Welcome do Day 3 of aimClear’s coverage of #SMX East!

In other words, retargeting requires you to be a bit of a cyber-starlking geek-creep. Right? *Shrug* Maybe so. But the spoils of retargeting, namely a more close-knit relationship with your customer/potential customer, are pretty sweet, and if you do it well, you can side-step that creep-factor altogether!

Moderator Pamela Parker, Q&A moderator Marty Weintraub, and speakers Dax Hamman, William Leake, Bibi Mukherjee, & Alan Osetek took the stage on the final morning of #SMX East 2011 to share insight on this new breed of advertising, as well as tips, tactics and top-notch best practices for creating campaigns that get real results. Many of them encouraged attendees to embrace our inner-stalker and to have fun doing it.

aimClear live-tweeted this session via @beebow. Read on for the full effect.

Pamela welcomed the audience, introduced the speakers, and explained that this session is a bit of a deeper dive into the Cousins To Paid Search session, specifically, all about retargeting.

Chris was up first. Chris works for Chango Inc., a search retargeting provider, so he had some pretty fresh insight to share. He began by pointing out, “Display has totally changed – that’s an important thing to consider. A couple years ago to do display, you had to buy big chunks of inventory, 10 million impressions on one site.” Yikes!

Now, thanks to real-time bidding and ad exchanges, Chris explains, display advertising is more like search.

What is Retargeting?
Retargeting is a display advertising technique for engaging users based on very specific action they have taken online sometime in the past.

1. Action – User navigates to site, leaves without converting.
2. Retarget – Cookie the user, follow him or her around the web.
3. Convert – Engagement drives customer back so they convert!

Why Use Retargeting?

• Obvious Reason –> Re-engagement. Converting existing customers by targeting on-site actions.
  • Source of data = You own it.  It’s on your site already. (Make sure you have GA or a similar analytics platform set in place.)
• Less Obvious Reason –> Prospecting. Find new customer by targeting off-site actions prospective customers take.
  • Source of data = Third party.

7 Types of Effective Retargeting | Chango.com/7types

1. Search – Users search your site.
2. Site – Users completes an action or views certain content.
3. SEO/SEM – User arrives via SEO or SEM ad. retargeting based on how they get to your site.
4. Email – Um, wait, why serve display to email subscribers? You’ve already got them! People get a lot of email, and don’t always open everything in their inbox. You can leverage retargeting to subtly remind them to check their email. One time, Chris retargeted users just prior to sending out a newsletter (like, within hours of pushing it out). The open rates dramatically increased
5. Contextual – user browses content.
6. Engagement – user takes specific action.
7. Social – user shares content. target them, target their friends. sneaky, but smart

Plugging the “Leaky” SEM Marketing Funnel
In the SEM funnel, you target user based on keyword search with the goal of, of course, getting them to click on your ads. Thing is, folks aren’t always ready to click (to buy), or maybe they click on your competitor instead. Ay, there’s the leak, as Hamlet once said. I think.

Plug that baby up! Retargeting fixes leaky SEM marketing funnel – if user searches your KW and travels elsewhere, you can cookie them and serve up an ad… wherever they go.

Tip: Think of retargeting as moving search engine marketing off of the search engines.

Retargeting – Advanced Optimization

• You can afford the KWs! It’s not as pricy as you think.
• Be mindful of KW freshness. With retargeting, the window for serving that ad is time-sensitive.
• You can increase lift in effectiveness when leveraging dynamic ads. Serve users an ad and landing page that really speaks to where they’ve been and what they’ve engaged.
• Utilize (and remember!) the frequency cap. Best practice is to keep it to around 4-5 ads per day. Stagger them. Do NOT cram retargeted ads down users’ throats 24/7.

How to Measure Your Retargeting Campaign?

1. Post-click measurement. Similar to SEM.
2. Post-view measurement. Engagement! Display ad increases brand awareness and improves search CTR & conversion rate. Measure it!

Next up was Bill, who warned that not enough traditional SEM agencies nowadays are on board with retargeting or display. Integrated agencies know where it’s at. Even if we <3 SEO & SEM, even if that’s what we’ve built our lives around… we need to be display people, too.

Display is as big as search, and it’s going to grow more… Anyone marketing to a considered purchase process knows search is not the handsome leading actor, it’s a supporting actor. Sometimes, it’s just a face in the crowd.

You don’t have to retarget simply based on on-site engagement. Consider retargeting from…

• Social media
• Partner sites
• Various marketing channels
• Press
• Portals
• Google Search within the Site
• Blended search

If a user comes to your site, take the opportunity to stalk them around the web for the next 90 days.

It’s all about integrated marketing. Bill shows a chart that illustrates such marketing has amazing conversion rates. Essentially: Display only < Search Only < Display + Search!

“Display by itself sucks. It just sucks.” (In terms of conversion)

Display done right drives brand searches. Statistics from 2010 prove this, and now, they’re even higher. Now, we can stalk better than ever. Wee!

“It’s a big world out there,” Bill continued. You have to think beyond search.

• 81% of your target market is reached by display
• 8% by paid search

Staggering! Again – with paid search, people may see your ad, but not be ready to engage. ”Most of the [PPC] tree is dealing with fruit that’s not on the ground,” Bill mused.

Retargeting allows small brands to compete with big brands, small budgets to compete with large stupid budgets.

Ongoing Issues & Challenges

• Impressions – Easiest to measure, almost everyone has inventory in this format
• Clicks – Easy to measure, but not always valid
• Online advertising industry = $10B –> Optimizing to the click results in more than $1B loss (ouch!)
• Creative. Formats = Multiple, production, testing
• Placements (1 ad exchange or DSP)
• Attribution
• Ongoing management
• IT’S NOT LIKE PAID SEARCH MEDIA ADS

Reclaiming Attribution from Email Marketing Bastards
From the top-down of the conversion funnel, it goes impressions, clicks, leads & online sales, to offline sales. If you have a house list of customers, don’t let “those email bastards” steal all the attribution for the sales! Retarget, steal the attribution back!

B2B Keyword Types
Bill points out that performance, intent and ROI vary tremendously by type.

• Company KWs
• Product KWs
• Industry category KWs
• Tactical pain KWs
• Broad focus KWs

Next up was Alan, set to discuss specifically about the agency and search marketers perspective on search KW retargeting.

Why retargeting? It’s considered by advertisers to be the most effective media channel for reaching consumers who exhibit intent.

Challenges with straight-up paid search:

• High PPC prices
• Scalability issues
• Limited to text ads

Retargeting works around these limitations. Sweet .

Alan compared the features and benefits of network providers Yahoo, Chango, Magnetic, and Simplifi.

The main takeaway? There isn’t one provider that’s always better than the other. Be responsible, do research. Dig into the inventory each provider… provides. Dig into where their data comes from to understand the quality level. Do this on a product-specific basis.

Tips for Overcoming Internal Agency of Company Objections to Search Retargeting

• Objection: Ad exposure – Where will my ads be showing up?
• Solution: Many platforms allow you to create white lists (I want my ads here!) and black lists (I never want my ads here!). Additionally, you can leverage technology like Double Verify or Adsafe — programs that prevent an ad from showing on sites with content you have deemed inappropriate.

8 Retargeting Best Practices

1. Working through the creative process is new. Give yourself time to familiarize yourself with what it’s all about!
2. Consider ad serving training. Learn the details behind ad serving as a part of the campaign.
3. Networks vary in scale and performance. Do research, talk to providers, learn inventory, specifics about data.
4. Managing search retargeting companies. Providers vary in agency-like approach. Understand how closely they can monitor campaigns, and how well they manage them.
5. Timing. Leave 3-4 weeks free to implement a retargeting campaign start to launch– from strategy, to KW research, to understanding your target, and going live.
6. Use historical client campaign success metrics. Share them with providers, if you can. They’re usually pretty good about integrating that data into your retargeting campaign.
7. Optimize, optimize, optimize!
8. Effectively partner with search KW providers like Magnetic, Chango, Simplifi, etc.

Last but not least was Bibi, who planned to focus specifically on Google’s search-based remarketing platform.

Sale Stages:

• Browse – User comes to your site, looks around, then leaves. Cookie the user. Serve user a customized PPC ad that speaks to the stage he/she was in when you cookied him/her. For example, “Welcome back!”. Create a dedicated landing page that reinforces this concept.
• View - User comes to your site, views products, thereby demonstrating deeper intent (closer to making a sale). Serve user a customized PPC ad that directly references the products he/she looked at. “Come back to view more [product]!”
• Abandon cart – User came to your site, added products to shopping cart, then left. Serve user a customized PPC ad that pulls at their heartstrings. “You were so close!…” Lead them to a customized landing page. Consider offering an incentive of “20% off since you came back!” or something similar.

Bibi reminded the audience that just with all other campaigns, nothing about retargeting is “risk-free.” An ad inviting users to “Come back, we luv you!” might irritate users. Seeing your ad too many times might turn users against your brand.

Audience & Remarketing Lists
So you’re thinking about retargeting! Well… unless you have an audience, how do you know who to go after? In AdWords, activate your “audience” tab. You can create audiences based on three categories:

• Interest-based
• Remarketing list
• Custom combinations

For retargeting purposes, focus on the latter two options.

Your remarketing list is built of people who come to your site in the default timeframe default is 30 days. You can adjust this default! Depending on your sales cycle, (is it fast-moving? longer term?) you might want to. Change the default timeframe to reflect the goal and length of your sales cycle.

Custom combinations are rad, and give you a tremendous amount of… customization! You can target people based on the fact that they started converting, and eliminate from your targets people who did convert, so you serve the most relevant ad possible.

As a basic best practice, Bibi strongly recommends creating a mix of video, image, and text ads for your remarketing campaign.

Performance Highlights of Retargeting

• Higher conversions
• CTR similar to search
• Low cost per conversion

Trifecta!

“Happy stalking!” Bibi concluded. It was on to the Q&A. Here’s some highlights:

Q: What type of attribution value should the post-impression get?

Bill: More than 0%, less than 100%. factor in # of touches, value of customers.

