All of us particpates in some sort of Social Media Marketing, Optimization, and Promotion on a daily basis with clients and/or the companies we work for. We wanted to share the knowledge that we have all gained on how to successfully drive traffic to sites, how to measure that traffic, and how Social Media Marketing for your Business really works.

We understand SXSW Interactive is a WAYS away at this point, but, the Panel Picker voting has been in full throttle and people have been talking about it like crazy on twitter. It’s no surprise that everyone is trying to pimp their panels and get people to vote.

Which is the reason for this post! A major part of the SXSW Panel Picker process is votes and feedback from the community on the panel ideas submitted. We have pitched a panel idea on “Social Media Marketing for YOUR Business” and WE NEED YOUR VOTE!

Click on the SXSW 2010 Panel Picker thumbs up image here, click the thumbs up and leave us a comment with what you want to see, why you are excited about the Panel, and/or any feedback you have!

We are all excited about the opportunity and looking forward to rocking it for you guys in Austin!

So, why am I telling you this?

The SEOktoberfest Last Ticket is available and the charity auction has started! If you can participate in the auction, it is a MUST! You have a chance to participate in an auction that will not only change your life, but, also, change the life of many others. The proceeds of the event will go to the AMAZONICA Foundation.

Check out the post by Markus Tandlers post with all the details of the event and participate in the auction on eBay and get the last ticket before it’s too late!

As an individual that works very hard at maintaining relationships and attempts to help anyone at anytime he possibly can, I see some pretty interesting mistakes that people make, DAILY! Sometimes, I have to admit, I’ve made the mistake of burning a bridge or two at past companies, just by the simple fact of not understanding how important it was not to hurt a relationship. But, I now know that there are some things that you should NEVER do…and I mean NEVER.

The Obvious One: There is never a reason to “out a website”:

There was a lot of chatter about this back at the end of April about how no one should ever out a website. I think this point has been beaten down your throats quite often. I commented on this a while back in that there really is no reason from a business or financial perspective to actually do this.

Todd Malicoat wrote an excellent post about what is your SEO Code? So, what is your SEO Code? Or, even better, what is your business code of ethics? Think about the following before outing another website:

•    What could you gain by outing another website or company?
•    How are you benefiting your businesses or growing as an individual by doing so?
•    Who are you HURTING financially in doing so? Think about it, the site you’re about to out and that could quite possibly be banned, could very well be a friend of yours. Do you want to be the reason that your friend or possibly even their kids don’t have food on the table?
•    Would you want someone to out your website publicly and possibly cost you a loss of income or some sort of financial burden.

Think through this before actually outing a company or reporting another site. When in doubt, also, you might want to ask a friend privately, they might be able to provide some insight or talk it through with you. Again, at the end of the day, you don’t want to out a site that could cost someone his or her livelihood.

Battling for Profits: Never publicly talk about companies paying too much for a service:

We are all in business in some way or another at the end of the day and we are all out to make smart business decisions. I’ll admit that I’ve scored some pretty sweet contracts back in the day where I’d made a decent amount of money and didn’t really do much. Other industry professionals can vouch for this as well. In fact, recently at Revenue Bootcamp, Neil Patel and I have talked about this before and es“If I charge you 20k to increase your traffic and I do it, and its worth it to you, it shouldn’t matter how long I spend, if I did it in 1 hour, then better for me!”

What you might call “overcharging,” I call a “smart business move.”

If you find out that someone is charging a client a lot of money for a service, you should never use a medium like Twitter to talk about how much people should or shouldn’t charge for a service. If you are competing that market, go out there and try to win the business.

There are too many factors that go into the rates of a consulting agreement that might not be obvious right up front. Things like the overhead of an agency, resources, services provided, etc. And, at the end of the day someone might have made a smart business deal and/or they have a client that is now going to question his or her consultant and create headache for no reason at all.

Don’t get all high and mighty and publicly talk about rates and charges over the Social Web, again, you never know if you have a friend or even business partner that you just cost a lot of money.

Secrets are Secrets: Secrets are meant to be private, keep them that way:

A lot of the sharing of secrets that have been heard at conferences and/or things shared in private aren’t being made as public anymore. But, that said, with the Social Web being ever so increasing, talking about things you hear at conferences becomes compelling.

Don’t do it!

Lots of us have websites, profiles on the Social Web, and/or businesses that we run that are meant to stay private. Revealing any of this through any social medium could cost someone a loss of income or, for some of us, our entire livelihood.

