Conference Buddies

Internet Marketing For Smart People

Speakers: Darren Rowse, Brian Clark, Chris Brogan
@problogger
@copyblogger
@chrisbrogan

Key Take Aways from this Session:

• Learn marketing from anyone, there are always things to learn from people
• Email was “THE” content deliverable (before RSS, etc.) – Spam killed email
• Deliver content that is related to what you sell.
• Community is a privilege not a right
• Find something worth selling, tap the needs of your customers
• Give your members as many places to connect as possible
• Goal is to convert readers to customers
• Treat people so well that they want to go with you
• Position yourself so unique that you don’t have any competitor, that’s where the battle is won
• Deliver exceptional value that makes people raise their hand and want to share
• From Chris Brogan: Selling is not getting more than you give.   It’s giving more than you get.  But not give, give, give, and not get.

Example 1: Darren Rowse, ProBlogger, got a sponsorship from  Canon for his photographer blog, based on his community / tribe getting together on their own and contacting Canon.

Example 2: Brian Clark, CopyBlogger does not take any advertising ($10K a month if he were to advertise), $3M in sales this year by having something to sell. 2 years of not making money to build the audience, first and foremost, now makes $3M/yr

Social Media ROI: What, How, Why

Panelist(s): Rob Hahn, Jim Marks, Sherry Chris, Mike Simonsen, Dan Green
@mikesimonsen
@BHGRE_Sherry
@jimmarks
@mortgagereports

What is an ROI?

Traditional ROI = Return on Investment
Social Media ROI = Return on Influence

ROI is a measure on traffic, clicks, and dollars. The basics of ROI is that, how much money you put in is how much you get in return. It can be summed up as such:

Time invested and sphere of influence put into Social Media => Return on Influence => Return on Investment

Time Spent on Social Media

To give a perspective on how social media works, Dan Green provided his background on his foray into social media. When he first started social media interactions, it took 18 months to get the first lead. Now he spends on average: 132 minutes per day or 13.5 hours per week on blog, twitter, facebook (essentially equating to about 1/4 of a week on social media). The pay off is that he’s closed over 100 real estate deals via social media contacts.

Another one of the panelists stated that it took 6 months of blogging before receiving his first lead, and now he’s gotten 4 real estate deals of $300K each.

The success isn’t to say that you make your conversions on social media. It’s a way to market yourself, gain access, garner contacts, and eventually close the deal. Traditional means such as a phone call or a face-to-face meeting are still necessary in closing the deal.

Structure Strategy, and Direction

Jim Marks states that for a successful social media effort, you need a structure, strategy, and direction. If you don’t know the direction you’re going in everyday, you have to change your strategy. Blogging works, since a byproduct of blogs results in traffic and conversions. Aim to bring online clients offline. Create relationships.

Corporate Blogging and Social Media

Sherry Chris says that getting approval for a Corporate Blog maybe difficult. However, the payoff could be substantial. For example: using BHGRealEstateBlog.com and through “tweeting”, it resulted in closing a $13M business deal.

Some tips for Twitter :

• When retweeting, use a teaser
• Give a reason to click on the link
• Lead them towards a means to close the deal

Social Media Success Stories – BlogWorld Expo 2009

Speakers:

Samantha Gammell (Oscar Mayer / Kraft), Justin Levy (Caminito Argentinean Steakhose), Brian Wiegand, Frank Eliason

This session explores Social Media case studies and success stories

Frank Eliason
Comcast Cares

• Twitter handle: @comcastcares
• Passionate not about products, passionate about customers
• Passion is important
• Look at Zappos, passionate about company culture, employees, brand, and passionate about customers!  or Gary V being passionate about wine.
• Tie results to purchases
• One Tweet Resolution = resolve problems quickly

Facebook = great place  to meet with people you already know

Facebook = not a great place to meet people you don’t already know (compared to Twitter)

Samantha Gammell
Oscar Mayer / Kraft

• Better engage consumers and expand customer interaction
• Weingermobile has been around for 22 years
• Using HotDoggerBlog.com as a microsite to engage customers
• 20,000 visitors a month
• 2600 followers on twitter (@HotDogger / @Wienermobile)
• Good traffic to their YouTube page too
• Great sentiment, people love the WeinerMobile!

