Most of you know why we’re here. It’s Pubcon. This conference marks the first time I’ve been “back” to an industry event: my first journey to Pubcon took place seven weeks after I was hired in 2006. Things are a little different this time around. This time, I know who most people are. Some people even know who I am. They speak to me now, instead of looking at my badge and asking, “Where’s Rand?”
I went to three sessions today. I may attend one more, but I had to leave the convention centre and return to the Wynn to write this, since the Internet connection at the conference is pretty awful. On my return to the hotel and after my purchase of twelve-dollar Internet access (thanks, SEOmoz!), I discovered that being offline for twelve hours creates a rather unmanageable email situation. However, I shall ignore the clogged, waterlogged inbox in order to tell you about my day…
I know that many people are tired of hearing the same presentations with “heard-it-before” content every time they attend a Pubcon, SMX, or SES. Acknowledging this, Rand attempted to bring some social media to a session on social media and pitched two speeches to the crowd, asking them to vote on which they’d rather hear. They chose to skip SMM 101, voting for a presentation on sixty websites that larger, in-depth social media campaigns can use for live links, reputation-management profiles, and the like.
One of his profile-building sites, SlideShare.net, often ranks on page one for my name, although I don’t know how much of that is due to its “freshness,” how much is due to links to my SMX London presentation, and how much is due to domain strength. We’ll see how long it stays there for! Rand also mentioned creating Digg profiles for reputation management’s sake, although I’ve noticed some oddities when it comes to this. I see Digg profiles jump around quite a lot. In one instance, a Digg profile looked as though it had been hit with a – 30 penalty when it had been ranking on page one for a certain keyphrase. Its irrelevancy must have had something to do with this, but irrelevant results sit prettily at the top of the SERPs all the time, so I’m not sure why a Digg profile should drop thirty places overnight.
It was more social media during the next session for me, which is probably appropriate since I somehow managed to be titled SEOcial Butterfly in the “silly SEOmoz titles” contest. It is on my business card and my conference pass. And Dax, what you drew on my card last night was not funny. Well, it was kind of funny, but only in the most inappropriate way…
Gosh, I get rather off topic on five hours’ sleep and lots of coffee. But yes: conference sessions. My next stop was Monetizing Social Media with Vanessa Fox, Michael Gray, Alexander Barbara, and Laura Fitton. One theme ran throughout: Diggers will not click on your Adsense. DO NOT EXPECT THEM TO DO SO! Alexander mentioned removing ads from linkbait before its launch, since ads can often alienate social media participants. I was relieved that the panelists mentioned this, because the name of the session worried me. I was a bit concerned that the name alone may prompt discussion of how to get social media surfers to click on ads and buy things straight away. Thankfully, Michael Gray mentioned just how many times people need to see branding before the brands stick in their minds. I think people lose sight of this because we see our own brands every day. They’re on our homepages and our desktops. They’re embedded in our email signatures. We often don’t realize that everyone else needs to see our brands over and over again before they’ll remember them and recognize what they stand for.
Laura Fitton’s presentation revolved around how social media branding can be insanely profitable. Her entire consultancy was built around social media marketing: her participation at Twitter has made her and her brand particularly strong. While this wasn’t exclusively monetization-oriented, Vanessa Fox and Laura Fitton both brought up a great point about backup material. In different ways, both of them advised that one or two pieces of neat linkbait isn’t enough to make a site sticky. Backup material consists of all the things a website has to offer which don’t constitute the original content that brought someone to the site. Older posts, newer posts, resources, tools, and community features can be backup material. It has to exist, as people look at this when determining whether they’ll subscribe and / or return. Another important point, made by Michael, was about failing to deliver on a promise. This can happen accidentally, especially with linkbait. His example was Microsoft, who apparently offered USB sticks to people who took part in an offer. Microsoft did not expect the offer to reach the homepage of Digg, and were thus caught short when their small stock of USB sticks ran out.
Having a server that can’t handle social media traffic is almost like failing to deliver on a promise. A link at Digg, Slashdot, or Reddit promises super content, but your server’s less than valiant death means that the promise goes unfulfilled. Most of us have heard this before, but the panel were sure to mention the importance of quality servers and cached content. No one mentioned hosting pictures elsewhere, which is a great help.
This afternoon, I sat through half of a Link Building Strategies session, but had to leave after Rae spoke due to the fact that I caught the plague whilst in London. Sometimes it gets the better of me and I can’t stop coughing. Before I left, I heard Jim Boykin, Greg Hartnett, and Rae’s presentations. Some highlights:
- The Yahoo! Directory is worth it, assuming you’re making money from your website. A blog about kites and knitting? Not so much.
- Prayer is your best bet in the “getting into DMOZ” strategy game.
- Appearing as though one is really human is good when conducting link-building campaigns and sending out emails.
- Ignore the low traffic levels from directories. Providing it’s a good directory, the traffic will be more savvy, more targeted, and more likely to convert.
Ramble ramble ramble. I haven’t eaten enough and I have had lots of coffee. I’m about to go and get some more.
You know what is weird about Vegas? Everything.
