SAScon Live Blogging Notes

Live blogging notes at the PushON blog

• Bruce Daisley (YouTube) – The Online Video Revolution
• Who is Best to Exploit the Social Media Opportunity?
• Running a Pan-European Search Campaign
• Advanced Link Building

Live blogging notes at the SAScon blog

• Bruce Daisley (YouTube) Keynote
• Who is best positioned to exploit social media opportunity (Panel F) Roundup
• Pan-European Search (Panel H) Roundup
• Corporate Marketing and Social Media (Panel J) Roundup

Live blogging notes by David Towers

• Bruce Daisley (Keynote)
• Search and Social Media (Panel B)
• Black Hat/White Hat – does it matter any more? (Panel C)
• Who is best positioned to exploit the social media opportunity (Panel F)
• Running a Pan-European Search Campaign (Panel H)
• Advanced Link Building (Panel I)
• The Evolution of Search (Closing Panel)
• Social media marketing findings from the SEMPO Survery 2010

Reviews / Roundups

• SEO Creative Roundup
• I-COM Roundup
• Phil Jones Roundup
• Daniel McClure Roundup
• theEword Roundup
• Tom Mason Roundup
• Artisan Roundup

Speaker Presentations

• Richard Baxter – Advanced Link Building
• Bas Van Den Beld – Running a Pan-European Search Campaign: More than (key)words

Images

• Photos by Mark Mayne

Videos

Videos by Little Orchard during the event:

• Bruce Daisley (YouTube) Video
• Andy Barke (Google) Video
• Simon Wharton (PushON) Video
• Jonathan Beeston (Efficient Frontier) Video
• Ben Poole (MEC) Video
• Ben Martin (NorthernNet)
• Matt Davies (Fluid Creativity) Video
• Rob Baker (Artisan) Video
• Paul Fabretti (Gabba) Video
• Dixon Jones (Majestic SEO) Video

If you know of any reviews, presentations, images or videos related to SAScon, then please get in touch and we will add them to this list.

Corporate Marketing and Social Media: Phil Jones, Brother, Malcolm Coles, internet content consultant, Neil Hardy, head of e-commerce at the Co-operative Group and Ivan Croxford from BT.

This was a really interesting session with some top dogs from big companies discussing how they have embraced social media, chaired by Massimo Burgio.

I thought I recognised Phil Jones from Brother Printers, and it turns out I’m following him on Twitter (@Philjones40). He explained that he spent good few months using Twitter personally and finding out how it all worked before considering using it for business. He then ran the Twitter account for the first few months and set up the Tweetdeck, before passing it on to a team of employees. One of the other panellists pointed out that it’s rare to get the sales and marketing director implementing social media.

Phil said; “We deploy social media tactically – I don’t have a Facebook group, for example. It’s about making it relevant, and I’m always thinking one level up. I talk TAT – time attention and trust – the things lacking in society now. I no longer distinguish between B2B and B2C marketing anymore, I think it’s B2me. I think consumers really just think about how it affects them.

“I think about all these trends and how to make it relevant to Brother. We use Twitter to listen and engage, and Linked In for a sales perspective. We are profiling our largest customers before we make an approach. We also use You Tube because we want you to know more about out printers.

“Overall, it’s about staying relevant and just doing the things that matter.”

Neil Hardy, from The Co-operative Group said: “We’ve been a bit cautious in terms of Facebook and Twitter. We’re using Twitter to put out news, travel news etc, and also looking to use it as a help line. With Facebook, we are using it as a mechanism for people to talk to us and trying to engage with us.

“Social media is representing what’s happening online but also what’s happening on the high street. Travel reviews and video are very significant for us and we have a partnership with Trip Advisor. Reviews and video are the most important things for us going forward.”

Ivan Croxford from BT explained that they have a customer service channel (@BTcare) which aims to respond to customers who need help. He said: “The customer service teams have embraced social media, in particular Twitter. This has become a very successful channel for us. It’s a very broad relationship you have with customers – more than marketing.

“We’re still at the beginning of exploring how social media can work but applied in an intelligent way it’s going to be critical going forward.”

David Edmundson-Bird asked whether the panel could envisage call centres but for Twitter, with hundreds of people in a contact centre responding to queries. Ivan brought up a great point, which was with Twitter being a real time conversation, customers expect their problems to get solved really quickly and get upset when this doesn’t happen.

Malcolm and Phil both agreed they could see Twitter centres, possibly integrated with communication centres – all doing phone calls, emailed and Twitter.