Also, if you’ve heard someone say something in passing or you could take out of context or you are attending a conference session where an individual asks you not to share or tweet about the information he or she is currently talking about, don’t share it. Remember the post by Brent Csutoras, “we know it’s social, but stfu already“…that will always be true.

Remember, if its questionable, it probably shouldn’t be done, and, at the very least, ask someone what they think before doing it, they will probably agree that you shouldn’t share it.

Burning a Bridge Can Will cost you in the long run!

People make this mistake too many times and I’ve even made it a few times years back. Whether its a co-worker that leaves on an angry note, someone you just dated that ended badly, or someone that is in your industry that you just happen to feel you just don’t “need” anymore.

The point: Everyone and anyone is valuable at some point. That bridge you just burned could be your future boss, future consultant, future investor, and/or someone that could bring your consultancy/agency new business. Remember, that you shouldn’t treat people as contacts, create relationships instead.

Granted, yes, there are going to be people that you just don’t get along with in business and personalities that don’t work together. But, rather than burning the bridge, separate yourself from the situation and at the end of the day, don’t be rude and or don’t personally insult people. That is where you REALLY start burning bridges and losing relationships and even contacts.

Over the last few months I’ve seen an interesting cross section of startups to large brands and marketers to developers that are all running businesses. There has been one thing that ties all of these people together, and that is gaining traction and visibility to your website or business online.

If you are a large brand, you already have that visibility, but it is hard to continue to be nimble and build quickly, therefore, you are typically left behind. While startups run into a different kind of problem, they are able to create cool cutting edge products, but, does anyone see these products? Many times, they are not visible and have no traction. I’ve talked to a number of developers, product guys, and “startup dudes” that all run into that problem. The reason being:

People don’t realize that just building a great product is not going to bring you buzz, traffic, or growth, it doesn’t work without visibility.

So, what do you do to solve this problem? There are a few things that you can do if you are a startup or your just a humble guy trying to make a living off a website that you own.

Search Visibility

SEO seemed like such a 4 letter word a few years ago. And, lately I’ve had interesting conversations around getting traffic in general, where I’ve been the SEO Evangelist, talking about how targeted and the high ROI of Search Traffic. It’s been exciting talking people and businesses that understand or are beginning to understand the importance for Search Visibility.

Creating Search Visibility is created by building Search Friendly websites that are authoritative to a given Search Engine.

How do I know what people are looking for?

A lot of people jump into SEO and try to build sites and throw popular phrases into h1’s, titles, etc. It’s important to understand the industry you are in and do the research that is required to know what it is people are searching for, this is called keyword research. For example, the knowing that people search for “cars” rather than “automobile.” (yes, I know that’s a crude example, but, you get the point!). SEOBook has a Free Keyword Research Tool to do this for you.

What is a Search Friendly Website?

A search friendly website is a website that is built so that a Search Engine will index and crawl their content, while adding importance, relevance, and authority to that sites content. Many times organizations will make mistakes by building a flash site or an Ajax site that is entirely unable to be indexed or crawled by a “search engine spider.” There are tips and tricks on on how to build Ajax SEO Friendly websites out there.

Creating authority is the key to visibility!

At the end of the day, no matter how much you’ve researched the keywords and how great you’ve built out your site so it is search friendly, you need external links. Without links to your site from external resources, you will not rank nor get search traffic, bottom line. Getting links isn’t an easy job either, it is the crux of the SEO problem. (i.e. It’s why we get paid the big bucks!)

Building links is an interesting mix of many different cross-functional skills. Whether it is the sales pitch to websites asking for links, the biz dev angle of partnering with other sites or buying links (while, I would NEVER condone that, wink wink!), or the art of building buzz around your content, product, or service through the Social Web.

Social Media Visibility

Ah, Social Media, the buzzword amongst all buzzwords across the web now at days, it’s amazing how much it is talked about. Amazingly enough, Social Media has become a part of the general web presence and we are moving away from it being a piece of the business, so to speak, but rather, the a fully conversational and connected Social Web.

Okay okay, I’ll get to the point: Getting visibility via the Social Web is done by being conversational, engaging, and invoking emotions.

