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Mar. 12, 2008 at 2:58pm Eastern by Danny Sullivan
Preview: Search Engine Land's SMX Social Media Marketing Conference
Last year in New York, Search Engine Land held its first SMX Social Media Marketing conference. I've been organizing conferences for nearly 10 years now, and this one was exceptional, if I say so myself. Every speaker blew me away with great ideas on how to tap into social media to drive traffic and help with search marketing efforts. Missed out? SMX Social Media is coming back, April 22 & 23, to Southern California. With our early registration price expiring this week on March 15, I wanted to give readers thinking of attending the show a quick overview of what to expect, including a new keynote discussion panel "Social Search: The Human Challengers," involving Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, Jimmy Wales of Wikia Search, and Steven Marder of Eurekster.
The day will kick off with SEOmoz's Rand Fishkin doing his Social Media Marketing Essentials session. Rand has a wonderful overview designed to help anyone get oriented to the world of social media. He'll leave you wanting to run out and start interacting online, believe me.
After Rand, Linkbait - Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites has link baiting vets Rebecca Kelley, Brent Csutoras and Cameron Olthius covering how to ensure your content is going to be attractive to many social media sites. Steve Rubel and I recently did a round where he felt good content will just naturally get rewarded on social sites. I argued that it is not so. How you craft your content can make it much more acceptable. Magazines have long run Top 10 lists; newspaper articles are written in inverted pyramid style. These formats have become established for good reasons. Social media audiences can be -- and should be -- catered to as well. Our link baiting panel covers how to do that effectively and in a way that is acceptable to the sites.
Following the Linkbait session, Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites covers one type of social media site, places where people seek news, like Digg, Propeller, Reddit, and Newsvine. Neil Patel and Chris Winfield know this landscape the backs of their hands. Those looking for success in these places -- where success can mean huge traffic and links to come -- will learn tons from the panel.
Moving from news sites, A Marketer's Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging looks at social media bookmarking services, such as Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. Guillaume Bouchard, Michael Gray, and Neil Patel will cover the importance of these sometimes overlooked services. Many focus on Digg for traffic, but StumbleUpon can send as much or more, just consistently over a long period of time. Del.icio.us can produce a traffic spike and warrants even further attention as Yahoo tests integration of Del.icio.us into Yahoo's search results.
The first day will end with Keynote - Social Search: The Human Challengers. As I mentioned, we've got three services that are all looking to see if humans can make a difference in how search results are generated. Jason Calacanis was first out of the gate with last year's efforts, with his Mahalo designed to use human editors to hand-pick the best results for popular topics. Jimmy Wales announced Wikia Search last year, then launched it at the beginning of this year, an effort to see if human involvement in rating results drawn from crawling the web can produce a better search engine. Eurekster is the real vet in the space, having tried various flavors of social search until settling on its "Swicki" model that takes social search into specialized search topics. The panel will do a short overview of each service, then it's to the audience for Q&A and discussion on whether any of these can revolutionize the space.
Effectively Leveraging Social Networking starts off day two, looking at social media networking services like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Twitter as ways of driving traffic, building links, and raising exposure. Cindy Krum on the panel is one of those speakers where I whip out my notepad each time she talks, trying to get as many gems down for later use. She'll be joined by two other panelists to be posted shortly.
Next comes Evangelist - The Marketer's Role in SMM, with David Berkowitz, Rob Key, and Adam Sherk looking at how you can be most successful as a company if you have someone who really does know the various communities out there, rather than shows up as a drive-by participant. It's *social* media, and companies can indeed be social -- and successful when so.
Micro Communities follows with Rand Fishkin returning, joined by Li Evans and looking at the many specialized social media communities that are out there. Pick a subject -- there's a social site to match your content!
Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers & Answer Sharing comes next, with Lisa Broer, Jonathan Hochman, Matt McGee, Jeff Muendel, and Don Steele of Comedy Central looking at how social answer sites -- places where communities build answers -- are important ways to build traffic and visibility.
Wikipedia Clinic will end the day. Uncertain how to approach an issue with the powerful Wikipedia site? The panel of experts will guide you to a correct path.
That's the preview! You can find more details at the SMX Social Media Marketing conference website. I look forward to seeing many readers out at the show. Be sure to register today!
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