Bibi: Check out the conversion tab in Google, it shows the first through last click attribution path, gives you a good idea of how much weight to grant a given touch.

Alan: The easy solution is to give them all equal credit.

Literally, after one question, we ran out of time. Big thanks to the speakers for awesome and actionable advice! Thanks for sticking around aimClear blog for coverage of #SMX East 2011. Catch y’all next year

Post image credit: dbalinger.com

Welcome back to aimClear’s coverage of #SMX East 2011! Ah, the fine art of communication. In the good old days, we could all freely converse with one another. Then, some brilliant folks got the idea to erect the Tower of Babel to get closer to the Big Man Upstairs, and we all know what happened there. Now, a zillion years later, we’re at it again – but this time, we’re not bridging the communication gap between [wo]man and neighbor. This time, we’re connecting [wo]man and machine.

And this time, it ain’t no tower unifying our language. It’s Schema.org, Rel=author, and other intuitive meta tags clarifying human-created content for robot-powered search engines so that other human-users can have a better overall experience.

The afternoon of Day 2 at #SMX East brought together moderator Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land, Q&A moderator Lisa Williams, President, MEDIA forte marketing, and speakers Janet Driscoll Miller, President and CEO, Search Mojo, Topher Kohan, SEO Coordinator, CNN, and Product Management Director, Search, Google. Janet and Topher shared tip-top tactics and advice for leveraging the universal language Schema.org and various meta tags of 2010 represent while Jack was there to be grilled by Vanessa and the crowd. aimClear live-tweeted this session via @beebow. Read on for the full recap. 

Vanessa welcomed attendees back from launch and introduced the session.

“A lot of people in SEO think a lot about ranking… that tends to take a lot of the focus… but there’s other parts to be considered,” she began.

What does the SERP actually look like? The SERP houses a ton of opportunity for you as a site owner to engage with people. The actual landing page is incredibly important, too. But for the sake of this session, we’re going to focus more on the SERPs and how you can beef up your presence.

Topher took the stage to deliver his magnificently titled presentation: ”Semantic Markup and You!”

The semantic web (or structured code), like that incorporated by Schema.org and microformats, is a ‘man-made woven web of data’ that facilitates machines to understand meaning of information on the Internet. It gives meaning and structure to data on the web, it takes data users can read, and gives it meaning so that people can use it in other methods, rather than just reading.

Microformats were the originator of semantic movement, but technically, microdata is what Schema.org uses primarily.

And Schema.org is…
Schema.org is an open source set of standard microdata markup to use on video & interactive content. It was originally pursued by Google an Yahoo, but factors in Bing, too. Thing of it as a language the three search engines understand and speak in unison.

A Brief History of Google Speak

• Google Speak on Rich Snippets. In may of 2009, Google announced it’s roll out of rich snippets capable of giving ”users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance.”
• Google Speak on Video Markup. This markup adds additional information to videos that search engines can understand. In 2009, Topher’s team added RFDa to video on test sites. What happened?
  • 35% increase in number of indexed videos in Google video search
  • 22% increase in videos showing up for targeting KWs
  • Note: Despite the increase in visibility, Topher’s team removed the code. Why? It tacked on serious page load time. Totally unacceptable. They’re looking to add the code once more, in a leaner and meaner style — in a way that won’t affect page load time (and, by extension, rank).

The Skinny on Rel=author
Rel=author highlights the creator of content, allows authors to be indexed. When marking up with Rel=author, Google would like you to point to the author’s Google profile page, but you don’t have to.

Topher recommends leveraging Rel=author if you work for a content-based organization, as it could be a big game-changer for you in terms of visibility in the SERPs. This isn’t about ranking (and perhaps it’s not even really about getting found)… it’s about letting search engines know what the content is about.

Example: hRecipe, a markup that tells search engines a given piece of content is a recipe.

When Topher’s team implemented hRecipe for one of their web assets, they saw:

• 47% increase of recipes showing in Google (within 24 hours of implementation)
• 22% increase of search traffic to recipe pages

Some Problems with Schema.org

• Schema is a “new” markup
• If your standards have to be in place, it might not go so well
• ROI has to be… existant.

Best Time to Implement Schema Markup

• Moving to a new CMS
• Launching new template or site (from scratch)
• Site redesign
• Down dev cycles

Topher wrapped up: “Peace, y’all.”

Janet was up next. She blazed through some facts on the semantic web and advice for taking it on.

What is structured data? It’s a way to annotate text. Formats include RDFa, microdata, microformats, and the like. Types of structured data for SEO include rich snippets, Rel=Author, schema.org.

What are rich snippets? Why use them?
Google says they result in better CTR. Is it true? *Shrug* Janet can’t say for sure rich snippets always translate to a better CTR. They do, however, affect visibility of a listing.

Rich snippets types:

• Reviews*
• People*
• Products
• Businesses & organizations
• Recipes*
• Events
• Music

(*= Used by Bing as well as Google.)

How do you implement rich snippets? It’s all done by super simple coding. The challenge comes with scalability. If you have a HUGE site (like Topher with, um, CNN.com), it is a HUGE undertaking to implement structured data across your pages. But if you have a smaller site, you should totally take advantage of markups. They will impact visibility.

Rel=Author Problems

• Doesn’t support multiple author blogs (or, at least, it’s tricky to get it to work)
• Only works on same site
• Only works on self-hosted sites

Implementing Rel=author: A Step by Step Guide

• Step 1: From author name on blog post, link to author page of blog. On that link, add rel=”author” to that link.
• Step 2: On author page, create link to your Google+ profile. Tag link with rel=”me”.
• Step 3: On Google profile page, create link to author page of your blog. Be sure to check “This page is about me” box.

Schema.org
Created by Google, Bing & Yahoo, Schema.org launched in June ’11. It represented a way for search engines to collectively understand information. Schema.org is very comprehensive– it understands persons, organizations, creative works, events, products and offers, and more.

Janet recommends checking out: google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets, a handy tool for testing the way your rich snippet will appear in a SERP. She called it, “The best tool ever, but it doesn’t always work.” So… keep that in mind.

Janet wrapped up and all who was left was Jack from Google. Here’s some paraphrased bite-sized nuggets from the Q&A that ensued:

Vanessa: Why Schema.org?

Jack: Schema.org is a vocabulary we’re trying to get everybody on the same page of using. While it does use microdata, typically at Google we’ve always been agnostic with types of markup. So if you love RDFa, and have done markup on your site with that, that’s fine, you can use that. Keep in mind though that HTML 5 and web as a standard, is moving towards microdata. So we suggest using that. Google will not phase out other parses, though. Rest easy, weary site master.

Vanessa: Do you have any thoughts on if any markup will influence indexing for relevance?

Jack: It’s really, really, really, really hard for a search engine to figure out what the Internet is saying. It’s not as intuitive an experience as it is for users. Anything that can be done to give search engines hints (wink: structured data) helps them deliver better results. Does that directly lead to double-plus goodness? I don’t know… *smile*.

Jack (On the Race to Implement Schema Markups): Schema.org is forward thinking. Not all of the markups actually do stuff now. We’re ahead of ourselves with the definitions. You can implement all the tags you want, but that doesn’t mean they will actually mean anything… yet…

Vanessa: Any more rich snippets we should be mindful of?

Jack: Janet’s list was pretty much it. There’s some more for mobile application stores, but that’s a small portion of sites out there.

Vanessa: In terms of multiple author blogs using Rel=Author, can it work? How hard it is?

Topher: We got it to work, but it was a lot of hoop-jumping, a lot of phone calls to Google, who was really helpful.

Jack: We’re sorry for any hassle you guys have encountered. Remember, it’s still a new markup, there’s still kinks. That said, we will work to make it easier, maybe post an official blog better explaining how to accomplish this.

Vanessa: Do you typically see CTR increasing for sites with markup, even if ranking stays exactly the same?

Jack: Yep. (With slight caveats.) It should be better for you. That’s what our goal is.

Vanessa: Someone in the crowd has noticed listings in the SERPs for their pages with title tags different from the ones they’ve created. What’s up with that, yo?

Jack: Um… yeah, sometimes Google makes tweaks to titles to make the content better resonate with the query, to make the user experience better.

And on that… eerie note… the session moved towards a conclusion…

Big thanks to the panelists for a tip-top discussion and sneak-peek into the future, which is underway today. Stay tuned in aimClear blog for more lively coverage from #SMX East 2011!

Image Credit: doodlepress

Welcome back to Day 2 of aimClear’s #SMX East 2011 coverage! The heavyweight battle between SEO and PPC has long graced the stage at mainstream online marketing conferences. Organic optimization in the red corner, paid search in the blue corner – powerful opponents seemingly fighting for a greater stake of your company budget.

Despite the provocatively titled session, suggesting a gloves-off bloody-nosed to-the-victor-go-all-my-marketing-dollars type scenario, attendees often walked away with a deeper understanding of and respect for the powerful combined forces of PPC and SEO. Yes, speakers would make their case for one or the other, but in the end everyone would agree that it just doesn’t make good sense to have one without the other, and that the most companies integrate a healthy blend of both PPC and SEO to ensure sustainable success online.

It’s often all sunshine and pussy cats after the end of these sessions… but that harmony doesn’t always translate back in the office. Allowing intra-office competition between PPC and SEO teams is a surefire way to shoot your business in the foot, miss opporutnities, and make life shi more difficult.

Fortunately for marketers at #SMX East 2011, moderator Brad Geddes, Founder, Certified Knowledge, Q&A moderator Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance, and speakers Tim Mayer, Chief Strategy Officer, Trada, David Roth, Sr. Director, Search Marketing, Yahoo and… Brad Geddes again, were ready to set aside the debate and share profound tips for getting SEOs and PPCers to not only coexist peacefully, but learn from one another.

aimClear live-tweeted this lively Day 2 session via @beebow. Read on for the full effect.Brad took the stage and welcomed Tim, our first speaker.

“Search marketing has become the umbrella term across PPC and SEO,” Tim led off. People need to look at both these factors holistically.

