Boy am I glad that I decided to come out to Las Vegas for PubCon 2009. The highlight of my day began with meeting Zappos CEO Tony Heish I wrote about his opening keynote here. He left us with some valuable insight into what makes Zappos such a success, information I believe that would be valuable to any web hosting provider or any growing organization for that matter.
I moved from session to session and picked up a few nuggets of information and tips along the way, some of which I think you might find interesting.
My first session was In-House SEO with panelists Chris Hooley, Jessica Bowman, Ash Nallawalla and Alex Bennert. Chris discussed major SEO tasks: Link building, content development, website development, finding the right talent in-house and splitting up the workflow. Alex advised that everyone setup constant SEO workshop sessions to make sure staff is trained in-house. She keeps the sessions brief and to the point once a week covering various SEO topics to educate the company. Good advice to get everyone in the organization on board with any SEO initiative. Ash says companies need to make a decision on in-house versus outsourcing SEO, set a budget and stick to it, it is not going to be cheap but provides the most value long term. Jessica raised the point that the person responsible for SEO in-house needs to have both technical and marketing skills as the role is unlike any other in the company.
The next session of the day Capitalizing on Twitter the Microblogging Revolution with panelists Jon Henshaw, David Snyder, Brian Carter, and Brent Payne. Jon urged everyone with a Twitter account to be a real person on Twitter and that means adding an actual photo of yourself. Remember to contribute and stay on topic, retweet for maximum ego boost and find topics of interest in Twitter search and simply Google It because it is all indexed. Corporations should control access to the account, use it for sales and support, job recruiting and pushing out coupons and promotions. He also recommended some great tools for Twitter EasyTweets, Topify and IncomingWho: Strategy and brand planning, 2. Where: Presence equals brand awareness, 3. Relate: Engagement = brand affinity, 4. Money (for macs). Brian mentioned the four phases of Social Media Marketing as 1.
I also learned some neat tips I would like to share for those of you that are producing video content on your website. The panelists here were Michael McDonald, Gregory Markel, Mark Robertson with Best Practices for Video Creation, Integration and Marketing. Michael was clear that quality is king for video, audio, editing and lighting and the prosumer to professional equipment and software you use will ensure great quality. Mark also pointed out that how you integrate the video into your website with your content is important for viewership and having a designated area on your website for video is also very useful. Gregory was quick to point out that viewers leave in the first few seconds of the video, so get your calls to action in as quickly as possible and where possible keep it throughout.
All in all great takeaways on the topics of SEO, Social Media and Video creation and marketing on day one. I look forward to the exhibit hall and more sessions on day two from lively Las Vegas.
View PubCon 2009 Conference Photos.
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