Social Media news sites like Digg

Creating content that creates a conversation around a particular topic, whether it is hilarious, sad, resourceful, etc. Creating content like this is all about invoking the emotions. You want to create content that a user is going to want to Digg. You want to have a page that is going to make someone stop while “stumbling” through your site. But, it doesn’t stop there is still another really important factor of gaining visibility:

If influencers within the Social Media space do not know about your content, then guess what, it is not going to be made visible. People and the masses follow the influencers (and I’m not just talking about twitter) by watching them and seeing what they are talking about, they create the “water cooler conversations.” It is similar to Search in that you need to build a site that the search engines can not only see, but is authoritative.

Create conversations and engagement about your brand

Remember those conversations that I talked about, well, pay attention, because the conversations are happening all across the Social Web. But, you can do things to create those conversations and create engagement that is tied to your brand or your site.

Be insightful, engaging, and provocative when creating a conversation

Don’t be a feed, creating a twitter account and throwing your RSS feed is not participating in the Social Web, it’s a feed and nothing else. You want to create a conversation, think of ways that you can create conversations about your brand. If you are a sports site, talk about upcoming events, like the NBA Draft. If you are a political opinions site, then you might want to ask questions on the Social Web about legislation and elections.

When you create conversations and people are engaging with you and your brand, then you are essentially creating visibility.

The Visibility of Trends

Since moving more into the Publishing and Media side of the business from E-Commerce and Product Centric websites, I’ve learned a ton around insights around trends. Understanding trends gives you insight into the topics that are “buzzing” around a certain category or vertical. You can use a tool like Google Insights to give you that knowledge.

So, you’re sitting there going, “great, who cares what is buzzing!?”…fine, you probably aren’t. That said, this is extremely important to understand, because, creating content around these trends can create the Search and Social Media Visibility needed to grow your business.

Don’t be good, be GREAT!

Remember, your product or content will not survive on it’s sheer awesomeness (even though I’m sure it is!). Make sure that you are considering the visibility of your product and content: ONLY THEN, can your Product and Content be truly considered GREAT!

1. The Sessions and Speaker List

The wide variety of entrepreneurs that will be speaking at Twiistup is unreal. I have never see a cast like this put together in a single day. Every single speaker is an entrepreneur and innovator in his or her own right. They have all been in the trenches, succeeded, and failed like all entrepreneurs. And, to be frank, some of them are just like you…running a business and trying to make moves.

Here are the speakers (taken from the Twiistup website):

• Jason Calacanis Serial entrepreneur, founder of Mahalo and co-founder of TechCrunch 50 and Weblogs. Wikipedia Link
• Chamillionaire Grammy Award-winning and chart topping musician and entrepreneur. Wikipedia Link
• Cyan Banister Early stage investor in Facebook, Slide, Tagged and founder of TopFans.com and Zivity.
• Todd Goldman Artist, entrepreneur, co-creator of BLAHGirls (with Ashton Kutcher) and founder of David and Goliath apparel. Wikipedia Link
• Quincy Jones III (QD3) Music and film producer/entrepreneur. Wikipedia Link
• Dave McClure Seed stage investor for the Founders Fund. Bio Link
• Ian Rogers Former business partner of the Beastie Boys and former GM of Yahoo Music, now CEO of Topspin Media. Bio Link
• Ben Huh CEO of viral phenomenon www.IcanHasCheezburger.com
• Chris Brogan President of New Marketing Labs
• Mark Suster GRP Partners, venture capital. Former VP Product Mgmt Salesforce.com & 2-time CEO and entrepreneur. Bio Link
• Brian Solis Author of Now is Gone and Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, Publisher of PR 2.0 and bub.blicio.us, Founder of Future Works PR, and strategic advisor to Fortune 500 businesses and startups. Wikipedia Link
• David O. Sacks Former COO of PayPal, founder and CEO of Geni.com and Yammer, movie producer Thank You For Smoking. Wikipedia Link
• Brad Feld Co-founder of Foundry Group and Mobius Venture Capital, founder of Techstars.org startup incubator. Bio Link
• Micah Baldwin Founder of Current Wisdom (sold 2007), VP of Business Development and Chief Evangelist for Lijit Networks. Bio Link

*Additional speakers are being added as availability is confirmed. All speakers appear during the daytime conference portion of the event.
**Sessions subject to change as additonal speakers join the program.

2. The ShowOffs

I don’t know of another conference that combines the ShowOff’s with amazing Panels. But, Twiistup isn’t going to bury you with 20-30 or a barrage of startups to bore you to death. These are going to be the best of the best 10 startups that were hand picked by the Twiistup crew.