Looking at the SERPs, PPC CTR = about 12% while SEO CTR = about 60-70%. Tim’s worked with many marketers who ask, ”Why should we optimize to show the same result in organic if we’ve already showed it in the paid section?” Conversely, some SEOs complain, “I already appear in organic #1! Why should I spend money on PPC for that term?”

Aren’t these two examples of surefire cannibalization?

Nope. They’re not. Let’s look at the math.

• Incremental ad clicks from PPC and SEO together = 89% (based on a July 2011 study)
• Incremental clicks examples – Advertiser spends $1k / month, results in 400 organic clicks and 300 paid clicks.
• Incremental clicks example – Advertiser cuts ad spend to $0, results in 500 organic clicks and 0 paid clicks.

What Tim’s Learned From Managing Commerce Sites with SEO & PPC Team

• Common success criteria. Conversions/ROAs vs. # of referrals to a website.Ranking is nice, but the click is better!  Important click determinants: KW title, branded URL, and KW in context in description.

A/B test your organic titles in PPC to see what works. Gem. Genius. Do it.

• Collaborative KW research. Determine where volume is in PPC to drive content generation efforts and SEO KW efforts.
• Examine site analytics for natural search to look for new KWs to test for PPC campaign.
• Use PPC and analytics to optimize landing pages. SEO traffic going to content-rich/low monetization content. Monetize more effectively with ads, create widgets to drive traffic into higher value areas of site, integrate & merchandise higher valued and relevant items. In summation, drive PPC traffic to A/B landing pages for quick iteration.
• Reduce impact of major changes. One box coverage, new design, site resign, new product launch, seasonal promotions & sales, etc. Ramp up PPC until SEO kicks in, then test with and without PPC. When your SEO and  PPC teams communicate together, you can better manage the traffic & revenue flow from an overall basis.
• Segment traffic! Try different landing pages for different types of traffic. Direct traffic = navigation or branded terms, SEO, PPC, etc. Consider different monetization levels: Higher monetization = higher $/PV = higher bid.

Tim wraps up and turns it over to David Roth. On the menu: Discoverability, sharing the page, cross-channel data, & attribution. Here’s some high-level takeaways from this dense, insightful preso:

• Considering buying paid ads even if you rank well organically (for brand terms)?
• One approach:
  • Target bran KW
  • Baseline SEO traffic
  • Buy the ad
  • Alternate buying vs. not buying
  • Be aware of cyclicality/seasonality
  • Gather all the data you can,
    Estimate CTRs
  • Use scatter plots to chart results
• In this example, when David bought the paid link, it increased the CTR on the organic listing.

Summary: Organic makes a difference. Fill in the gaps with paid. Paid vs. Organic is more about math than philosophy.

Brad (as a speaker…) was up next, to discuss the relationship between SEO & PPC with a rather literal metaphor.

What do 12 year olds do when they like someone? They sucker-punch them. In the beginning, when they were both “young,” SEO and PPC fought like two kids with crushes on one another. Over the years, they’ve grown up, and started dating. Eventually, they got engaged. Now, it’s time for them to get married. We need to marry SEO and PPC within our own companies and online marketing efforts if we want a happy ending.

“What is an ad?” Brad asks. It is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take action. Guess what? That’s exactly what your compellingly-written organic listing does, too. Ergo, the goal of PPC and SEO is exactly the same. Why, then, all the talk about competition between the two?

[Br]advice for Leveraging PPC to test SEO
(That’s advice form Brad, get it?)

• Test Tags. Take your potential title tags, make them ad copy, test with PPC, see what yields a better CTR. Make the winners your SEO tags.
  • (Note: If all you do is SEO, work with your paid search team – your approach to writing title tags may be slightly different than what it takes to make a good ad. Vice versa.)
• Test Homepages. PPC is great for homepage testing, too. Make potential homepages the landing for brand traffic in PPC. Which LP gets better conversions? Test and find out.
  • (Note: This is where robots.txt files are essential. SEOs know this. PPCs might not. Make sure to block right pages so you don’t harm SEO efforts.)
• Test Templates. Use PPC to test site design templates. Paid search teams and SEO teams have to design together, because ultimately, these are not dedicated PPC pages. They’re test pages for SEO purposes.

Are you noticing a trend? In all of these scenarios, it is vital for the PPC team to work with the SEO team. Each is invaluable to the other. They are both completely involved with these tests.

Brad cruised through a heaping handful of examples showcasing SEO CTR, SEO conversion rate, PPC CTR, PPC conversion rate, and SEO+PPC CTR as well as SEO+PPC conversion rate, but they weren’t the easiest thing to capture on-the-fly. Suffice it to say – in pretty much every case, when SEO and PPC joined forces, the results were favorable, in every sense.

That about does ‘er, folks! Stay tuned for more coverage from #SMX East 2011, right here in aimClear blog.

Welcome back to aimClear’s coverage of #SMX East! It was the rank spank heard round the world: Google Panda, an algorithm update by-and-large focused on quality content, rolled out in waves starting February 24, 2011. Panda thematically dominated SMX Advanced back in June, and by proxy, the Best of SMX Advanced Track this go-round at East. The morning kicked off with Google Survival Tips and lead into the afternoon with inspirational and informative techniques for Panda-Proofing Your Content.

Moderator Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land, Q&A moderator John Doherty, SEO Consultant, Distilled, and speakers Horst Joepen, CEO, Searchmetrics, Heather Lloyd-Martin, President and CEO, SuccessWorks Search Marketing, and Chris Silver Smith, Director of Optimization Strategies, KeyRelevance took turns sharing actionable advice for creating top-quality content designed to satisfy users, rank well in search engines, and of course, please the Panda. aimClear live-tweeted this session via @beebow. Takeaways live after the jump.

Chris Sherman took the stage and welcomed the crowd. He raised a noteworthy statistic addressed earlier int he day, namely: Google claims only 12% of websites were affected by Panda. While that doesn’t sound like a ton, consider how many sites and pages are indexed by Google. Twelve percent of a trillion is pretty darn sizable, don’t you think?

Regarding Panda, Google has always said quality content is important. But there’s also technical aspects to consider when optimizing for the algorithm. While Panda has some site owners screaming bloody murder, it also presents a (perhaps previously overlooked) opportunity for them to seriously rework their content so it works to their advantage.

Heather was up first. She began by stressing that we are all content marketers. Websites are composed of content. If you own a website, you’re marketing it. Therefore: website owners are content marketers.

“Some see Panda as a slap,” Heather noted, “but it’s about emphasizing quality content… something we should have been doing all along.”

Pre-panda, folks focused on search engines and forgot about readers. That’s a serious shame! The war-cry was always, “Create content for the search engines!” Thing is… search engines don’t pay your bills. customers do.

“Make sure every word you write is focused on what your users want to read,” Heather stressed.

We all know what quality content is by being able to look at it, being able to paraphrase. In fact, here’s a paraphrased quote from Potter Stewart Heather shared with the crowd:

“Quality content is hard to define, but we know it when we see it.”

(Author’s note / question to the reader: Was I actually supposed to put quotes around that?)

Heather went on to comically lament, “At no other time in history did people create such crappy content everywhere and expect good results.”

As content marketers, we want to create quality content, but we don’t know how to start. Here’s Heather’s tip: View your content as parts of a whole.

Heather’s Guide to Panda-Proofed Content

• Create an editorial calendar that makes it easy to slice & dice your content & repurpose it for different mediums.
  • Quality content allows you to do this easily.
  • Crap content is like buying a cheap shirt you will wear for one season, then toss.
• Stop asking, “What does Google want?”
  • Focus on what your customers want, on what they’re interested in reading.
• Develop content around keyphrase research, customer questions, sales funnels, and stories you can tell about your company.
• Strategically repurpose content across different mediums.
  • From whitepapers, make blog posts, tweet stats that point to whitepaper, post facts on FB page, put in newsletter, etc.
  • From blog posts, make videos, share links on FB and LinkedIn, Twitter, start discussions, etc.
  • From sales pages and case studies, integrate video testimonials, tweet facts, link back, etc.
• Important: Keep track of your content assets with an editorial calendar. Stick to it! On-the-fly is no good.

Action Steps – What You Can Do Now, Yes, Now!

1. Evaluate your current content assets. What do you have? What have you done?
2. Get everyone on the same page about SEO content. This could be a fast chat, or an in-house training.
3. After researching topics, create your editorial calendar. Assign monthly content to in-house team, or outsource.
4. Watchdog the quality. Even post-Panda, some folks are confused about how to approach SEO writing. The content may not pass the test.
5. Have fun with content development. This is your chance to tell a story about your company and convert like crazy .

Heather wrapped up and turned it over to Horst, who was going to discuss more of an international perspective – on what our friend Panda did in other countries.

Looking at the history of reported or noted penalties and updates…

• 2006 – BMW goes black hat
• 2009 – The Vince & Canonical update
• 2010 – MayDay Update (May), Brand Update (August)
• 2011 – Panda hits U.S. (February), more U.S. & International affected (April), Pan-English (August)

What makes the difference? Why do some sites get penalized, others, not? With Panda, it was more of an auto-penalty or auto-quality rating. Previously, things were more of an analytics-supported (manual) quality rating and time limited penalties. Now, however, there’s a greater emphasis on permanent quality assessment during crawling / indexing, permanent pressure on KW positions, etc.

Early-Warning Signs: Do They Exist? What Are They?

• Quality content is necessary. What do search engines do with the rearrangement of rankings and the redirecting of traffic?
• Example: idealo.de vs. idealo.fr. No change in traffic for the German site. For the French site, there was a 39% loss of visibility. Conclusion: Brand protection goes a long way.
• Excessive linkbuilding example – the JCPenny rollercoaster. Why the hell did they do that? Lesson: Learn from your competition. Watch for penalties in your peer groups.
• Reasons for penalties will be built into Panda and algorithm improvements. Warning signs (instances of sites getting spanked) indicate what might hit you later.

