Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land
Q&A Moderator: Jeff Ferguson, CEO, Fang Digital Marketing
Speakers:
- Michael Hayward, CEO, ROI Labs
- Jennifer Lopez, Community Manager, SEOmoz
- Sean Percival, Vice President, Online Marketing, Myspace
- Elle Shelley, VP Social Media, Zog Media
Up first is Michael Hayward:
- Challenge 1: We need a Twitter strategy.
- Commerce and lead generation
- Customer service and complaint monitoring
- Reputation management
- Promotional messaging
- Trying to monitor everything becomes a nightmare for scalability.
- Challenge 2: Online Publishing Reality: niche publications don’t develop an online audience; advertising can’t be sold
- Future of Four Seasons Magazine
- Advertising support
- Online presence
- Can’t just PDF your magazinge and be successful
- However, the online value-ad is a competitive necessity
- Challenge 3: Trying to reach customers earlier in the buying cycle
- Reaching into the top of the longtail of travel search
- Homepage overload: new spa, new restaurant, new chef, latest promotion, destination guides
- Search to the Rescue:
- Tweets contain: brand, top of the tail terms, built a custom link shortner (fshr.com), deep link into magazine with tracking variables built in, editorial calendar set up to a year in advance based on when articles go into magazine and then get tweeted
- Good point about scheduling tweets months and months in advance, based on seasonal peaks. Optimize frequency with search in mind.
- Search traffic from search has grown over 50% in the past 4 years; all other traffic sources +5%
- Now ranking for non-travel terms
Takeaways:
- Use twitter as key driver of SEO strategy
- Magazine became part of the the SEO strategy
— advertising now subsidizes search - Use the Magazine to carry general/inspiration content
Next up is Elle Shelley from ZOGMedia:
- “Just as search was in 1998, social is today.” – Jeff Herzog
- Tip 1: Integrate into Strategy
- Be organized, Work backwards with content, sprinkle short AND longtail keywords
- Customer Continuum: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Transaction, Advocacy
Oops. Gotta run. Sorry.