I spent the day at the Oxford Internet Institute Social Media Conference. It was a fascinating conference with some extremely experienced speakers including Dave Sifry who started Technorati and Mark Rogers CEO of Market Sentinel.
If you are not familiar with Technorati they provide a specialised blog search engine that Dave started in 2002, so he knows a bit about SEO and Social Media and I had a fascinating conversation with him at the end of the seminar about the importance of having basic SEO in place to boost social media.
I also spoke to Mark Rogers of Market Sentinel who do on-line brand monitoring systems that monitor social media sites.
There was much discussion on the effectiveness of using blogs, Twitter and facebook to build reputation and awareness. In particular the discussion turned to using these social media tools to great effect when you are selling an information intensive services which requires a lot of explanation.
At one of our internet marketing workshops, we will be discussing ways to use social media to raise awareness of content you are posting on your blogs and the positive effect this can have on getting customers to visit your site, especially if you make sure you get your basic SEO keywords implemented properly as I have written about in previous posts.
Dave is now Chariman at Technorati and has also launched a new business called offbeat guides which are the most amazing personalized travel guides. He had a printed one with the weather for the trip, shows that are on in Oxford and the most amazing bit which was that they had picked up that the Lemon Tree restaurant had closed down. Very impressive especially on the Kindle. If you travel, you should check them out.