Customers interacting with brands — that’s marketing in the 21st century. And SMM is key to fostering brand/customer conversations. This session will orient you to the world of social media. You'll learn the leading sites, the functionality they provide, and best practices for interacting in these virtual places.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-founder, SEOmoz

Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services

Held at the Metropolitan Center in New York, the session kicks off as soon as Danny introduces Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-founder, SEOmoz who is here to talk about all things Social Media. Between April 2006 to April 2007, the area od social media has snowballed by a whopping number of 668%. This is not the end, everyday it continues to grow and we must know what it is all about. Also, if we are to incorporate this in our company then how to take advantage of it. As social media touches web site traffic, conversions, sales, Page views, ad revenue, it leverages your brand and helps it grow positively. Connect with participatory communities, create and promote viral content. There is a map from Nation geographic on display, that shows that there are more single men than women in Seattle. It seems this particular map aided in receiving many links, traffic and gave them a good rank for single-oriented keywords.

According to Rand, many kinds of content that can turn viral are websites that have innovative and impressive designs, no content without ads, rich content and it should be accessible. When one has such items in their social network, its ups the chances of readers and users to consider you as their friend. This is because they feel you are giving them good content they can take advantage and make use of. Rand also showed an interesting graph of the countries that read blogs, Japan leads along with China and South Korea. Second place belongs to the UK and the US. Apparently, people take action after just reading a blog.

Next Rand gives a helpful list of places where one can carry forth a Social Media. These are:

• Social News Aggregation Portals: These are sites where you post your content for other users to read, vote and hopefully make it the most read one for that day. Examples of these are Reddit, Digg, Techmeme, Newsvine, Sphinn, Meneame (spanish), Propeller and Newsvine.
• Popular Blogs: Popularblogs are accessed by millions of readers worldwide daily. Important points to remember are to make the text visible while also being impressive enough to influence readers. Examples of these are Techcrunch, Boing Boing and Lifehacker.
• Social Bookmarking Sites: Ensure you tag and save the content for others to read, After it becomes popular, it has more visibility and gets more exposed to other users in social bookmarking world where it gets hosted. Some popular examples are: StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and ma.gnolia.
• Social Networking Communities: Millions have an account in these. Visit a social networking site, create your very own personal network, include all of your favorite content so that your “friends” can see them. Some popular Social Networking Communities are Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.
• Long-Tail of Blogs, Forums and Groups: Comparatively, these have a smaller reach and are aimed towards niche-communities and blogs. Discover the one in your industry or interest group, search for a blog and view the forums. Examples are Slashdot, Truemors, Fark, NYTimes etc.
• User-Generated Content sites: In a User-Generated Content site, the user creates and posts content which gives visibility to your text and your company. Does Flickr, YouTube and Wikipeida ring a bell?

Rand did a great job in putting forth techniques, ideas and methods so that all of us can take advantage of what he says about social media. All his points will lead to us receiving more links while also building good brand awareness. Knowing all kinds of social media and having the tools to take advantage of each one of them will definitely give us an edge over our competitors.

IMAGES SOURCE: Dana Larson

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