The Maine SEO Blog

The following is a recap from a session at Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East. Follow the conference and session on Twitter.

Foursquare “Advertiser” Survey a Few Months Later

Highlights from 1st survey

• Majority of “advertisers” have been on Foursquare for about 6 months
• More “advertisers” believe Foursquare helps grow their business than not
• Most are tracking check-ins
• Most have claimed Google Places page (and now Facebook Places)
• Only 10% say they’d pay for it

Interesting location-based services user statistics

• Between June and October 2010, advertisers are still seeing the benefit of using it
• Advertisers are (overwhelmingly) using Yelp and Facebook Places
• Advertisers have started valuing Foursquare users less over the past four months

Takeaways

• Yelp and Facebook Places are gaining in adoption
• Majority of respondents on Foursquare greater than 6 months
• Mobile and social users 70% likely to make a buying decision

Will Scott, President, Search Influence

The New Local Search

Changes in Local Search

• Address & Map
• What’s nearby
• How good is the place
• Who’s nearby
• How “worthy” is that person and their opinion
• It’s all about reputation

Additional data points

• Every data field accepted by a publisher represents traffic and revenue opportunities
• Business overlook simple ones that are vital – like hours of operation
• Video is the future – even if it is a simple slideshow hosted on YouTube
• Small businesses can use a Facebook page if they do not have a website

How to Make Businesses Disappear

• Messing with names – stuffing keywords
• Call tracking numbers
• Address social climbing
• Category lapses
• Missing data elements
• Insufficient distribution

Chris Travers, Universal Business Listing

Yelp Mobile

1/3 of searches come from the mobile app

Case study: Optometrist in Brooklyn

• Offers customers a gift card for ice cream down the street and $25 a visit if they check in on Yelp
• Has 5-star rating with 76 reviews

Kevin Lee, Yelp

Evolution of Local Search

1. Find out what
2. Find out what and where
3. Find out the what and where with context of who
4. Find out the what and where with context of who and when

NAP = Name, Address, Phone number

Gib Olander, Director of Business Development, Localeze

The following is a recap from a session at Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East. Follow the conference and session on Twitter.

Google Maps has an evolved algorithm

• Improved spam detection/reducation
• Increased numbers of information sources
• Has begun absorbing microformats/RDFa/Micro-data
• Shifted to include “PlaceRank”

Google Maps spam detection/reducation

• Hired more human staff reviewers to check data
• Reported doing phone verification from offshore
• Algortithmic “skepticism” – new listings need to have reinforcements from multiple authoritative sources (IYPs, data aggregators, local info sites, etc.)

PlaceRank

• Google introduced “PlaceRank” with Landmark icons (“Smart Maps”)
• PlaceRank is PageRank for places
• More information on PlaceRank

Relative Popularity – what can help you rank better on Google Maps

• Buzz
• Wikipedia
• Photos
• Videos

Businesses might have to focus on PR to promote area to drive popularity and improve business popularity

What are citations/references?

• Links to website
• Mentions of website domain in plain text
• Mentions of business name
• Mentions of business street address/place
• Mentions of business phone number

What else might produce citations?

• Tweets about a place
• Checkins and Facebook

What to do:

Clean up your profiles with something like UBL Citation and Auditing Tool

Chris Silver Smith, KeyRelevance

Tools for Local Search

Local tools to save time

• MyGeoPosition – Get latitude and logitude of any address
  • Tag videos, images, etc.
  • Easily creates fles
• GeoRSS – Cheat sheet for geo tagging RSS feeds
  • Official zip code lookup
  • USPS mailing address validation
• LocalMarketingSource.com – Geo term generator
  • Get a ton of geo terms
• Blumenthals – Raw list of Google categoreis for GLB categories
• Google Insights – term trends by locations and dates and regions
  • Which terms are trending
  • Relative search volume by location
  • See top related terms
• GetListed Local Search Ecosystem [PDF] – infographic of local search portals
• GetListed Primary Data Providers in Local Search – Infographic of data providers
• UBL.org – Business data submission tool
  • Scrub data
  • Get more listings
  • Affordable
• Localeze: Data submission tool
• GetListed.org – Discover where business is listed and claimed