Justin Levy
Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse

• Partner in a Steakhouse in Boston
• Initially losing 10% to 20% a month
• Justin’s Chef/partner spent 80% on marketing budget on small town newspaper
• Targeted Google = Up 20% in profits (actually up 40% to overcome 20% loss)
• Targeted Google SEO = Up 20% in profits

Brian Wiegand

JellyFish.com

• 18 months only, 100% social media, no paid advertising, sold to Microsoft

Alice.com

• Launched 15 weeks ago
• Sell Toilet Paper and everyday essentials online (You wouldn’t think but there is a lot of energy around these products, but there is!)
• Prices are the same as Walmart
• Always free shipping, combined with a Netflix feel
• Gather Social Data: i.e. She’s a great mother, what type of diapers she uses; She’s beautiful what type of make up does she uses
• Reach out to Mommy Bloggers

Panel Q&A:

• Be the first, the leader of an industry
• Comcast, Dell, Cirque = great examples
• Social Media = Humanize your brand
• Don’t just create corporate policies, but also provide tools, rules and methods for your employees to deal with Social Media
• My job isn’t to build Twitter – My job is to meet customers where they already are
• Go to where your community is already are

If you could do over:

Brian Wiegand:

Hire a little better, who already understand social media (more experience and knowledge – not everyone is a fit, don’t force it.)

Samantha Gammell:

Make sure you have the resources and people.  If you start, you can’t stop.  Make sure you have the time and money to staff it.

Justin Levy:

Wished we used Twitter, like KojiBBQ, tweet events, locations, drive customers

Frank  Eliason:

Frank’s only statement was to ask everyone to use  the #beatcancer hastag 6pm today to support the cause.
[Note: as a result of all the organizers, speakers, attendees and supporters of BlogWorld Expo, the hash tag #beatcancer not only raised money but also helped make this initiative reach a world record at #bwe09 for largest social media push in in a 24 hour period!]

Social Media in the Enterprise – Seminar Notes
June 17th, 2009 12pm -5pm
Palace Hotel, San Francisco

First Speaker: Alex Blum, KickApps

• Social Media creates channels for new revenue and deeper insight into potential clients
• 93% of Americans believe a company should have a social media presence
• Key to Success: Create a community around your content
• Widgets: A key for viral integration and for viral syndication of activity and content
• As powerful as SEM or SEO
• Social Media compels people to share, which provides lots of data results and informs us of marketing strategies
• Social media gets people talking in the context of your brand
• Can allow you to respond to feedback, and in turn, gain customers’ loyalty
• Must take full ownership of your membership
• Blum’s Law of Website Development: As soon as you launch it, you’d want to change it

Second Speaker: Jerimiah Owyang, Forrester

• Power is shifting to communities
• Marketers to increase Social Media Marketing spending (even during a recession)
• Marketers to shift budget to Social Media Marketing
• Budgets for Social Marketing remains miniscule (under $100K)
• Fragment and “pollinate” to communities
• Apps are more important than actual websites
• Shared ID can be used all over the world via mobile devices
• Expect Social Media to aggregate activities
• Traditional marketing moving towards Social Media
• Activity feeds, GPS and Bluetooth will be used to find friends and their locations
• Facebook already allows users to surf the web within their site
• Customer trust other customers rather than marketers
• Social browsers allow users to bypass registration and lower spam rates
• Get Glue: aggregates all consumer opinions (used in IE or Firefox) (semantic web)

Future of the Social Web (the 5 Eras)/Five Eras of the Social Web

• 1) Era of Social Relationships: People connect to others and share
• 2) Era of Social Functionality: Social networks become like operating system
• 3) Era of Social Colonization: Every experience can now be social
• 4) Era of Social Context: Personalized and accurate content
• 5) Era of Social Commerce: Communities define future products and service
  • Relationships = connections (join the conversation)
  • Functionality = becoming like operating systems (fragment websites to communities)
  • Colonization = everyone has an entourage (focus on aggregating the conversation)
  • Social Context = content where I want it, when I want it (increase content and make your website flexible)
  • Commerce = communities define products (involves customers in R &D)

• Social contracts (opt-in options)
  • Consumers will share information in exchange for discounts
  • Social Marketing is informational instead of interrupting
  • Is social TV in our future? (only broadcasts shows that you like)

• Challenges
  • Privacy issues
  • Legal issues
  • Consumer burn-out
  • Extremism (consumers less exposed to new ideas)

