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PubCon Las Vegas gets started tomorrow (at least content-wise), and promises to deliver  tons of great information about social media marketing, search engine marketing, etc. WebProNews will be covering the event with many exclusive interviews with speakers at the show (see PubCon’s full speaker list here). 

At BlogWorld last month, WebProNews sat down with Brett Tabke, CEO of WebmasterWorld, which hosts the event. "We have a huge  kick off keynote this year from New York Times’ Mr. David Pogue, lead tech editor…very well known in our space. We’re really excited about having him out," says Tabke. "We also have a huge social media panel the second day with Brian Clark, Scott Stratten, Chris Brogan, PR Sarah Evans…"

Tim Mayer, former head of search product and business at Yahoo, will also keynote the third day. 

"We’re really looking forward to it. We have a huge presence this year in social media…kind of turned the corner on search this year…obviously that’s our core interested – SEO, SEM of course, but social media, just a huge set of tracks this year on social media," says Tabke.

"Coming up to about two years ago, we had done traditional marketing, offline marketing, PPC marketing…buying ads here and there. We had limited success with it," he says. We know it was working to a degree. People used coupon codes, took us up on offers, and then we decided…well, with the advent of Twitter and how huge the impact it had on events, such as SXSW…all the conference space, we decided to move exclusively to Twitter and Facebook marketing. It completely changed the nature of our business and the nature of the attendee that comes to PubCon."

It’s not only PubCon’s content that focuses on social media. Tabke and his team take full advantage of social media to organize the event as well. "We found quite a few great speakers via Twitter and through a service called Klout that rates tweets and their influence, and we tracked everybody through Klout and we came up with some very interesting speakers, such as Scott Stratten (we discovered him through Twitter 2 years ago), Chris Brogan (a couple years ago as well)."

Topics to be addressed at the event include: reputation management, PPC tactics, in-house SEO, affiliate programs, modern CSS and HTML coding, social media marketing, retweets and influence, Twitter apps, keyword research, large scale search programs, hiring SEOs, optimizing for universal and personal search, WordPress SEO, multimedia SEO, SEO tools, geo-location marketing, content creation and marketing, backlinks, monetizing social media channels, PR, link-buying, community administration, information architecture, e-commerce, optimizing for contextual ads, analytics, local search, and much more. 

We’ll be providing continuous live video coverage throughout the event. Stay tuned to WebProNews.com and live.webpronews.com throughout the week.

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I caught Brett Tabke, founder of WebmasterWorld, shortly after the session to get his take on some of the high points of the discussion. It looks like this social media thing is doing nothing but growing and it’s impact is being felt across the board in ways most of us never imagined.

Realtime Search:
Realtime search is one of the biggest concepts to talk about in terms of social media. Brett brought up the example of the French airliner that crashed in South America recently. Information about the incident was available instantly through Twitter.

More significantly, this information wasn’t simply in the form of Tweets about the crash, there was new content being created and linked to in Tweets. This new content, created on the fly and accessed in real time, wasn’t available through Google, Bing or Yahoo yet, but it was in Twitter.

The concept of content discovery in realtime hasn’t really been done (at least not very well) to this point. This is why you’ve been reading weekly rumors of this company or that company being interested in purchasing Twitter.

Marketing:
Social media marketing is entering a whole new level. Business interest in social media started out a lot like business interest started in blogs. When blogs were first coming into vogue, businesses were, for the most part, looking at blogging from a public relations/reputation management standpoint. Of course, as blogs became more and more prevalent businesses increasingly incorporated them into their marketing mix.

The same thing is happening with social media, just a little faster. Take a look at BestBuy and their ‘Twelpforce’ Twitter strategy. They have over 500 people signed up, scouring Twitter looking for folks with questions about plasma TVs and various gadgets.

Social media, particularly Twitter, is moving more and more out of the realm of the ‘optional’ for business. Managing your identity in social media is becoming just as important, if not more, than managing your .com domain. GoDaddy is even going ahead and registering your Twitter accounts along with your domains now.

Just like with your domains, if you aren’t ‘you’ then somebody else is apt to become ‘you’. Twitter registration has evolved to the point that account creation there is just another step in responsible brand management.