Another question from the audience asked if all the companies had social media fully integrated with the marketing and business plans, and everyone said it was.

Neil Hardy added, “One of the advantages we have as a travel company is that we get to a different target market. We would try different voucher codes online to target new generation. It’s important we do things a bit differently but keep to the brand line.”

When asked about the cost and economies of responding to Twitter, Phil Jones said: “It’s a trend now. We can’t ask all of you to turn the volume down because we can’t resource it. When someone starts a conversation with you it’s in real time.”

Neil added, ‘I don’t see any difference between a tweet, email or phone call. People can multi-task with communications.”

Pan-European Search Panel: Massimo Burgio, Bas Van Den Beld, Kristjan Har Muaksson, Guillermo Villaroag.

This session after lunch had some great European speakers, bringing their own experiences. The session was chaired by Massimo Burgio and had presentations from Bas Van Beld, founder of Search Cowboys and Andy Atkins-Kruger, who runs WebCertain and Kristjan Mar Hauksson from Iceland. There was a lot of information here, so I’ve just picked out the main points here.

The European market  is second biggest in the world – bigger than the US – but is also very splintered market. There are 50 countries in Europe Union and 23 languages – but over 200 languages across Europe. And there are more than 1000 languages and dialects, so very hard to address.

You need to address different countries in different ways because there are so many different cultures and groups within the continent.

You cannot target every European company the same way, and you can’t target same-language speakers (eg Austria and Germany) with same website or campaign, nor different groups within same country (eg. Belgium) because there are too many differences.

Essentially you need to address each company in it’s own way. Don’t just translate content – get native speakers to find out differences in culture and language.

Globally, colours matter because they can have different political and cultural meanings. For example in the Ukraine orange means revolution while in Holland orange means party!

Get a real grip of each country’s behaviours  – not just online though, offline behaviour will tell you a lot.

You can think about domains and sub-domains for a long time but really it’s all about content.

Translating key words do not work! They are short cut thoughts and abbreviations and they don’t match up from one country and culture to another.

Because Google is English language based there are a number of languages differences that Google doesn’t work well with, so be aware of that.

Google rankings are different for each country version.

Geographic signals to help your SEO
- language
- local domain
- hosting
- local links

How to succeed globally
- Centralise at least part of the activity
- Benchmark against history
- Native speakers SEOs – need to advice on language
- Co-operate with local teams
- Senior management being on board
- Implement what the agency says (!).

Who is best positioned to exploit social media panel: Will McInnes, Judith Lewis, Paul Fabretti, James Lowery, Massimo Burgio

Massimo Burgio, from Global Search Interactive, kicked off the third session of the day by querying the panel question ‘Who is best to exploit social media’ by saying that social media isn’t about exploiting anyone, it’s about sharing. Among the rustling of boxes of Heroes being passed round, this was a great way to kick off this interesting discussion of social media and how it sits alongside search marketing.

Paul Fabretti, from Gabba, started off by saying that PR, SEO and social media all have to fully integrate to get the most value out of social media.

This was followed by the idea (from another panellist) who said the people are getting most out of social media are the people who engage, so brands need to know who to engage with.

Judith Lewis, AKA deCabbit, said: ” Search and social media are coming together and becoming one thing. It can be about exploitation in that how can I leverage all my sites to work better for business. But mostly it’s about engaging, instead of traditional pushing messages one way to consumers.”

The discussion moved onto say that inside a company everyone should be given guidelines on social media, but the freedom to engage.

Paul Fabretti said: “Different departments will look at social media for different reasons in terms out what they want to achieve We want to use it to bring out what the business is about, but we need to realise that each different person within a company has different objectives.

“There can’t be a model for one company – they need to understand where the opportunities lie.”

Massimo Burgio added, “Social media conversation depends on what your internal goals are, not just marketing goals. It could be human resources.”

Will McInnes, from Nixon McInnes, said: “Traditional media has been about storytelling, but now search is an ingenious game to get to the top of the rankings BUT was it the story that sent me there?” He asked the crowd how many people just wanted to use social media to get to the top of rankings and very few people put their hands up.

Paul Fabretti added that there’s no point in having a great community but it’s sat on p5 of search rankings, so it just has to be integrated. He explained, “Technically they are two distinct disciples but agencies that combine that successfully will be able to take advantage of these opportunities.”

He went onto say, “A few years ago companies would say they  need a Facebook page because their competitors had one, but I always say don’t do something that will be half-baked. I spend two to three weeks looking at conversations and whatever your campaign, you have to make sure your messages are absolutely relevant.”