Third Speaker: Sandy Carter, IBM

• Analyze and ensure strong market understanding
• Nail the relevant strategy and story
• Go to Market Plan
• Energize the channel and community
• Leads and revenue
• Scream!!! Don’t forget the Technology!
• Acronym is ANGELS
• Sandy provided ROI case studies for Social Media efforts based on her work with IBM
• Social Media often used in conjunction of with other marketing mix
• She will test out performance by turning up or down each marketing effort in the marketing mix
• She used Social Media before, during, and after events
• One of the most success product launch included using blogs to gather product requirements during the product development phase. When the product was released, many people were already Angels (advocates) for the product and helping to spread the news

Listening Tools

• TweetDeck
• Google Alerts
• Radian6.com

Marketing 2.0

• Profit generation
• Foster intimate relationships
• Leverage power of Web 2.0
• Understand influencers’ value
• Tune marketing mix
• “Bot” ads were surprisingly effective in delivering company’s message and provide information
• Communities define companies
• Collective opinion and desires give companies opportunities to build specific products
• Power is shifting to communities
• Social networks will become next-generation CRM systems

Fourth Speaker: Dylan Boyd, eROI

• 2/3 of marketers who have never used social marketing say that they are knowledgeable about social marketing
• 64% of companies using community insight said that it helped make better product selections

Fifth Speaker: James Masten, Blue Rain Marketing for Microsoft OneNote

• Building online communities: IHeartOneNote.com
• Create an off-brand community
• Off-brand communities have less constraints on content
• Must have robust content
• Social Media is user-generated marketing
• Traditional Media is marketer-generated
• Found success in social media using a fictional character to do all the correspondence (tweets, Facebook, etc.)
• Much more casual approach than on-brand companies

MODERATOR:
Seth Goldstein, Co-Founder and CEO, SocialMedia

PANELISTS:
Mike Hoefflinger, Director of Brand Product Marketing, Facebook
Andy Mitchell, VP, Interactive Marketing, CNN Worldwide
Randi Zuckerberg, Director of Market Development, Facebook

Social Media Engagement:

• Be genuine for the medium
• Challenge yourself
• There will be mistakes but learn
• Set ambitious goals
• Creative with audience mindset
• Creative test plan
• Have plan B

Engagement Ads:

• What is in it for them? Providing something, not necessarily free promos, incentives, exclusive content (ie. taking fans behind the scenes)
• Asking questions for engagement
• Think 360: cross promote in different channels (ie. Facebook to website/TV, TV to Facebook)

Utilizing Social Media and Web 2.0 to Market Your Business – Miva Merchant 2009
Speaker: Hal Lublin, President, BuzzBuilderz

Conference Notes:

• Social Media = People driven, social, collaborative
• Estimated search engine marketing spend is $11B in 2010 = SEM (Search Engine Marketing Professional)
• 65% of people feel constantly bombarded with too much marketing and advertising and consider to be out of control (Forrester)
• Average person receives 70 spam emails a day (McAfee)
• Become Part of the Community
• Physical networking is being replaced by social marketing
• Create a professional profile
• Frolleagues = colleagues who send friendship requests
• Plaxo = Professional Profile
• Facebook = Personal Profile + fan page for business
• MySpace
• Yelp = Local businesses
• LinkedIn = Professional Profile
• BLIP.fm = Music Social Network
• Seesmic = Video
• BriteKite = GeoTagging
• Flikr = photo sharing (shared to twitter and blog)
• 12seconds.tv = Video (documentally = funny)

Twitter Corporate Voice Examples:

• Better Homes and Gardens
• BHGrealestate
• WholeFoods
• TravelChannel
• Comcast Cares

A Few Twitter Tools:

Twirl, TweetDeck, SocialTool, Twengager, TwitterFeed.com (blog)

Other Social Examples:

Coke Cola Blog
AMEX Open Network (Small businesses)
Miamism.com (Miami Blog)

Reputation Management Cycles:

Profile -> Identity -> Reputation -> Trust

What are you posting and sharing:

Digg, Reddit, Delicious, StumbleUpon

Social Tips:

• Claim your handle
• Create a profile that can be replicated across several platforms
• Be Genuine
• Be Consistent
• Have Fun
• Listen & Read First
• Try things – You cannot break the Internet

Other Tools:

Checkusername.com = check if your username is taken across other social media sites
squarespace = blog service

Use LinkedIn/Facebook/Yelp to Create Your Web Presence + 20 More Sites

Nicole Nicolay, Effektive Solutions
Rick Rochon, AdSymetrix.com

Rick Rochon:

Social Marketing Puzzle

• Web 2.0 Terms
• Creating a Web presence
• Blogging for business
• Social Networking
• Social Media
• Taking online … offline
• Monitoring what others are saying

Social Marketing Puzzle:

• Your Business   -> $$$
• Your Content -> www, video, blog
• Their Content -> content around your content -> consumer opinion, blogs and websites, Favorites

How we used to Market:  (Print, Broadcast, Mail)

How we can market now?

