In essence, Kevin is filling the giant shoes that Danny Sullivan left and that’s a very, very tall order. Danny has made nothing less than groundbreaking progress in a very short amount of time with Search Engine Land and from all accounts, the SMX conference.

I would be curious to hear from Kevin how he’ll address the inevitable comparisons and also what his plans are. How will he approach content strategy for the SES conferences and the SEW site? Whatever the answers, many eyes will be on him both internally at Incisive as well as the search marketing industry.

Comments

“I’m looking forward to being the in-house director of online media, managing the content development strategy and online marketing programs for vacation rentals at zonder.com,” Elizabeth said in her SEW post. She will still be involved with the SES Travel conference, which takes place July 26-27.

Elizabeth noted some upcoming changes to SEW, including a site upgrade and the addition of new contributors and staff.

Her exit follows last year’s departure of Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Watch, the site with which he was identified with for years. He now runs Search Engine Land and a new conference series.

“It was always great working with her, and one of the saddest parts of leaving was saying goodbye to her as a work colleague,” Danny said on his site.

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 there are three things to keep in mind when link building. Links should be treated as a business transaction and they should focus more on traffic and not just ranking.  People should ask themselves would they want a link if search engines do not give you credit or if they do not exist.

She then touched on directories pointing out that most do not employ human editors. The advantage of niche directories, which she is a big fan of, is that they can drive targeted traffic and are cost effective.

For local associations and directories she recommends doing your own research. You can use paid linking to generate traffic as long as you keep it relevant and vary pages linked to and anchor text.

When using a reciprocal link a person should ask what is the intent and is the link relevant

Before using social media to build links you need a support network to help you. For example use online friends, forums, bloggers, media, industry insiders and email lists.

If you use a blog to build links you need to become an authority and make new connections. Also add more content to your site.

One of Lewis’s first examples involved Digg and StumbleUpon.  While it’s true that being featured on those sites will raise your profile (or that of your company), Lewis pondered what sort of damage any negative comments could cause.  All those eyes . . .

And all that traffic to your site.  The Sage Rock founder labeled these things as “vague benefits,” and said that you should always question the identity of your visitors.  Businesses should also try to determine the visitors’ cost per acquisition, and consider if they will actually buy.

Yet you needn’t be a psychic to determine these things.  Lewis noted that stats are getting better – services can provide bar graphs or pie charts (whatever’s your pleasure) to display what items were clicked on and what feed readers people use.  He also mentioned FeedBurner, “the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds,” by name.

Other sites that you should embrace, according to Lewis, include Flickr and Google Video.  This second service, in particular, makes some great statistics available (such as downloads and page views).  And, hey, it’s Google – you can’t go too wrong there.

Another Mountain View product to get a plug was Google Webmaster, which shows you both internal and external links.  The description on Google Webmaster’s home page is succinct enough to repeat here: “Welcome to your one-stop shop for comprehensive info about how Google crawls and indexes websites.”

The Sage Rock founder concluded his talk by looking to the future – the future of social media optimization (SMO) metrics.  While noting that this wasn’t invented for business (and so the available stats are rather poor), Lewis endorses the idea of aggregating SMO analytics tool to pull data.  Experience will show us, he noted, what is valuable to measure.

Golden works for the Karcher Group as Vice President of Development.  He is, according to his company bio, known around the office as a “pretty boy,” and he loves cheesecake.  But today, Golden set aside any grooming products and dropped his fork for the sake of Web standards and accessibility issues in SEO.

He first promoted the Web Standards Project, better known as WaSP.  This “grassroots coalition” works towards establishing “standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.”  Golden then added that, when embracing standards, people should think about semantic data – putting meaningful content into tags.

And the speaker wanted the audience to know that, if you think embracing these ideals would take too much time or energy, this is all important no matter how strictly business-oriented you are.  According to a statistic that Golden shared, 70 million people will be able to use your site in the soon-to-come year of 2010 if you cater to those with disabilities.

Creating and obeying Web standards will, to cut to the chase, increase everyone’s opportunity for profit.  Golden pointed out that those baby boomers aren’t getting any younger, and that Web standards will also allow pages to load faster, content to be multi-purposed, and sites to age gracefully.

But, hey, supporting Web standards would be just plain nice of you, as well.  Golden believes that there is a social responsibility to increase Web accessibility.

At SEW Live in Ohio, Laycock explained that you and your marketing are only as good as your ideas.  Search engines, she said, are attempting to become more and more human (or, rather, their designers are trying to program those tendencies into them), so there is no longer any sort of magic formula.

Laycock dubbed this trend the Pinocchio Effect, and believes that it is already in play.  She firmly stated that there is no sandbox – it makes no sense, according to the Search Engine Guide editor – and said that, like a person visiting an Ethiopian restaurant instead of a Chinese takeout place, search engines attempt to find uncommon content.

As Google’s, Yahoo’s, and Ask’s little Pinocchios become real boys, tracking click-thrus and latent semantic advertising are on the horizon.

This leaves just three rules of organic search, according to Laycock.  First, speak the customer’s language.  Second, understand the search buying cycle.  And third, searchers must learn to be more effective, building interest, doing research, and making purchases.  And the number one rule of pay-per-click: it’s not about buying clicks, it’s about buying customers.

Want to gain some more insight on these subjects?  Jennifer Laycock, Search Engine Guide guru, recommends reading Dale Carnegie’s 1937 book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”  After all, the Great Equalizer is just common sense.

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.