When Examining Peers / Competitors, Look For…

• Which competitor got away?
• Who got hit, and why?
• Compare buckling structures, content and structure of competitor domains
• Compare AdSense and affiliate load (less is better!)
• Compare social network activities
• Compare user experience

SEO 2.0 Winning Traits

• Sites with original content, but not always the original wins
• Brands and established businesses are preferred

So you got spanked…

• Adjust SEO strategy
• Go long tail, don’t stand in between
• In the short term, compensate with PPC traffic or other universal channels
• Distribute content on subdomains
• Worst case, relaunch

Key Takeaways:

• The line has been moved up towards quality
• Leverage peer group monitoring to learn from others
• Don’t stand back, don’t go overkill– walk the line!

Last but not least was Chris Silver Smith.

“What is Panda?” Chris mused.

Vanessa Fox says it isn’t simply an algorithm update. It is a platform for new ways to understand the web and user experience. Danny Sullivan, similarly, says it’s not a new algorithm, it’s a new factor. Stephan Weitz and Maile Oyhe maintain Panda makes it easier to reliably detect social spam. Chris believe it’s a combination of automated metrics and human factors-  a method for modeling webpages and websites that have certain usage profile combinations scoring those combos then using scores to rank pages.

Usability and user experience have become more influential in ranking determinations. Have we seen an earlier incarnation? It seemed familiar to Chris. In the past, Google has gone after “thin affiliates,” and penalized them from ranking.

Quality Evaluator Tips, & Other Things to Consider

• Check out how your page looks in the search results. Is it what the user making the search query would want to see?
• Human factors with an impact: Clicks for SERPs, bounce rate, time on site, linking behavior, social media- shares / mentions / votes.
• Leverage a paid human evaluator staff, algorithmic analytics, and application of factor values.

Tips from Chris

• Remove/noindex pages of low quality or oath (remove error pages, aptly vestigial pages)
• Site: search for error pages, check server status codes for error pages
• Combine similar pages, redirect one to the other (KW term variation pages targeted by panda)
• Include more value-add features on your pages. relevant images, videos, maps, related links, charts
• Coordinate strong social media & pr campaigns if this is post relaunch, change usage profile model, improve it when it is next assessed by panda
• Don’t force users to click secondary pages to view vital info
• X testing – focus groups, usability testing follow clickstreams, personas
• Clean out spam from comments and gourds
• Use rel=author tagging for customer trust in pages
• Does article have spelling /s stylistic or factual errors? clean and fix
• Remove excessive ads that interfere with user access of content
• Become an authoritative source (links for Wikipedia)
• Publish a book about your business
• Avoid over-optimizations

—

Big thanks to the speakers for some awesome tips on pleasing the Panda and creating quality content. Stick around aimClear blog for more coverage from #SMX East 2011.

Photo credit: Nak Datta

Chris Sherman: Is Google making us smarter, or dumber?

Steven Levy: It’s beside the point. Technology changes us. It’s about us adapting to the technology. Google makes it easier to get by if you’re dumb, though.

Marc Rotenberg: Teachers/Parents freaked out about Wikipedia – but it was interactive, so if something was wrong, you change it. Search engines are essentially the same.

Jeff Jarvis: We ARE smarter. We are more fact-based. Now, if you want a fact, you see it in .2 seconds, opposed to going to the library.

Sherman: Think about the gas you’re not using by NOT having to drive to the library. In regards to privacy, Google is doing similar things as Facebook. There is a difference between gathering data and using that data: what’s your take? IS Google a good steward of our data?

Rotenberg: There should be a high legal standard. The government shouldn’t be able to just go to Google and get whatever info they want. We (EPIC) don’t think the government should be setting privacy standards. We’ve looked into the relationship between Google and NSA which they could “neither confirm nor deny.”

Levy: Gmail was a turning point in Google and privacy. The Internet makes a lot of things available/accessible & Google is the instrument. If you Google yourself & a DUI comes up in the first 10 results, that’s like someone putting something on your resume. (ouch) General users can’t do much about it, unless you’re an SEO specializing in reputation management. Google should take more ownership of that problem. There is no solution to that. But Google should take ownership. That’s the core privacy problem with Google. For Facebook, it’s different. Facebook encourages you to put info there to be more accessible.

Rotenberg: Quick note: individuals in Spain have ordered Google to take some personal information down which is still in progress.

Jarvis: I want to re-cast this discussion: There’s a notion of “public-ness.” Essentially there’s a Guttenberg press in everyone’s hand. We see this benefit the unrest in the Arab nations with social media. People have the notion of the “right to be forgotten” – do you tell a newspaper to take something out of the archives? Do you tell me to forget a memory? I think we have to start here with what people are doing. There are 750 million people on Facebook – willingly, sharing and posting. If you’re able to take down searches earlier, we wouldn’t be able to track the Flu or other epidemics which has great value. We should tread very carefully in saying what should be public.

Sherman: Google provides very sophisticated tools. Google is being proactive (giving people control over their data), but are they doing enough?

Jarvis: Well, I talk about you on my website. You would call that your data, but it’s not, it’s mine.

Sherman: What about actual tools e.g. deleting emails/exporting?

Levy: I think Internet companies do more than most. There are full-time employees whose job is privacy. I take issue with Double Click in AdSense for the “benefit” of relative ads. You may get a better ad, in exchange for Google’s servers gather data. I think if more people knew about that trade off they may prefer to see a less relevant ad.

Rotenberg: I am becoming more of a skeptic. When it comes to privacy with Google & Facebook nothing is stable.

Sherman: Google has acquired the technology for facial recognition (Google Goggles) Facebook did this too, will this be part of a day to day?

Rotenberg: Google Goggles would cross the creepy line, while Facebook has embraced this.

Levy: Google Goggles – they didn’t think it’d be a problem (in development), but the perception of the problem was there & they didn’t go for it. Google is happy Facebook did it first instead.

Jarvis: Facebook has recently added new controls similar to Google+. Now photos that are tagged must be approved. You can now choose who to share updates, photos, etc with. This gives us more control than anywhere else on the Internet. Facial recognition can be good, for example, they used it in the UK to identify terrorists before they get to the gate.

Rotenberg: But they used facial recognition in the UK to identify political protesters…

Jarvis: The technology is neutral, how we use it can either be good or bad. We should not assume it’s bad, and thus ban it and lose what can be good.

Rotenberg: We must have a discussion about who’s using this technology and to what purpose.

Levy: What about Street View?  The simple idea of showing a public street seems to us an invasion of privacy. We think about it in the negative case: such as burglars casing a house they may not have seen.

Rotenberg: What if a large French company using cars to photograph streets and use that information? We wouldn’t perceive that as OK.

Jarvis: It’s a matter of principle. They called Google street view a violation – I view this as: it’s from a public street, and a public view. If you tell Google they can’t take a picture of a public place from a public space, are you going to tell a journalist they can’t too?

Levy: Look at the bigger picture – view it as the capability of the Internet to have a huge archive. If it wasn’t Google, there’d be another company.

Sherman: Shift from privacy, let’s talk about legal issues. Which is most important? What are the risks?

Levy: It’s already changed how we use Google. They’re focused with how they do algorithms. It’s serious stuff & you have to take your hat off to Microsoft & AT&T for bringing the legal concerns up. Google has to take it very seriously. They’re sending Eric Schmidt to congress next week. I think that there are important issues that the SEO community deals with every day with the anti-trust thing. What right does Google have to set its algorithms? A judge said it’s a protected opinion – like movie reviews. That opinion however is under attack because Google is perceived to have too much market power.

Rotenberg: I think there’s a lot on Google’s plate when it comes to legal issues. The Washington office is growing to no surprise. But take a step back, what is Google worried about? Monopoly & anti-trust issues because Google dominates so much across the board. That’s the difficult problem. It’s hard to escape their success.

Jarvis: We love success then fear success. Google becomes aware later of the problem of this. It’s portrayed as Godzilla & they perceive themselves as Snuffleupagus. If Google comes to a company & says they’re violating rules of spamming & they say “No, we’re a directory.” in this case Google has the power of god to wipe the company out of the SERPs. But there’s always an alternative.

Levy: There was a time when Google was down and the traffic for yahoo shot straight up. If Google uses the power of god, takes away a search result too often, people will go to competitors.

Sherman: This concept, search neutrality, looking at Google, there’s no yard stick from the personalization.

Jarvis: That kills the SEO industry because you can’t prove the lift/ROI. But this goes back to privacy: they’re trying to have users to generate signals.

Rotenberg: Coming back to the organization of search – we filed a new complaint to FTC which looked at the changes in the search algorithm pre-Google acquisition of YouTube and post acquisition of YouTube. We look at the default ranking factors of YouTube before acquisition which were: hits, then user rankings (stars), then relevance. So, there’s two objective metrics then a subjective. Post acquisition, relevance became the default. This is internal proprietary measure is subjective. For example, post the change, if you did a search for “privacy” five of the top ten are generated by Google. Before EPIC ranked in the top four. That use of search algorithms can bias public access.

Jarvis: But pre-acquisition YouTube search SUCKED. You can only guess at the motives.

Levy: I wouldn’t be shocked to learn, the company that values relevance so highly, made it the primary factor. It could also just be their algorithms.

Rotenberg: But it’s their algorithm.

Jarvis: This is conspiracy theory here.

Levy: Isn’t this interesting that Google’s privacy stuff comes up. So if we suspect something is up, do we have the right to demand seeing Google’s algorithms? That’s a big question.

Rotenberg: We were a competitor in this space and all our stuff just dropped.

Sherman: With Larry coming back as CEO – Google has killed more products in the last month. Is Google changing direction? Or Larry re-asserting control?

Levy: Not a new direction, but trying to get back to more original direction. It’s a mixed bag of stuff they discontinued in their spring cleaning. Larry wants a coherent strategy and new products, but is trimming the fat. Google can’t operate as a clunky bureaucracy.

Jarvis: Question for you, Levy, I’m curious about innovation inside and outside. On the inside there was WAVE, you spend time on that and it’s gone.

Levy: For certain projects, Google is still a welcoming company of innovation. I think through history you see the risk of acquisitions. Google’s unique – they made great acquisitions like YouTube, Android and DoubleClick. YouTube hasn’t been profitable, but what would you rather have? Groupon or YouTube?

