We’re really picking up steam with our tips on Iternet Marketing Conferences, appropriately enough, during SES San Jose. Our next tip comes from Robert Scoble, Managing Director of FastCompany.TV and blogger extraordinaire.

I caught up with Robert at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and he agreed to play along and answer a few conference tip questions. The insights below are transcribed from the video interview I did with him during the event.

It’s tough because I’m the guy who likes to hang out in the hallways. I hate being stuck in a conference session unless I know I’ll learn something. To me the hallways are great because that’s where I do my networking and find out what’s really going on.

Stewart Butterfield showed me Flickr in the hallways of the Emerging Tech conference and he didn’t even have a spot on the stage, he said, “Hey check this out:”. Typically that’s been true that the more interesting stuff happens in the hallways. Unless you’re at a really top rate conference like TED or Pop Tech then it’s an experience. So if you go to one of those, I always sit in the front row.

I went to Davos and sat in on several sessions and always sat in the front row. Mostly so I can capture video and see things and participate in the conversations better, get seen if I want to ask a question.

Watch Twitter. Twitter is now the back channel for a lot of these conferences and you’ll see people talking, particularly in a multi-room conference. At SXSW there were several things going on at one time. The Twitter stream sort of told you what other people were experiencing and if the talk in your room was really boring you could switch rooms and go to another talk that might have been much more interesting.

With the parties being able to pace yourself is important. With SXSW there’s so many parties that you could go to, you’d be up to 4 in the morning every morning, you can really burn yourself out pretty fast.

Have a sense for what exhibits are there and see what people are talking about. During the day, I would watch a site like Techmeme (at least if it’s a tech conference) to see what other people are talking about at the conference that you might want to see or partner with or build a relationship with.

Learn about new technologies so that even if you don’t use it, you’re educated and can inform your boss, who’s paying for you to go. If it is something you might use, you’d better get business cards from the people that you’d want to partner with so you can make things happen.
Bring business cards that are memorable.

Super advice Robert, thank you.

Who could possibly be next you’re wondering? What further internet marketing conference wisdom could possibly be in store? Out next tipster is none other than Danny Sullivan of Third Door Media and the Search Marketing Expo series of conferences.

Do you have tips for getting more out of internet marketing conferences or any kind of conference for that matter? What insights can you share? You never know, maybe one of these conference organizers might actually notice these posts and your brilliant ideas and ask you to speak or moderate or who knows? The future looks brighter with your internet marketing conference tips in the comments below.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2008. | Internet Marketing Conference Tips: Robert Scoble FastCompany.TV | http://www.toprankblog.com

The first day of a conference for me typically starts out with registration:

A stop by the speaker/press/blogger room then rolls into keynote presentations from industry leaders and news makers like these:

Jonathan Schwartz CEO of Sun and Tim O’Reilly

Matt Cutts from Google

and Matt Mullenweg co-founder of WordPress

Some keynotes are worth blogging and many others are not. The challenge is to pick the right mix of blogging and photos that best represent the conference and reader interests.

Before you know it, it’s lunch time – one of THE best times to network for prospective clients, marketing partners, vendors and new employees. Hopefully the food doesn’t suck too bad. Otherwise, you schedule client or hot prospect meetings at a proper restaurant.

Once the exhibit hall opens, of course you have to walk through it to get to the lunch area which was mysteriously served elsewhere before exhibitor booths were on display. No matter, visiting exhibitors provides a great way to learn about new technologies, prospect future clients and of course, conduct competitive research.

After lunch there’s more sessions where attendees sit patiently through a mix of presentations ranging from entertaining to informative to sales pitches. In between sessions you do your best to stay on top of email, phone calls and possibly sneak in some friendfeed.

Some presentations include very in-depth graphics and explanations which further reinforce the ideas being presented and in some cases, guide the audience into a state of, “This is fantastic, but I can’t possibly do this all on my own. I need outside help.” Other presentations will disappoint and many truly inspire.

One of the great things about conferences is that you run into other people that share your interests you wouldn’t normally see in person. As Robert Scoble said in our interview, some of the best parts of a conference come from interactions in the hallways.

At the end of the day, there are private dinners and after conference events where people gather to meet like-minded professionals and have conversations,

meet friends

listen to and maybe dance to some music

and in some cases, watch Unicorns run wild.

At the end of the festivities it’s time to go home and do a few hours of work, making notes of all the contacts met that day, prime blog posts and organize notes from sessions covered, compress/upload videos, upload and tag photos, answer emails and schedule the next day’s sessions before the next wake up call to start all over again.

I truly enjoyed the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco because of the technology focus (geeks galore!) and the optimism. Albeit, it’s a bit of over-0ptimism in many cases, but all the same, it’s a forward looking, intellectual and hopeful perspective towards possibilities, collaborations and building things of value. Hats off (pun intended) to Dave McClure, Techweb and O’Reilly for a great event.

