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!