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, problem 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 even more. After all, blogs are social media and 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?

Day 5 of the 2010 online Social Media Success Summit included 3 more information-packed sessions.

Unfortunately, the last session seemed very rushed (it ended in under 18 minutes) and it was probably a good topic for further discussion.

The three sessions were:

1. 8 Steps to Creating a Winning Social Media Strategy
2. How Mobile Marketing Can Improve Your Social Marketing
3. The Future of Social Media

Once again, I’ve published a detailed wrap up post on Market It Write’s blog with the main takeaways of the 3 sessions.

I never realized that just by participating in social media marketing and email marketing, you are also participating in mobile marketing. Why? Because people interact with their social networks and email from their phone. As the popularity of smart phones grows, this will be increasingly important. In fact, it may be an important trend to watch when it comes to the future of social media. Yesterday’s presentation in that regard was about focusing on trends and not specific technologies.

An eye-opening example of that were the stats on search engines from 1999. Back then, Yahoo was the big Kahuna of search. Google hadn’t even emerged yet. Today, Google dominates the market. It’s a lot like how MySpace shrunk and Facebook grew dramatically. What new technologies and platforms will be out there just a few years from now? It’s mind boggling.

What are your thoughts on mobile marketing and the future of social media?

Day 4 of the 2010 online Social Media Success Summit included 3 informative sessions.

Unfortunately, my PC froze up during the final session, but I did jump back in as soon as I could. I’m confident that I was still able to capture the essence of the final session.

The three sessions were:

1. How to Bring Raving Customers to Your Local Business with Foursquare and Groupon
2. 5 Social Media Case Studies Worth Close Examination
3. Creating Buzz With Social Media Contests

I’ve published a detailed wrap up post on Market It Write’s blog with the main takeaways of the 3 sessions. Unfortunately, my PC froze up during the final session on Social Media Contest, but I did jump back in as soon as I could and with the help of the slides and recordings of the sessions, I think I’ve captured what was important.

I’m beginning to see a continuing theme throughout the Summit sessions. Essentially:

• Be yourself and be friendly.
• Listen to your customers and prospects.
• Don’t butt in or push your products or services too hard. Let your community do that for you, as their word is considered much more credible than yours.
• Social media is not a quick fix. Even though with some viral campaigns activity may be front-loaded, over time your customers will spread the word about you and you need to be listening to what they say. However, you don’t always need to respond.
• Social media offers great potential for viral marketing; however, not all social media efforts go viral.
• There are great opportunities to reuse you content on various social media outlets.

What are your thoughts? Did you attend any of the sessions? Are you enjoying the summit as much as I am? If you weren’t able to attend this year, do you see yourself attending next year’s summit? Have you tried Foursquare or Groupon?

Day 3 of the 2010 online Social Media Success Summit included 3 information packed sessions:

1. Getting the Most Out of LinkedIn
2. How Whole Foods, Best Buy and Home Depot are Leveraging Social Media
3. 3 Reasons You Need a YouTube Strategy

I’ve published a long wrap up post on Market It Write’s blog with the main takeaways of the 3 sessions. It wasn’t really too easy to summarize the panel discussion that talked about how Whole Foods, Best Buy and Home Depot are using social media because I thought there was too much important first-hand information that really shouldn’t be left out.

I think the main takeaways from the case studies is that they all agreed that social media is NOT a campaign for them. It’s more like a long term strategy that they intend to build and grow. I think the other common trait I noticed among the 3 big companies is that they have a lot of grass roots involvement in social media throughout the organization. I think that’s what makes social media somewhat unique. While they have a few people in a central corporate location driving things, much of their social media interaction is taking place in the field.

The LinkedIn and YouTube presentations were interesting, although the YouTube presentation seemed a bit short. Of course, that session was the last of the day and by then I considered a short presentation to be an asset. I was getting pretty tired by the end of the third session.

