Web Hosting SEO Expert Shifts Gear, Becomes Social Media Evangelist

At HostingCon's advisory board meeting last week, Ben Fisher from TechPad Agency told me why he doesn't offer SEO traning any more.

Ben's White Hat techniques have helped clients achieve prominent positions on keywords such as "web hosting", "dedicated servers" and "ecommerce hosting". On the other hand, a customer of his recently shared signup stats from visitors who Googled these terms; the conversion rate was abysmal! After all, every hosting company (and there are thousands) looks up the same few keywords all the time to scope out the competition. You do the math on how much search traffic is generated by end users.

These days, Ben's focusing on social media marketing. At the very least, reputation management should be on every company's agenda. That means monitoring and responding to conversations about you, even if they're initiated by relatively small customers. Ben also recommends establishing a presence on MySpace, Digg, StumbledUpon, MyBlogLog, Flickr, YouTube... You participate, therefore you are. And the earlier you get started, the more credibility you will have relative to late arriving competitors.

Ben mentioned Will It Blend as one example of a successful social media marketing campaign. We also joked about organizing a Second Life edition of HostingCon. Our conversation reminded me of Sramana Mitra's Web 3.0 equation. She says 4C+P+VS is where we're headed, the 4C's being content, commerce, community and context. In other words, great products/services alone aren't enough; you've also got to tell a compelling story. P and VS stand for personalization (see Aggregate Knowledge) and vertical search (see Krugle).

By the way, speaking of Digg, did you know that Dell, Salesforce.com and WordPress all use voting systems to collect and prioritize customer feedback? The Linux PC discussion thread on Dell got 82,599 votes. If 82,599 of your customers wanted something, wouldn't you like to know?

Remember: biggest community wins through platform power, which isn't available through SEO - or by increasing bandwidth/storage quotas. Web 3.0 success (which Ben says you need to start planning for now) will come from participating in communities beyond your company - and letting interested members of the public play active roles in your world.