Online Marketing Blog

Conferences are a big part of TopRank’s marketing and content promotion strategy and it looks like a busy summer is ahead of us. Numerous events are coming up quickly - enough to make your head spin. Here is a summary of our involvement with PRSA, DMA, PUSH, SIS, SES and SMX events over the next 30 days:

05/14/08 - MIMA: Duality Reality - Who Controls Social Media in the Enterprise?
The local interactive marketing association along with inspiration and motivation from Doug Pollei, there will be a very interesting panel of in-house Interactives discussing how large companies (General Mills, Best Buy, Target, Fingerhut and OptumHealth) are adopting and measuring social media programs. If you’re in the Twin Cities this week and involved with social marketing now or in the future, this is a MUST ATTEND event.

Jeremiah Owyang posted recently asking his readers what conferences they would be attending in the coming months and I thought that would be a great question for Online Marketing Blog readers as well.

Over the past 3 years we’ve been focused on search marketing conferences but have expanded more into direct marketing, interactive and PR. We’ll continue that trend the rest of this year but with more conferences outside of search as our online marketing agency evolves.

Conferences that I’m attending in the coming months include:

• May: ACCM in Florida
• Jun: PRSA Digital Impact in NYC

M&O PR’s Kevin Sawyer and I are now finally back in the office after two jam packed days of Media Relations Summit. Public and media relations professionals, academics and business communicators from across the country gathered at what is known as the largest event for media relations in the world. Kevin blogged the event over at Media Relations blog and I made a few posts here and many more on Twitter.

Here’s a summary of the sessions we attended and covered:

The compelling morning keynote presentations were sandwiched by PR Technology updates and then followed by 4 tracks of sessions. Here are the sessions that Kevin and I blogged:

In the opening keynote at Media Relations Summit, the legendary TV journalist and interviewer, Charlie Rose, had the tables turned and became interviewee with the famous PR guru, Howard Rubenstein.

Rubenstein: Why are your interviews so revealing? How do you get your guests to reveal so much?

Rose: The thing about a story… Describes the recent news over the weekend about the Clinton campaign manager getting sacked. People that do what I do want to advance a story like that. Stories are about communicating the range of emotions that are important to people.

The day two Media Relations Summit lunch keynote is given by Mike Moran, a distinguished engineer from IBM, who starts out with a question: Did Robert Scoble make you feel technologically stupid this morning and now you’re thinking you have to listen to an engineer? Mike admits he can’t be Robert and neither should we.

“You have permission to sip from the new web 2.0 world, rather than drink from it like a fire hose”. Give yourself permission to do a little bit of this. What I don’t want is for you to feel overwhelmed by all of this. Also, “I’m going to count clips and thats it”. Don’t retreat to what you’re comfortable with. Be willing to experiment.

Our client visit to San Francisco last week fell right next to the Media Relations Summit conference happening this week at the Westin St. Francis on Union Square. The near crossover meant a weekend in one of my favorite cities.

As one of the largest conferences dedicated to media relations, this event attracts an array of public relations practitioners including the top PR agencies in the world, large and small corporate PR staff and academics from PR programs at major universities. Overall theme seems to be looking to the future.

The Bulldog Reporter Advanced PR Technology in Practice in San Francisco wrapped up and here are a few photos. One thing is for sure, I need to buy a new camera. Another thing is that the event started out with lots of conversation about using SEO to drive “pull” PR efforts and ended heavy on the social media. It was a great match for TopRank: SEO and social media for public relations.

A modest sized audience, but engaged and plenty of questions.

Jim Sinkinson, Publisher of Bulldog Reporter

One of my presentations: “Optimizing Press Releases for Search Engines (SEO) and Using RSS to Distribute Releases”.

I just returned from the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) International conference being held in Philadelphia where I participated on a panel, “Social Media, What Every PR Practitioner Needs to Know” with Rob Key of Converseon, Nicco Mele of echoditto and Peter Himler of Flatiron Communications who handled moderation duties.

Fifteen minutes before the session, the room was packed with people eventually standing against the back wall and it was clear that both the room and the topic of social media were going to be hot.

Next week starts one heck of a week starting with DMA07 in Chicago, the largest marketing conference in the world.  On Tuesday afternoon I am speaking on a panel called “Desperately Seeking Links Baiting, Buying and Socializing for Links” with Stephan Spencer, Seth, Besmertnik and Eric Ward.

Then on Thursday, I will be presenting as part of a post conference workshop on new media, specifically social media, with Joseph Jaffee of Crayon. Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning Joseph is covering blogs, podcasting, video casting and Second Life/virtual worlds. Thursday afternoon I will be presenting on social bookmarking and SEO as well as a grab bag session on Yahoo! Answers, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. I might have picked a slightly different mix of applications to talk about but then again the topic selection wasn’t my call.