Don’t stop offline areas, instead add new things to the Mix

Nicole Nicolay:

Web2.0 – Online interaction

• Social Networks
• Social Media / New Media (Video, podcasts, blogs, comments, twitter, etc.)
• Blog vs. Website  (one s static, and one is updated frequently)
• RSS -> Really Simple Syndication – Flow of information (TV, Newspaper, etc.  now online feeds, subscribe to websites and blogs)
• SEO -> optimize website get on search engines
• Blogging for Business

Why blog?

• Enhance your online presence
• Build a community
• Share your knowledge
• Enhance your credibility
• SEO, Search Engine Optimization
• Turn blog traffic into business

State of the Blogosphere: (Technorati):

• 1.5 M blogs created in last 7 days
• 77% of internet users read blogs
• Over 184 million blogs have been created since 2002

Blog’s:  Easily consumable, easily digestible by Search Engines.

Some Syndication Tools:

zecoda and feed blitz = blog tools to syndicate content

Offer freebies, advice, to collect users

5 Steps to Create your Blog

1. Go to WordPress
2. Sign up for account
3. Choose your domain & blog name
4. Activate account
5. Start blogging

Things to Keep in Mind for a Blog

• Target Your Audience
• Grow You Readership
• Write good content with your keywords (Natural… not stuffing!)
• Post frequently 3-5x a week
• Encourage readers to subs to your newsletter (freebie)
• Submit your blg to directories: google, yahoo, dmoz, blogged, etc.
• Foster community with commenting your and others
• Link to others within content or blogroll (related, higher rank)
• Employ backlink strategies (beg, borrow and make badges)
• Spread the love and good content w/guest posting
• Tag your posts
• Aggregate your blog content on your social profiles
• Cross promotions (online/offline)

Misc Tips:

• Don’t make it a mystery for users to get a hold of you or buy
• Analyzing your readers:
  Click Analytics:  getclicky.com and google.com/analytics
• Don’t cut marketing

The most successful companies

Facebook:

• Over 110 million active users
• 4th most trafficked social media site in the world
• Over 55K regional, work related, collegiate, and high school networks
• More than 30M photos uploaded
• Over 24,000 applications

Linked In:

• Profile oriented for professionals
• Asking questions, answering questions, join groups

Flickr:

• For your photos/images
• Social network around your photos
• Groups
  Throw events, give cards out

ITunes for podcasts:

• Hardware Mic: Snowball
• Software: audacity
• or use…Blog talk radio

Flip TheFlip.com ($179) (minnow) – one click to YouTube

• Create 1 best video
• Creating your own Ads
• Automatically upload to YouTube

Other misc:

• SpotMixer.com
• Animoto.com

Taking Online … Offline

• Eventbrite.com  (workshop, seminar, etc.  for knowledge expert on topic)
• Meetup.com

Web Monitoring:

• Yelp.com
• Google.com/alerts

Plan, Place, Perfect – Create your web presence plan

• blogging
• commenting
• social networking
• social media: pictures, podcast, video

Q & A:

Handling a Negative review on Yelp:

• Read the Yelp business rules
• Don’t call the user directly or their boss, that violates the Yelp business rules
• Contact yelp customer service / legal

Other

Recommended length of a podcast  = 1 Min. for initial one.   Then create a longer one for a deeper one for those users interested.

TBD.com is the social network aimed toward the older generation

Here is a list of websites to help the beginning blogger
 

Tips For Bloggers:
CopyBlogger.com
DOSHDOSH.com

Build Your Own Widgets / Widget Publishing:
WidgetBox.com  
Gigya.com

Some of the Recommended Social Tools:
Digg.com
StumbleUpon.com
Reddit.com
Facebook.com
Sphinn.com
Twitter.com

Ad Serving:  
Max Banner Ads 1.2.5           
http://www.maxblogpress.com/plugins/mba/
OpenAds.com

Contextual Ads:
Kontera.com
Hubpages.com (60% rev share)

Affiliate Ads:
Nooked.com
AdaptivBlue.com (Smart Links)
 

Affiliate Tools:
MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate 1.5 (Ads automatically ad links even for contributors)
http://www.mbpninjaaffiliate.com/

WordPress Affiliate Pro
http://www.wpaffiliatepro.com/

Identify, Manage and Track your best performing affiliate links.

