I want to commend the folks at the Search Marketing Expo (Third Door Media) for putting on a great show about search and search as it relates to social media. The Javits Center has never felt so much like home as it did this week at SMX East which I attended with my colleagues John Lee and Deanna Jiminez.
There were many great speakers and presenters. Dan Morris (Brafton), Maile Ohye (Google) and Eric Ward (EricWard.com) really stand out in my mind as I write this blog entry.
As a student of search, as part of my role in Bringing it to Digital here at Flightpath, I take away some core themes that I wanted to share with the Digital Insight Blog Community:
1. Like usability before it, Search is very much about putting yourself in your target’s shoes. This begins with personas and serious keyword discovery. Unless you are running the Hairclub for Men (No offense to Sy Sperling), remember that you are not your own client. So optimize for terms the client personas are likely to use.
2. Have a strategy that seeks to meet some long term goals. Search (and Social Media) goals are not necessarily standards yet, so take time to "agree to agree" on what you are trying to accomplish so you can come up with ways to measure.
3. Be prepared to resource appropriately to manage and monitor. Jon Fox and I like to poke a little fun at our former President’s “Trust but Verify” slogan but I think it is clear that it is a wise philosophy to apply to Search. I can recall attending conferences in the '90's when Jakob Nielsen was preaching website "gardening"; now one must be equally, if not more vigilant, with SEO and SEM.
As my frienemy David Berkowitz said at the closing session of the conference, there are beaucoup tools out there with all kinds of crazy names to help execute and measure search campaigns, but I believe these three things must come first before you consider which cool tool like Google Webmaster tools, Facebook Lexicon or Wordtracker to use. Who knows? Pretty soon all of us may end up on Twitterholic.
For more on the conference, John Lee and I were tweeting from the event via @flightpathny with the hash tag #smx. I saw many other great tweets from the event as well, so I encourage you to check it out.
And, no, I’m not a client of Hair Club for Men….yet.
PS – Special thanks to Katie Gausephol for loaning me some charge for my blackberry so I could use twitterberry :) from the sessions. Sounds like I am some kind of twitterholic, doesn’t it :)
