Coverage of SES Chicago will continue.  Stay with WebProNews for more notes from the event this week.

In the session “Search, PR, and the Social Butterfly” the focus  was how to use social media along with traditional PR tools.

Lisa Buyer, President & CEO of The Buyer Group, said social media is creating more opportunities for PR people and marketers, “it’s not killing PR.”

Customers are search and socially savvy. “Facebook is becoming a search engine,” said Buyer. With the Facebook and Bing integration, search is becoming more social.
The media is also search and socially savvy. More news outlets are using Facebook and Twitter.

Social media is influencing stories and news. 89% of reporters arre turning to blogs. 65% of journalists use social media. Google is used by 100% of journalists. Get  your content in Google.

“Social media provides a wealth of information for journalists,” Buyer said.

Optimize
Press releases
Blogs
Videoss
Images
Posts
Tweets

Use keywords in your tweet and titles.

Publicize via distribution and social media. PR strategy should be social via tweets, posts, status updates, blogs, and foursquare.

Have a content strategy and then break it down to daily, weekly and monthly updates.

Comments matter for all social media and your business. Comments can drive traffic to your blog. Integrate all your social tools…Facebook…Twitter…Foursquare, video. Add social media links to all press releases. Press releases need to be in HTML format.

Have sharing tools for company news, Twitter, Facebook etc.

SEO, PR and social media need to be BFFs.

Peter Liefer, President, Primeview, talked about a case study for a client where they took pictures of a product before launch and sent them to select bloggers to get a pre-buzz.

Target bloggers in your industry. Do a press release about an upcoming product to get exposure and credibility.

Hire influential bloggers to write about a press release. It builds a buzz and use social media. People can write comments about a product via social media. More comments more buzz.

Use all the social bookmarking sites to bookmark blog posts and press releases about the product.

Use a variety of Twitter accounts, Google indexes tweets immediately. Good way to get exposure for a product or brand. Distribute press releases via all social media.

The web can be great place for a brand to thrive and pick up steam, but it can also go the opposite way. A single blogger can take down a brand. "That’s the reality of the web," says Downhill. It can go the way of Dell or it can go the way of Tiger Woods (or somewhere in between). 

Downhill’s advice is to be proactive, rather than reactive, when it comes to brand reputation. I take this to mean that you should be putting yourself out there with as much positivity as possible to begin with, as opposed to waiting for someone to trash your brand, then defending yourself. Even if such trashing is unjustified, like Downhill says, it only takes one blogger to hurt your brand, and there’s a chance some potential customers will only see that side of the story. The more positivity you put out, the more likely they are to find something good to latch onto. If someone sees a lot of good things, then one bad blog post won’t carry as much weight. 

In fact, Downhill suggests never engaging brand attackers at all. If they’re attacking you on blogs, forums, and social media, you might be better off simply addressing such complaints on your own blog and defending yourself from there, than using SEO to work on the visibility of your side of the story. Taking legal action, can be an expensive "black hole", she says. As far as as responding to attackers on blogs, social networks, etc. I would say it’s a judgment call. If I’m getting trashed on a well-trafficked forum that attracts a lot of interest within my niche, for example, I’m probably going to want to respond accordingly. 

Wozman adds that free speech is protected online by the Constitution (at least in the U.S.) and that only false accusations are considered defamatory – not opinions. You can call someone a jerk, but not a criminal. Commenters cannot be held liable because of the Communications Decency Act, and ISP providers cannot be held liable for commenters. 

Downhill recommends buying domains like "yourbrand sucks.com" and any other version of your brand’s domain that is defamatory, that you can think of. Not a bad idea, but it could get expensive depending on how creatively your mind works. Either way, those out to ruin you can probably get pretty creative in that department. 

At BlogWorld last week, I attended a session about brand monitoring. This was not so much about reputation management only, but simply being able to spot the conversations that are happening in relation to your brand, and getting involved in conversations (including positive ones regarding your brand). Ann Peavey, Becky McCray, and Sheila Scarborough gave some good tips. More on that here.

WPN’s Mike Sachoff contributed to this piece. 

Coverage of SES Chicago will continue.  Stay with WebProNews for more notes from the event this week.

In the session “Social Goes Local,” the speakers offered tips on using social media and local search to promote businesses.

Gregg Stewart, President, 15Miles, said social and local go hand-in-hand. Growth from search engines are being outpaced by non-search engines. Growth I n search is driven by local.

Facebook is local in nature. It’s capitalizing on search with its search bar.

Google is getting more serious about localized search, cites Google Places as an example. “As local heats up, Google is making strides to own the local search space,” said Stewart.

