SMC Seattle

By Maya Bisneer

SMCSeattle was a partner at the Online Marketing Summit this week.

As a member of SMCSeattle, I was clearly one of the few people who had a good pulse on the Social Media side. Considering that most people there were clearly going to be marketers, I was curious to see how they view the intersection of Social Media with Search marketing (SEO and SEM).
On the whole, it is great news for the Social Media community.
Social media is going to play a bigger and bigger role in search and marketing in the coming years. The best way to stay ahead and be the best marketer is to play and learn on the Social Media front. Embrace technology. Laggards in technology will always be laggards in marketing.

The opening Keynote with Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz and Mike Grehan of IncisiveMedia set the tone for the day.
They talked about Facebook, Twitter and Google and how search is shaping up beyond Google these days. Real time search is being redefined by location based applications such as OpenTable that tell you if a table is available at a restaurant close to your location RIGHT NOW. That is way different from, and more real time, than Google search, said Mike Grehan.

Rand Fishkin said they do not have enough data to say how exactly tweets are influencing real time search on Google, but the fact is that they(tweets) are and will influence search. Staying ahead matters, he said. So get on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare.

Each of the keynote speakers gave their four step marketing plan for any small business that wants to market without getting overwhelmed -

Rand Fishkin’s key points -
1. Start with Analytics – focus on measurements
2. Track your tweets, clicks on your links etc. using tools like bit.ly
3. Invest your time and marketing efforts on what you are most passionate about. If you are good at and feel strongly about Twitter and Facebook, start there. If you are an SEO person, first focus your efforts on SEO.
4. Give something away – something of value depending on what skill you have in house. White papers, infographics etc. always get a lot of hits and retweets, he said.
That should give you a good start. Keep measuring and slowly move to other areas and tools to market.

Mike Grehan had a 4P plan for businesses -
1. Positioning – First decide who you are. That is key to driving traffic.
2. Permission – Get the visitor’s permission to email them, add them to your lists etc. For this, you might need to give away something valuable.
3. Partnership – Do not try to go it alone. Marketing is so much more easy and effective if you co-promote, co-sponsor with other companies.
4. Performance – Now focus on doing better. Use tools such as email marketing, affiliates etc.
Measure everything. Analytics are key.

Another highlight of the day was a presentation by Jonathan Colman – Internet Marketing Manager at REI. I am including a link to that here. The presentation was packed with good information – so take your time to study it.

About: Maya Bisineer
twitter: @thinkmaya
Startup: Memetales – http://www.memetales.com
Blog: http://thinkmaya.com