3. Open Bar

Not many conferences have an open bar as readily available as Twiistup, and, they deliver. Let’s face it, we’re technologists and entrepreneurs that love to drink.

4. Innovation, Innovation, Innovation

Twiistup is just that, all about Innovation. You can go to another boring conference where you try to learn 2-3 things about Twitter or how to do SEO, or, you could attend a conference that is going to inspire you and invigorate you and your ideas to get you to take that next step. You’re going to watch these people on stage, you’re going to interact with others, and you will leave with a fire ignited ready to get stuff done.

5. The Networking

Not only is the speaker list phenominal, but, the attendees of the event are going to be unbelievable. You’ll be interacting with fellow business owners, innovators, marketers, people in the press, and investors. Personally, I always take away the personal interaction from the people attending a conference, it is the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT reason that I attend. With Twiistup, it is definitely going to be that. I want to meet these people, I want to share the stories, hear what people have to say and get involved in some of the greatest conversations that will be happening in Los Angeles, this year. If there is one reason to attend, it would be the opportunity to be involved in the conversation that could shape innovation for the rest of the year.

Sign up for Twiistup before Tickets are Sold Out!

Of course, this year, a bit topic of discussion was Microsoft launching Bing…which of course was the search engine formerly known as Live Search and MSN…wonder if Microsoft can pick a brand and stick to it with Bing now…

That said, there was some other major topics of discussion this year from the entire track dedicated to Social Media, which I truly enjoyed hearing about StumbleUpon from Brent Csutoras, to Twitter from Michael Gray, and well, my talk about proving the value of social media and the metrics and data behind it. I did have a couple interesting discussions though about the need for a seperation between the Monitoring and Corporate Social Media Profiles and the Persona based Social Media Marketing panels.

On the SEO side of things there is always a fun discussion with Paid Links with Michael Gray talking about Google Profiling SEOs. Michael and Matt definitely got into it a little bit at the Mixer and it was definitely made clear during the You & A with Matt Cutts. Also, during the Canonical Tag Panel there was a major debate apprently about how the tag is really not working as it is suppose to, and, how people are still using PageRank Sculpting. There was obviously some confusion about how the “nofollow” attribute is being used and some debate about how it is working.

That said, as always, my favorite part about the conference is the 1 on 1 conversations that I got to have with some of the most amazing people that I know in this industry. I had some amazing conversations with people like Michael Gray, Alex Bennert, Elisabeth Osmeloski, Brent Csutoras, Michelle Robbins, and Rae Hoffman. I also got a chance to uphold Yahoo!’s honor by beating Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan at a game of Pool with Jonathan Hochman at the SEOMoz party. And, Carol Adam (my sister) helped out the Third Door Media team by volunteering to help and apparently did so well, others wanted to hire her as a Virtual Assistant! (Go Carol!)

Finally, I got to take some really cool pictures at the conference, here is the Flickr Slideshow:

See all the SMX Advanced Pictures!

But, wait a second, I haven’t turned on mobile notifications in a LONG time. I guess Twitter is at it again!

So, I logged into my mobile settings and saw this:

So, I quickly updated my settings so my phone would stop buzzing away like crazy. And, of course, like a good Social Media person (or something like that…) I did a quick twitter search to see that it wasn’t just me, oh no, it was everyone as it seems!

So, whatever happened to @biz saying that he was going to communicate things a little bit better. Expect to see a post from him on the Twitter Blog. But, I have to agree with one of the tweets sent out, you’d think by now twitter would have their act together with regard to SMS.

Keep the conversation going and follow me on twitter: @tonyadam

Originally, by default, twitter would not show you the @replies sent to other users until you went in and made the change under Settings -> Notices. Apparently, this caused confusion to many people, despite the help article explaining replies settings to users.

Where we use to see this:

We now see this!

What I am wondering is how they came to this decision?! Isn’t the point of Social Discovery to discover people that share the same friends or interests that you do. Turning this feature off only negates that experience.

Personally, I would like to know how many users have made the change in their settings to receive all @ replies. Not to mention, but, I thought that’s what Direct Messages were for, to keep the conversation personal. Twitter and Social Media is about conversations and by putting this “muzzle” on as @marshallk mentioned, we are losing out on that conversation and furthermore, we are witnessing Twitter taking the Social out of Social Discovery.

Update: SInce posting their note about the “small settings update,” Twitter has posted this in response to all the feedback that they apparently didn’t realize how important the social discovery aspects were to the community.