Consumers are increasingly using more sources to find local information and content.

Google Maps is helping to drive local search. People are using other methods to search more frequently, not just searcg engnes, but on mobil and social networks.

Use of content management is vital for local search. A lot of development in digital word of mouth, such as reviews and reccomendations.

Adress, location and driving directions are important for local search. Get your base business identity correct.

Users are more likely to do business with a company found on a social network. Consumers need to see responses to posts on Facebook and Twitter. Social networking users are heavy shoppers and tend to buy more than generic search users.

Local business search on social sites will continue to grow and can’t be ignored.

Searchers are referencing company brand pages on social networks. As local search and social continues to grow, reviews and ratings will become even more important.

Gib Olander, Director of Business Development, Localeze, said mobile devices are driving local search as well. “No one has local and social completely figured out,”
said Olander. There is a lot of noise out there.

Mobile local search today is a combination of devices. People expect to buy within one hour on mobile, compared to 7 days on a PC.

By 2011 80 percent of mobile devices will have GPS. Sixty percent of mobile usage is spent on social networking. Get your business on Foursquare as well as Facebook and Twitter.

Business identity needs to be established online. It anchors the customer experience with your business. If your identity is not established online, your business does not exist.

Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google, offered advice on how to optimize your site in a Q&A session keynote.

Ask yourself if your website is helping your customers and users. Do you have relevant content?

Reviews and user-generated content is an opportunity for your site to rank in Google.

When it comes to links, optimize your site for your users first and then focus on links. There is nothing you can do about old links. “If users find links valuable, then search engines will too,” said Ohye.

Is it better to be an older website? It’s good to have an established business, but if you have buzz and links you can build on that. It does help to have age because your website is more established.

Google does not have a “trust rank” so don’t be obsessed with it. If your site has a value add you can compete.

Google Caffeine has nothing to do with ranking, it was a major infrastructure change that allowed Google to process more documents. It led to a 50% fresher index.

Webmaster Central is where you can go to get questions answered about your website.

Look at conversions and rankings for items you want to sell. Sign up for site alerts. Google will message you about any problems about your site – hacking, malware etc.

To sell more or convert look at your site and search query data. Look at what your site ranks for and focus on that for SEO. Look at terms and where they rank. You may run into duplicate content issues.  Look at your search results to see where you rank.

Keywords. See where they rank in webmaster tools. And shift or adjust from there.

Coverage of SES Chicago will continue.  Stay with WebProNews for more notes from the event this week.

In the session “How to Transform Your Approach to Video,” Jonathan Allen, Director, SearchEngineWatch, offered ways to make video more effective.

“YouTube is brilliant at mediocrity,” said Allen. Video on YouTube has to be good but not great. There is more exciting content on YouTube then on Twitter in Allen’s opinion.

Embeds drive the most traffic for video. People forget discovery is the main traffic driver on YouTube.

Use all the space available on YouTube for the description of your video. Uses tags  be the source. Put videos into playlists and copy other peoples tags.

Talks about a video of himself eating live octopus. Has 4,000 views on YouTube. Added tag and titless based on YouTube search for eating live octopus. Got picked up in related videos by National Geograhphic. That brought him 1,200 views for the octopus video.

Talks about making a video called “man versus snowman” where he tackles a snowman he made and said it ranks first on Google.

Video discovery can lead to your video spreading to blogs and other websites.  Foreign language can lead to more traffic for you video.

Greg Jarboe, moderator of the session and Co-founder, SEO-PR, said video is 50 more times likely to make you rank on the first page of Google search results.

It’s like a backdoor to Google (video). You can segment longer videos with shorter videos. Link them together as a playlist. Submit chunks of a video to other video sharing sites besides youtube.  Tubemogul is a good site to you use and Vimeo.

Invite bloggers to embed videos on their sites and webmasters. Don’t  just borrow tags, borrow great ideas!

Develop your persona, define the conncetors and your final audience. Your content must be relevant to your audience and your business.

Make your videos easy to share. Youtube offers 13 ways to share video, use them. By getting embeds it empowers you. Get people to interact with your video  by sharing via socail media.

Recommendations are the future of all Web TV.

Coverage of SES Chicago will continue.  Stay with WebProNews for more notes from the event this week.

Kodak had to adapt or die. Film had lost its relevance because of digital. Passion alone is not a substitute for planning. A business or a brand has to ask themselves, “Why are they in the game?”

You need to get your customers’ attention quickly. The average attention span is eight seconds. Ask yourself why people should do business with you.

