Wow. What happened?

I was moving along pretty well there, at least through day 6 of the Social Media Success Summit, then blam! No posts ’til now.

I’ve been busy and the Memorial Day weekend didn’t help, but that’s no excuse. After all, the Summit ended before Memorial Day. I did manage to snag one full day away from the computer though.

At any rate, the Social Media Success Summit 2010 has come and gone. To say I learned a lot would be an understatement. I can now understand the value of conference attendance. It was like a year’s worth of study completed in less than a month.

Here’s what I’ve written up over on the Market It Write blog:

Day 7 Social Media Summit Highlights

Day 7 Social Media Success Summit Wrapup. Day 7 actually discussed blogs. I was wondering when they were going to get around to that, but finally there was a discussion on blogs. So my gripe in my Day 6 post became moot. In addition to blogs, the final session was meant to be a wrap up that pulled all of the sessions together.

To satisfy the need to pull everything together on my own, I then posted a complete summary of the important takeaways over the course of the Summit.

17 Crucial Must-Knows for Social Media Success

I titled this post, “17 Crucial Things You Must Know for Social Media Success”. It’s a post that was intended to pull everything together. I think it succeeded – it’s been a popular post and has drawn some great comments.

For the most part, all of the Summit coverage on Market it Write was popular. It resulted in a surge of new Twitter followers for Market It Write and for my own accounts, including some well-known and respected bloggers. We saw some good traffic spikes on the blog.

The challenge now is to keep the momentum going. The real way to do that is to keep posting strong content that people want to share and comment on.

More Value-Adds for Conference Blogging

My blogging activities during the Summit helped me in a number of ways, perhaps the most important of which is it forced me to think about what was really discussed every day. It was difficult to avoid getting too wordy with the daily session posts. There was just SO much information to digest.

Because I knew I was going to post about each session, I had to pay close attention and take good notes. It took a few days for me to discover the best method for note-taking without paying more attention to my notes than the active session.

The second value-add of documenting what happened at the conference was that it forced me to post on this blog on a more frequent basis. That’s always a good thing and it’s something I try to drill into my clients every day – you need to post frequently and on a consistent basis.

What happens is that your posts get indexed, so you get more visitors. Most of whom are new to your blog. Some of whom decide that either they’ll subscribe to your posts or RSS feed or come back again to see what else you have to say. At that point, you need to keep the momentum going or you lose your hard-earned audience.

And that’s what I did – something I tell clients you absolutely cannot do: Let your post frequency drop away to nothing. But I’m back now and I’m gong to fight like mad to keep the posts coming. Not crappy filler posts that go up for the sake of posting. But posts you’ll find informative enough to share and are worth coming back for.

Share your thoughts and comments. About the Summit, social media in general and about blogging. I’d love to hear them and connect with you.

Day 6 of the 2010 online Social Media Success Summit included 3 more great sessions to help attendees make the most of their social media efforts.

It’s always great when you can hang with guys like Chris Brogan, Brian Clark and Dareen Rowse and Mari Smith’s Facebook presentation was awesome, as expected.

The three sessions were:

1. Facebook Engagement: Advanced Strategies for Building a Loyal Fan Base (Mari Smith)
2. Using Social News Sites to Grow Your Audience & Improve Your Search Engine Optimization (Muhammad Saleem)
3. Twitter Power Panel: Tips & Insights From Twitter Superstars (Chris Brogan, Brian Clark, Dareen Rowse)

Once again, I’ve published a detailed wrap up post on Market it Write’s blog with the main takeaways of the 3 sessions as well as some closing quotes from Brogan, Clark and Rowse.

It’s not easy to say which was my favorite presentation of the day. In her first presentation Mari Smith went a bit fast for me, but this time her speed was perfect. She’s an incredible person and probably the foremost authority on Facebook. She’s also very friendly, open and genuinely likable. Of course, to say that Chris Brogan, Darren Rowse and Brian Clark weren’t likable would be an injustice.

While I appreciated their insights on using Twitter, I’m thinking I would have enjoyed hearing them talk about blogs and blogging even more. After all, blogs are part of social media and can act as the home base to which you can draw people in from outposts like Facebook and Twitter (and Digg, for that matter). Plus, these 3 guys are probably the “go to” of blogging around the world. But SMSS 10 is not focusing on blogs this year.

As much as I’m loving the Summit, I think that may be an oversight and perhaps contributes to some overlooking blogs as an important part of the social media marketing mix. (My oversight – Tuesday’s first session is Making Your Blog a Social Media Destination with Denise Wakeman – Yay!) What are your thoughts?

A new blogging services client asked me to help get her blog set up on Google Blogger (blogspot) a few months ago. I was happy to help.

This particular blog’s purpose was to provide useful information and legal tips on personal finance and debt management. The client wanted to monetize the blog through some affiliate programs and with AdSense.

I had no problem getting the content in place and laying out the pages, etc. I’ve used Blogger quite a bit so it didn’t take much time. A few weeks later, I went into Blogger to edit this personal finance blog. To my surprise, Google had disabled the blog completely as they believed it was spam. WTF??????

Now, it’s about 6 weeks later. Today, for the THIRD time I clicked the link to get the blog restored within Blogger because it was mis-characterized as spam. Meanwhile, the blog is not live, is not available to the public or EVEN TO THE BLOG ADMINISTRATOR, so even if I decided to try making some adjustments so the Goog wouldn’t consider it spam in the future, I CAN’T. In essence, then, Google Blogger has hijacked this content since it is no longer accessible. And meanwhile, of course, I see spam blogs all over the blogspot domain all the time. URGHH!!

Of course, all of this points out that if you want to have a blog, you are best off hosting it on your own domain so this doesn’t happen to you. And yes, there are countless other benefits to hosting your blog on your own domain, but that’s a post (or several) for another time.