Conference Buddies

Successful Tactics for Social Media

It’s about the conversation
People like to tell their stories and interaction about your product
Sharing & Conversation
Collect wisdom of the crowd

Ancestors of Social Marketing:
Listservs, user groups, message boards, chat boards

Audience development, interactive PR, certain forms of what we named guerilla marketing, seeding

sCRM (Social Customer Relationship Management):
Surveys, polls, story telling, etc. 

Types of Social Media:
Social News
Social Sharing (Videos & Photos)
Social Networking
Social Bookmarking
And many other areas

Social Technographics (aka Demographics/Psychographics):
Creators
Critics
Collectors
Joiners
Spectators
Inactive

From the book Groundswell 

Dominate your Search Engine Result’s Pages (SERPS):
MySpace.com
Youtube video
Youtube channel
Other Social Marketing links
Links are a by product of social media.   
Each area is a potential to rank in your SERPs

Sony, Walmart, and other companies = back lash for being unethical for fake blogging.  Such as offering a fake promotion to generate buzz.

BlogWorld
Las Vegas, NV
Sept. 20-21, 2008 (E&E Conference Sept. 19)

BlogWorld & New Media Expo is the best place to jumpstart your blogging career.   But it isn’t just for bloggers. If you own a business or are in marketing, PR, or just want to learn more about blogging this is the place to be.  BlogWorld is where online influencers, leaders and innovators will be looking for resources including: Blog Publishing Software, Designers and Communities, Podcasting, Internet TV & Radio Services, Equipment and Networks, Social Media Technology and Communities, Badges, Widgets and Plug-ins, Computer Hardware, Software and Peripherals, RSS Services, Advertising Networks, Affiliate Programs, Mobile Blogging and Vlogging Technology and Devices, Broadband, Wi-Fi and ISP’s and much more

For More Information on the Conference:
http://www.blogworldexpo.com/

Hotel Information:
http://www.blogworldexpo.com/Attendee-Info/Hotel-Information.html

Internet Retailer 2008
Social Sites for Retailing

Find a message to promote such as being carbon neutral as a company or being involved in the Green movement.

Dell.com/regeneration (re-generation)
ReGeneration.org

Enlist and encourage participation within the social networks

Dell used Facebook to start a contest: “What does green means to you”
They first used the Graffiti add-on to promote writing and pictures, then later used more of an essay style contest.   Numerous of Facebook users spent their time online to express themselves about what “Green” meant to them through Dell’s contest.

Social Network Statistics:

MySpace & Facebook Stats:
8 to 9% overall online US market share, 80 to 90% of social network traffic
Bebo & Facebook = UK’s largest social network market share (not myspace)

Facebook & MyYear book, high growth in the US

Gaya Online (an anime website) uses  coins to give users to spend to motivate online social activity.  They also offer limited edition coins as a special status within the community.

Social Networks has on average 2.6x pages than search engine traffic and 8 to 9x page views of news and media.

Monthly Retention Rates:
95% for Myspace
94% for Facebook

MySpace Demographic Growth:
18-24 (-13%)
25-34 (+9% growth)

Facebook Demographic Growth:
18-24 (-28%)
25-34 (+7% growth)

Adoption:
14% find videos useful
Of the 14%, there is 57% Use video to become your Brand Advocate
Of the 14%, there is 47% that tell others of a new site i.e. send a link to tell friends

Social Network Demographics:
Younger & Weathier
38% = Age 25-34
19% = Income over $100K

Entertainment related products recieve greatest share of referrals
Top areas: Music, Ticketing, Apparel, Computers, Sport and Fitness

Some Companies Utilizing Social Networks (Digital content to advocate your brand):

Delivery.com (earn points)
Amazon created apps for wish list, birthday reminders, buy gifts for friends
Sears uses facebook for social shopping for prom dresses
Pink from Victoria’s Secret (photos)
DiGiono (apps when pizza is ready, and provide coupons)
Guiness (petition to make st. patricks day an official holiday)
Zappos (badges to spread your brand message on websites)

More stats:  ilovedata.com = hitwise data blog

Trends:
Convergence of Entertainment and shopping experience

Uses:

Enhance Customer Experience:
Honeyshed (product video, and click to buy)
Martin + OSA (Shop by outfit / video)
VS Pink  (user generated content)
misses: madewell (no buy button, must call them to buy)

Increase Transaction Conversion:
QVC how to videos
Walmart canopy drill in details on product photos

Other:
How to fold a casual cuff, bowtie, etc.
Top 3 Social Areas:
Social networks
Ratings and reviews
Blogs

Others:
Wikis
Widgets/Applets (website, mobile, desktop)

Social Shopping:
Shopping 1.0
Surgical shopping, Know exactly what you want (lost pleasure of shopping)

Shopping 2.0
Kaboodle (60+% market share of this space)
(wish list, comments, similar interests)
anyknockoff

Product Design 2.0:
Let customers design, share, vote on and the co produces it (Levis)
1. product comparison
2. build a place for customers to play/share (behr paint)
3. Engage in the conversation (talk to your customers i.e. Racked)
4. give users and influencers the ability to leverage content from you (to become advocates, i.e. content for facebook page i.e. home depot, karma loop i.e. earn points)

Ajax SEO Problems:
crawling
bookmarking
no unique url

Turn off javascript in browser to see page in the eyes of SE (also can use firefox plug-in)
Other tools:   googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com
Other Misc Notes (SEO):

B2B:
GalaSource.com
2nd largest distributorship ecommerce site ($18M), food service equipment & supplies dealer serving hospitality industry  (design services, equipment, from concept to completion).
DiscountedRestaurantEquipment.com ($30K/mo on eBay)

Galasource.com, avg 6800 to 9000 visits/day
PPC: $80 to$150K/mo
SEO: 63% Organic
Product Data Feeds, froogle, pricegrabber, business.com
GalaDesigns.net 300 vendors, 300,000 products
25,000 keywords in PPC
5,355 keyword focus (747 on 1st page)

92,000 product pages (seec)
7% of 2007 rev
20+% some months
only 1.7% of budget (sales, 5 to 6% of rev for mktg)
Automated Page Generation
Performance basis, by click basis
Higher page rank, the more pages will be index (i.e. url rewriting)

B2C:
Trulythefinest.com
teakalook.com
gonauticalgifts.com
oneofakindbuys.com

Google I/O is a 2 day developer conference in San Francisco, Wednesday & Thursday, May 28 to 29, 2008.

This conference is geared toward developers wanting to develop applications that integrate with any of Google’s applications.

The latest buzz involves the public launch of several development tools to create any type of web application (not just for google) which is geared toward Web 2.0 Social Applications, such as Google App Engine which provides a full development environment to build, test and host new web applications for free.  Registration is now open to the public.

Major programming languages supported are Java, AJAX, and PHP.   Phython is also used within Shindig for their new Open Social project, which is standardizing widget or mini-application plug-in development for Social Applications (where you build once and can launch on various social websites without rebuilding 100% of the code each time for each website – build once, use on many websites).  

You can visit the conference information at: 

http://code.google.com/events/io/ 

BlogWorld
Las Vegas, NV
Sept 20-21, 2007

The very first conference for Bloggers!

This started by a group of event organizers that noticed that Bloggers like themselves did not have a forum to meet in person, ergo, BlogWorld 2007.

2007 Photos:
http://www.blogworldexpo.com/Gallery/Gallery.html?Itemid=0

2007 Video Clips:
http://www.blogworldexpo.com/Blogworld-07-Videos.html