Set clear conditions of satisfaction. A business needs to know how to satisfy customers.

Causing tension.  Marketers should cause tension. No pain, no gain. Be who you are… not who you are not. Kodak wanted to be fast. Even if you make mistakes, do it faster.  You can only move as fast as your slowest common denominators.  Slow people hold back your business.  They are not bad people they are not part of the team…too slow.

No one is going die because of a mistake. Says make your mistakes big. So what?  Talks about campaign for Kodak. Shown in theaters.  The campaign was a big failure. Only two people responded. People turn off their phone when they go see a movie. Spent a lot of money but no one died.

“It’s okay to make mistakes, no one is going to die,” said Hayzlett.

Kodak had to get back to their core business and be clear on one DNA. They did that by bringing back the “Kodak Moment.” It’s emotional technology. They embraced digital while reminding people of what makes Kodak special. It was a brand transformation.

Have a trustworthy brand and have fun at the same time. Have some personality in your business.

Drive the right people who will be loyal to your business.

“Creative people should never have to compromise to deliver their vision,” said Hayzlett.

The four E’s:
Engage
Excite
Educate
Evangelize
Make people your brand ambassadors.

Coverage of SES Chicago will continue.  Stay with WebProNews for more notes from the event this week.

Rob Garner, Senior Strategy Director at iCrossing, was the first speaker.  He stressed that real-time search is an important segment of Web search, just like image or video search, and that to be successful in this segment, there must be two elements: a crawler-based algorithm and a human-driven social layer.

Trust and authority are important, as well, Garner said, and an active, agile, approach to marketing is necessary versus passive tactics.

Garner also indicated that real-time is more than Twitter.  Forum posts, blog posts, and comments can factor in, as "recency" replaces "relevance" to become the new "R" word.

Annie Stickney, General Manager of Online Marketing and Development at Minyanville Media, then stepped in.  She recommended using Google Trends as a way of tracking what’s popular in real time, but said not to chase every term.  Remember your business and your objectives, then go after trends that are "on fire" or "volcanic" by Google’s reckoning.

Stickney noted that, by doing this (and then pushing a story to Google News via sitemaps and tweeting it), she’s generated traffic spikes and seen a return on investment.

Aaron Kahlow, Founder and Chairman of the Online Marketing Summit, then wrapped up the session by hinting that real-time search doesn’t deserve all of a marketer’s attention just yet.  He said it’s impossible to catch up with real-time search, and the best thing is to have lots of content on hand and tend to SEO basics.

Kahlow argued that it’s difficult to catch people in the buying cycle using real-time search, and that real-time is still evolving.

WebProNews writer Mike Sachoff contributed to this report.

Google makes changes constantly all year round, and that’s just Google. Yahoo and Bing obviously have a lot going on as well. Bing has a new partnership with Facebook for putting Facebook data in search results. Then there’s the whole Yahoo/Bing search and advertising deal, with Yahoo returning Bing results underneath its own user interface. 

Search simply does not stop changing. With mobile and social media heavily in the equation, and TV and tablets about to enter the fray at an increasingly rapid pace, there will continue to be plenty to speculate upon when it comes to where search is headed. 

So this year’s SES Chicago "Search: Where to Next?" session featured discussion from iProspect CEO Robert Murray, Bruce Clay President Bruce Clay, and Rosetta Director of SEO Chris Boggs.

Here are a few takeaways from that discussion:

1. Keyword research may be narrowed down by all three search engines. 

2. Autocomplete needs to branch out. 

3. There will be deeper analytics. 

4. Building content will continue to be very important

5. There will be increased filtering of search results by users. 

6. SEO is going the way of a targeted market. 

7. Complexity of keywords is changing because of the algorithms

8. SEO is going to be "a piece of optimization pie."

9. There will be increased focus on local. 

10. Even as mobile continues to grow, there will always be search.

11. Social will continue to play an important role. Likes will become as important as links. 

Visibility

If you ask me, it’s going to be (and really already is) about being visible in as many places as possible – on as many screens as possible. It’s about being visible in search engines, but it’s also about being visible in communities (social networks, blogs, forums, etc.), sub search engines (like Google Images, Blog Search, Videos, YouTube, etc.), mobile apps, web apps, TV apps, and anywhere else that consumers turn their attention – particularly the kind of attention that comes with problems for which your content has the answer – for which your business has the answer. 

The future is going to require a lot of testing.

Testing on different browsers, different phones, different tablets, different connected TV experiences, different apps, and different combinations of each of these. It’s also going to be about speed. Not only is Google placing more and more emphasis on this, but people will just simply leave if they can’t get your site to load in a timely fashion. It may be fine on the desktop, but have you checked it from different mobile devices/browsers? How’s it look from there?