 
Affiliate Networks:
CJ.com
Shareasale.com
LinkShare.com
Performix.com

Affiliate Tips:
Affiliatetip.com/affiliate-newbies/

Misc Affiliate and Revenue Tools:
ClickBank.com (10,000 publishers with over 100,000 available products)
Squidoo.com (content, links, revenue split)

SEO Keyword Tools:

Google Insights & Trends for Search:
Search volume and trends by keyword search
http://www.google.com/insights/search/
http://www.google.com/trends/

Google External Keyword Search Tool:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
 
Other Keyword Tools:
WordTracker.com
KeywordDiscovery.com
WordZe.com
WordPot.com
Quintura.com (search with tag clouds)
SpyFoo.com (hit or miss, not that accurate)
SEODigger.com

Misc SEO Tools:
www.iwebtool.com/tools/
www.seobrowser.com
www.dotsauce.com/2007/05/27/5-free-web-apps-for-seo/

Misc For  Big Companies:
Hitwise.com
Compete.com
Comscore.com 

Misc General Tools:

DISQUS.com
Commenting System to connect to your community 

MyBlogLog.com
Track and connect with visitors to your blog

AllTop.com
Top Ranked Sites

ContestGiveaway.com
Sweepstakes, sell tickets for raffle

10 Ways To Build Your Readership
Speaker: Nicole Simon (Crueltobekind.org)

friendfeed.com/nicolesimon
twitter.com/nicolesimon
slideshare.net/nicolesimon

Use a tool like stumbleupon.com to discover new sites in areas you are intersted in and subscribe to these.
nixande.stumbleupon.com

Help with Writing:
doshdosh.com
CopyBlogger.com

Be Topic Centric, setup up focused categories (Better for users and for search engines)

Be Consistent:
Quick tips of the morning, week or month (but be consistent)

Minimum 2 to 3 months (at very least, but at a pace people can expect)

Be a Resource:
Information for visiting the conference, the party guide
Overview of photos, articles, etc.

You first blog post can be an outreach for contributors and members (pass to friends “we are looking for…”)

Widgetizing Your Blog for Profit

Speakers:

Micah Balwin

Daniel Ha (web service for blog comments Disqus)

Robyn Tippins (BlogLog Widget -> Yahoo Developer Network)

Louis Moynihan (Feedo)

This session was all over the place and didn’t follow a solid organized structure.

Micah Balwin from Lejit  was shamelessly self promoting his product in detail, but the main take away is that you can monetize search results within your blog.   IMHO to make it generate enough revenue off course you’ll need 1000′s of useful articles or page content to really gain enough traffic to make it worth an internal search monetization engine. 

Most  Bloggers do not use an enhanced search, so this is one area that may expand.

One example used in this session for an internal search (by Lejit):  

Learntoduck.com

Components of a blog:

- Content, Comments on Content, Search Result in Blog, RSS Feed

Make sure to add Feedburner for feeds

Build Your Own Widgets / Widget Publishing:

- Use Widget Box (enter your embed 

- Gigya

- ClearStream

Affiliate Ads:

Nooked.com

AdaptivBlue.com (Smart Links)

Misc:

ContestGiveaway.com (Sweepstakes, sell tickets for raffle)

Q&A website from audience:  

SpiritGum.net

- Create a widget Use Widget Box (enter your embed code for your audio player) 

- Need analytics

- Their feed looks good

- Need to use  Feedo or Feedburner to monetize feeds

Bloggeries.com

 Blog Reviews (Paid and non paid listings)

 $27 = Review

Panel asked owner what the value is for his service.   

No discussion about “Widgets”

RedRoom.com

Authors, fans and inspiring writers to connect

10,000 signed up to blog, but only 50 active a day

Panel suggested the need Amazon widget to buy right on the pages

AskTheBoater.com

An information source for Boaters (cooking tips for boaters, boat maintenance, news, info, etc.)

They have amazon links but need additional ideas

Panel recommended to be an expert in a field.   Visit websites resources that your customers are going to:

BoatNerd.com, BoaterEd.com

Not much discussion about widgets in this discussion?

twitter.peoplebrowser.com

New online service to visually see your connections

Owner wanted to know how to monetize w/o being intrusive

Panel recommended a sponsorhip model   (companies sponsor a page)

i.e. viewdi.com = visual search engine (sponsor views i.e. conference page)