Conference Buddies

Travel Blogging 2009 & Beyond

Travel Blogging Tips & Advice

• Write stories about things that are happening, things you see, people you met
• Don’t do it because of money, do it because you love what you’re doing
• Make your travels into interesting stories
• Blog in conjunction with twittering, use bit.ly to put links on there

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The Value of Blogs To Hospitals, New Organizations, and Industry

Notes:

• Represent what you and your institution stands for. Why would anyone not do that?
• People like seeing posts of medical institutions, statistics, new medical breakthroughs
• Everyone else is talking about us, why aren’t we? Large Corporations might have legal & regulatory constraints, but they can give out new info, respond to customers, address issues

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State of the Medical Blogosphere

Speakers: Kerri Morrone Sparling: www.sixuntilme.com
Kevin Pho: www.kevinmd.com
Nicholas Genes: www.medgadget.com, www.blogborygmi.com
Kim McAllister: www.emergiblog.com
10/15/2009, 9:45am – 10:45am

Evolution of the Medical Blogosphere

• 60% of patients use the internet as their first source of information
• Doctors need to get on board to connect with their patients, answer questions about medical news and new medical info
• Patients are blogging about their experiences as a way to find other people like them
• People are leaving the Blogosphere due to privacy and employer issues

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SEO/SEM

Speakers: Rhea Drysale: Outspoken Media
Stephen Spencer: Net Concepts
Brett Tabke: WebmasterWorld, PubCon
10/16/2009, 4pm – 5pm

SEO/SEM Tools

• seo-browser.com: scans websites for SEO content. Tells you what type of redirect it is.
• Yahoo Site Explorer: free tool, log in to get comprehensive data, exclude internal links, only inbound links from other sites, lists not all, but most of your inbound links
• getlisted.org to claim your business on several local search engines & see how your business is listed at Google, Yahoo, and other top local search engines

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How Twits Lay Golden Eggs:
The Art of Social Engagement for Business

Speakers: Nicole Nicolay, “Nic Nic“, author: Twitter for Real Estate Twits
Jodee Rich, @wing dude, peoplebrowser.com/wingdude
Chris Brogan, President, New Marketing Labs
Nick Halstead, @nickhalstead, Tweet Meme
Laura Fitton, @pistachio, author: Twitter for Dummies
10/17/2009, 4:15 – 5:15pm

Key Twitter Tips and Advice:

• Put a link to your site on Twitter, put your Twitter on your site so people know that your Twitter account is authentic (one forty.com)
• Look to see what your competitors are doing, see who is following them. Research keywords in Twitter, see who comes up.
• Always follow people back, or they’ll get mad at you
• Listen, learn, care, serve.
• Google: Grow Bigger Ears. Use search.twitter.com
• Use seesmic.com or TweetDeck to manage your account
• If you keep seeing the same question to you more than once, don’t keep tweeting the answer, post the answer on your website under your FAQ

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Building A Sustainable Online Community: ChicagoNow

Speaker: Tracy Samantha Schmidt
10/16/2009, 3pm – 3:30pm

Tracy Samantha Schmidt wrote for Time magazine. They wanted her to get a student eyewitness at the Virginia Tech shooting. She reached out to people through the Virginia Tech group on Facebook and found a survivor. She beat out 800 other journalists to get an exclusive interview. She believes in using social media to get facts and to reach people.

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10 Ways to Build Your Audience
Speaker: Nicole Simon, Social Media Mentor & Consultant, @nicolesimon
10/17/2009, 12:45 to 1:15pm

Four different types of visitors:

• Subscribers, (people who already love you)
• Search engine traffic, (they don’t know you)
• Life stream (people come for specific reasons, people pointed others to it)
• Social bookmarking (people who find you interesting)

Other traffic:

• People who want to contact you (journalists)
• People who want to offer you something (other bloggers)
• People who want information from you

Big Questions:

• What do each of these segments want from you and your site? They are all different!
• What do you have to do to help them get what they want?
• What makes me happy?
• What helps me to get what I want?
• What can I do to make me happy?

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BizTechDay
October 22-23, 2009
Hyatt Regency SFO
Burlingame, CA
http://www.biztechday.com/

The Most Powerful Entrepreneur and Small Business Conference

BizTechDay is a two day conference targeted at entrepreneurs and small business owners. The purpose of this conference is to show small businesses how to leverage on technology to grow a business.

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Facebook & Twitter Fortunes: How To Strategically Grow Your Business Using the Top Two Online Social Networks

Panelist(s): Mari Smith
@marismith

Facebook:

Facebook Mission: To help the world connect & communicate more effectively.

For social media, it is important to know the difference between a Facebook personal page and a Facebook fan page. Facebook personal pages have a limit of 5000 friends but fan pages do not have such a limitation. Fan pages are also fully indexed by Google. Personal pages do not have any requirements to get a shortened vanity Facebook URL. However, fan pages require at least 25 fans (initially it was 1000, then 100) in order to register for one.

Twitter

When it comes to Twitter, who you follow is as important as who follows you. One rule of thumb to go by is, follow people that have “passion”. Also, it is important to always thank people who retweet your content.

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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

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