I took a lot of notes during the three sessions. Of course, I’m not going to rehash everything that was said, and some of the tips are best saved for later, individual follow-on blog posts. I think the best thing I decided to do this time was not to try to keep on eye on the tweets coming out of the session and just give my undivided attention to the presentations. The other smart thing, for me at least, was to tile the windows on my screen and type my notes during the session, instead of trying to write them out by hand. It was easier to make sense of them and I didn’t have to type them in. If I’m taking notes by hand and the speaker is moving along at a pretty good clip, it gets to the point where I can’t read my own writing (maybe better classified as scribble). I will probably continue doing that for the remaining sessions.

What are your thoughts? Did you attend any of the sessions? Are you enjoying the summit as much as I am? If you weren’t able to attend this year, do you see yourself attending next year’s summit?

Day 2 of the 2010 online Social Media Success Summit featured 3 sessions:

1. Optimizing Your Facebook Fan Page for Profits presented by Mari Smith
2. 5 Ways to Measure Social Media Marketing Success presented by Jason Falls
3. How a Chicago Pizza Franchise Used Social Media to Create Raving Customers (A Case Study) presented by Ramon De Leon, franchisee of 6 Domino’s Pizza stores in the Chicago area

I attended the first two sessions but not the third.

Mari Smith’s presentation included reasoning on why Facebook Fan pages are a better choice for most businesses than Facebook Groups – primarily because Fan pages are customizable and fully indexed in Google while Groups are neither customizable nor are they indexed by Google. For large corporations, Groups further restrict that you can only message 5,000 members at a time, while you can message unlimited fans of your Facebook fan page.

She also discussed ways you can customize Facebook Fan pages and use them for A/B testing as landing pages to your Facebook presence. It was an information packed session that went very fast. Smith will be back with a more advanced Facebook session later in the summit.

Falls’ presentation was all about determining social media success through a strategic planning process that includes setting measurable goals, defining clear objectives and measuring results. Many businesses claim that they are unable to measure the ROI of social media efforts, thus this presentation was helpful in dispelling that myth.

I have written a more thorough post on the takeaways from Day 2 of SMSS on the Market It Write blog.

My Facebook Fan Page for About Home Business

What were your takeaways from Day 2 (if you were in attendance). I’d especially love to hear from those who sat through all of the third session since I wasn’t able to. What do you think about measuring the success of social media marketing campaigns? Do you have Facebook Fan page?

The opening day of the 2010 online Social Media Success Summit was a keynote address from Guy Kawasaki of alltop.com, entitled Using Twitter as a Marketing Weapon

I’ve published a post on Market It Write’s blog with the main takeaways of the session.

One of the things that Kawasaki makes a regular Twitter practice that I hadn’t considered before was the he repeats the same tweet four times at eight-hour intervals. He gave the example of how TV news, like CNN, repeat their news stories on a loop, so that if you were to sit there and watch it continually over a two-hour period you’d hear the same news over and over again. I can see where tweeting at different times of day could be an advantage – especially if you want your tweets to get noticed by Twitter users over different time zones. While morning seems to be the most active Twitter time for most, there are those who only participate in the early evening or late at night, too, so I can see the reasoning behind it.

Some attendees seemed to think that auto-tweeting the same message was tantamount to spamming. I suppose there may be a number of Twitter users who feel that way, and social media fans in general don’t take lightly to spam. Kawasaki showed his analytics that further supported his reasoning in that all four tweets had fairly strong click-through rates at the tie they were tweeted.

What are your thoughts? Are repeated tweets spam in your book, or smart social media marketing?

The old days of finding keywords and then performing organic SEO techniques on your website’s pages and finding links are gone. It’s just not enough anymore to try to carry out a successful SEO strategy without social media included in the mix.

What do I mean when I say Social Media?

When most people think of “social media” they think of Facebook and Twitter. True, these are social media outlets and chances are, depending on the nature of your business and your target prospects, these social media outlets should be included in your SEO strategy.