Now here’s a poll for readers of Online Marketing Blog: Are conference “photo posts” a good thing or no? Or should I just link to the Flickr set we’ve set up like this one for Web 2.0 Expo?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2008. | A Web 2.0 Conference Day – Wrap Up | http://www.toprankblog.com

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2008. | Web 2.0 Expo – Video Interview Brian Solis | http://www.toprankblog.com

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After finding out my new camera’s SDHC card wasn’t recognized by my Sony Vaio laptop, I was stuck taking lots of photos but not posting to Flickr as I normally would. After checking several stores I finally found a card reader and below are a few photos from the Web 2.0 Conference here in San Francisco this week.

Dave aka “PayPal Mafia” McClure

Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li of Forrester

Geoff Livingston, Brian Solis and Rohit Bhargava

Facebook Marketing Panel

Audience Questions

Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff @ Groundswell Book Launch

Chris Heuer Interviewing Guests in the Blogtropol.us Blogger Lounge

Robert Scoble

Stowe Boyd and Brian Solis

Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester

Brian Caldwell and Jacob Morgan

Vanessa Fox, Hiten Shah and Dave McClure

Be sure to visit TopRank’s Web 2.0 Expo Flickr set for over 100 more photos.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2008. | Web 2.0 Expo – Photo Picks | http://www.toprankblog.com

After the keynote frenzy this morning, the session that stood out for me was “Facebook Marketing: Best Practices” with Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester Research as moderator, Evan Mager from AKQA, Holly Liu from Watercooler, Brett Keintz of 750 Industries and Stanford GSB and Kevin Barenblat of Context Optional.

Some of the key takeaways from this session were:

• Be clear with your objectives
• Test spending money on Facebook marketing even if you aren’t sure about the return. Hey, 1,000,000 visits can’t be wrong!
• Understanding the ROI of Facebook requires a new kind of mindset
• Don’t take away the social features of Facebook from users
• Facebook marketing is not about driving traffic to your web site. Keep Facebook users on Facebook

Hopefully Jeremiah doesn’t think I’m stalking him as this is the second session in two days of his that I’ve blogged. Unfortunately, I don’t know the panelists and there are no name tents, so each panelist response or comment below is labeled simply as “panel”.

He started with a series of polls: How many people use the internet? Facebook? Bloggers? Twitter? With each poll the number of hands raised changes.

Owyang cites stats from the Facebook site:

• 70 million active users
• Facebook is the 6th most-trafficked website in the world (comScore)
• Facebook is the 2nd most-trafficked social media site in the world (comScore)
• Over 55,000 regional, work-related, collegiate, and high school networks
• More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older

The neat thing about Facebook is that they have a platform that allows 3rd parties to develop widgets and other applications. There are over 20,000 applications, mostly junk. 140 new apps are added per day.

Forrester data: Researched to find out how people use social networks. Primarily, they use Facebook to self express and also to communicate with peers. Nowhere does it say they look for products or look at advertisements.

Facebook offers many methods and channels for marketing – many of which you can find in this article: The Facebook Marketing Bible: 24 Ways to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook

Panel: You approach Facebook like any other media. Think about your objectives and audience and go from there.

Panel: It depends on what your goals and budget are. If your looking at branding and community, create a Facebook page and consider engaging an app developer.

Owyang: What are you seeing as objectives from clients?

Panel: If you’re looking to attract users, applications are useful.

Owyang: Any companies looking to increase sales and revenue?

Panel: This space is so new, no one has really developed a ROI formula that works. The value is the ability to create virality around your brand. It’s a different way of thinking about achieving your objectives.

Owyang: What are some best practices?

Panel: Keep your content dynamic and fresh. Keep people coming back. There are basically two types of content on Facebook: The assets themselves, photos, text, etc. Also the social digital actions around that content like comments on photos.

Ways to keep assets fresh: 1. Do it youeself. 2. License it 3. User generated content – allows a lot of engagement. Users feel ownership of community. However, with UGC you will definitely need moderators.

Create applications that are metaphors for what people already know. For example, the Dodgeball mobile application. People are familiar with the concept and can jump in and start using it right away without a lot of confusion.

Owyang: Some of the audience will hate the brands being marketed on Facebook. What do you do about that?

Panel: You’re going to hear the good and the bad. That provides you an opportunity to listen to customers, audience.

Owyang: What about trolls?

Panel: With some people there’s not a lot you can do. Brand fans will come to your aid in many cases.

Owyang: Does driving traffic to your site work in Facebook?

Panel: Not really. If you have great content or incentive, they’ll go. With our viral marketing clients, you can take that same content and wrap it into Facebook itself so the experience for the consumer is seamless. We look at Facebook like TV, it’s an immersive experience. They generally don’t respond well to going offsite.

If you do send them offsite, make the landing page or microsite look similar to the page they came from within FB. Otherwise, we recommend trying to keep people on Facebook.

Panel: The clickthroug rate to outside sites is low. This is a distribution channel and you’ll get more page views if you keep them within Facebook.

Owyang: What are some measures of success?Panel: We track everything that happens with the application. We a/b test everything about the app. We also track effectiveness of the campaign, impressions and where they’re coming from. In the app world, it’s important to understand the viral factor. How many are passing the app along and how successful that is.

Panel: There can be challenges in getting data/metrics from Facebook to match up with traditional media formats. Sometimes you just have to go for it.

Owyang: When I look at Facebook apps, I see a lot of crap. Where’s the buisiness utility in this?