Local tools for competitive analysis

• Location Citation Finder – find top places for citations
  • Uses user input
• LocalSearchToolKit.com – competitive analsis
  • Uncover and emulate common attributes
  • Citation scraper
  • Review scraper
  • Category scraper
• GetListed.org/default.aspx – industrial strength multi location data confusion tool (best for chains, multi-location businesses)
  • Checks listings on important local sites
  • Sales and reporting tool

Mary Bowling, seOverflow

Local Search, Today: Facebook Places & Google Instant

Facebook Local Business Pages

• Address/info optional
• Interact with Facebookers
• CS, Events
• Like button
• Embed web page
• Promote, ads

Facebook Place Pages

• Location/info required
• Lightweight Local Business Page
• User check in
• Claiming process
• Can merge with a Local Business Page

Google Places - SEO benefit via web citations

Facebook Places – touch.facebook.com is SEO void

Facebook Local Business Pages - 25-50% associated!

Smartphones – Facebook Places (ContextOptional, PlacePop, NearbyFriends, and more)

Targeting “location keywords” may become less relevant for local businesses. (Google automatically uses your location.)

• Google can triangulate your location from their street view
• IP address
• Logged into account

David Rodecker, LocalSplash.com

Call Advertising: Three Trends in Local Search

1. Advertisers are getting more sophisticated in how they track calls

• Establishing more granular ad groups
• Incorporating call mining to:
  • Reverse-engineer conversion data
  • Discover keyword “nuggets”
• Leveraging call recording to learn how ad copy impacts consumer intent
• Piloting IVR testing and targeting

2. The debate over tracking numbers in ad copy is getting more intense

• Fans think:
  • It adds legitimacy to the listing
  • Gives consumers another way to respond
  • Increases Search ROI
• Non-fans think:
  • It takes up too much space
  • It may depress quality score
  • Might create user dissonance

3. Mobile search provides an opportunity to reach a completely new audience

• Consumers are leveraging feature phones to become more efficient
• They are placing calls to businesses as a way to redeem dead time (when they wouldn’t have been able to in the past)
• Many calls happen instantly at need
• Consumers are increasingly likely to place a call in response to an ad

Brent Turner, Marchex, Inc.

What’s New with Local Search?

• Searchers now EXPECT Local Results…
• Engines are responding with relevant products
• and Advertisers are responding with budgets (1/$10 of local ad spend is online; in 3 years, it will be 1/$4)

The Holy Grail? Measureable return!

• Calls
• Leads
• Conversions

Sivan Metzger, KENSHOO

The following is a recap from a session at Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East. Follow the conference and session on Twitter.

Google stats

• Billion users, billions of searches
• August 2008 – over 7 million search for Britney Spears, over 1,000 misspelling of Britney’s name, top 10 misspellings of those misspellings add up to over 900,000 additional searches

Longtail search

• 55% of queries have more than 3 words
• 70% of queries have no exact keyword match
• 20% of queries in a given day have not been seen in the previous 90 days

What to use?

• Wonder Wheel
• Search-based Keyword Tool
• Insights
• Traffic estimator
• AdWords Keyword Tool

Final thoughts

• Problem: You need features from all products, and need to use them all.
• Keyword Tool has 2 million + users and gets 300 million + ideas a month
• Recently, the tool was updated and relaunched, including using Google.com – specific numbers.

Q&A

Why’d you get rid of the old tool?

The only infrastructure was going away. The new tool primes Google to be able to add a lot more functionality.

Geotargeting: Will that be available for the new keyword tool?

Getting stats for a city/state level is in the works.

