Social Media Four POVs

Li Evans came up with an idea for at panel at SES NY, looking social media from several points of view. I moderated and Li,  Beth Harte, and Rob Key of Converseon covered search and SEO; marketing and communications; and agency points of view. Beth did a great job writing up a version of this (combining agency/marketing and adding social purist as the fourth view) here.

 

SMO + SEO = ?

SESNY just wrapped. Friends from far and wide are now off to the next conference, vacation or back home.  I did have a chance to catch up with Anne Kennedy, of Beyond Ink before she left.  We were joined by John Riccardi, a SES attendee/exhibitor back when he was with Yahoo!, who asked how the conference was this year. One of the topics that came up was the ever increasing overlap between social media and search.

Not surprisingly there were more social media sessions this year than last. In fact, social media, specifically Twitter, was the topic of the first keynote by Guy Kawasaki. Guy talked about Twitter as a marketing tool he used to promote Alltop, his web business, positioning Twitter as the best thing to happen to marketing since television.

However, what was really different this year was how often social media topics and tools were discussed in the search track sessions – either by the panelists or during the Q&A.  It certainly makes sense as social media, if used effectively, contributes to traffic and page rank. Rebecca Lieb, now vice president at Econsultancy, who just published ‘The Truth About Search Engine Optimization’ mentioned some sites get more than ten percent of their traffic from Twitter.

Social media when used to help drive traffic and improve rank is often referred to in the search world as Social Media Optimization, or SMO, and many SEO firms now also offer these services. Last year GSI for example hired social media expert Julio Fernandez, seemingly known to all who twitter as ‘SocialJulio,’ formerly a social/community expert at Oracle. So wither Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? What happens when these two types of ‘search’ – one via an engine and another via a social network – continue to intertwine? When all SEOs also offer SMO services?

 

#notSXSW – what did I miss?

It’s become the ‘Woodstock’ on the social media conference circuit, seemingly everyone I know went – you have to ‘be there or be square,’ so I was sorry to miss it. I chose to participate in a conference in Iceland instead. It would have been fun to get back to Austin. I spent four years working with a team based in Austin so I used to get down there several times a year.

As for SXSW, which I’ve never attended, I haven’t rolled up my sleeves and explored all the Tweets and blog posts, but over all, most of the comments coming my way seem to be about parties and meetups. Some of the most informative interactions at any conference happen around the conference or during the break, and Austin is a fun town, but all the same it makes me wonder about the non-music, non-film part of the conference.  Hope to have time to read up and see what went on at the conference proper, once I get to Reykjavik. Going a bit early in order to have time to enjoy the city before www.rimc.is.

My favorite conferences are off the beaten path and small, because you get more of chance to interact with participants. My least favorite events are the super large ‘we cover the waterfront’ events, where strangely enough, even though there are way more people to speak to the situation to start talking to other conference attendees you don’t know doesn’t present itself.

 

Looking Forward – so many blogs, so little time

I suppose someone somewhere was trying to tell me something when the non-production server in the lab hosting my internal blog was wiped clean and redeployed – time to start blogging externally.  Obviously I enjoy social media but I’ll be the first to admit between reading other people’s blogs, keeping up with Twitter, Facebook, and exploring all the new social media sites that crop up around the world, I’m enjoying myself but also learning to get by with six or seven hours of sleep a night.