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Free Tickets to Social Media Strategies in Santa Clara

April 7, 2010 By Leave a Comment

We will be giving away two ticket to the Social Media Strategies conference for Web Analytics World readers. The conference is hosted in Santa Clara (May 18th) and is focused on social business, social marketing, advertising and optimization. To enter, add the text “webanalyticsworld” in the tag field when you sign up http://www.webguild.org/user/registration.php?retURL=/lists/?p=subscribe. (You cannot be a vendor, consultant or provider of search, SEO social media marketing services. You have to be an end user of these services at a company. The ticket is not transferable nor can it be sold or redeemed for cash value.)


If you don’t win the tickets, we are also offering $200 off the registration price if you sign up by April 17, 2010. That code is also “webanalyticsworld“.

What You Will Learn

  • How to create an effective Social Media strategy
  • How to measure the effectiveness of your social media strategy
  • Best practices to track, analyze, and improve your social media marketing campaigns.
  • Optimization techniques to increase usage and engagement of social media tools and applications.
  • Trends and future direction of social media and how you can best position your business to benefit.
Filed Under: SEM Conferences, social media

Social Media & Mobile at SMX East 2009

October 5, 2009 By Leave a Comment
SMX East is set to take place Monday in New York and if you take a look at the agenda you’ll notice some pretty cool Social Media & Mobile sessions. Here are some of the Social Media & Mobile sessions you absolutely can’t miss:
Day 1
Mobile Search Apps & Opportunities – Need to search for something? There’s an app for that! A large variety of them for a wide range of needs. This session looks at popular search apps on different devices, how they gather data and opportunities they offer to marketers.
Ranking Tactics For Local Search – This session looks at cutting edge tactics that work to drive traffic from local listings, plus highlights research to predict where things may be going.
Day 3
Social Media, Search & Reputation Management – Trying to deal with a reputation management issue? Social media sites offer a key opportunity to influence search results. This session looks at the role they can play.
Analytics For Social Media – Trying to understand how your social media campaign is going? Standard web analytics tools might not be enough. This session looks at some specialized tools to consider.
Filed Under: SEM Conferences

Searchnomics 2009 – 5 Reasons to Attend

September 3, 2009 By Leave a Comment

The 2009 Searchnomics Conference is set to take place on October 29th and 30th in Santa Clara, California. If you’re on the fence about whether or not you’re going to attend, here are 5 reasons to help you make the choice:


  1. It’s Santa Clara in late October, where the weather will still be hovering around 75 degrees (that’s 24-25 Celsius for us Canadian Folk).
  2. 3 Great Tracks: Search Marketing, Social Media and SEO with frequent appearances on topics such as: Web Analytics and Mobile
  3. Some excellent sessions on the agenda which deal with integration, reputation management and actionable site reviews.
  4. They’ve had some great speakers such as Google’s Marissa Mayer and Hitwise’s Bill Tancer in the past and are expecting to keep the trend of having the top talent on-location going.
  5. Bill Hunt has been added to the Searchnomics Advisory Board who brings a vast amount of strategic knowledge to the table.
Filed Under: SEM Conferences

SES San Jose 2009 – Quick Day 3 Recap

August 14, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Today was the final day of SES San Jose (in terms of sessions) and we had another pretty full day. Over the last 3 days we posted over 70 tweets which you can check out here. Here is a recap:
  • Charlene Li, Co-Author, Groundswell started the day with an excellent keynote in which she discussed the future of search including many social media elements. Charlene explained that in the future, social networks will be like the air, in that they will be seamless and our networks will follow us everywhere we go. Another cool concept she mentioned was the idea of targeting via social graphics whereby marketers can target users based on their behaviours and relationships with others.
  • Discussion with Local.com – We met with the Local.com team to chat about what’s happening in their organization. One of the main strategic services was their Local Connect platform by which they provide their media partners a white labelled version of their local directory. Local.com’s traffic is up 57% from last year or 63 million visitors per month.
  • Follow the Carrot: Cool Mobile Apps is what we attended after lunch, which was a session dedicated to successful mobile apps and mobile app strategies. The panel mentioned 5 characteristics of Cool Apps: Unique, Viral, Useful, Interactive, Fun/Novel and 3 major factors when developing mobile apps – Distribution , Discoverability and Stickiness.
  • Discussion: Omniture’s SearchCenter with the VP of Search Sales, Chris Zaharias. Chris mentioned SearchCenter has released version 3.3 which included some significant infrastructure and backend updates – mainly to handle the load of over 150 million keywords. SearchCenter has approximately 600-700 clients of which 15% use it as a standalone application. Omniture is looking to become a platform for agencies and businesses rather than a suite of tools.
  • Up Close and Personal with Yelp! – which featured Jeremy Stoppleman, CEO of Yelp! Jeremy discussed that Yelp! has increased their visitors to 25 million per month which includes 7 million reviews. Yelp’s strategy is to launch one city at a time and to do it right rather than growing too quickly. With the help of Yelp, small businesses will be encouraged to provide the highest level of service or face negative reviews.
  • Extreme Makeover Live! Why Am I Not Making Enough Sales? – The audience submitted 5 or 6 sites and the expert panelists provided insightful feedback to help the businesses increase their bottom line or number of leads. Most of the sample sites required obvious changes which could lead to some quick wins for the site owners.
Filed Under: Search Engine Strategies, SEM Conferences

Are You Attending eComXpo? Free Virtual Conference

May 25, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Affiliate marketing industry’s top global experts share their insights on how online marketing strategies need to shift in 2009 at eComXpo on July 8-9. They will discuss the latest online tools that both merchants and retailers need to consider to drive ROI and remain competitive in the current landscape.

