SMX Advanced 2011: Event Recap & Session Summaries

Posted by Optify Team on June 13th, 2011

SMX Advanced 2011

Last week the Optify Team attended and exhibited at SMX Advanced 2011 here in Seattle, WA. The event took place June 7-8 at Seattle’s Bell Harbor International Conference Center. Co-Founder and VP of Products, Erez Barak, presented Optify’s Real Time Marketing software during a Solution Spotlight segment on June 7.

Looking for recaps from SMX Advanced 2011 sessions?

Get the session highlights from:

Optify Coverage

Of course, at the end of the day, the expert-led sessions our what really make an event like SMX. For the first time in our history of attending SMX, we had an employee on the trade show floor, live blogging and tweeting from several of the sessions throughout the two-day event. We took two different approaches for the multiple sessions we attended. For some sessions, we live tweeted direct quotations and interesting insights directly from the Optify Twitter handle, as well as retweeted other attendees’ shared content throughout the session. In order to get our tweets noticed, we made sure to piggyback on trending hashtags by including them in each of our tweets, like the event hashtag (#SMX) and the session’s hashtag (e.g. #12a). Another approach we took was to take notes throughout the session and with a quick turn-around time, publish a blog post recapping the session within an hour or two following the session.

One content-building tool that we testing during SMX was Storify. Storify is a free, beta product that allows you to build content by adding in existing content from across countless social networks, like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc. Here’s an example of a Storify post that we created for the SMX Session: Yes, Virginia, Tweeting is SEO. Two tips for using Storify:

  1. If you’re planning to use Storify to build content, make sure people are actively creating content around the event/show/webinar you’re looking to cover. For instance, we were able to pull in a lot of content through Storify using specific keywords and hashtags from the SMX sessions, but for a less socially networked event, this might not be the right fit.
  2. Watch out for auto-notification. Since this was our first time using Storify, we didn’t realize the option to notify everyone mentioned in our Storify post would auto-@mention users across Twitter. In hindsight, it would have been best to have manually sent DMs to those users, notifying them that we had used their content in our article. Granted, we did see a lot of social sharing and tweeted “Thanks” from these users after Storify notified them of their mentions in our story.

Additionally, we returned to Twitter Promoted Products for this event and set up several Promoted Tweets campaigns around the content we built for each session. This is a great method for a campaign around an event where there’s a lot of noise on Twitter surrounding the event; Promoted Products allows you to elevate your tweets to the top of users’ searches using Twitter’s specific ad targeting criteria.


SMX Session Recaps

While we provided live coverage for three SMX sessions during the event, we also attended several other sessions and have gathered and summarized the highlights for you below.

Yes, Virginia, Facebook is SEO

Topic: This session focused on how to increase impressions and number of Likes in Facebook.

Interesting Takeways:

  • People say they are fans of 5-20 Facebook Pages, but they rarely (if ever) revisit that page.
  • Research suggests that since users only see 3-7 posts in Facebook at a time (impressions), if you have 10k fans, your content reaches about 25%. If you have 5M fans, your content reaches about 10%
  • SEO+Social should be used to increase rank of Facebook Pages and of web pages
  • Some speakers suggested that companies need to focus on the Facebook Send button since it has the potential to be the next big social signal, and may start to further edge out email

For more information on this session, check out: http://blog.search-mojo.com/2011/06/08/smx-advanced-2011-yes-virginia-facebook-is-seo-or-maybe-not/

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Leveraging SEO Power Tools

Topic: This session was about using SEO power tools for content creation.

Interesting Takeways:

  • Amazon’s Mechanical Turk & O-desk were the two platforms of discussion
  • Crowdsourcing is a great way to come up with great content on a limited budget, but performing QA on that content is even more work
  • Analogy:  When you go to the car dealership to purchase a new car, you don’t ask the salesman if they can find out the first name of the technician who installed the steering wheel or who wired in the electronic door locks.  You automatically assume that there was a substantial amount of QA done prior to your purchase.  In the same way, when you are creating content, the end user has an expectation that there was a bit of QA done on the article or press release that was written

For more information on this session, check out: http://adsenseadwordsseo.com/2011/06/09/leveraging-seo-power-tools/

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Modern Online Marketing Mix: SEO+PPC+Social

Topic: A discussion around the online marketing mix for 2011 and how diverse it needs to be to meet consumer demand in this industry.

Interesting Takeways:

  • One speaker recommended using paid search as a test mechanism, and suggested not worrying about spending a lot of time picking the right terms, but just testing and seeing what happens
  • Best content to share out is interactive or infographics that speak to a more broad audience
  • Social media for B2B:
  • Content should focus on who the decision makers are for your offering
  • B2B are very easily drawn into networks/groups, etc and that is the main places they will make a buying decision–when a product is recommended by someone in their group.
  • Some feel that social media is more important for B2Bs because of the long sales cycles where you need to keep fanning the relationship

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You & A with Matt Cutts

Topic: This was a fun, loose format session in which Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land picked several question which were previously submitted by conference participants online.

Interesting Takeways:

  • A lot of time was spent discussing the Panda update, during which Matt Cutts of Google confirmed that reiterations of Panda are coming, while the full international launch is not known at this point.
  • The latest reiteration (2.2) is approved, but not yet launched. Cutts spoke to several important, but known, points regarding Panda:

- Panda is not directly targeted at usability, but the famous quote “Don’t chase the algo, chase the user” holds true.
- “Thin Content” doesn’t necessarily literally mean thin, Cutts used Flickr.com as an example for little, but useful content.

For more information on this session, check out: http://searchengineland.com/smx-advanced-liveblog-you-a-keynote-with-googles-matt-cutts-80576

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MEGA Session: SEO Vets take All Comers

Topic: Danny Sullivan again moderated, posing questions to a panel of SEO experts, which had been submitted from the conference visitors.

Interesting Takeways:

  • There is no real recovery from Panda. One has to seriously rethink business strategy and essentially start from scratch
  • There IS anchor text over-optimization
  • Schema.org impacts display only, not ranking or relevance at this point.
  • Only use sharing buttons when you have something valuable to share. Use the networks your audience uses, there is no need to 20 sharing options. Shares with a big “0″ suck. Watch load times, and use CSS/JS ordering to adjust loading.

For more information on this session, check out: http://yourseosucks.com/2011/06/smx-advanced-2011-mega-session-seo-vets-take-all-comers/

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The SoLoMo Revolution: Social Media, Local Search & Mobile Search Collide

Topic: An examination of the intersection between social, local and mobile and how to align your marketing strategies with this growing trend.

Interesting Takeways:

  • The real benefit to brands is the ability to hyper target.
  • Purchases have become conversations, so make sure that you’re keeping the customer happy and being a promoter of your brand vs. a detractor
  • Simplify the process for the customer
  • Instigate repeat purchases
  • Facebook’s Sponsored Stories: They’re endorsed by your friends, so this can be very effective. One company found these to be very effective and sticky.
  • How am I going to justify getting money for social media marketing from my company? Track direct revenue from both paid and unpaid placements, track follower and fan totals and value of each
  • Ultimately, what this can mean for you are customers are going to help you tell your brand story

For more information on this session, check out: http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/the-solomo-revolution-social-media-local-search-mobile-search-collide/

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More resources and recaps

Search Engine Land, the online publishers running the SMX series, has been doing a great job covering the show and sessions. For more recaps of other sessions, visit Matt Matt McGee’s SMX Advanced 2011 coverage page.