SEW Live Recap: This Is Getting Personal

SMO (Social Media Optimization) includes, not precludes, SEO/SEM, in case that’s what you were thinking. 

Search Engine Watch’s Elisabeth Osmeloski says the tastes-great-less-filling version of SES is part of a larger effort to reach the heartland, as online marketing begins to bleed in from the coasts. Though the event is trimmed down, it’s certainly not dumbed down.

Since the desired end is a sale, the means is building relationships. This goes beyond generating grand influxes of traffic – or what you might call drive-by marketing – more important metrics these days involve time visitors spend at a website, how many pages they viewed, and how those things relate to conversions.

For that reason, there seems to be a growing consensus that baiting the crowd at Digg.com is over – unless you are targeting that specific young, male, geeky demographic. As SiteLogic’s Matt Bailey notes, the end result of a popular Digg story is spikes in traffic and crashed servers, but not visitors who stick around or make purchases.

Traffic not being the ultimate goal is new. This a sea change in the industry, as Sage Lewis, of SageRock.com suggests in his WebProNews video. A lot of traffic is good, as long as it’s the right traffic. What hasn’t changed though, is the importance of linking, or so goes the, um, Sage-like advice.

So ignore the Digg crowd if you’d like more control of your message and who sees it.  

Instead, Bailey and Search Engine Guide’s Jennifer Laycock suggest utilizing YouTube, where marketers have more control of their messages, a free platform to broadcast, and a well-populated area in which to demonstrate.

Whatever medium you choose for your viral campaign, the pros at SEW Live advise to ask these questions before you begin:

1.    What sparks passion in my customers?
2.    What has not been done before?
3.    How does my idea benefit my users?
4.    Will my audience risk their own reputation to spread the word?

The most important ingredient in your campaign, though, according to Laycock, is common sense. It’s not about buying clicks, it’s about buying customers. In line with the common sense approach, is an integrated strategy that involves an amalgam of paid and organic search, vertical search, social media, and web analytics.

Analytics in SMO is another rather uncharted territory, but careful analysis of social data will become increasingly important as marketers strive to know who is interested, what motivates them, and how consumers behave.

It becomes, then, a matter of getting to know the customer on a highly personal level as sellers seek to fill the consumer’s needs more effectively. As the user profile becomes more apparent, the more a marketer can tailor their campaign to accommodate a wide range of customers.

The visually impaired, for example, will benefit from the marketer’s knowledge of their needs and efforts to make the online shopping experience easier for them.  

She said two key search-marketing strategies were link bait and viral marketing. Link bait works because people are looking for content and need things to blog about. Viral marketing has the content to build a buzz.

It’s important to create brand evangelists, which gives people a reason to talk about your product. When coming up with an idea you should ask your self four questions.

1. What sparks passion in my customers?
2. What has not been done before?
3. How will your idea benefit your users?
4. Will your audience risk their own reputation for it?

When trying to get your message out she said that ideas spread because they are important to the spreader not the originator. Good social media ideas work through relationships.

You can plant seeds for you idea by using blog engines to find topically approved blogs. She pointed to Technorati as being a good source that provides data on blog rankings to help you judge the quality of the blog.

Using humor to run a marketing campaign can be good because it has universal appeal, spreads quickly and leaves a positive association. The risk though is that it can be tough to sell humor to the executive crowd, it has the potential to offend and does not always fit your brand.

In closing she hit on three points to remember. Well planned campaigns can score big. Invest in your community and it’s all about creativity.

In an interview with WebProNews in Columbus, Ohio, SearchEngineWatch’s Elisabeth Osmeloski spoke with us about SEW reaching out to new areas. In the past, the events have been primarily either on the East or West Coasts, but with SEW Live, they decided to bring the conference to the Midwest region.

According to Osmeloski, SEW aims to provide the search marketing community with information on how to handle the hottest search-related topics. They are trying to let the smaller events such as Columbus, preview the big events.

SEW Live Columbus discussed social media, organic and paid search, and measuring marketing strategies. With social media becoming increasingly popular, Osmeloski believes marketers can learn how to market to social networks. Marketers now have the opportunity to deal with customers one-on-one.

An industry that can make good use of social optimization is the travel sector. Because people that travel love to share and give reviews, social media provides a great resource for people who travel frequently and overall, it offers a great opportunity for marketers to find out consumer trends.

To get more on the SEW Live Columbus, watch our exclusive interview with Elisabeth Osmeloski.