Rotenberg: What about Zagats?

Levy: They tried to use reviews from Yelp and went too far and got spanked for that. It was Marissa’s mobile group who bought Zagats. The challenge will be to keep up the user participation & the culture of Zagat. It fits very, very neatly into Google’s operation.

Jarvis: They view Zagats as a platform, not a content company. The problem you come back to is favoring their own content. So if they treat it like content, it’s danger-danger, but they see it as a platform. Content, would affect their ability to be neutral and fair.

Sherman: A huge initiative is Google+: people call it a mash-up of Facebook and Twitter. Will this go the way of Orkut, Buzz or WAVE?

Rotenberg: If you want search it’s Google, for social it’s Facebook.

Jarvis: I don’t know that Google+ is a social network. I think Facebook is about relationships. Twitter is for broadcasting. Google+ is about sharing. Though, I think people interpret it differently. I was seeing the wall as a place to publish, however my son saw it as having conversations in new and different ways. Just in the use of it: twitter is fundamentally different about being more live. But I get better, deeper conversations on Google+ than on my blog. They also don’t attract as many trolls. Broadcast + conversation + social = Google+

THE INTERNET IS THE SOCIAL NETWORK.

Levy: First, Google+ is not a Facebook killer and they don’t think they’re going to knock off Facebook. They just want to be a part of the equation. Google+ wants to be more real-time, for example, video hangouts. Second, people were unhappy with how Facebook made them share. Third, we haven’t really seen what Google+ really is. We’re on the front-end of Google being more social.

Rotenberg: It’s like an operating system for the internet. Is that where Google would like to take this?

Levy: We just haven’t seen the full integration.

Sherman: Favorite Google anecdote?

Levy: One day in October 2009 – Google does this thing: Google Product Strategy. It’s a big meeting every week, top executives are there… these people from different groups come and show new products. I sat in on a couple. On this day: it was the YouTube team. They showed numbers that he cannot talk about. It was a very Men In Black memory eraser moment. The thing before me was Google video. A new product. And the thing after was Google Goggles. Before the meeting began, Eric came in and had just steamed a CBS tennis match and was really excited about it. He told the YouTube team and that’s part of the reason why YouTube is doing more streaming.

Rotenberg: As busy as we are raising concerns, some of my closest friends work there. At a personal level, I have enormous respect for abilities and achievements. From the Washington point of view, we need to take a step back and ask hard questions.

Jarvis: My book was different than Levy’s. I didn’t want to sign the NDA at the door. I was using Google as a foil of the changing world. I did a talk at Google and there are rocket scientists there, telling me how full of shit I was. Google is a place that defaults to SMART. When the default in so many companies feels like stupid.

Rotenberg: Google’s Achilles heel is its hubris. Google said: don’t be evil – really they meant, don’t be Microsoft. With Microsoft it was about arrogance. Google has tobe careful about over-extending.

Sherman: In five years, what will we be talking about?

Levy: How to get back from space in the Google spaceship?

Rotenberg: Who’s going to be running YouTube? And search?

Jarvis: I think ubiquity of connectivity is going to have a change in society that’s bigger than Google itself. The internet of things, things connected all over. But, Google is not invincible.

Sherman: Is Google’s biggest risk competition? Or doing something internally?

Rotenberg: That’s a great question. Its greatest adversary is itself.

Levy: Agree. In dealing with its size & trying to not be bureaucratic.

— Thanks to the panelists for a fabulous discussion. Stay tuned at aimClear blog for more #SMX East 2011 coverage .

Photo credit: CreativeCommons

Keynote speaker and author Eli Pariser, wisely, remains wary. In a world where algorithms, code and robots curate search engine result pages, among other facets of the Internet,  how can we be sure we’re seeing the whole picture?  Together with moderators Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman, the trio tackled this sensitive subject before a room of intrigued attendees– some were wide-eyed, some skeptically squinting, some still asleep.

aimClear live-tweeted this powerful keynote via @beebow. Read on for thought-provoking takeaways.

Topic of Discussion: The moral consequences of living a life that is mediated by search algorithms.

Who knew Mark Zuckerberg was such a metaphorical ballerina? Eli cited Zuck’s rationale of creation of the News Feed, as captured in David Kirkpatrick’s book,  The Facebook Effect, which goes a little something like this:

“A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more important to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.”

Hurmph. Whether or not you agree with that statement, the underlying sentiment is a concept worth considering: Human beings by nature are sometimes more responsive to and engaged by content that more directly relates to their life, to the here and now.

One day, Eli (a self-professed lean-towards-the-left dude) noticed that his conservative Facebook friends had all but vanished from his user experience. Why? Facebook’s algorithm had noticed behaviorally, Eli tended to interact more with liberal or non-conservative content. So… Facebook tailored Eli’s user experience accordingly.

This sense of personalization isn’t service-specific, either. Where you sit, where you computer is being used, which browser you use – all of these factors can impact what you see on the web.

The Great Google SERP Experiment
As an experiment, Eli asked some of his friends to search for “Egypt” on Google, then send him the screen capped SERPs. Understandably, they were rather different. One friend got results about the (then) ongoing protests and crisis in Egypt. The other friend got links to daily news, travel tips, airfare, and the like.

Lesson?

“The web is increasingly showing us what it thinks we want to see, not the world as it is.” -Eli Pariser

Filter Bubbles, Ice Cream, & Broccoli
Online, we are increasingly surrounded by a membrane of personalized filters, what Eli refers to as filter bubbles. You cant choose what’s gets in through your filter bubble, and moreover, you don’t know (and cannot change) what gets edited out.

Generally, it seems, the web tends to serve up “information junk food” or “information dessert” – mindless, entertaining content that satiates users’ hunger for instant gratification. (Eli uses an ice cream cone to represent this content. A very tasty looking ice cream cone, I might add.)But sometimes, what we’re really in the mood for are information vegetables (represented by broccoli a book) – more meaningful content we can learn from in a deeper way.

Great media feeds us a balanced diet information junk food and information vegetables. Unfortunately, filter bubbles can often weed out the veggies.

Who, or What, Is Guarding the Gate?
Once a manually-engineered frontier, the web is now constructed, curated and guarded by a new set of gatekeepers: code. Unfortunately for us, code has no civic sense of what actually matters to the human user.

If these algorithms are really going to mediate how we understand the world, we need to make sure they don’t just focus on a narrow idea of relevance, on what we click first, on the information ice cream cones

We really need the Internet to be that thing that connects us to new ideas, new people, new ways of thinking. We need Internet broccoli.

“This balance cannot happen if we’re all stuck in a personalized bubble of one.”

With that, Eli returned to his seat and the discussion between he, Chris, and Danny commenced.

Bite-Sized Discussion Takeaways from Eli

• There are two modes to how people use Google – information retrieval & information mapping. Google is focused on former, not latter.
• If you want to find the URL of official White House website, no problem. But if you’re looking for blogs with opinions about Obama’s presidency, that gets a little trickier.
• For some searches, personalization can be subtle. For others, it’s not. Google undersells how significant it is.
• Google most likely doesn’t have malicious intentions with personalization. Google is trying to give you a better user experience.
• Google sees personalization as making it harder to game SERPs. If everyone has different results, it’s harder to know where you stand, and therefore harder to know where manipulation opportunities (or needs) exist.
• Speaking of which, Google probably gets perverse pleasure when site owners watch rankings go up and up with no mind to personalization. Before you get excited about your search rank, log out, switch computers, and make sure it’s not just you.
• Yahoo News does some personalization on news headlines based on your Yahoo profile. Sneaky monkey! This point illustrates that you never really know if you’ve busted out of your personalization bubble.
• Ultimately, Google’s goal is to make the web experience a little more passive, a little more home delivery, rather than going out searching.
• It would make it easier if we (users) were able to understand the filters, able to turn them on or off, rather than having them imposed on us.
• It would be good if people knew what the transaction was they were making with google. “you take this data, okay!” That way, folks could decide which data they want to have google use, when it’s on, when it’s off.
• Originally, Google was going to add some sort of visual indicator to help identify when things are personalized. Most likely, that will not happen any time soon. Not only does it almost make it creepier when you know what’s adjusted for you vs. not, apparently Google engineers feel/felt that not everyone understands this concept, and that confusion could make things more difficult.
• Google thinks about user data from a more ethical standpoint than some other companies. (Well, that’s comforting.)
• If you’re able to target by inferred data, you should be able to see that data is being inferred about you. I.E. Google should say, “Here is what we literally know about you, and here’s what we can target based on inferences.”
• Most people don’t think about the fact that we’re walking around the Internet with a big price tag on our shirts. We are.
• Still, Google doesn’t really know who you are. it knows who it thinks you are based on content you consume, among other things.
• Google: “We’re not getting complaints about our personalization!” Universe: “Yeah, but they don’t know it exists.” How can people make complaints about something they don’t know exists?
• Eli believes Google could do a lot more to explain its philosophy about personalization without making it super easy to boost your results.
• The balance comes when people are able to use these tools the way that they want to use them, to decide for themselves.

“I just want info junk food right now, kthnx. Tomorrow, I will want information that provokes me. I don’t want to be force-fed.”

And, truly, with that, Eli dashed off stage to catch a plane. The keynote wrapped up and attendees were let loose in the convention center to hit up their next session. Stay tuned in aimClear blog for more coverage comin’ atcha from #SMX East 2011

Post image photo credit: psd

Welcome back to aimClear’s coverage of #SMX East 2011! Breaking News: Changing SEO elements of your website, e.g.: title tags, Meta descriptions, anchor text, interlinking structures, can have a tremendous effect on organic rankings. Okay, so maybe you don’t need spades of sophisticated know-how and online marketing agility to know that little tidbit. Pretty straight-forward: Update your site and take note if a ranking change occurs. One did? Great! Was it causal or correlative?

Was it what?

The ability to successfully distinguish between website updates that cause a change in rank and updates that merely correlate with change in rank is something deep marketers must possess in order to be a master craftsman craftswoman SERP-ninja. But hang on a tick… are there specific SEO changes that directly cause a change in your SERP position? Surely those are golden tickets every sitemaster should implement straight away!