Improving Tech

Then you have voice search, which is quickly becoming a much more common method. Google will continue to perfect visual search (Google Goggles as well). Things are going to get really interesting. 

The future of search is much like search’s present – just on steroids. Faster, more powerful, on a lot more interfaces, and a lot more people using them. 

What does the future of search look like to you? Comment here. 

Coverage of SES Chicago will continue.  Stay with WebProNews for more notes from the event this week.

Kaushik indicated that many people don’t understand search and SEM.  He recommended becoming more familiar with (and successful at) them by embracing analytics.  Try to get great at keyword discovery via competitive intelligence, for example, looking at audits and who’s bid on what historically.

Then it may be a good idea to experiment with behavioral targeting.  Don’t obsess about tools, Kaushik suggested – just try to understand the landscape, identify gaps and opportunities, and execute like crazy.

Later, Kaushik indicated that the magic of search is the tail, and although the number of keywords in the tail can pose a major problem, he proposed a solution.  Just focus and sort through the data, using logical filters, and keep an eye on visits, new visits, and bounce rates.

You can solve anything with a good algorithm, Kaushik stressed, and by focusing on bounce rates, you’ll get the highest return on investment.

Finally, a few other ideas Kaushik put forward include utilizing tag clouds, keyword trees, and looking beyond the top ten rows of datasets.

People don’t focus enough on business outcomes, he concluded.  It’s necessary to look at the whole search engine marketing process and consider what’s of value.

WebProNews writer Mike Sachoff contributed to this report.

Does PPC have more benefits than SEO? Comment here.

Churchill pointed to a study from Engine Ready on conversion rates by source of traffic (PPC vs organic). The study found:

- Conversion rates: PPC just barely beat SEO
- Average Order Value: Paid won
- Average time on site: Paid won

She gave the following as advantages of PPC:

- Gives immediate online presence
- Have a new site? Have ads in an hour
- Start getting ROI sooner
- No ramp up time
- Great for seasonal items or time sensitive promotions
- Great for testing
- Easily test effectiveness of new marketing message or site design change
- Quickly gather feedback
- Regulate traffic volume
- Sales pipeline empty? Use PPC to push traffic
- Overloaded? Pause campaigns or cut back spend
- Have limited sales season? Saturate market while demand is high

"PPC is very agile. It’s also has targeting advantages," said Churchill.

For targeting, she says PPC provides opportunity for high visibility in multiple channels (search engines, content sites, mobile phones), expands results beyond search results, and gives you control over placement on SERPs and better control over landing page/message.

It’s often easier to sell PPC to management because the concept is similar to traditional advertising, and provides for direct accountability. It’s easy to track measures of success. It’s an effective way to drive qualified traffic to your site, and it allows you to expand your opportunities.

Weber says the top five reasons why "PPC rules," are: speed, flexibility, it’s unlimited, it’s goal-driven, and it’s controllable. You can quickly manipulate keywords to those that drive conversions, you can quickly change bid prices, and you can quickly get in and out of the market. You can turn your campaign on and off, and change ad copy, keywords, etc. You can target a much wider range of keywords, adhere to a budget, and have an immediate impact on sales.

Fishkin pointed out that PPC gets 10% of clicks, but 90% of spend. He said SEO is more challenging and less controllable, but the spend is there and the fact that people click organic results.

Gray said he believes that PPC could make SEO better, but Google is banning people now, so it makes things more challenging. Naylor said he believes SEO is more "open." Weber and Fishkin both said they would outsource PPC over SEO.

Gray said it’s important to get in the top during the early part of the research phase, especially since Google is personalizing results for everyone now. Churchill noted that Google’s personalization is a better argument for PPC. Like iEntry CEO Rich Ord recently noted, the addition of personalized results could "make people less reliant on organic search results for their traffic and in turn increase their use of Adwords."

Another point was brought up as we recently discussed – that the search engines are pushing organic listings down with mixed media (blended, universal) results.

Certainly there are many advantages to both PPC and SEO, and they can compliment one another. Actually, a recent study from a couple of NYU Stern professors found that organic search engine results can play a direct role in whether or not a paid listing is clicked.

Which do you think is more important – SEO or PPC? Share your thoughts here.

WebProNews reporter Abby Johnson contributed to this report.

Related Articles:

> Does an Organic Search Presence Help Paid Result Performance?

> Can You "Rank" in Google if Everyone Has Different Search Results?

> Optimizing for Mixed Media Search Results