Panel: It’s like TV – it’s an opportunity to put your message in front of someone. If you have a million users engage in an app over amonth, that’s something interesting to them. That’s also time they’re not spending with other media.

Panel: If you can tie in your Facebook campaign with other marketing efforts or as part of a larger effort, it can be more effective.

Owyang: What is Beacon? What is a fan page?

Panel: A fan page is an official page for a brand on Facebook. A Facebook page is created and other users can become fans of the page. Marketers can buy ads on those fans and their networks.

Owyang: Beacon is what happens on 3rd party sites. Is Beacon a good way to do marketing?

Panel: For most Facebook users, it’s about the feed. What we’re driving toward is distribution through the feed. Giving your fans a place to rally enables you to up the experience for fans. It can supercharge excitement for the brand.

Panel: Apps are important but fan pages are also very valuable.

Panel: Brands that want to present an “official” representation, can use Facebook pages. For unoffical engagement, they can provide applications.

Owyang: What about ads?

Panel: If all you’re doing is banners and ads on Facebook and nothing else, you’re missing tremendous opportunity.

Panel: If you can slip an ad into the feed without being obtrusive, you can get very good clickthrough rates.

Owyang: What about demographic and targeting based on self volunteered personal info? Cites an example of being able to reduce the number of potential job candidates from millions to 200 people by this kind of segmentation and targeting. However, when the ad campaign to work for Forrester was executed, it didn’t generate results.

Panel: You’ve got to have a soft touch or it can alienate.

Audience: How do you define success?

Panel: It depends on the campaign. For video, it’s views, traffic back to the fan page.

Owyang: Tell me about a company that’s done it wrong.

Panel: Walmart created a back to college Facebook page. To Walmart’s credit, they “keep trying” with social media. A problem with the Walmart Facebook page was that it was a shallow experience. They disabled the peer to peer experiences – forums, comments, etc. That generated a bad vibe from Facebook community because they couldn’t interact. Also, the Walmart Facebook page was designed to send people to the Walmart web site. When people are on Facebook, they don’t want to leave.

Owyang: Best practices broken down: Let people communicate with each other, and don’t focus on sending people off Facebook.

Owyang: Biggest problem I see in this space when talking to brands is that they come into Facebook without goals/objectives.

Audience: Looking at using Facebook from a recruitment branding perspective. Anyone have experience with apps?

Owyang: Gives the Ernst and Young Facebook recruiting example.

Audience: What are best practices to research a target market on Facebook?

Panel: Facebook has official tools to identify psychographic information. your best bet is to poll Facebook users.

Audience: Is Facebook enough? Or should I advice to our developers to pour everything into OpenSocial?

Panel: It depends on your audience. We make that decision based on who we’re trying to reach. ie, other sites that support OpenSocial that have audiences of interest. Facebook is certainly large, but it does make sense to make apps available to other sites.

Audience: Any examples of lawfirms using Facebook for recruiting?

Owyang: Nothing specific, but I would start with LinkedIn actually. Do a search via Facebook ads for law students.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2008. | Facebook Marketing Best Practices – Web 2.0 Expo | http://www.toprankblog.com

The cast of characters in this session includes: Greg Narain of Blue Whale Labs who moderated, Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester Research, Brian Solis from Future Works and PR 2.0 and Stowe Boyd of The /Messengers.

Follow these guys on Twitter and you may learn an awful lot about this space:

@gregarious
@jowyang
@stoweboyd
@briansolis

While you’re at it, feel free to follow me as well: @leeodden Not sure how much you’ll learn there but you may be entertained

I’ll admit that it was a pretty silly thing to blog this session because like the ADD reference above, it took new directions each moment and never stayed on any one topic for long. Not a conducive environment for blogging. But then again, that’s appropriate for the topic.

The late entrance of Robert Scoble drew some interesting humor from the audience, some of which instigated by Josh Bernoff.

Who uses Twitter? Whole audience pretty much raises their hands.

@gregarious informs us the audience gets to control the presentation by following @micromedia2 and suggesting topics, messages or sharing images. Posts to @micromedia2 displayed on the projection screens with some pretty funny as well as insightful contributions.

@jowyang says microcontent applications like Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce and FriendFeed are on par with email.

@stoweboyd talks about buddy gopher that pulled in all the responses from your friends on AIM. Behaved somewhat like Twitter. cThe emergence and popularity of the Facebook mini feed is not too unlike Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce.

@jowyang Shows a graph from Compete with Twitter experiencing hockey stick growth and Pownce/Jaiku staying fairly level. A small group of influentials contributed to the success of one service, even though there are three services with very similar features.

@briansolis uses microcommunities to engage in real time conversations, share content. With posts on his old blog, he gets more responses on Twitter than on the post itself.

@gregarious Talk about the notion of streams and flows as well as what it means to be a real time participant:

@stoewboyd Contrast reading blog posts or RSS feeds compared to consuming a torrent of information coming from individuals. You can pay attention to it or not. Complete attention to a large quantity of text is a very differnt thing than checking in to a stream or thread of information when you want.

It’s the difference between being at a church service and being at a cocktail party.

Interesting phenomena that much of conversation that happens on blogs is shifting to Twitter and microblogging platforms.

