I had the opportunity to go to the Search Marketing Expo (SMX West) in Santa Clara, California last week. Here are some notes I jotted down during the session: SEO & Social Media Marketing. For further reading, I’ve found other resources covering this topic here and here.

SMX West: SEO & Social Media Marketing

Speakers:
Barbara Boser, 3 Dog Media
Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz
Michael Gray, Owner, Atlas Web Service
Neil Patel, CEO, ACS

Rand was the first speaker. 55 slides in 9 minutes? Wowza. He launches into how to succeed in Social Media Marketing: “Interacting with participatory communities on the web.” Social Media Marketing supports branding & mindshare goals. It also helps bolster search marketing goals. It even helps with traffic & conversion goals.

Social media is growing tremendously… so why not capitalize while it’s still getting hot? Users are reaching other blogs by links on other blogs – imagine that! The blogroll rules.

Who creates links on the web? Bloggers, reddit & digg and etsy users. These social media people are creating links on the web and you need to reach out to them.

Neil was the next presenter. He went over social media case studies. Life Insure was an interesting one about how they embraced the fact that everyone dies and now they rank number 1 for “life insurance.” Short presentation!

Barbara was the next speaker. Talking about how to use social media sites. “It can take months and months to build up your profile.”

“Your profile is very important.” Be anonymous and likeable. Choose a unique name that’s memorable. Choose a memorable avatar. And use the same identity on all of the sites. In terms of adding friends, add the top user’s friends. If you add one with an IM account listed, give them an IM and say you added them and introduce yourself briefly.

Michael was the last speaker. Showed us examples of current events in social media… which included a couple of sites that had to do with the Oscars.

Went into talking about Twitter. “A short micro blogging style of publishing.” Marketing uses for Twitter:

a) Linking your blog to your twitter account with blog post updates
b) Post news or info with links to encourage subscribers

You can also use Twitter as a sales channel. Use it to announce new releases. Twitter has high CTR compared to email or PPC advertising… and it’s free!

Some examples of Twitter accounts:

1) NY Times
2) HGTV
3) Yahoo! Adbuzz

And for sales channels:

1) Jetblue Airlines
2) Southwest
3) thisnext
4) Amazon Gold Deals
5) Woot

How to get more out of Twitter – expand your profile. Make it look like you’re a real person. Blend together your “sales” twits and your personal ones.

QnA followed with some questions about how a corporation should go about doing social media (the problem being the IP address being the same for all of the computers). The answer here was – don’t let them do stumbling or digging at work!