Evolution of Twitter:
Now that Twitter has become too big to be ignored and (for many) too important not to use, what comes next? Just as with anything else new on the web, it hasn’t taken spammers long to get into the mix. Spammers have hit Twitter like 7 year locusts. Anyone who has been using the service of a significant amount of time can tell you that the peddlers of porn, mortgage ‘deals’ and pharmaceuticals have arrived en force.

Twitter by nature is completely opt-in so you would think that the spammers would have a hard time with getting much done. Fortunately for the spammers however people are, by nature, just greedy. The currency of Twitter is (for the most part) your follower count. Whether it’s to increase the effectiveness and reach of your tweets or just to stroke the ego, for many, the Twitter game is largely about growing the follower number.

This has given rise to countless "add 500 followers per day" schemes and mechanisms in order to game the system. The rationale being, if you find somebody with 3000 followers, you are apt to think, "hey, this guy must have something cool to say". It’s logical enough but unfortunately not necessarily the case.

So, how can you tell if somebody is worth following? That’s a question a lot of people are asking. What is authority? How can you tell if someone is an authority? How do you know the person you are following is even who they claim to be?

Twitter has started verifying accounts for some of the A list set. Celebrities are finding their way onto Twitter in increasing numbers. Prompted in large part by a lawsuit filed by Tony LaRussa, Twitter has started a program of verifying the accounts of celebrities. It’s a step in the right direction which will likely make it’s way from celebrities to businesses soon enough but it’s really just a start. What if you want to find twitter people to follow within niche industries, or within your local area? 

Finding people to follow is easy enough. We have Twellow and Twellowhood (shameless plug alert) just in the way of examples of sites you can use to find interesting people. How do you tell who is worth following though once you’ve found them?

Brett and I talked about this a bit in the interview. We are starting to see some sites and services pop up to ‘grade’ Twitterers in an attempt to assign some sort of authority or rank to accounts.  Sound familiar? It should. This is essentially what search engines have spent years trying to figure out for websites.

Personally, I think there is something a little unsettling about the concept of having rank or some arbitrary authority assigned to Twitter accounts, but I suppose it’s probably inevitable to some extent. You can check Klout.net for an example of such a service. Here you will find an algorithmic number value assigned to Twitter accounts.  The ingredients and factors of the algo are (of course) secretive and mysterious, but we’re all used to that by now aren’t we?

So in some regards, meet the new boss, same as the old boss. There’s still a lot of ground to cover with this whole social/Twitter thing.  Remember search? How many search engines did we go through before we got Google? How many Google-killers have come and gone since then?

Social Media is still an area very much in it’s development. There will no doubt be plenty of twists and turns as we move along. However, there is one thing you can absolutely take to the bank: if aren’t in it, you need to get there. For better or worse, "wait and see" strategists have no place in this world.

They have profile pages, private messages, and public conversation where other users can respond and add to the conversation. They are also indexed by search engines. Do you value forums as social media marketing tools? Tell us what you think.

In a post a few months ago, I referenced a WebmasterWorld thread discussing how Google values forums. WembasterWorld founder Brett Tabke said Google was devaluing forum links, but there is a bigger picture I think that Jaan Kanellis pointed out (which was also referenced in that article).

"It is normal for Google to favor forum threads for certain queries. Naturally websites do not optimize themselves for long-tail queries that forums are automatically optimized for by way of user-generated content."

Forums have marketing benefits. And they’re very much the same as the benefits that come from social media marketing. In fact, I would say that social media marketing plans should include forums in the mix when applicable. When it is about the conversation, that conversation is generally not confined to Twitter or Facebook. That conversation is very possibly being extended into the Blogosphere, and yes…online forums.

Forum participation allows for reputation management strategies, brand awareness tactics, and even link generation, similarly to where social media fits into the SEO equation. Of course, many marketers have known this for ages now, but forums seem to have taken a backseat in the mind’s eye to the newer, trendier networks.

But the forums are still there. And they’re there in niches. And niches mean relevant and related content, audiences, and engagement.

Of course, there are benefits to forum participation beyond just marketing. They often provide destinations for help with specific problems that can be hard to find elsewhere. They are still a fine venue for networking with other professionals, and just being involved in the conversation often simply translates to staying in the loop for current trends within your industry.

With social networks like Facebook and Twitter, do you still have time to participate in forums? Tell us about it.

Tabke said PubCon had "More than exceeded expectations this year and the buzz has just been fantastic. If you have been following us on Twitter, we are the number one ranking search term."