Global monthly/Local monthly

Global: last 12 months and global search volume

Local: only what you have your settings on (e.g. English United States) Local is actually National.

What is the minimum keyword volume a keyword has to have to show up in the keyword tool?

No volume threshold. Pricing threshold. Any query has an opportunity to show up in the keyword tool.

Google has various filters to show only things that are commercial.

How much is filtered out for privacy?

No stats; but from a search advertising perspective, you’re getting a good coverage of all search terms.

Logged in vs. non-logged in

When you’re logged in to KWT, you could get up to 1,000 queries.

When you’re not logged in to KWT, you only get up to 100 queries.

Google Suggest

Keyword Tool uses Google Suggest, on top of a lot of other metrics.

Commercially used keywords

The KWT uses commercially used keyword. A trigger is when a keyword is used in an ad.

Search-based keyword tool

Thresholds on search-based keyword tool are very similar.

Search-based keyword tool is being phased out because the technology has been incorporated in KWT.

Who wants a tool that shows all the raw data of Google search terms?
EVERYONE. (Look for something like this in the next year.)

Do you pull in realtime data?

Volume numbers given are for the past 12 months.

Similar words have similar volume numbers.

Volume is rounded.

Traffic Estimator

You can get the estimated traffic for terms inputted, and can filter exact/broad the same way as KWT

Filters on KWT

1. Commercial filter
2. Privacy filter

Ad impressions vs. search volume

Keywords are shown for AdWords keywords that have been purchased. The search volume is for all searches.

Why am I seeing different numbers when I’m not logged in vs. when I am?

That bug should be fixed – it was because of switching over from the old interface.

How is punctuation treated?

Gather separate results for punctuation vs. non-punctuation

Baris Gultekin, Group Product Manager, Google

The following is a recap from a session at Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East. Follow the conference and session on Twitter.

Realtime Search, from Google

Deep investment in search technology

• Instant – brand new technology that finishes your search query as you’re typing
• Caffeine – new indexing technology
• Social – public content authored by people you know
• Realtime – scrolling search of any updates online (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.). To realtime search, go here or click the updates option in Google:



• and hundreds of changes you probably didn’t notice

History of realtime

• Launched in December 2009
• Launched Replay in April 2009 – search back in time across Twitter
• Currently pull from Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, and more

Realtime Search options

• Time (Any time or Latest)
• Location (Anywhere, Nearby, or Custom Location)
• Images (All updates or Updates with Images)

Jeremy Hylton, Software Engineer, Google

Realtime Search, from Twitter

Overview of Search at Twitter

• Infrastructure
  • A highly efficient inverted index (based on Lucene)
  • Over 1,000 tweets inserted per second
  • Over 12,000 queries per secnd (>1B queries per day)
• Used to power
  • Twitter search API (mobile, apps, widgets, etc.)
  • Search on Twitter.com
  • Numerous services on Twitter.com (ex. related tweets)

Examples of types of Twitter searches

• Follow an ‘event’ in realtime
• Address a hyperlocal questions
• Communicate with a realtime community
• Vanity searches (@mentions)
• Standing search around an interest
• Gadgets integrated on a website (e.g. mentions of an article)

Different relationship between search engine and information

• Traditional search = routing
• Realtime search = filtering

Pothole theory: it’s all about context

• Current focus
• Location
• Communities
• Trends
• Events

What does ranking mean in the realtime world?

• Impact of ranking is different because of time factor in consumption
• Dynamic and relative concept of credibility
  • In traditional search, credibility is relatively static and uniform
  • In realtime, people’s interests are expressed naturally
• Time effect is critical/micro-trends
• Context, context, context

What in PageRank’s sake does this mean for SEO?*

• Traditional SEO: ‘Hacking’ the search algorithm
• Realtime SEO: ‘Hacking’ human interest
• Realtime traffic perhaps closer to gamin dynamics than search optimization?

Perhaps think of objectives differently?