@jowyang Cites a report with Peter Kim. Twitter users are early adopters.

@gregarious How can we use Twitter for business?

@briansolis Cites Dell using Twitter as a customer service tool. Monitors issues and solves them before the competition can take advantage.

@jowyang Did anyone talk about taxes on Twitter? Did H&R Block reply? H&R Block monitors Twitter for people talking about taxes and contacting them to bring them closer to the brand.

@stoweboyd People can see the immediate benefit of using Twitter based on current features. He shares that he is working on workstreamr – a workflow information transfer and sharing application.

There is a IM behavior to Twitter plus the 140 character limit. Shared a story about being disgusted with email pitches and he started referring them to do a “twitpitch”, which is essentially doing a pitch via Twitter. Stowe received some good pitches and is re-posting them online.

@jowyang Ways to message someone with Twitter. @username is one way. Another is to use hash tags #tag. You can also use Tweetscan.com to search brands, products etc.

@gregarious LA Fire Department is using Twitter as an emergency broadcast system and shouldn’t.

@stoweboyd The government nationally or regionally should build something stable to provide a digital air raid siren.

Audience: How can companies are monitoring micromedia?

@briansolis Twitter is great, but there are other tools such as seesmic, Friendfeed and others to consider.

To monitor micro-content, come up a list of keywords and terms, search them and create RSS feeds – you’ll be notified when there are mentions of those phrases in your RSS reader.

@jowyang Uses Google Alerts to monitor and mentions that social media monitoring tool, Radian6 monitors Twitter.

Twitter launched an advertising model in Japan today

@stoweboyd The thing that was scary about Andrew Baron selling his Twitter account on eBay is what if people hired others to build up an account – fake. There’s something horribly wrong with that.

@jowyang It’s becoming clear that content is moving off of Twitter and over to apps like FriendFeed.

@stoweboyd Twitter and the like: Flow Apps. Twitter is many to many.

Audience: Is micro-content still a nascent space? Is Twitter “it”?

@Stoweboyd There’s still a lot of opportunity.

@jowyang Browser client is the most active way to access Twitter. Second is Twhirl (which is being purchased by Seesmic)

@jowyang Polls the audience: How did this session go? Most people thought the format went well.

Overall, the session was entertaining and went very fast. I suspect that the panel expected a savvy audience, so there wasn’t unnecessary time spent on “What is Microblogging” or “What is Twitter” although there is certainly opportunity for that.

At Tweetscan you can see the thread of posts from the audience as well as posts made by people not at the session. It was interesting to see the initial audience comments and then people elsewhere in the world and Twitterverse noticed their friends making @ comments to @micromedia2 and started to post as well. The effect of the session was felt round the world and in real time. That’s powerful.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2008. | Web 2.0 Expo – Microblogging and Micromedia | http://www.toprankblog.com

In this session, both Li and Bernoff emphasize the importance of not jumping into social technologies and applications just because the competition does, but to have specific objectives and measurement. With defensible results, a social technology will be in a much better position to survive slimming budgets. The focus is on people, not technology with social technologies and applications.

Josh Bernoff: Are you experiencing web 2.0 avoidance syndrome?

Symptoms:

• Obsessive interest in blogosphoere, etc
• Excessive salivation of successful corp applications
• checking techruch and techmeme
• increasing nervousness answeing bosses and collegues about web 2.o\
• Asking your teens “what’s up with this myspace thing?”

Groundswell focuses on the social trend.

Groundswell defined:
A social trend in which people use technologies to get things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.

Where are you on this scale?

Left Corporatists – Online activities must deliver business benefits
Middle are pragmatists – People are in charge but corp can benefit
Right Purist – People are the most powerful force on the net

Objectives are the key to successful social strategies not technology.

Josh relates a story of a retail client asking for advice on starting a community. Why? Because the competition has. The retail company didn’t have a good reason, or any reason for starting a community. Josh emphasises that you must know what you want to achieve in order to succeed with a social strategy.

Four step approach to the groundswell: POST

• People
• Objectives
• Strategy
• Technology

First step is to understand the people.

Josh shows the social technographics ladder: Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators and Inactives. These groups include people participating in at least one of the activites monthly. Free tool: groundswell.forrester.com

Second step is to understand key roles and their groundswell objectives

Roles and Groundswell Objectives Matrix

Research – Listening
Marketing – Talking
Sales – Energising
Support – Supporting
Development – Embracing

Now Charlene Li takes the mic and talks about examples of objectives.

Shows an invite only Del Monte dog community. Members share information with each other. Del Monte asks members questions and get insight into product preferences. The Del Monte dog community serves as a private focus group/survey audience, but can get far more useful information.

Del Monte actually developed a product based on feedback they received from the community. What would normally take months, took weeks. This is a great example of the Listening objective.

Next example is about Tampons. P&G created a site called BEINGGIRL.com with an “Ask Iris” feature where members can ask questions. Interactions were lightly branded.

Brides.com energizes brides with MySpace a countdown widget. People would put the widgets on their MySpace profiles and each widget has a solicitation to get the widget. Widgets enable enthusiasts to do the selling for you.

The next example is Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation – which is an internal community.

