Online Marketing Blog

Attending and speaking at conferences can be a goldmine for content, networking, publicity and lead generation. While many companies might rate a “B” on achieving these outcomes, the speakers could do a lot better by effectively promoting their presentations. The more people that attend a presentation, the more opportunity there is for:

• Your session to be liveblogged or covered by an industry journalist
• To persuade prospects to contact you
• To persuade clients to explore other services
• Attract new employees
• Inspire new vendor and partner relationships

There are many other possible outcomes, but I think you get the idea. Here’s a list of 18 ways to promote your next speaking engagement and possibly make it a more meaningful and relevant experience for those attending.

BlogWorld Expo is holding it’s first conference in New York this week and I’ll be presenting “Dominate Your Niche with Social SEO & Blogging” on Tuesday at 10:15am as part of the Social Business Track. This post is a light preview of that session and I hope to see you there.

Is blogging dead? A number of high profile bloggers and news media sites from Scoble to Wired to the New York Times have opined the demise of blogging as a consequence of growing social destinations like Twitter and Facebook.

On a sunny, warm day in Minneapolis, marketers gathered near one of the city’s best attractions – LakeCalhoun – to learn about “Search and the Connected Consumer”, a view of how people retrieve information online and what that means for the future online and search engine marketing.

Hosted by MIMA, the event featured Mike Grehan, Global VP Content, Search Engine Watch, ClickZ & Search Engine Strategies.

Mike started by educating the audience on the history of the World Wide Web and the Internet (note: they are not one in the same).

The disciplines of search, social media, content marketing and online PR continue to intersect and often combine to create a powerful mix. Besides leveling the playing field, companies and individuals are creating competitive advantages as they adapt to shifts in technology and consumer behavior. Learning and mastering the ability to integrate should be top of the personal development list for marketing and communications professionals.

Here are the details for four upcoming events to do a deep dive into Optimized Online Marketing and PR. I hope to see you there:

Event: Blogworld Expo New York – Social Media Business Summit
Date: May 24-26, 2011
TopRank Presentation: Dominate Your Niche with Social Media, SEO & Blogging

After a great opening keynote presentation by Arianna Huffington, I was drawn into the nearby speaker ready room and ran into the always inspiring Brian Solis. Brian’s Marketing Masters track at ad:tech San Francisco was on my list for live blogging and as always, he shared a great mix of insights and inspiration about business on the social web.

I haven’t live blogged in a while, so forgive the rough edges

How do we improve the game for social media in business?

Why have people begun to hate the term “social media”? It’s about what social media is not. Social media is neither one to many marketing or many to many. It’s about 1+1=many.

Today I’ll be speaking at ad:tech San Francisco with one of my favorite people in the Search Marketing industry, Melanie Mitchell, who is a Senior VP of Search Strategy at Digitas. She’s tasked a panel including Simon Heseltine, Rob Snell and myself to talk about “Modern Search Engine Optimization”.

While SEO is a billion dollar industry, many companies focused on advertising are quite new to how SEO might fit within an online marketing strategy. With plenty of outdated and mis-information online amidst a fast changing industry, it can be a challenge to have confidence in what’s true and best practices. Few marketers want to invest in something they don’t quite understand. Or at least not understand where it fits for connecting the brand and customers to drive revenue.

The SES New York 2011 conference wrapped up last week on the heels of one of the biggest Google updates in recent years.

And although there was enough Panda talk to make a passerby think we might all be zookeepers, there were other themes running through the conference as well including content, paid strategies and tools, tools, tools.

Here’s a quick recap:

Panda: The Aftermath, as it was called essentially recapped what TopRank and other content advocates have been saying along.

Create unique, quality content that is written first for the target audience and second for the search engines. It’s those who have been living dangerously – or maybe just naively – creating what’s now referred to as shallow content who likely got hit the worst.

Content, Content, Content.

After attending search conferences for a few years now, it seems only right that content is getting some time in the spotlight. This week at Search Engine Strategies (SES) New York, I had the great pleasure of presenting on the topic of content marketing.

For so long talk has been about how to optimize and then how to promote – but we’re circling back around to meat and potatoes of online marketing which is the content.

Without it, what are we optimizing and promoting? Oh no, please don’t say it’s your static product pages… Well, if it is (and we’ve all been there), it is most definitely time to look at content marketing and what it can do to take your brand to new levels of customer engagement and acquisition.

Since 2005 or so, I’ve been pretty active speaking at conferences all over the world. Some of the cities I’ve been to for speaking engagements include: San Francisco, Chicago, Washington D.C., Boston, Detroit, Hong Kong, Auckland, Sydney, London, Barcelona, Toronto, Minneapolis and Park City, Utah. But to this day, my favorite city for a conference is New York.

All of the cities I’ve listed above have many great things going for them, but there’s something about New York that stands the test of time to me as the best city for a search and online marketing conference. This is a timely observation of course, since SES New York is coming up fast, March 21-25.

Yesterday I spoke at Search Congress in Barcelona Spain on the topic of improving online marketing (and PR) with Social Media and SEO. My co-panelist was Aaron Kahlow of Online Marketing Connect and the moderator was the famous Massimo Burgio.

Just before the event, Massimo suggested we break out our Spanglish in the presentations plus I ran into Bryan Eisenberg who did a keynote – unexpectedly in Spanish because the translator didn’t show. “Gracias” and “si” are about all I know, so you can imagine the situation.

Speaking and presenting all in English wouldn’t be very considerate to the audience, so I decided to use Google translator (suggested by Mike Grehan) and translate most of my slides from English to Catalan. The presentation went over fairly well I think:

I’m a bit of a travel bug and my third trip to London didn’t disappoint. SES moved its venue to the center of London, literally across the street from Westminster Abbey and a short walk to Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, the London Eye and many other well known landmarks.

Whether a conference happens in amazing places like London or New York, there are a few things I try to do in order to maximize the value from attending including speaking of course, but also networking, connecting with media opportunities and creating content. Here’s a rundown of some of that before and during SES London.

The last session of the day on the last day of SES London was on Social Media in the Marketing Mix with Kristjan Hauksson of Nordic eMarketing in Iceland and Mel Carson of Microsoft in London.

Kristjan started things off: What happens when a volcano goes wrong?  He recounted the situation last year when Eyjafjallajokul erupted (say that 3 times fast – I dare you) and so much ash spread into the atmosphere that hundreds of planes were grounded from flying.  This, you can imagine, had a dulling effect on Icelandic tourism. Iceland regularly has more tourists than there are people who live there.

Understand that everything we do in broadcast and digital needs to take advantage of all channels available.