• For websites, traffic is a proxy for goodness – action is on the website
• In realtime world, engagement may be better proxy – action is more immediate
• Is SEO for realtime more about creating engagement?

*Isn’t PR synonymous to ‘God’ in search world?

Potential metrics that matter

• Follower counts
• List inclusions
• Retweets
• Trending topic
• Clicks/pageviews

Othman Laraki, Director, Twitter

Realtime Search, from Microsoft Bing

Microsoft has done a lot of research around searching vs. asking your network and the implications of each. Below are questions people actually ask, based on type, topics, and motivation.

Questions: Types

Questions: Topics

Questions: Motivation

Answer comparison: search engines vs. Facebook Bing and Ping Social Networks & Search engines Search engine “friends” offering answers to questions

Meredith Ringel Morris, Microsoft Research

Realtime Search, from Yahoo

Social/Realtime Activity

• Yahoo! users are linking their Facebook/Twitter accounts in record numbers
• Twitter integrate into Y! search

Industry Trends – MS-DOS lives on Twitter brand is mass-market, but content often isn’t… Use the “Mom” test. (Does your tweet make sense to the average person – the Mom?) Massmarketing consumption patterns are emerging:

• “Trending now” aggregation
• Algorithmic curation of linked content
• Easily identifiable and filterable service auto-tweets and retweets
• “XSLT for Twitter” ought to be the norm, not the exception

Industry Trends: Rivers are hard to tame Most realtime search experiences target ‘professionals’ Changing consumer behavior is a barrier for mass adoption

• Only limited user value when looking through a pinhole
• Thematic clustering and time-series analytics provide a good proxy

What have we learned?

• Celebrity tweets have higher user engagement than News
• Needs to be easier to find/coverage expanded in-SRP
• ‘Influencers’ rule!
• Signal/noise is sub-optimal and ML ranking is hard

Leading vs lagging indicators of realtime “buzz”

• Realtime “buzz” detection can be derived from multiple signal sources
• Realtime “buzz” detection needs to include a local event baseline

Tweets only an advertiser would love

• Challenge: filter out a handful of intensively positive tweets from 100s of millions in realtime with ultra-high precision
• Solution: Y! Deep science over a deep basket of tweets with many sentiments with filtering

Brian Theodore, Yahoo

I’ve been participating in the GuestBlogging.com Apprenticeship Program, run by one of Copyblogger’s associate editors, Jon Morrow. In the second workshop, Jon talked about How “Ditching Your Niche” Will Help Your Blog Get More Traffic.

A little background

Google doesn’t do a great job listing popular blogs. Historically, Bloggers have been forced to make lists of influential blogs and bloggers. Then, Guy Kawasaki created Alltop; a glorified collection of (the best of the best) blogs. Guy started by creating lists by hand and organizing them into categories.

How to make sense of Alltop

Alltop has hundreds of niches, from SEO to Auto Racing to American Idol. So start by searching for your niche.

Searches don’t just search for the topic you search for; you’ll also have related topics served up. The other topics will help expand your focus as well as inspire you. After choosing a category, you’ll find the most influential blogs at the top of the page:

Then, use this list to search for influential blogs for both links and guest blogging opportunities.

How to find the best guest blogging opportunities

Some guest blogging opportunities are going to get you more bang for your buck than others. Once you’ve found a few blogs you’d be interested in blogging for, start by doing a little background.

1. Scan Alltop

Scan through the blogs at Alltop and pick blogs near the top that look interesting.

2. 5-Step Checklist

Go through this checklist, making sure it’s somewhere you want to write:

1. Feedburner subscriber count
2. Twitter link – Are they on Twitter? How active?
3. Comment count
4. About page and/or advertiser page
5. Commonalities in the blogroll

3. Do they allow guest posts?

Do a quick search on Google to see if they allow guest posts (Google site:[website] “written by” or “guest blog” or “guest post”) or just ask:

Hey, quick question. I’d really like to do a post for <blog name>, but I couldn’t tell if you allow guest posts. Would you be open to runnning a few ideas past you?