This year 30 percent of the sessions were focused on search down from last year. PubCon has grown in other areas and has not reduced the number of sessions.

Tabke talked about his 26 Steps thread on Webmasterworld that focuses on how to build a Web site and make it successful.  Tabke said," Anyone can build a one hit wonder but it has to be sustained for 4, 5, 6 years in a row."

Tabke creates the PubCon series by asking people what they would want to talk about. From there they try and mix and match speakers. "It turns out everybody talks from their passion. ‘It’s not just us coming up with this is gonna be hot, that’s gonna be hot you go speak on that, you go speak on that.’"

Tabke says that "Search has matured. It’s part of the whole picture. Google really led the way with Universal Search. They’re pretty much an admission its not just about 10 little blue links anymore."

Tabke said PubCon had "More than exceeded expectations this year and the buzz has just been fantastic. If you have been following us on Twitter, we are the number one ranking search term."

This year 30 percent of the sessions were focused on search down from last year. PubCon has grown in other areas and has not reduced the number of sessions.

Tabke talked about his 26 Steps thread on Webmasterworld that focuses on how to build a Web site and make it successful.  Tabke said," Anyone can build a one hit wonder but it has to be sustained for 4, 5, 6 years in a row."

Tabke creates the PubCon series by asking people what they would want to talk about. From there they try and mix and match speakers. "It turns out everybody talks from their passion. ‘It’s not just us coming up with this is gonna be hot, that’s gonna be hot you go speak on that, you go speak on that.’"

Tabke says that "Search has matured. It’s part of the whole picture. Google really led the way with Universal Search. They’re pretty much an admission its not just about 10 little blue links anymore."

Tabke said PubCon had "More than exceeded expectations this year and the buzz has just been fantastic. If you have been following us on Twitter, we are the number one ranking search term."

This year 30 percent of the sessions were focused on search down from last year. PubCon has grown in other areas and has not reduced the number of sessions.

Tabke talked about his 26 Steps thread on Webmasterworld that focuses on how to build a Web site and make it successful.  Tabke said," Anyone can build a one hit wonder but it has to be sustained for 4, 5, 6 years in a row."

Tabke creates the PubCon series by asking people what they would want to talk about. From there they try and mix and match speakers. "It turns out everybody talks from their passion. ‘It’s not just us coming up with this is gonna be hot, that’s gonna be hot you go speak on that, you go speak on that.’"

Tabke says that "Search has matured. It’s part of the whole picture. Google really led the way with Universal Search. They’re pretty much an admission its not just about 10 little blue links anymore."

Tabke said PubCon had "More than exceeded expectations this year and the buzz has just been fantastic. If you have been following us on Twitter, we are the number one ranking search term."

This year 30 percent of the sessions were focused on search down from last year. PubCon has grown in other areas and has not reduced the number of sessions.

Tabke talked about his 26 Steps thread on Webmasterworld that focuses on how to build a Web site and make it successful.  Tabke said," Anyone can build a one hit wonder but it has to be sustained for 4, 5, 6 years in a row."

Tabke creates the PubCon series by asking people what they would want to talk about. From there they try and mix and match speakers. "It turns out everybody talks from their passion. ‘It’s not just us coming up with this is gonna be hot, that’s gonna be hot you go speak on that, you go speak on that.’"

Tabke says that "Search has matured. It’s part of the whole picture. Google really led the way with Universal Search. They’re pretty much an admission its not just about 10 little blue links anymore."

Moderator:

• Brett Tabke

Speakers:

• Brett Tabke,
• CEO,
• WebmasterWorld.com

Brett started out with some stats on the famous ’26 Steps’ Webpage. Some of his Webpage’s achievements:

• 29 million page views.
• 5 million uniques.
• 200 copies over the web.
• 290 cease and desists have been issued so far.
• It is the first chapter in Google Hacks. The post is owned by O’reily now.
• Total income generated is $500 paid by O’reily for Google Hacks Book.
• The webpage features 10,000 thousands back links.

One by one, Brett went over all of the points he wrote in the webpage back in 2002 and discussed over the same with the audience. Back then, Brett had written that it was enough for the initial document to have 100 pages. However, he said, now the number should be around 500.