Another example is from Starbucks, called My Starbucks Idea. Customers can submit their suggestions. Basically an online suggestion box. What’s unique is that there is top down management support and visibility of the ideas. They can also respond to ideas that get implemented, giving customers feedback and recognition.

In all of these successful examples, the companies had specific objectives they wanted to reach.

Josh is back up and reiterates that when budgets get cut, programs that have specific objectives and measurements are the last to go.

One of the most difficult things to justify is a blog. Forrester put together a breakdown of the ROI for an executive blog. Estimates $285k first year cost, most of which, is time spent training the executive.

Total estimated first year value is $353k. Most of the value comes from press stories which are valued at $10k each. Support savings are also high at $69k.

Important to explain goals, what was done/implemented and impact on the organization.

Key to success for pragmatists:

• Start with your customers. Know the audience.

• Choose an objective you can measure.

• Line up executive backing – Audience poll: How many people have launched a soclial application? How many people had pushback from the executive team? Same number of hands.

• Romance the naysayers. Example: Legal has an issue, then sit down and talk to them. Get buy in from legal, accounting and compliance people up front.

• Start small and thing big. Start with one project, be successful and then you can grow.

Pragmatists bring companies and the groundswell together – find common ground. Parting thoughts:

• Objectives are the key to successfuyl social strategy
• Use POST to frame your strategy
• Start small but think big

Audience Q and A:

A: Where do you see this live in an organization?

Josh: Which dept in your company is responsible for the internet? The answer depends on the application you have. Marketing, sales, support. Focus on the objectives you want to achieve to decide where it lives. Eventually, all departments will be touched.

Charlene: You must absolutely be laser focused on your customer. Gives SW blog as focused on, listening to, thinking about and serving customers.

A: What are some strategies for measuring customer participation?

Josh: Has been doing some work with clients on this. Some are doing surveys, some do workshops. Cites an example of a media company that was targeting Alpha Moms. They thought the moms would like to do blogs and create content. It turned out, they would be more likely to be critics and not content creators. That is the kind of analysis every company should do with their customers and sub-segments of their customers.

A: From a corporate strategy perspective, how do we get involved, participate as a company in the places were these activities are occuring? Not creating your own community, but “marketing” within social communities.

Charlene: Cites an example with Tivo being transparend about who they were with a community and interacting with the community. Tivo also helped support the infrastructure of the community. They didn’t need to create a new community – they were able to tap into the 100,000 users of an existing community.

Josh: Cites an example with Ernst & Young that opted not to create a community, but to interact with Facebook by creating a careers presence. Top hiring exec for NA at E&Y watches and answers questions on the E&Y Facebook group.

A: What are tactics for romancing the naysayers? Person to person or “shotgun” approach?

Josh: Worked with a company in SF that had a group blogging. It’s a regulated industry so each post had to be vetted. Legal provided rules to follow and guidelines for communicating.

Another example is Forrester. They have their own sales and marketing efforts. Made sure when the book site was created that the branding people were aware so they wouldn’t be offended.

Cites an idea from Jeremiah Owyang – There need to be two people involved: Community Manager and an Application Evangelist. The Community Manager works externally with customers. The application evangelist works internally within the organization and represents the application – getting buy in, educating and serving as an advocate.

Charlene: Work on a person by person basis. Give the benefits to them individually.

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• 9:40am Creating a Coherent Social Strategy for Business Charlene Li (Forrester Research), Josh Bernoff (Forrester Research)

• 10:50am Consumer 2.0: How Web 2.0 is Changing Moods, Metrics, & Monetization Rafe Needleman (CNET), Konrad Feldman (Quantcast), Erin Hunter (comScore, Inc.), Garrick Schmitt (Avenue A | Razorfish), Murtaza Hussain (Peanut

Now comes a tough call. Three sessions in the 1:30 slot that I’d really like to attend at the same time.

• 1:30pm Best-kept Secrets to Search Engine Optimization Success: the Art and the Science Stephan Spencer (Netconcepts)

OR

• 1:30pm Short Attention Span Theater: The Birth of Microblogging & Micromedia Gregarious Narain (Blue Whale Labs), Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research), Brian Solis (Future Works and PR 2.0), Stowe Boyd (The /Messengers)

OR

• 1:30pm IBM: Web 2.0 Goes to Work Gina Poole (IBM Software Group), Rod Smith (IBM Emerging Internet Technologies)

It’s a really a tough one, so if you have a preference for which session you’d like me to cover, please share your preference in the comments!

The conference day will wind up with: (for me at least)

4:00pm Opening Welcome Jennifer Pahlka (CMP), Brady Forrest (O’Reilly Media, Inc.) O’Reilly Radar Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media, Inc.)

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Hiten Shah of CrazyEgg and KISSmetrics provided practical examples and Vanessa Fox of Ignition Partners and Nine By Blue offered a combination of SEO centric tips, analytics and examples.

First up was the Web 2.0 Pirate, Dave McClure with his “AARRR” model:

• Acquisition – Where users come to your site from the web
• Activation – First positive experience
• Retention – Keep them coming back
• Referral – Refer others to the site
• Revenue – Users conduct some kind of monetization behavior

Startups need to decide what their business model is going to be. For many startups, the key is to focus on:

Getting users – Acquisition, referral
Driving usage – Activation, retention
Making money – Especially profitable revenue

To help attendees understand these focus areas, McClure asks questions of key roles within startups starting with the CEO.