Thanks!
<Your Name>

Making it Manageable

• Every day, choose a different topic and go through all of the blogs
• Set a time for 30 minutes, and then do as many as you can before the time goes off
• Only go through 10 or so blogs per day
• Don’t try to do it all at once. Do a little every day, slowly getting to know the blogosphere

Nicki Hicks
Now get out there and guest blog

Social Media FTW is an annual social media marketing conference held in Portland, Maine. Don’t forget to follow them on Twitter and like them on Facebook!

Since I was unable to attend every workshop, I thought it best to recap all of the great summaries and presentations from the conference in one place. Enjoy

Keynote: Discover How to Use Social Media to Get the Edge for Your Business

by Deb ‘Coach Deb’ Micek

• Tina Burnell’s recap
• My recap
• Follow Coach Deb on Twitter

Social Networking 101: An Introduction to Twitter and Facebook

by Chrystie Corns

• Follow Chrystie on Twitter

Who Hangs out Where? Finding Your Audience Across Social Media Platforms

by Sarah Hines

• Tina Burnell’s recap
• My recap
• Sarah’s full presentation
• Follow Sarah on Twitter

Writing a Social Media Policy for Your Company

by Sarah Wallace

• Sarah’s full presentation
• Follow Sarah on Twitter

Blogging 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Business Blogging

by Nicole Ouellette

• Tina Burnell’s recap
• Nicole’s thoughts, post-conference
• Nicole’s full presentation
• Follow Nicole on Twitter

Facebook 201: Take Your Facebook Marketing to the Next Level

by Jaica Kinsman

• Jaica’s full presentation
• Follow Jaica on Twitter

Social Media for Non-Profits

by Alex Steed

• My recap
• Follow Alex on Twitter

How to Use LinkedIn to Build Your Network and Your Business

by Carole Mahoney

• Carole’s full presentation
• Follow Carole on Twitter

Blogging 201: Make Your Blog a Lead Generation Machine

by Rich Brooks

• Tina Burnell’s recap
• My recap
• Rich’s full presentation
• Follow Rich on Twitter

Creating, Publishing and Marketing Online Video

by Chris Cavallari

• Chris’s thoughts, post-conference
• Chris’s full presentation
• Follow Chris on Twitter

Twitter 201: Leveling up Twitter

by Leslie Poston

• Tina Burnell’s recap
• Leslie’s full presentation
• Follow Leslie on Twitter

Is Any of This Social Media Stuff Working? Social Media ROI

by Amanda O’Brien

• Amanda’s full presentation
• Follow Amanda on Twitter

Overcoming the 5 Challenges of Social Media Marketing

by Mike Lewis

• Follow Mike on Twitter

The Power of Email and Social Media Marketing

by Corissa St. Laurent

• Tina Burnell’s recap
• Corissa’s full presentation
• Follow Corissa on Twitter

Building Online Communities

by Derek Rice

• Derek’s thoughts, post-conference
• Derek’s full presentation
• Follow Derek on Twitter

Social Media Success Stories

Heather DiSimone, Calvin Gilbert, Mark Nutting

• Follow Heather on Twitter
• Follow Calvin on Twitter
• Follow Mark on Twitter

Recaps of the Event

• Amanda O’Brien’s takeaways
• Slideshare presenations

Photos of the Event

• Photos from Maine Today
• Photos from Samuel Cousins Photography
• Photos from Angela Coulombe Photography
• cellphone Sketchpad

Twitter conversation

• http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/ftw2010
• Twitter Search

If you have notes or access to a presentation I’ve missed, please let me know and I’ll include it!

Social Media FTW is an annual conference held in Portland, Maine. Follow the conversation on Twitter at #ftw2010.