Update #2: Since this mornings chaos and feedback note Biz mentions that they have learned a lot and are working on changes to the replies functionality.

GeekOut09: Why #iamageek on 12seconds.tv

Why Online Reputation Management is important

For companies and individuals alike, there is a major need for reputation management. It’s the reason that conferences have panels specifically on the topic. That reason is that individuals and businesses alike can be affected by negative reputation. This isn’t just an issue of popularity either, it’s an issue of brand perception, an individuals brand perception, or even the ability to be hired/fired from a job.

Having Online Reputation Management concerns can cause revenue losses and/or income.

I really want to state that if you have not dealt with this or have no experience in understanding the Reputation Management space, then please, do not write about why it is not important.

Who are these people?!

Rather than continuing to tell you why ORM is so important, I’ll answer the question you might ask: “who are the people or companies that care about online reputation management?” Lets run through a few of these right here to provide a better understanding of why ORM is important:

CEOs

An organization with a CEO that has negative perceptions in the press or social atmosphere can lead to the organization or the brand of that organization having negative sentiments or perceptions. I’m not just talking about the SERPs here, but, in terms of Social Mentions in blogs, microblogs, and/or news results that surround that individual. Did you know 87% of people believe a CEO’s reputation reflects on the overall company’s reputation?

Political Figures

Think about the number of times have you seen a political figure that gets tons of bad press and has led to the downfall of his/her campaign or election/re-election to office. Social Media is now playing a part in the political climate and because of that we saw now President Obama reach millions of people.

But, to take this to the next level, lets look at an example that deals with President Obama. How many of you can say you know that he is a smoker? (Now, I am not judging him on this, but using it as a point of reference). This was downplayed a ton during the elections again because of the fact that his team did not want to create a negative perception of the candidate during the elections. This becoming an issue could have, hypothetically, led to the loss of many votes, especially from anti-cigarette and anti-smoking groups.

Companies and Brands

Companies and the brands of those companies alike experience the most pain when it comes to reputation management. Something that is a hard fact: Companies and Brands with negative search results tied to brand related queries will see a drop in revenue because a user/customer is likely to switch products/services based on that negative result. Even more interesting is that queries relative to corporate figures will also lead to a dip in revenue/sales. It’s estimated that 58% of searchers will visit a competing website after seeing negative search results.

An example of this is tied to PayPal and my experience working there. PayPal saw 4 of it’s top 10 search results tied to the brand query “paypal” go to flame sites. Working internally, there was an estimated figure in net revenue losses per negative search result. That is where that 58% number above comes in…because of this negative reputation caused by search results, users were switching.

Celebrities

Celebrities make the news all the time for the stupid things that they do. Whether it is someone driving drunk or who’s sleeping with who, it is all things that affect their personal brand. And, in this case, their personal brand is like that of a business, their personal brand is the most important thing to their livelihood.

Because I am all about examples, lets continue down that path and look at the sports figure that we all know I can’t stand: Kobe Bryant. He was accused of raping a girl in a hotel room back in 2003/2004. Luckily for Bryant this was during a time when Social Media was not as prominent, but, unluckily for Bryant it still effected him financially. He lost endorsement deals from companies like Nike because of the negative press and negative reputation.

The Job Market

The economic climate is horrible at the moment. Unemployment is at astonishing highs and it’s tough to find a job right now. Now, to add to that, recruiters and HR teams are getting saavier and understanding Search and Social Media extremely well. What does that mean for you? It means that Online Reputation Management is important to your personal brand. Because, not only are they looking, but 78% of recruiters research a candidate online and 35% actually reject a candidate based on this. Andy Beal even wrote a post on why your Google Reputation can hurt your career.

Creating a personal brand is even more important as researchers and experts in the job market reference this all the time. I can’t tell you how many times I’m watching CNN, (and let me tell you, I caught a lot of it while I only had a few channels the last couple months!), and these experts mention Facebook, Google, search, and your personal brand being EXTREMELY important, not just now during economic uncertainty, but, forever.

Don’t be silly, Online Reputation Management does matter:

Again, this is another situation where we have someone that is creating a post that is possibly baiting for reactions or what not. Or, we have another person in the industry that is writing something without actually researching the topic. But, please please please people, if you have no experience or expertise on a topic, then stay away from writing it, it just makes you look like you haven’t done your research. And, if you look at the stats above, then it’s pretty obvious that ORM does matter.

**Credit for ORM stats goes to Marketing Pilgrim and Oilman.