James Lowery, from Latitude, said: “If it’s a customer service role then it has to be owned by that team. If it’s branding or marketing then it’s different. The person who needs to take responsibility is the CEO or who’s vision it is.”

Judith added, “We need to know why you’re doing something. You have to think does the world really need another Facebook app?!”

At the end of the session, an interesting question was asked by someone in the audience, who said: “Does social media just reflect your brand or can it develop the brand?”

Paul Fabretti said it can be successful if you find the right approach or message for the right audience. With retail clients if we find the right hook you can make a splash, and increase search activity.

Overall, it was generally agreed that SEO and social media have a massive overlap, but with different standpoints and objectives. A great conclusion was that social media will make big national companies and politics even better because people can engage with them and contribute to the ongoing conversation.

Video is now one third of all web traffic, but by 2013 this is predicted to be a massive 90%. This is what we were told at here at SAScon by the key note speaker Bruce Daisley from You Tube. He went on to talk about just how massive video has become online, and how integral it is to search marketing.

In terms of marketing, television advertising had been out of reach for all but big national brands. The rise of online video streaming has given the same power and, arguably just as large a reach, to any brand, SME or individual – potentially.

Bruce also talked about the emotion of using video on You Tube, and this is because it comes from the every day person. A great example he used was of the ‘big snow’ we had this winter that dominated the news with doom and gloom of how it ground the country to a halt, and cost so many millions to UK businesses.

There were 1,000 news results on Google (when Bruce searched) BUT there were 3,000 uploaded films to You Tube. And these were people throwing themselves down hills on sledges, rolling giant snowballs on Hampstead Heath and generally having fun.

In Bruce’s words there is a “freer flow of debate, and that is very empowering. The social aspect gets you closed to the truer story.” That’s because it’s real, it’s not filtered by a news organisation.

In the same vein, Bruce also mentioned in the early days of the internet people thought that e-greetings cards would be massive. And you can definitely see why they would think this, but it certainly didn’t work out. An interesting insight from Bruce was that people actually send each other You Tube clips to convey emotion – to cheer someone up, make them laugh, send them something meaningful.

And you don’t need an online greetings cards company to do this.

I really didn’t realise that You Tube is only five years old – that’s a very young brand which is now so powerful and globally recognised. We were told that 24 hours of video are uploaded to You Tube every minute. But what does this mean?

Well, half of all those videos are either rated or commented on. So in terms of basic ROI you’ve got a 50% chance of being seen to begin with without any tactics.

The average iPhone user watches three to four clips a day, while the average Android user watches twice that. I wonder if that’s because the Android phones have a younger audience who can’t afford iPhones but have more time to watch clips?

The power of the smartphone has really been unprecedented, and brands should really be aware of just how many people watch videos on their mobiles. I rarely spend time watching You Tube clips because I’m so busy with work but I recently found myself watching a clip someone had posted on You Tube while sitting on a cliff in North Wales. Now I’m old enough to remember the Channel 4 test card so the thought that I could have a breather on a hike and watch a friend’s (terrible) film is a massive sign of the times.

Moving onto the advertising and marketing side, Bruce pointed out the changes in the homepage. Interestingly the research told them that people just wanted to watch film, so they actually took stuff away from the homepage and made it look sleeker. I wish more companies would think down the ‘less is more’ route when it comes to websites and the user experience.

He went onto talk about the paid advertising, which works very much like Google keywords, and only puts your video and keyword next to cleared content – which essentially means it won’t appear next to dodgy home videos which you can’t control.

However, a Techcrunch article found you get 51 times better results from natural search, so they would always encourage companies to have their own channel and encourage their own inbound links.

In short, any brand looking at search marketing would be crazy not to embrace You Tube as part of its marketing strategy.

Just a final point of note, the Chat Roulette piano man was You Tube’s biggest ever clip. Now Chat Roulette is just downright disturbing, but if you’ve not seen these clips go on and add to the stats.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/SeachMarketing

PS: There is also a chance to win an iPod Nano!

To book your ticket for SAScon, visit the online booking page today.

More videos will be appearing here this week, but you can also follow them on the SAScon YouTube channel.

To book your ticket for SAScon, visit the online booking page today.

More videos will be appearing here this week, but you can also follow them on the SAScon YouTube channel.

To book your ticket for SAScon, visit the online booking page today.

More videos will be appearing here this week, but you can also follow them on the SAScon YouTube channel.

To book your ticket for SAScon, visit the online booking page today.

More videos will be appearing here this week, but you can also follow them on the SAScon YouTube channel.