SMX Advanced: SEO, Meet SMM

(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