Role: Founder/CEO

Which metrics and why?
Focus on critical few actionable metrics. Ultra important to your business, and few (3-5) and they are the kinds of metrics you are taking action on. If you’re not taking action on the metrics you’re tracking, it doesn’t make a difference to your business.

How can you get to more actionable decisions and metrics?
Hypothesize customer lifecycle – high value to the users and also high value to you.

Target those three to five steps, test and measure. Consistently refine. Measure against key metrics and measure success.

Have different people in your organization manage the different metrics and the CEO can serve as a tie breaker

Role: Product/Engineering

What to build and why?
Build features that increase conversion

Wireframes = conversion steps
Measure, A/B test, iterate fast – daily/weekly
Optimize for conversion improvement – 80% on existing feature optimization and 20% on new feature development

Conversions drive feature set development. Measure success on feature development depending on how well they contribute to conversion.

Role: Marketing / Sales

What channels, which users and why?
High volume, low cost, high conversion

Design and test multiple marketing channels + campaigns then pick the best performers. Common channels include: blogs, SEO/SEM, landing pages, automated emails. Find out which channels are driving high volume, low cost, high conversion rate customers.

Next up is Hiten Shah who will talk about the various types of online marketing channels.

Acquisition

Five of the most popular and productive online marketing channels:

1. SEO and SEM. Do your keyword research. Find out how users are converting on the site via SEM and leverage that knowledge for your SEO. You can use search marketing to drive traffic and conversions before the product is developed.
2. Blogs – Focus on industry specific blogs.
3. Email – Capture emails as a microconversions
4. Social media and social networks – Creating pages on Facebook/MySpace, social news promotion for exposure and traffic
5. Domains – Create different microsites or register domains anticipating type in traffic.

Keyword Vocabulary ( at TopRank we call this a Keyword Glossary)

McClure stresses the importance of keyword research and application early on, during product development, naming and as a way to understand consumer demand.

What to research when developing a keyword vocabulary:

• Top 10 -100 words
• Brands, products
• Customer needs benefits
• Competitors
• Semantic equivalents. derivatives
• Misspellings

Things to analyze: sources, volume, cost and conversion

Where are users coming from?
Key metrics for a PPC campaign: quantity, cost and conversions. How are the campaigns and various keywords converting. Setup a good conversion funnel and track signups to see how keywords are performing.

Acquisition Tools:

• Google Analytics
• Google Keyword Tool
• SEO Book keyword tool

Acquisition Resources:

• SEOBook.com
• Social Media Manual (SEL)
• Andrew Chen article on how to ruthlessly acquire users

Activation

Understanding acquisition sources and how they convert on home pages and landing pages is critical. Lots of A/B testing and landing page testing. Make iterations fast so you can learn what to change faster.

What do users do on their first visit?

Types of activation conversions:

• Click on something
• Account sign uip, prov ide email address
• Referrals and tell a friend
• Widgets and embeds elsewhere
• Low bounce rate

The text for conversions need to be user centric – what’s in it for them?

Activation Tips:

• Less is more. Don’t throw up everything to see what sticks. Pick 5 things you want to test for with 5 different landing pages or home pages. There might also be multiple versions of each home page and landing page variant. Look at the results of each to find out what works best.
• Focus on the user experience
• Provide incentives and call to actions
• Test and interate continuously

If you have to test things individually, be sure to test them quickly.

Hiten gives an example using CrazyEgg heatmap tool. Conversions increased by users spending more time on the site – which happened as a result of making tests and edits to the site.

Launch early with a small user base. Be slower to launch with big splash and PR. Until you know for sure that your product doesn’t suck, it’s better not to throw tons of marketing budget. Get in front of a small universe of users early. Use search marketing to attract users and test refine test refine.

Once you have solid data and testing, soft launch and when you know your web site and product works then put signifcant marketing dollars towards promotion.

Activation Tools:

• Crazy Egg – Visual click mapping
• Google Website optimizer – A/B multivariate testing
• Marketo (B2B lead generation management)

Activation Resources:

• Avinash Kaushik article: Experimentation and Testing: A Primer
• Copyblogger: Landing Page Tutorials
• 101 Easy to Use Google Website Optimizer

Retention
Emails and alerts, blogs, RSS, system events and time based events.

• Automated emails are simple and easy retention, but don’t overdo it.
• Lifecycle emails @ +3 +7 +30
• Status emails – weekly or monthly
• Event emails as they occur BUT make it easy to unsubscribe

What compelling words and calls to action that drive users to your site? Spend 80% of your time on the subject of your email and 20% on the body text.

How do users come back?

• Automated emails
• RSS – news feeds
• Widgets and embeds – example YouTube and Slideshare

Example goals: Users visit once per month or once per week means you have a relationship with that customer.

• Open rate of 20% and a 2% CTR (a bit high)
• High deliverability and low spam rating
• Long customer life cycle and low decay
• Identify cheerleaders for your site and tap them as testers and evangelists

Test, test, test email subject lines and don’t confuse customers with content in the body text. Find out what subject line text drives user behavior.