Or is it more of an indirect effect? A mere, yet telling, correlation?

Fortunately for any frazzled marketers at #SMX East 2010, moderator Danny Sullivan, Q&A moderator Max Thomas, and speakers Eric Enge, Micah Fisher-Kirshner, Mitul Gandhi, Kristine Schachinger, and Tony Wright were set to take the stage and weigh in on Great Debate of Correlation vs. Causation. aimClear live-tweeted this session via @beebow. Fruits live after the jump.

Danny welcomed attendees and introduced speakers before next introducing the session itself: Causation vs. correlation was a big SEO theme from this year’s #SMX Advanced over in Seattle, earning it a spot at the table this go-round.

As a site owner, it’s crucial to be mindful of the difference between causation and correlation. Is X the cause of Y? Or X and Y are correlated?

Two presentations, delivered by Kristine Schachinger and Micah Fisher-Kirshner were about to tackle that very concept, after which the panelists would each get a turn to share thoughtful responses, and engage in a bit of a… well… debate.

Kristine was up first, ready to address, at a high-level, what correlation and causation are.

What is correlation? Correlation describes a relationship between two or more things that have a measurable effect on each other (things = variables).

What is causation? Causation is a relationship in which one action or event is the direct consequence of another.

In every causal relationship, there is a correlative relationship, but not always vice versa.

Oftentimes, correlation is mistaken for causation, meaning A is perceived to cause B, but it may or may not have a measurable effect.

In SEO terms, we could make an assumption based on old ideas or incorrect perception (a big no-no), for example, the effect of updated site code on rankings, pre-Google’s site speed announcement.  When we have a skewed perception, we either have no correlation (think there’s one) or a spurious correlation.

A what?

Spurious correlation: (noun) a perception that A affects B, but in actuality a third hidden variable does. (Sneaky!)

Example: New York City might see a sudden spike in alcohol sales when oodles of SEOs are in town for SMX East. That spike, however, might be attributed to Fashion Week, which happens to coincide with SMX this year.

How to avoid such a slip-up?

• Test and measure so that you can fully understand the relationships.
• With causal relationships, you can directly measure that A does cause B.
• In correlative relationships, you can only measure the strength of the effect of A on B.
• Strength can be described by a factor known as a confidence interval, or confidence level, in the form of, for example, margin of error: + or – X%.

Returning to the original takeaway: You have to test everything to understand effect. As you test, make sure you are aware of the variables, sample size, outliers (do you control them?), your analysis method of choice (is it the proper one?), and the limitations of your conclusions, if they exist?

Kristine wrapped up by asking us the question we were all hoping to answer, namely: Is SEO correlative or causative?

Her answer: Most of it is correlative. Period.

There you have it. Micah was up next, ready to dig deeper into correlation vs. causation.

Perhaps one inspiration for this debate-style session at SMX East was the in-depth study SEOmoz CEO & Co-Founder, Rand Fishkin, presented attendees at SMX Advanced just three months back. That said, distinguishing good (accurate) vs. bad (inaccurate) public correlations presentations was the topic Micah kicked off with, just in case you’re interested in doing some hardcore testing on your own site with the hope of turning it into a presentation.

Elements of Good Correlation Presentations

• They’re shown with scatter plots. These help visualize the correlation & what you’re trying to prove / show.
• They use non-integer numbers. Generally, integers make it harder to visualize correlations

Some things to keep in mind and questions to ask if you’re considering compiling a preso of your own:

• Remind yourself that correlations are a place to start, not end.
• Sanity check the results with an SEO.
• Ask yourself, “Does this make sense? What if we factor for…”
• Continuously ask questions – examine data, dissect it, test it again. This is the only way you will get a better sense of what’s going on with your correlation.
• Ask yourself, “Do we have enough data to prove it is statistically significant? How long will data collection take to prove it?”
• Make sure you understand what the ROI is to collect and test data.
• Make sure you’re working with quality data. Do you trust where the data comes from? Do you have enough metrics that factor into algorithm?
• Does the correlation hold up by site type? Or is this a punishment-by-group type deal? Are how-tows, CSEs, marketplaces, news sources all being spanked?

When the time comes to test and understand data, be sure to look at metrics day over day, week over week, and stay mindful of seasonality, not to mention holidays or world events that can skew data.

Best of the tests focus on subdirectories, subdomains, and domains. Micah recommends finding ways to split your site in half along standard site architecture to run tests. If you don’t have these, use numbers in URL or even / odd.

Questions to Ask
Common correlating pitfalls can be other marketing channels. Or, it can all be internal. Ask yourself, did our brand team launch something? Did the UX team change things? Did something break? Did you launch another test on your site?

Extraneous online events can skew data, too. Did Google update its algorithm during your test? Did our analytics platform have a tracking events update?

“Proving requires digging.” –Micah Fisher-Kirshner

In case you didn’t glean this already: When looking at correlation presentations, question everything. Don’t just accept it. Drill deep. Ask questions. Keep digging. Did we mention, “Ask questions”?

With those pertinent words of advice, Micah wrapped up, and our remaining panelists got up to share their elevator speech about causation vs. correlation.

Here’s some high-level takeaways:

“A single statistic does not a trend make.” In other words: Test, test, test. Ask questions, ask questions, ask questions. -Mitul Gandhi

Tony Wright’s 4 Easy Steps to Better Rankings!

Do these things better than your competitor and you will outrank them, 95% of the time.

1. Code. Have good code
2. Content. Have good content.
3. Connections. Have good inbound links.
4. Conversations. Be social.

Do these 4 things cause better rankings? Tony can’t say, statistically, that they do. But do they help? Yep.  (Again… 95% of the time.)

Eric Enge shared some insight worth noting. To paraphrase, correlation and causation don’t matter – just do your best to build great stuff that causes both of those things to happen. When you think about what you’re going to do on a given day, think big picture. Think about what will cause all of those signals to work in your favor.

And that’s all she wrote! Thanks to the panelists for an awesome session. Stick around aimClear blog for more conference coverage coming atcha from #SMX East 2011.

Photo credit: Scott

aimClear’s coverage of #SMX East 2011 kicked off with… PANDA WATCH! How else?

Largely due to this sweeping smackdown, Panda has been a hot topic at online marketing conferences this year. Google estimates the algo’ update has affected a mere 12% of all websites, but how many of them truly deserved the ranking-spanking?

On the morning of #SMX East Day 1, moderator Matt McGee, Q&A moderator Chris Silver Smith, and speakers Alan Bleiweiss, Director of Search Services, Click2Rank Consulting, Micah Fisher-Kirshner, Senior SEO Manager, Become, Inc, & Mark Munroe, Senior Director, SEO, Everyday Health, came together to share insightful two cents and survival tips for overcoming Panda’s wrath and staking your claim in the search engine result pages (SERPs) once more. aimClear live-tweeted this session via @beebow. Read on for the full guide.

Matt McGee took the mic, welcomed attendees, sussed the level of sleepiness and sobriety, introduced the speakers, and kicked off the session. On the menu, Google’s Panda, the infamous algorithm update that hit Feb 24, 2011, and recovery tips for those spanked, clobbered, annihilated, i.e.: affected.

Mark Munroe was up first. He began with various site traffic charts that showcased the decrease in traffic some sites suffered during the first wave of Panda (by comparison of the roll out of the MayDay algo update). For some sites, the decrease attributed to Panda was a fiery crash and burn. Stock-market style.

Conclusion according to Mark: The Panda update is the most significant change to the organic search also since the intro of Page Rank and link reputation.

Follow Up Conclusion: Whether or not you were hit by Panda, it is vital to learn from what’s going on, and prepare yourself for the next wave. Some folks weren’t hit by Panda, and got cocky. You better believe they got spanked during the second wave.

General Sites That Got Hit:

• Q&A sites
• Sites about everything (eHow.com, for example)
• Content farms
• Directories

Pre-Panda
In pre-Panda Google, search relevancy was defined by content, links, and anchor text. Site reputation and page importance were determined by linking structure of the Internet. Pre-Panda SEO strategies and SEO objectives focused on ways to create new content and new pages, e.g. search result pages, tag pages, data driven pages, or variations of same page optimized for different keywords. Even if users were less targeted, site owners still made money based on some conversions and ad clicks.

In Google’s eyes, pre-Panda days made it too easy to manipulate the SERPs without respect to quality.

Post-Panda
SERP positions are now modified based on new reputation factor, a quality assessment of site as whole. Mark hypothesized that reputation is based primarily on user metrics, i.e. on how the user interacts with your site in the SERP.

“Google know more than you do!” –Mark Munroe

Truth – when it comes to the SERP user experience (XP), Google knows more about the user experience of an SEO visit to your site than you do.

That said, what do you know?

• Conversions
• Bounce rates
• Two-page visits
• Three-page visits

What do those user actions mean about user satisfaction?
It’s not easy to glean a whole lot. If a user searches for android app reviews, clicks on “topandroid.com,” goes through to site, finds no reviews, clicks back to the SERP to find a good site, this tells Google that the topandroid.com site was not useful.

What Interests Google?
Think like a Google product manager. What do they care about? They care about Google SERPs – their effectiveness and organization. They care about the way the user interacts with the SERP.

It’s likely that Google does not get its data from Google Analytics or the Google Toolbar. They likely focus more on metrics like:

• G-Bounce, a.k.a. if someone clicks on a link from the SERP and bounces immediately back to the SERP
• Query behavior after the G-Bounce
• Average time before the G-Bounce
• CTR
• Repeat visits

…and similar metrics that are not be reported by your analytics package.

