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?
