(With my laptop running out of battery power, I decided against doing a live, as-it-happens post on this session. And as it turned out, I ran out of battery power halfway through, anyway. Ugh.)

Rand Fishkin, SEOMoz

Social media marketing, you can:
- rule the SERPs
- control your brand
- get link love
- get traffi
- influence traditional media

Where to do SMM? In order: YouTube, Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, Yelp, LinkedIn, Flickr, Craigslist (temporary, but Best of Craigslist rocks), Facebook, Amazon, MySpace, Technorati, Judy’s Book, Newsvine, CitySearch, WikiHow,

Viral Media Marketing, you can:
- get links
- acquire traffic
- grow readership/subscribers

Where to do VMM: Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Netscape, TechCrunch, Newsvine, Boing Boing, Fark, Engadget, Techmeme, Lifehacker

Neil Patel, Pronet Advertising

Rules of social media
- don’t pay for votes
- don’t create multiple accounts
- don’t submit illegal content

Unwritten rules
- self-promotion
- add biased information
- ask friends for votes

Neil’s Golden Rules
- add tons of friends; they don’t have to be your real friends
- participate in the community
- become a top user
- use their features against them
- create a social brand

Conclusion
- Do what’s ethical
- don’t jeopardize your brand
- think long term

Todd Malicoat, Stuntdubl.com

Benefits: control over anchor text. body copy, etc.

Spam is determined by intent and extent; bots are stupid, but engineers are not.

(Battery is about dead……switching to pen and paper.)

Use social media sites for branding via profiles.

Testing social media sites for link value:
- is the site indexed?
- is the page indexed?
- do pages rank?
- is the theme appropriate?
- does the link pass juice?

Cindy Krum, Blue Moon Works

Secure Your Social Presence
- have a strategy
- identify relevant social sites
- social profiles are portals to your brand

Manage Your Reputation
- push detractors out of top positions
- send traffic to positive press mentions

Empower Brand Evangelists
- give them cool stuff, like widgets, blog/Myspace themes, games, videos

Embrace Convergence
- use offline advertising to promote social profiles