How can you stay ahead (or before) the curve?

In the past, non-profits have tried to move the individual, not the network.

Tea Party – nimble organization which Alex suggests provides the future for organization.

Stop worrying about how you create membership, there are already people who are in clusters or networks. Find those people/networks and help them create a narrative.

What are Non-Profits looking for? Fundraising!

Small Pieces Loosely Joined – Alex highly recommends this book

Reputation drives so much for organizations, and it can be lost in an instant – especially with social media.

A lot of talk around open vs. closed systems and how the two work together.

Alex Steed, Steed2010, @AlexSteed

Social Media FTW is an annual conference held in Portland, Maine. Follow the conversation on Twitter at #ftw2010.

What you need:

• WordPress (or another Content Management System)
• Own your own domain name not a WordPress, TypePad, or Blogger subdomain.
• Be committed to the process

Lead Generation: What does a lead mean to you?

Holistic Web Marketing

• Attraction – SEO, Blogging, Business cards, etc.
• Retention – How you keeping communication open with customers, Email marketing, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube
• Conversion – Move them through your sales funnel, Calls to action
• Measurement – Google Analytics

Attraction

• Search Engine Optimization – do a keyword analysis for your blog and find out what your audience is searching for
  • Use keywords in your blog title/page title, headers, links, categories and tags
  • Every blogpost is a new web page and every web page is another opportunity to rank well at the search engines
  • Use the most important keywords front loaded in your blog titles
  • Recent post titles (typically) show up on every other blogpost
  • All-One-SEO: best tool for SEO on a blog
• Sharing Tools
  • ReTweet for Twitter
  • Like button for Facebook
  • Share this for most other networks
• RSS: Real Simple Syndication
• Cross pollination
  • Commenting on other blogs
  • Guest blogging
  • How can you find bloggers in your niche?
    • Google
    • Alltop
    • Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc.
    • Twitter (Twellow.com, TweetFind.com, WeFollow.com)
    • MyBlogGuest

Retention

• Leverage RSS: make sure it’s near the top of the page; use a feed like FeedBurner to syndicate blogposts
• Engage commenters; the more you engage with them, the more you’ll come back and continue to comment
• Disquis

Conversion (Tactics)

• Link to a product/ecommerce page or your contact page or your call to action
• Affiliate programs

Measurement: Google Analytics

Advanced Blogging Tools

• Google Alerts
• RSS
• NetworkedBlogs
• Disquis
• My Blog Guest
• Ping.fm

Rich Brooks, flyte new media

Social Media FTW is an annual conference held in Portland, Maine. Follow the conversation on Twitter at #ftw2010.

Why do we care?

A few social media platforms: forums, Q&A, location-based services, blogging, and so much more!!!

What’s next?

• General demographyics
• Identifying audience
• Using services to get to your audience

Current Landscape

• 78/100 Americans (ages 12+) use the Internet daily (for multiple uses)
• 48/100 Americans (ages 12+) use social media, 39/48 access profile once a week, 24/48 access profile once a day

Put together who you think your audience is and reference it.

• Location: out of towners? geographic location?
• Interests: what are they interested in that cross references with what you’re offering?
• Position/role: what role are they playing? what is their position at the company?
• Who they look to for authoritative information?
• Life priorities: e.g. environmentalism, family, religion, etc.
• Emotional state when they look for your product/service

Google tools

• Google Alerts: track keywords and who’s talking about you
• Google Analytics: track your traffic
• Google doubleclick adplanner

Other Social Media Research Tools

• Flowtown: best for small-medium businesses
• RapLeaf: best for medium-large businesses
• Quantcast

Choose your potion

• Purely social
  • Facebook
  • MySpace
  • Google Buzz
• Professional
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
• Blogging
  • Blogger
  • WordPress
  • Tumblr
• Video
  • YouTube
  • Vimeo
• Photo sharing
  • Picasa
  • Flickr (Creative Commons)
• Niche communities
  • Ning
  • BuddyPress
• Review-based Websites
  • Urbanspoon
  • Yelp
  • TripAdvisor
  • Goggle Places
• Location based Apps
  • Foursquare
  • GoWalla
  • Facebook Places
  • Loopt

Social media is just one tool in your toolbox; it has to work for your business.