A key session at the event is a presentation by Chris Anderson, Editor-In-Chief of Wired, talking about developing money models in a cashless economy.

“The internet has enabled lots of businesses and business models to go digital. And one of the economic advantages of digital is that the marginal costs of anufacturing and distribution are zero, or close to it. This means that you can now experiment with giving away one thing to sell something else. It’s no surprise that virtually all businesses on the internet are based on ‘free’ in one way or another,” said Anderson.

Joining the ranks is Rohit Bhargava, Author of Personality Not Included, who shares his innovative strategy on how merchants can use Twitter to generate sales within 30 days. Talking about his presentation, he says, “There’s a growing trend of online retailers using Twitter to promote direct sales and therefore it is important to use it right.” He also added that the increasing role of individuals and personality in driving higher sales and customer loyalty mean that marketers need to change the way that certain pages and processes work in online retail to increase customer loyalty.

eComXpo features a combination of presentations and panel discussions on a variety of topics including social media, marketing accountability, m-Commerce, content optimization, affiliate management and incentivizing, search marketing, new customer acquisition, channel attribution, RSS marketing and black hat vs. white hat.

Debra Haym, Executive Director of eComXpo at New York based conference organizer, Worldwide Business Research, said, “The research for this conference with high caliber marketing executives indicates an intense interest in seeking out the opportunity to discuss many pressing and urgent issues of the day. We have worked hard to create a speaker line up to provide the best catalyst for fresh thinking and energized debate. We expect eComXpo to provide an exceptional platform and that, going forward, it will be viewed as having been a significant and influential gathering.”

eComXpo is 100% virtual and free. For additional information on eComXpo, please visit: http://www.ecomexpo.com/
Filed Under: SEM Conferences

Web Strategy Summit: Calgary

May 4, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Today I will be attending the Web Strategy Summit, hosted right here in Calgary Alberta. What initially caught my attention was the fact that both Avinash Kaushik and Jeremiah Owyang are keynoting however when I looked deeper into the schedule I found some fascinating workshops that I wanted to explore further as well.

On Day 1 you can find me at the Social Media Strategies for Organizations workshop which is lead by the author of the “Facebook Cookbook” Jay Goldman. Here is a quick summary of what Jay will be going over in his workshop:

Key Concepts

  • The importance of transparency and authenticity
  • Respecting and gardening your community
  • Real products and services for real people
  • Being a champion
  • Handling the inevitable issues

Tools:

  • Blogging and RSS
  • Facebook, MySpace, and the social networks
  • Communicating in 140 characters or less: Twitter
  • Podcasting and the rise of rich media
  • User Generated Content and media from YouTube, Flickr, etc.
  • Collaboration tools (Basecamp, ConceptShare, Google Groups, etc.)

I believe I have a fairly strong grasp of the details above but I am very interested to see how other businesses in Calgary react to strategies on social media – More on this tomorrow.

Filed Under: SEM Conferences

Are You Attending eTail Baltimore 2009?

April 13, 2009 By Leave a Comment
The east coast eTail event is putting its money where its mouth is. At a time when online retail executives need to maximize every aspect of their businesses, eTail Baltimore will leverage its intimate setting to facilitate more brainstorming and networking than ever before.

Last year, the event welcomed 800+ retail executives to Washington DC and 59 solution providers, a deliberate reduced service provider ratio against attendees to ensure a non-tradeshow experience for networking and knowledge sharing. This year, eTail Baltimore will take things one step further with an entire stream focused on retailer-to-retailer idea sharing – other industry events simply cannot pull this off because of the logistics of managing such large crowds. Plus, only 10-15% of all speakers on the agenda will be solution providers – ensuring that every session delivers key retailer insights and take-aways.

Over the course of four days, specialty forums and workshops, designed to drive results among niches within the delegation, offer a focused environment for solution-defining discussion and an intimate setting to benchmark against peers.

New to the eTail Baltimore 2009 program, features included:

  • Extended CEO & CMO/SVP Workshops – Two separate and focused workshops by invitation only.
  • Expanded Card Swap for the entire delegation – This ensures that you meet 30 new executives within the first morning of the event.
  • Networking Workshop – For the first time at eTail, a retailer-only idea sharing workshop during the day’s events. In just over an hour, every retailer gets to ask 5 pressing questions to over 15 other retailers – seats will be limited.
  • Holiday Workshop – Holiday 2009 will be more pivotal to the success of online retailers than ever before. August is the perfect time to rework your holiday strategy – we make sure you capture every dollar in this critical year.
  • Retailer-Led Think Tanks – Back by popular demand, these topic-segmented roundtables offer brainstorming opportunities at the end of each day.

eTail Baltimore will showcase 71+ “Retailer” thought leaders from Fortune 500 companies like Home Depot, Dell and Sears. Notably, Michael Cooper, VP Specialty Channels from Home Depot will show you how to create a multi-channel strategy that unites your channels and supports the customer experience; and Sean MacDonald, Director, Global Online Communities for Dell examines how to utilize social networking tools to build a richer engagement and create a fully-vested relationship with the customer.

Filed Under: SEM Conferences