Ranking Spanking Recovery Plan, Tips & Tactics:

• Fix the pages that drive you traffic.
• Addressing the issue on pages that address only a small part of traffic will not have a large impact on overall metrics.
• Integrate SEOs and User XP engineers – make sure your SEOs are thinking about user XP, and make sure your designers are thinking about search.
• Define, implement, and report on good metrics that correlate to the search XP.
• Analyze the impact of each new release on the search XP.
• Beware of and give close scrutiny to type of content and techniques that have specifically led to Panda issues.
• Remember the user XP starts on the SERP, and starts with a KW.
• Leverage survey polls to get a deeper understanding of who is ending up on your landing page.
• Survey people who are representatives of your overall traffic. Only survey the ones coming from Google (because that’s the traffic source you’re testing!). Your homepage users and your incoming-from-Google users are very different users.
• Do actual user testing to get a sense of usability – but make sure to start on the SERP, not on your website. (Check out usertesting.com, Mark recommends- it’s cheap, effective, and spits back answers within hours.)
• Use KWs from your analytics package that are representative of your traffic.
• Create scenarios that test the key Qs people have when they come to your site (based on your surveys). Do people find what they’re looking for? Are ads in the way? Do people know what they’re supposed to do?
• Look for bad KWs. Do you see KWs that don’t make sense? Fix them, or change the content that causes them to show up.
• Make sure the content relevant to the search query that brought a user to a site is easy to find.
• Beware of content hidden behind read more buttons, tabs, etc.
• If you allow comments & UGC, get sophisticated spam filtering implemented. Spammers are good at bringing in unwanted traffic.
• Make sure you have good titles! SEO 101. That’s just plain smart.
• Beware of having content for content’s sake – content should be very tightly focused on the title of a page.
• De-index content that does not deliver, e.g. Q&A pages without answers, dynamically generated pages with little to no content, etc.
• Use no-index / no-follow on these pages, but be careful to test to make sure it doesn’t go on the wrong pages.
• Link freely to relevant content – if you cant give users what they want, show them where they can find it.
• Don’t annoy your users with too many ads, slow load time, or anything that will make people bounce quickly.
• Don’t ever have downtime. If you do, create a lovely-looking maintenance page so a user knows what’s up.
• Give a good mobile experience. Some sites are seeing 15-20% of traffic coming form Google. Make sure your mobile site makes for a good UX.
• Be mindful about the validity of your metrics – standard bounce rates as reported by most analytics packages is extremely flawed, says Mark. Likewise with time on site, as it doesn’t factor in bounces. Bounce rate based on time instead of single page view – 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, true time on site, etc.
• Industry specific concerns – Certain types of were royally spanked by Panda (shopping sites, for example). If you’re in one of these verticals, you’ve just got to work extra hard to create a solid UX, to help users get to their ultimate destinations.

Mark summed up by noting Panda is a quality assessment of your site, most likely based on data of how user interacts with SERPs.

There you have it. Next up was Alan Bleiweiss. In case you didn’t know, Alan is a sorcerer. He must be – how else could he have brought back sites from the dead after mondo-Panda-spankings?

Ah, yes. Perhaps he’s just a great SEO.

Alan performed a 17 site audits that compiled the data in his presentation. The 17 sites amounted to approximately 43 million pages indexed by Google. Of those 43 mil, only 10 million were indexed in Bing. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Right off the bat, Alan emphasized the importance of attracting activity and traffic from a lot of sources other than Google.

Myopic SEO vs. Sustainable SEO
Alan toured us through two approaches to SEO, one he calls “myopic” and the other, “sustainable.”

• Myopic SEO = The magic bullet theory. “If I focus on this single type of work, I will succeed!” Not exactly realistic, or responsible. Myopic SEO can be caused by or lead to topical confusion, not enough text, internal link poisoning, unnatural off-site patterns, and similar factors.
• Sustainable SEO = Focuses on user XP as seen through the eyes of search bots & algorithms. Sustainable SEO can be characterized by consistent signals on topical focus, confirming focus, not overwhelming senses, and off-site diversity. Sustainable SEO usability factors include section specific sub-nav, microdata breadcrumbs, high quality topic focused unique content, main content area.

As if we had any doubts, Alan showed some graphs from his case studies, comparing the results of Panda as felt by sites that took a myopic approach to SEO vs. a sustainable one. The sites with sustainable SEO were on a noticeable road to recovery. The myopic SEO sites, not so much.

Spread Your SEO Wings!
Spread out your focus and your efforts. SEO needs to be a broad range of techniques, and tactics. Really take time to put yourself in your users’ shoes. Examine your page. Is it overwhelming? Is it enough? If users have a problem with your site, you can pretty much guarantee that under certain circumstances, Google will, too.

A Word About AdSense…
If you are a real person or a real company that offers real services, don’t have AdSense ads on your site. Just don’t do it. It’s gross. And unnecessary!

Inbound Links
If you want powerful results from the search engines and a sustainable user experience, spread out how you communicate what you’re offering. One way to do this is through diverse and optimized anchor text, and beefing up your inbound link profile. The more domains you have sending inbound links to you, the lower your link to root ratio is. Your overall link to root ratio show more sites sending fewer links to same site. It is natural (and good) to have a low link to root ratio, as this helps tell the search engine you have a diverse source of inbound links.

Be Kind to Bing
If you’re taking the time to submit your sitemap to Google, go the extra step and submit to Bing. Lest we forget, Bing does drive traffic. That said, Alan notes it has a hard time finding content on its own, so submitting a sitemap can be extra helpful. A lot of site owners neglect this small but super smart tactic. Don’t be one of them.

Things Bing Loves

• Diversity in inbound links
• Really tight correlation between anchors and relevant pages
• Social (but that doesn’t mean you should settle for having a social presence. Become a social authority!)

Alan next hit some insightful points on the future-thinking:

• Sustainable SEO cares about the future. Always consider, what will users be doing six months from now? A year form now?
• What Myopic SEO techniques is Matt Cutt’s next target?
• What are the biggest emerging tech trends?
• Next big thing: Social! (For Google and Bing… from+1 for websites to authority tweeters and everything in between

Let’s talk about Schema.org.
What does it mean? Schema.org means more diversity of deep information – of events, products, locations, and people profiles.

“Schema.org is definitely going to be a ranking factor in 2012,”Alan stressed. “Take the next 6 months to learn about it, to get on board, and to use it.”

Powerful and smart! Last but not least, Micah Fisher-Kirshner. He laid out 11 questions to ask in the event of a massive drop in traffic.

Sample Event: OMG! Your monitoring system goes haywire! Traffic drops +20%! Why?!?!

Q1 – Is the data fully available? This is where maintaining a good relationship with ops team is crucial. Massive events require flexibility within the organization. If you don’t have an ops team to work with, you can utilize Google Analytics to double check. Drill into hourly reports within advanced segments.

Q2 – Who else is affected? Find the limits of the event. SEO affects everything and everything affects SEO. Communication is essential. This isn’t the time to send emails and then wait for responses! Keep your departments near by.

Q3 – Are there rumors of an algorithm update rumors? The best way to know: Read, read, read. Focus on trusted online forums.

Q4 – What was recently launched? Keep an event log. Sometimes, product launches a month back can be the cause of a sudden drop in traffic. At the same time, go bug engineers who may have launched something. Not every entail is written down. Watch for rollbacks that undo critical changes.

If nothing was recently launched, go back to Q3

Keep on reading! Remember -just because you find one issue doesn’t mean this is the only issue. Go back to the same forums and search news sites.

Proceed to Q5.

Q5 – What areas are affected? Segment in any way you can. KW grouping, KW length, traffic level, motive, page grouping, home, category, products, domain / site groupings, etc.

Return to Q3.

Any mentions around the web? No? Get back to work. And proceed to Q6.

Q6 – Did something break? Let’s assume everything has been white hat. Sometimes, broken or forgotten process can lead to a broken website that looks like a black hat SEO site. Ouch! Know what is fundamental to your sites SEO – backend function are easiest things to miss, worker transitions always miss certain processes. Go back to ops team to run through SEO checklist.

Did that? Good. Return to Q3.

Keep reading! Can you find a confirmation from around the web of an algorithm update? Yes? Finally!

So… now what?  Now’s time for data collection. Pull the sources mentioning the algo update together as you move to Q7.

Q7 – Who is talking? Recognize the regulars. Skip the broken track records. Always read the important people, even if its just one sentence from them. Conversely, scrutinize the strangers – read long commentators. Short comments are typically not worth it. Repeat the mantra, “Jerks will be jerks.” Push past annoyances and listen to what people are saying.

Q8 – What sites are dropping? Your ranking data shows the severity of impact. Take a look at competitors ranking data- this is essential! Seeing who survives can help provide answers about ago updates.

Q9 – What are the theories? Think like a black hat (did we just say that?). Think about what is going on, where the series fit.

“Hate content farms? Wait for the new click farms!” -Micah

Q10 – What theories fit? Find out everything you can – work your business connections, read blogs for in-depth analysis. Jot down likely possibilities, make sure you have enough data. When you’re collecting data, make sure you’re collecting enough. Two sites do not = enough data. Throw in a third, and suddenly data doesn’t quite look right…

Q 11 – What can we do to recover? Build for the user, think like a search engine, learn to love statistics – understand how changes were made. A/B test. Everything. Multiple times. Test across subdomains, page types, categories.

With that, Micah wrapped up, and turned it over for a little Q&A. That’s all aimClear captured, and we hope it whet your appetite for more #SMX East 2011 coverage to come Stay tuned.

photo credit: yoyolabellut

It’s here, it’s here! #SMX East is finally here! You know what that means: Pilgrimages to the Big Apple, strolls through Central Park, and one of the coolest online marketing events this side of the Mississippi. Traditionally held in October, the East coast edition of Search Marketing Expo is usually the signal that rocket-launches New York City into autumn. This year with the conference calendared smack-dab in the middle of September, attendees are in for a sweet taste of late summer in the city that never sleeps.

From the aimClear team, Marty Weintraub, Manny Rivas, Merry Morud, and  Lauren Litwinka (me), are eastbound, energized and eager for the conference to kick off. Joined by Lisa Buyer, President and CEO of the Buyer Group, and Will Scott, Founder and President of Search Influence, we’re starting the week aimClear’s Facebook Marketing Intensive Workshop where we’ll rock marketers for a full day of soup to nuts training in all-things Facebook. Read on for the full scoop.