But many people overlook the fact that blogs are also considered part of social media, and they can play a big role in the success of your SEO campaign, especially if they are integrated with other social media outlets, including Facebook, Twitter and for many – especially B2B businesses – LinkedIn.

Regularly posting blog content generates leads. Plain and simple. Proven. A recent Hubspot study confirms it. See Bigger Business Blogs Generate More Leads.

Why Blogs work for SEO

Regular blog posts, especially, but not limited to, those posts that are targeting your ideal keywords, also attract the attention of search engines. And, because blogging platforms like WordPress generate a separate page for each blog post, you pick up that many more entry points for people to find your site in search. Plus, blog posts, because they are not generally selling anything (a good word here and there doesn’t hurt with a link to a product or service page), are more likely to attract incoming links.

Additionally, you can cross-link to other pages in your site you want to rank for using the target keywords for the destination page in the anchor text. Doing so also helps the page in which those links are placed. All good things for SEO.

Now reconsider your SEO strategy with no blog, or a blog with no recent posts. Doesn’t make much sense for most businesses, does it?

Integrating your Blog Posts with Other Forms of Social Media

Once you get on a regular schedule providing read- and link-worthy posts on your blog, you’ll want to get those posts found. That’s where other social media outlets come into the picture.

Twitter

Tweeting about your new blog post works, especially if you have a strong Twitter following. But you don’t want to Tweet only your blog posts and nothing else. You need to participate – to be social by posting thoughts and re-Tweeting the thoughts and interesting posts from others.

Facebook

You can also promote your new blog posts on your Facebook fan page. Your Facebook fans (and your Twitter followers, for that matter) may not have subscribed to your blog and they may not otherwise know about your new post and the insight it provides.

Again, your Facebook fan page updates cannot only be about promoting your blog posts. You’ll need to sprinkle in other updates and insights or people will think you’re merely blowing your own horn. They’ll learn to ignore you.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn now allows you to post your Tweets on your LinkedIn profile. If you use a tool like TweetDeck, you can automatically update your LinkedIn (and Facebook) status with your Tweets. However, keep in mind that those updates will go to your personal profile page and not your company page. At least in the case of Facebook, you’ll want to provide information about your new posts manually – right on your fan page. The purpose wasn’t to promote your blog post to your family and friends, was it? It only takes a minute.

Just the Tip of the Social Media Iceberg

I’ve given you some basic ideas on how to integrate social media with your SEO strategy. Today, that’s essential as search engines look for “real time” results – what’s hot right now. Your Tweet may end up at the top of the search results page, whereas your website may not. Plus, you are adding links to your blog post. Always a good thing.

SEO can no longer be performed effectively in a vacuum. You need to take the blinders off and look at the bigger picture. And while it may take some time to see results, (doesn’t everything worthwhile seem to take time?) be patient. You’ll improve your rankings and build your traffic.

Wasn’t that the goal of your SEO strategy in the first place?

How have you integrated social media with your SEO efforts, and what results have you seen? Leave a comment: I’d love to hear from you.

So 2.0 has come and gone? Aw man!

Anyway, in her post on Copyblogger, Copywriting 3.0, How to Bounce the Fat Kid off the See-Saw, guest blogger Erika Napoletano takes a look at how the art of copywriting has gone high tech, with 5 specific areas where traditional copywriters need a strong understanding in order to create effective content and get it found in today’s world.

In it, she points out that you don’t need to be a 500-pound gorilla to overcome the bullies (competition), you just need to think like one.

Actually, four of the five areas call for a strong understanding of SEO and relate to SEO copywriting in a way, so brushing up on what you need to do may not be as hard as it sounds.

This is a very high-quality post (as you’d expect from Copyblogger) that’s informative AND entertaining, so it’s a perfect example of the type of copywriting you should aim for in today’s online world.

Copywriting 3.0, How to Bounce the Fat Kid off the See-Saw