Key metrics to track? Source, quantity, conversion, loyalty (return visits) and session length.

Retention Tools:

• Campaign Monitor and mailchimp
• TriggerMail
• Litmusapp.com – email and web site design testing in different client/browsers

Retention Resources:

• 30 Free HTML email templates
• Best practices in writing Subject lines

Referral

Focus on driving referrals “after” users have a positive experience. 8-10 users are happy with activation experience before you initiate any viral campaigns.

How do users refer others?

• Send to friend email IM
• Social media
• Widgets
• Affiliates

Referral Visual Growth Factor

Viral Growth Factor = X * Y * Z

• X is percent of users who invite others
• Y is the average number of peole that they invite
• Z is the percent of users who accepted an invitation

A viral growth factor >1 means an exponential organic user acquisition. Caution is that you might not want to focus on this if your user experience isn’t great yet.

Referral Tools:

• gigya.com social media distribution and tracking tool
• Sharethis content sharing buttons – (Note, TopRank also has it’s Social Bookmarking Tool)
• getmycontacts.com PHP contacts importing and invitation software

Referral Resources:

• Seven ways to go VIRAL
• Whats your viral loop?

Revenue

What do you have to offer that’s worth charging money?

Revenue Tips:

• Don’t rely on AdSense
• Start Free > Go Freemium. Get a free model to one where a small percentage pays a premium.
• Subscription / Recurring transactions
• Qualify your customers – Lead gen (arbitrage)
• Sell something! physical or virtual

One interesting concept from McClure: Unsubscribe is more of a hassel than paying. Not such an appealing goal but gives you a sense that if you can’t capture a small % of all the leisure spending that happens, then you may have a problem with your offer or your model.

Now we get to hear from Vanessa Fox, Founder of Nine By Blue with a presentation on, “Search metrics for startups”. Afterwards, Fox explained the reason to start Nine By Blue but I’m still not sure what it means or if there is a story behind that specific name. Maybe she has nine cats and blue is her favorite color?

30% of all sites on the web get their traffic from search. If your site isn’t getting at least that much natural search traffic, you have an opportunity. One of the biggest reasons search engines don’t send a site traffic is that the content is not “discoverable”. If search engines can’t find a site’s content, it basically doesn’t exist.

Fox gives an example of Arbor Snowboards and Vans that don’t offer text content. The sites are basically invisible to search engines. As a resource, Google WebmasterCentral can be used to see if a site is having search engine accessibility issues.

Search Discoverability: Can searchers find your site?

• Fox gives an example of a search on “superbowl” and the Superbowl site doesn’t show on the first page.
• Gives another example of Vans with a search for “skate shoes” which has the Vans site showing on page 122 in Google.

Search Conversion: Do searchers click on your result and stay on your site?

• Fox gives example of Dania, a home furnishings retailer where “Dania” is the title tag on all pages of the web site. That makes it difficult for users and search engines to quickly distinguish pages.
• She also shows the Vans.com site again and that it is invisible on a smart phone browser

Measuring search:

• Google Website optimizer
• Webmaster Central
• Google Analytics

Accessibility Measurement:

• Who well is the site being indexed?
• Are site errors decreasing?

Search Conversion Measurement: Bounce rate, average time on site, pages per visit

Key questions:

• What content are external sites linking to the most?
• What is the conversion rate of key terms?
• What queries do you rankin highly on but aren’t getting clicks?

Fox gives an example of her own blog, vanessafoxnude.com getting a spike in traffic. But was it the right traffic? The reality was, people were looking for “vanessa” and “vanessa nude” because of nude pictures of an actor named Vanessa from High School Musical that leaked online.

After this there were site reviews of 10 or more startup websites (except for HP Small Medium Business).

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2008. | Web 2.0 Expo – Startup Marketing Web Metrics | http://www.toprankblog.com

Muhammad Saleem’s portion of the presentation focuses on Social Media Optimization and Marketing 101. I’ve not met Mahammaed in person before and he’s sporting a very cool goatee with a waxed moustache.

Saleem’s presentation focuses on 4 aspects of social media:

• Blogs
• Social News sites
• Social Networks
• Online Video

Many other tools don’t have that big of an impact/conversionrate for the “average” company.

Blogs, social news, networks and online video are low cost and fairly easy to implement. They can also work well with your other SEO efforts.

9 Industry rules of SMO
1. Know your audience – analytics
2. Create original content – try new things
3. Increase your linkability by creating evergreen content worth linking to
4. Make tagging bookmarking easy. Example tools: ShareThis and Sociable
5. Help your content travel through RSS, email subscriptions, newsletters, embeds, mashups and e-books.
6. Reward and thank people that comment, that link and traffic sources.
7. Be real and genuine – if you’re not, users are savvy and can tell if you’re just spinning or marketing
8. Participate – Not only on your own site, but also with other sites. Especially if it’s a major traffic source. Don’t just “take the traffic”, participate on social news sites and participate.
9. Make SMO part of the process and best practices. Develop a social media strategy and use the tactics wisely.

One if the big problems with people optimizing social media is a short term perspective. A short term strategy is misleading.