Get ready to span the gamut from down and dirty demographic targeting to guerilla befriending tactics, end-to-end Facebook ads, community management best practices, reputation monitoring and more. In short, attendees will walk away with a comprehensive understanding of how to leverage Facebook’s massive online community to achieve KPIs.

Workshop Curriculum:

Demographic Research & Guerrilla Targeting Tactics
Marty will kick off the day with a deep look at Facebook’s Ad Tool to discover infinite persona segments for any and every marketing campaign. Attendees will learn how to develop a keener understanding of who they’re serving ads to, mindful to combinations of music preferences, favorite brands, political views, perversions, afflictions, professions, interests as well as other predictions and affinities. We’ll dish up bite-sized segments and social synonyms that open dozens of new doors for targeting. Get ready to vacate your comfort zone.

Establishing Facebook Marketing KPIs
Plain and simple: It’s impossible to achieve goals unless you set them. Marty will share his expertise on how to establish realistic Facebook KPIs (key performance indicators) that touch external channels such as PR, YouTube, Twitter, search engines, blogs, and more.

A Day in the Life of a Community Manager
This 6-part session will deliver invaluable insight and actionable takeaways for any community manager.

• Lauren will kick off with content aggregation tools and tactics and a lesson in the importance of sharing third-party, non-competitive, complimentary content.
• Marty and Lisa will deliver  some righteous holistic befriending tactics and convincing case studies.
• Lisa will also run through a community manager’s typical work day, the PR side of Facebook pages, as well as branding with Facebook.
  
• Lauren will finish things up with a tour through holistic cross-promotion (integrating Twitter with Facebook), and tips for managing social media crises.

Facebook’s EdgeRank & Organic Visibility
Will Scott will tackle the formerly (and still somewhat) black-box, red-headed stepchild known only as Facebook’s ranking algorithm, EdgeRank. He’s set to share useful tips and insight for how to leverage community engagement to effectively increase visibility in FB.

“Buying Friends” and Organic FB Analytics
Will’s also going to share intensely awesome tactics to target customers and identify authority users, cull deep competitive intelligence on truly engaged friends and use all the info to your benefit. Attendees will learn how to capitalize on this insight for organic friending and aggressive Facebook Ad targeting.

Reputation Monitoring in Facebook
Marty will return to the stage to deliver a crash course in the latest and greatest techniques and tools for keeping track of Facebook buzz, and keeping your reputation intact.

End-to-End Facebook Ads
Merry will blaze the all-things Facebook Ads trail, leading attendees through the process of creating ad accounts, brainstorming compelling ad creative and images, setting budgets, and of course, optimizing ads to help ensure prolonged success.

Site Clinics
Interspersed through the day we will host two 30-minute site clinics for attendees interested in putting their Facebook assets on the table. Community Management and Paid Ads are the options on the table -and we’re ready to dish up recommendations and lightning-round feedback for anyone brave enough to step up .

And there you have it! Will we see your face in the crowd? Not unless you’ve got a ticket, we won’t! Don’t have a ticket? Fear not – there’s still time to register for aimClear’s Facebook Marketing Workshop.

Safe travels, y’all!

Amy Vernon a.k.a. The Bacon Queen a.k.a. fellow New Jerseian and IRL pal is just about as genuine as they come. With over 20k Twitter followers and the title of “top 15 submitters of all time on Digg.com (and the highest-ranked female ever),” she’s also a powerful social media maven worth paying mind to. VP of Strategy and Alliances at Hasai, Amy’s a familiar face at an array of digital marketing conferences, whether she’s on stage speaking or in the crowd pumping out lightning-fast tweet coverage.

I met Amy at last year’s #140Conf in NYC, and as we “chewed the fat,” so to speak, over U Café grub on the upper East Side, it became apparent why her cult-like following across various social media circles, from Tumblr to Facebook, flocks to her consistently. She works a seriously smooth combo of calculating community manager and super-cool social-savvy friend.

On the advent of #SMX East, I had the pleasure of sharing a candid Q&A with Amy. Topics ranged from “Who are ya, howdidja get here?” to favorite social sharing services, advice for social marketing n00bz and the battle between newsprint & online media. Read on for the full scoop.

| aimClear: Thanks for your time today, Amy! According to your bio, you were pretty deep in the trenches, professionally, at a traditional newspaper just a couple years ago. Now, you’re a widely-known social media authority on all-things awesome. Care to share a bit on how that transition came about?

Amy Vernon: Well, as happened to many people in newspapers, I was laid off. The next day, I had my first contract for consulting and friends reached out to their contacts to help me get freelance writing jobs. What made that transition so seamless, however, was that I’d spent the previous year-plus at my job blogging and figuring out how to get people to our website using Digg, StumbleUpon, Blog Catalog and other sites and communities. (In addition to being a metro editor.) Without setting out to, I had set up my new career while still at my old one.

| aC: How very efficient of you . On a scale of “Get the defibrillator! This ain’t over yet!” to “Good riddance to inky, outdated rubbish,” how do you feel about the battle between newsprint and digital media?

AV: It’s basically the Doctor, before he begins regeneration. Very vulnerable, but just has to change form and it’ll be OK.

OK, for the non-Doctor Who geeks, what I mean is this: The news organizations behind newsprint will survive. Not all, but some. And they will evolve into this new form, as the best have begun to do already. The role of newspapers is not gone – it’s just the format itself that’s dying. And, frankly, it’s forcing news organizations to adapt and change for the first time in decades. I watched for 20 years as newspapers tried to figure out how to get young readers, and then ignored any substantial advice and suggestions that could have helped. Then the Internet came along and newspapers ignored it until it was too late. Now, it’s adapt or die. The best will adapt.

| aC: Darwin would be proud. Because we’d all like to know the daily routine of a “social media maven,” describe a typical… Thursday… to us. Please

AV: I have two little boys, so I’m generally up by 7 a.m. (Eastern) or so on most weekdays. During breakfast/getting ready for school time, I usually check my email, Facebook and Twitter to see what happened overnight, to get a sense of how much catchup I have ahead of me before I can start anything new. I generally sit down at the computer sometime between 8 and 9 a.m. After I respond to email, Facebook and Twitter, I start working. That can involve working with clients to find articles they have with viral potential or updating Facebook pages or talking strategy with clients or co-workers.

In the background, I have several Tumblrs open and check in on my EmpireAvenue account throughout the day. I’m on Digg, Tumblr, Reddit, StumbleUpon and other sites and whenever I see anything that amuses me, I post it somewhere – whether on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter or a combination thereof. I feel as if it’s my duty to share the funniest and coolest stuff I see – I’m on these sites that really aggregate the best of what’s out there, so why not spread it around?

I’m a little bit ADD, I think, so it suits me to have to hop from tab to tab, looking at different things. I also contribute to several blogs and squeeze in posts for them, though I’ve let that lapse a bit too much, I think.

That’s basically what I do all day long. If I’m going into Manhattan at night for a seminar or networking event or party, I hop on a train with both my smartphones (iPhone and Droid X2) and focus mainly on Foursquare, Instagram and Twitter for the evening, though I’ll continue to check on my email. (Who said email was dead? Really, it’s not even close.) And I wouldn’t be able to keep track of the events I attend without Plancast and Meetup (and their mobile apps).

On Thursdays, in particular, however, I try to spend some time with the hubby, watching our sitcoms. Big Bang Theory is teh awesome.

| aC: And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen! Okay. Now. Your top 3 go-to sources for finding super-cool content and/or top 3 tools for streamlining social sharing, ready, go!

AV: Content: Tumblr, Reddit, StumbleUpon. Sharing: Dlvr.it, TweetDeck, HootSuite.

| aC: Two words: Bacon Queen. Enlighten us.

AV: Once upon a time, I submitted a photo of bacon to Digg. It hit the front page. I laughed as hard at the comments wondering why it was on the front page, as it was nothing more than a photo of bacon, as I did at the comments from Diggers who were bemoaning they had to put on pants so they could go cook some bacon. Apparently, a lot of people use Digg while pantsless.

Anyway, I started seeking out the coolest bacon-related submissions (there are multiple groups on Flickr dedicated to bacon, for one), and a lot hit the front page. Let it be known that not every bacon-related submission hits the front page. It just seems that way. So people started pinging me when they saw a bacon-related submission on Digg that I hadn’t commented on. People started calling me the Bacon Queen. So, doing what any web geek does, I bought the domain, BaconQueen.com. I wasn’t sure what to do with it at first, because there are a LOT of bacon blogs out there. So I decided to become the bacon news aggregator. A Drudge Report for bacon/pork news, if you will.

| aC: Rounding out Day 3 of #SMX East, you’ll be participating on the Social Media Site Clinic. Imagine a deranged audience member stands up and shouts, “But I just don’t get what social media can do for my company! What’s the point? Why should we try?!” What would you say to get him/her down off the ledge?

AV: I’d ask this person if they understand why marketing/advertising/pr is useful for a company. Social media has become the new form of that triumverate. The main difference is that it’s real-time and has to be both proactive and reactive. Social media can be whatever you want it to be. It can be a customer service tool; it can be a venue for advertising your sales; it can be a lead generator. It’s all in how you use it. And if you haven’t found it useful yet, you’re either doing it wrong or you’re not using the right platforms for your needs.

| aC: Looking to the future, what social networks are you paying attention to, or feel are worth paying attention to? What platforms have the most potential that the masses aren’t on yet?

AV: I think the next big play is the business-level network. I think LinkedIn will continue to dominate as the Facebook of sorts for business, but other platforms that focus on different aspects of business and networking will be the next to explode, I think. Those include Hashable, for acquaintance curation; Commonred, for finding connections to and commonalities with new people; or EmpireAvenue, as a gamified cross between Twitter and LinkedIn (that doesn’t really explain it well, but it’s the best I can come up with right now). And Empire Avenue is, by the way, a great tool for keeping you aware of your activity levels across various networks.

Also worth paying attention to: Posterous, to see if it makes a play to be regarded as the more grown-up, business-focused version of Tumblr. Though it operates in much the same way as Tumblr, it has an extremely different feel and a very different user base.

| aC: Awesome stuff all around. Thanks for the time, Amy. See you in the Big Apple