The posts are not really supposed to be about SEO, but more about content, traffic and building a sustainable website. On asking the audience regarding their experience with website having less that 100 pages, most say that they (the experiences) haven’t been satisfactory.

Regarding the domain name, Brett said that the domain name game is now much more complicated than ever and one can have a TLD (Top Level Domain) of his own.

About Site design, Brett stated that the criteria was and still is that the simpler the better. The advent of the iPhone has further confirmed on the notion. It is imperative that now every website is designed keeping the compatibility with mobile devices in mind. One has to adapt all current designs to iPhones.

Static sites are seemingly going extinct and there’s simply no point in building up sites in HTML. But the most important thing was, is and will continue to be content. Content should have its purpose and not be there just for the sake of existence. Quality content cannot be substituted.

Matt Tuens added here that content was the main reason that Search Engines were created. One should ensure a certain degree of stickiness in their websites since people are too busy to go to twenty different sites. You can do the same by simply creating one site that could be the ‘go to’ site.

Brett moved on to the topic of user generated content. The reliance on UCG is a thing of past now. Back in 2002, outbound links were considered a delicate issue since each site was as good as to the ones they were linked to. Even now, Search Engines judge on the same criterion. One could practice cross linking to boost up PageRank on lesser value pages.

Shared hosting is unthinkable now for the simple fact that costs have dropped drastically and everyone can have a server of their own. About regular log tracking softwares, Brett stated that his team uses one they have created on their own and displayed the wide variation it shows from the results of other packages.

Many CMS (Content Management Systems) are still not spider friendly and this can be a major bottleneck in your SEO objectives. Ensuring that you are in the right directories is still a good way to enhance traffic. With the users becoming more web savvy than ever, gimmicks are still a hit. People tend to negate the importance of options, such as ‘e-mail a friend’. These are still as valuable as they were earlier.

Targeted content is the key now. Smart content can get your business places. Matt Tuens goes on to elaborate on ‘smart content’. You have to understand that everyone is trying to criticize and judge your content. Give information that your demography is looking for instead of irrelevant garbage just to get a good ranking, otherwise you will incur losses on sales, credibility and overall business in spite of a good ranking.

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PubCon logo
(Photo Credit: PubCon)

The conference will be held in the North Halls, Las Vegas Convention Center. WebProNews will be attending the event offering both video and written coverage.

Brett Tabke, PubCon’s organizer and WebmasterWorld’s CEO, said, "It’s great to be back to our November dates in Las Vegas, this time with a switch to the North Halls at the Convention Center. Our 2007 Las Vegas PubCon once again broke records for attendees and sessions."

"Once again, our aim, for Las Vegas PubCon 2008, is to deliver an extensive program of educational, highly topical and cutting-edge Internet marketing know-how, and to bring extensive networking opportunities to every attendee. It’s a great place to meet and learn!" Tabke continued, "Anyone wishing to speak at the conference should apply with their proposal as soon as possible."

Conference registration will open later this year for those planning on attending.
 

PubCon, SES Chicago To Collide

Two major search conferences are going head to head this year, forcing a wide array of people to choose between Search Engine Strategies and PubCon during the same week in December.

Barry Schwartz noted at SERoundtable how the two events would happen concurrently. "SES Chicago starts on December 3rd and runs through the 6th. PubCon starts on December 4th and runs through the 7th," he wrote.

Which makes us wonder, why would Brett Tabke of WebmasterWorld choose to play a zero-sum game with IncisiveMedia? Schwartz listed the various ways the two conferences will overlap in December: sponsors, speakers, exhibitors, audiences, and press (the latter to a smaller extent).

His very informal poll about where people will prefer to go in December, to Las Vegas for PubCon or Chicago for SES, has the majority of voters opting for Vegas. A twenty degree difference in average temperature, not to mention the glittery draw of The Strip, could be a deal maker.

Schwartz believes there is some difference in the business opportunities available at the two conferences, and gives the nod to SES. There is also the "Danny Sullivan" factor to consider.

The well-regarded search expert is supposed to be at SES Chicago, according to Schwartz. But Sullivan took part in PubCon last year, delivering a keynote at the November 2006 event. SES starts a day earlier than PubCon this year; perhaps the enterprising Sullivan, who launches his Search Marketing Expo in June, will make an appearance at both.

We plan to keep an eye on this to see what might develop, and invite you to add your thoughts to the comments on this article.