Sarah Hines, Shines & Jecker, Full presentation will be available at: shinesandjecker.com/socialmediaftw

Social Media FTW is an annual conference held in Portland, Maine. Follow the conversation on Twitter at #ftw2010.

Why are we on social media?

• Connecting
• Build relationships
• Build trust

80% of success is just showing up. Just by showing up on social media, you’ll get connections and even business. Suddenly, you’re already going to be doing better than your competition who isn’t doing anything on social media.

Deb says LinkedIn is the social network to watch in 2010.

Google CoachDeb and see how she dominates about 10 pages. Why “CoachDeb”? 1. It’s easy to remember. 2. It’s a conversation starting – as in, “what do you coach?”. You want to be top of mind for your clients.

Build a million dollar business without ever leaving your island

• Get rid of the old you have to be face-to-face to do business
• Social media is new media with lipstick on

Deb started blogging and started showing up on Google. She got free advertising for her business because of it.

Deb’s written two books – Secrets of Online Persuasion and Twitter Revolution (with free updates at TwitterHandbook.com).

Want free Super Bowl advertisement? Tweet.

• You can be found in Google’s real time search
• You can be found in Twitter Search

Deb developed software to automate, simplify, and monetize social media – QuanSite.

Should you autotweet or go live? It depends on what suits you best. Deb thinks autotweeting is driveby tweeting.

Why is Twitter so hot?

• Instant
• Mobile
• Easy
• The new American Express card is the cell phone – Don’t leave home without it. (Only 4 people in the crowd don’t have their’s on them!)
• People are using Twitter (and Facebook) to connect.

What is Twitter?

• It’s the new golf (or tennis). It’s where you can make connections.
• Cocktail Party
• Living Rolodex – it’s how you can connect with people
• Free PR
• You’re missing 100% of these opportunities when you’re not there!

It’s a social media revolution!

• “There an app for that!” (games, Twitter/social media, GPS, Foursquare/location-based, Yelp/review-based) – Think about creating an app for your business; Deb is predicting a trend of this for this/next year. Get your clients/community involved with your own app!
• Explosion of mobile devices
• Flash mobs/Bluetooth/Ads
• Everything is focusing on customer engagement
• Everyone’s doing it! (even Oprah)

#flashmob – TMobile’s viral campaign: Deb shared the fun video to show how ideas spread and community is created:

Viral doesn’t just go. You need something extraordinary that will catch on and start a revolution because they just can’t help but get involved.

Social Media ROCKS! Imagine what it could do for your business if you could BEAT Oprah!

Tribal seduction is the ultimate way to market on Twitter

• People – increase community
• Participation – get them involved
• Persuasion – emotional, engaging, entertaining

The Hashtag

• Track keywords
• Become a trending topic
• Links back (SEO)
• Punchline

Jerry McGuire: a lesson in customer engagement. Twitter is showing up and saying hello. (And you had me at hello.) Business is always personal.

Show me the money

• FeedJit.com
• FiltrBox.com
• FlowTown.com
• Track keywords
• Track emotions (track pain/pleasure keywords for this)

Social Media Optimization

• It’s proven
• It works
• It’s the fast that beat the slow

#BeatCancer

• Hashtag that began in Blog World
• Guiness Book – most used hashtag
• Raised Charity for breast cancer awareness/research
• Got on CNN – used new media to capitalize on traditional media
• Brian Williams – Deb’s friend who lost his wife to cancer; thanked Deb for her work on #BeatCancer. It’s all about connection with other people

Coach Deb Micek, QuanSite