I’ll skip over the trip to Newark and into New York city, as Rebecca’s already covered our exciting three-train adventure and “moderately” priced dinner, and cut straight to Day One…
I attended Advertising in Social Media (yeah, of course I did) and listened to Nicole Bogas of BlogAds, Marc Schiller from ElectricArtists and Bill Flitter from Pheedo, Inc. Bill Flitter talked about integrating social media aspects into online advertising, letting people comment on ads and write reviews for advertised products. He made the point that interaction was one very good way of turning disinterested users into potential customers, both by letting them comment and by letting them read the comments of others.
Nicole Bogas talked about how BlogAds creates highly targeted ads for popular blogs such as Perez Hilton, Daily Kos and Cute Overload. The ads are made to look as organic as possible and are specifically designed as click-bait, only presenting readers with a small amount of tantalizing information. She also mentioned testing even successful ads because you never know how a change in an ad’s wording or image could improve click-through rates or conversions.
Marc Schiller talked about marketing in Second Life and how ElectricArtists have chosen Second Life to prototype projects that they plan to develop in real life. The company takes users’ comments and recommendations into account and make changes to their plans for a glass-and-concrete hotel that will open in 2008.
My question from this session is best described as a stunned “WTF” face at the idea of people “haning out” in Second Life, “waiting” for events such as fashion shows to start. I mean, what? You turned up early for something that was happening on the internet? I do, however, agree that virtual reality probably has great potential and I can well imagine a world where people book real hotel rooms while in Second Life. Twenty-five years ago, our methods of booking things online would have seemed like a virtual reality to most.
… and that was as far as I got going-to-sessions-wise on Tuesday, as Scott Orth had hooked up us with tickets to the Late Show with David Letterman. As a long-time Letterman fan, I was mightily excited about this prospect.
You can see us in the audience when a guy runs down the isle. Yes, I DVRed it. What?
I learned a valuable don’t-be-lazy lesson from this session: just editing pages won’t help much with conversion. If a page isn’t doing well, rewriting it from scratch is the only way to go. Editorial tweaks are the lazy way out of a content problem and won’t fix many underlying composition issues.
Jill Whalen spoke about avoiding copy that sounds silly and being careful of WYSIWYG editors that turn great content into a giant graphic. She also went over which formats are definitely indexable and which aren’t. I was surprised at how many examples Jill could provide where the cached version of a site showed nothing at all due to the use of beautiful yet totally useless graphics.
Another great point – and one that I’ll keep in mind for client work – is that if you are a marriage lawyer in Boston, you don’t need to be topping the SERPs for the term “lawyer.” People in Northern Ireland or Los Angeles or Singapore can’t and won’t use your services. Don’t waste yours and your SEO’s time and money on ranking for such a broad, difficult term.
My question from this session was in regards to alternative spellings. Jill talked about using alternate spellings (such as co-worker versus coworker) on different pages in order to not look silly. I wondered about sites that serve both American and British markets. Do you integrate both American and British spelling? Even spread across multiple pages, that’s going to catch people’s attention and potentially look like you don’t know the difference between the two. Of course, having a .co.uk and a .com version of your site is an option, but then you’re splitting your domains which is possibly worse than looking like you can’t spell!
After attending “Earning Money From Contextual Ads”, Rebecca and I met Michael McDonald of WebProNews for a videoed discussion about social media. Rebecca says in her post about the conference that she sat there and looked like an idiot, but that’s not true: we were both fabulous. I don’t think I gawked in fear at the camera and thought of the size of WebProNews’ audience even once.
Day Two’s Microsoft dinner was absolutely great, although Scott was disappointed that the cigar-shaped objects on our table were in fact chocolate and not illicit and smokable.
Despite the lack of tobacco products, Mystery Guest and I were rather pleased with dinner
Next up, I attended Wikipedia and SEO, and I got to see Neil Patel wearing a suit. I also learned that it’s not okay to “be a dick” on Wikipedia because apparently they don’t like that so much. Also, on a more serious note, I never knew quite the extent of Wikipedia’s terms and conditions. I was aware that they did not allow people to modify content that stood to benefit them in some way, but I was not aware of the multitude of other rules and regulations the site has in place.
I’m also quite impressed that, given Wikipedia’s bazillion pages, the community manage to police their site so well. Despite how much we dislike Wikpedia’s dominance of the SERPs and of college citation pages, it’s truly impressive that their community cares so much about the integrity of such an enormous site. It’s rare for a site of that size to be so well-cared for by its users. Just ask MySpace.
After our great dinner with some fellow SEO ladies, we caught about five hours of sleep before Rand’s presentation on link-baiting. As I walked in, only marginally late, Rand said to the crowd, “Oh, here’s one of the people responsible for our link-bait right here!” On the screen was an entire post devoted to celebrity nudity. Luckily, I don’t embarrass very easily.
In the latter part of the day, the Mozzers got to encounter Grouchy Jane at the airport, who is also known as Don’t Mess With Me (Or Just Give Me Ice-Cream) Jane. Having been presented with a chocolate sundae, we boarded our flight for Seattle and I promptly passed out, awaking somewhere over Minnesota. When we got home, it was raining in Seattle and didn’t want to see another martini glass for quite some time. Thanks to all of you who had fun with us in New York, bought us drinks, stopped to talk to us in the foyer and hallways of the Hilton and stayed up with us until ungodly hours at the Old Castle pub. We enjoyed ourselves immensely, and hope to see you all in Seattle in June!