A long term strategy will show a spike and then a drop and then another spike and drop with about 20% of the traffic retained. The “Digg effect”.

Stats that matter (Digg culture)
- Audience preferences – what social site best matches the kind of content you have to offer
- Popularity by container, keywords or by day. Shows a graph indicating what’s popular on Digg by category. The Tech category on Digg has been in decline for about a year. That should influence the categories you promote to.
Gives examples of StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious. In the case of Delicious, tech is on the upswing and if following the data, you can see if you’re promoting tech, it makes more sense to promote on Delicious than Digg.

Look at links by topic and track trends to see what the audience responds to. Same with links by keyword so you can make decisions about what words to use in your social news submission.

Also look at conversion rates by time to find the optimal time to submit and promote a social news item in order to achieve the desired outcomes.

When optimizing yoru site for social media, there are 2 things to keep in mind:
1. Content – Copywriting and design that resonates with the audiences you are promoting to.
Make your content pop – the 10 second rule. Write for regular readers, social media visitors and search engines.

2. Community – To be able to seed content to mavens and power users, you need to be involved with the communities you’re promoting to. Muhammad mentions the tendency for these users to reciprocate the promotion of content. In order to do that, you need to have something to offer and you can do that by being actively involved in the community.

Social media readers consumer content at a much faster rate. Site design and content organization should be laid out according to their information consumption habits of social communities being promoted to.

Tips: Titles and headlines, sub hjeadings, bold, bullets, underlined, quotes, images, charts, graphs and a summary of the article.

Check your content to make sure it’s original content, substantive topic and easily digestible.

With plugins (All in One SEO Plugin for WordPress) you can have different titles for the same post.

Social media titles:
1. Lists
2. Adjectives
3. Figures, facts, numbers
4. Indicating media type – photos, audio, video, interactive

Whichever title tactic you use, it’s important to deliver on what’s promised if you want to have impact.

Ex: 16 Incredibly Unconventional Hotel Rooms (PICS)
The formula: [Number] [Adjective] [Keyword Phrase]

4 Amazing Social media friendly site design tips: (my attempt at using Mahammad’s social title writing advice)

Things to avoid with your site URL stucture and hosting service
1. Hyphens or numbers in domain
2. Keyword stuffed
3, Any non dot come domain
4. Not self hosted

General site design tips
1. Take down the registration wall
2. Overselling ads
3. Minimize use of widgets
4. Show interest and participation with social community
5. Recognize
6. Access – Make sure you offer access to whatever conversion you are targeting

High value content above the fold
If everything above the fold is ads, you’re not delivering high impact content. [Doesn't this run contrary to the advice to provide easy access to the conversions you desire? What's the happy medium?]

People say social media readers have a high bounce rate, it’s not that these readers don’t want to read the content, it’s that the content is not designed for social media readers information consumption habits.

Community – actionable items
1. Relationships with the community can be instrumental to being able to seed and promote content.
2. The social media manual – Use common sense in your behavior, don’t just dump your content.

Ways to share your content for more exposure:
IM, email, share features inherent to social news sites, microblogging. Don’t use public forums and groups because the social news sites can easily see that a group is engaged in organized content promotion. [Muhammad didn't say not to create a group, he just said don't create a public one]

The Digg algorithm: Recent participation and rank of the person submitting, who has voted on the content after submission, the submitters voting content on the site as a whole, the category being submitted to and activity in that category, the speed of votes and diversity of voters, buries received for the user submitting, comments made and comment ratings. All these factors affect how the story being submitted is handled by the Digg algorithm.

Misconceptions people often have about the Digg algorithm:
There is not specific number of votes, it’s dynamic. The news item doesn’t HAVE to be submitted by a power user. The number of people you “friend” on the site is not important. There also isn’t a 24 hour window required. It’s possible for content to go hot 3-4 days after being submitted.

Social media and search marketing:
Social media efforts can interact and influence search engine optimization efforts. The visibility of content on search can be affected by social media visibility.

Interestingly, he gives example of a submission from a photo site that went hot and had 8 hyphens in the url

How do you calclate the ROI on SMO?
- Standard web analytics
- User engagement on seeded page as well as destination – comments
- Cross pollination effect – Hot on Digg then hot on Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc
- Actual conversions: registrations, subscribing, clicking on ads
- Link building overall and ranking on long tail terms
- Branding and mindshare – This is an investment. With the consistency of submitting quality content,

5 Essential Rules of Social Media Optimization:
1. Embrace technology, transparency and community
2. Do your home work – know the audience
3. Focus on niche communities
4. Create value rather than expect value
5. Encourage and reward interaction

Audience Question which I also had: You’ve given great examples using blogs. What are the opportunities for regular web sites to optimize their sites for social media?

Saleem: It’s easy for magazines to implement SEO – they’re already creating content. Wired, Epicurious etc do well. It’s harder for corporations to do it because you have to create content.

However, car companies are an example where they communicate with enthusiasts and give them unique access and content. That might not generate traffic to the corp site, but it does increase awareness and can drive pickups on other blogs that point to the corporate site or blog.

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TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2008. | Web 2.0 Expo – Social Media Optimization | http://www.toprankblog.com