Digg, Propeller (was Netscape), Sphinn, Meneame (spanish) (Rand says SEOMoz gets good traffic from there), Techmeme, Newsvine (was sold to MSNBC). Users link together. They provide events, public announcements, external applications. Facebook is an example. MySpace. Facebook is an "influencer" more than MySpace because demographics are younger. Linkedin, for professional networking. These are sites where users can submit content with some editorial review on some of them. YouTube provides user generated content. Wikipeida has very visible content. Flicker, for image sharing. Yahoo! Answers has more than 3.5 million users in the last year. Yelp is a local portal for business owners. Popular blogs are ready by several thousand daily readers. Comments and content are accessible. True participatory community. Bloggers can be reached directly. TechCrunch is an example of a large blog. Boing Boing is another. Gizmodo, The Huffington Post for politics. Life Hacker for news and advice. Gawker is a celebrity blog. Mighty Goods for shopping.

Social Bookmarking sites:

You can tag content and share it with friends, the more who bookmark it, the more it rises to the top. Stumbleupon is one. Del.iciou.us is one of the most popular ones. (Someone says they're going to change the name.) Ma.gnolia is another one shows up in search results well. Yahoo! My Web.

Niche and topical participartory sites. Slashdot is one. Fark (not safe for work surfing, nice long tail.) Truemors is gaining in pop. NowPublic has a tech focus. Upcoming.org for events (Yahoo! owns it.) The long tail of blogs, forums and groups reach smaller, niche communities. Mainstream media portals. Large, well known brands. Enable participation or influencing. They note most talked about sites. News.Google.com lists most popular news sources. SearchEngineLand is a source for News.google.com. NYTimes (which now allows user comments. Some people don't like this.) San Francisco Chronicle. CNN (allows comments). Wired is connected to Reddit. Wired will link to blog content. MSNBC is another one.

Conference will cover techniques to succeed in SMM. Ideas for vital content that can help your site gain traffic. Which social communities are valuable for your business? SM is still cutting edge, which means you have the advantage over your peers or competitors who aren't into it. (He's showing screen shots with Simpson characters.)

(Note: Spelling errors exist. We traditionally type and post. Blogged by Kim Krause Berg for SERoundtable.)

The Search Marketing Expo, Social Media conference is tomorrow and Wednesday in Manhattan. We will be providing in-depth and full coverage. Tamar, Kim and I will be posting sessions. There is only one track comprising of:

• Social Media Marketing Essentials
• Linkbait - Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
• Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites
• A Marketer's Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging
• Keynote Q&A: Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us & Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon
• Effectively Leveraging Social Networking
• Evangelist - The Marketer's Role in SMM
• Micro Communities
• Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers & Answer Sharing
• Wikipedia Clinic

Please make an effort to attend the Internet Marketers of New York's Charity Party, which is taking place tonight at Town Tavern Bar & Grill 134 W. 3rd Street and 6th Ave. between 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm.

Also, Tamar will be speaking at the Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites session tomorrow, so make sure to get a front row seat!

See you all there!

Next Monday, the Internet Marketers of New York (IM-NY) will be holding a charity party just in time for SMX Social Media, which will be held next week (October 16-17) in New York.

The details follow:
Cost: $40 Donation, which will go to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society
Time/Date: Monday, October 15, 2007, 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm
Location: Town Tavern Bar & Grill 134 W. 3rd Street and 6th Ave.

One of our own, Marty Weintraub, who was diagnosed with Stage 3B lymphoma, will be there, so this is an issue that hits close to home in our close-knit community. That said, even if you're not going to SMX Social Media, you should definitely attend this event to support the cause.

By the way, if you are attending SMX Social Media, I will be speaking for the first time, so please be nice. ;)

Also, IM-NY is looking for sponsorship of future events. The charity event next week is being sponsored by Best of the Web, who will be graciously covering the costs of the event itself. If you're interested in sponsoring an event in the future, please contact IM-NY.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.