It’s a little bit of a shame that I took so long to publish this interview to Robin Good. Originally recorded on a sunny december morning in Rome, these files ended up in a back-up hard drive I lost track of, and that I finally found more recently (with a lot of other “lost files“). Nice that I finally got them back.

Robin Good is one of my favorite references when it comes to internet marketing. Despite of the Sherwood-esque nickname Robin Good decided to be public with, Robin (real name Luigi Canali De Rossi) is an italian chap living in Rome where he set up the headquarters of his organization, that keeps growing behind the efforts of the knowledge sharing website Master New Media and other independent publishing ventures such as RobinGood.tv.

As a matter of fact, independent publishing is what made Robin…. independent, as he has been the very first pioneer in Italy (and among the firsts in the world) in setting up a business model based on Freeconomics (the free Economics recently discussed in a book also by Chris Anderson of Long Tail fame) – giving knowledge away for free, empowering web users towards the adoption of internet tools that can actually make them free to set up any publishing initiative on the web.

Robin Good’s business model is based on advertising, and Robin has been the first independent publisher in Italy to be able to get a steady stream of profits generating uniquely from advertising on his web properties.

So I put my SEMPO hat on and, on a sunny december morning in Rome, I finally met and interviewed Robin Good! please note that, even if the recordings are 2 years old, the topics discussed from both Robin and myself (below) are still hot and valid today – maybe because we both are internet visionaries? =)

Independent publishing has been of course the topic of the first part of the interview, a good way for Robin Good to introduce himself and the topic. Watch the video!

In the second part of the video Robin Good touches base on search engines, and compares search engines to “The Great Librarian“, a very interesting metaphor that really amused me – but very true! Watch the second part of the video interview.

Third and final part of the interview to Robin Good went back to independent publishing and, more in detail, on the vast availability of internet tools that can allow any user to set up any publishing venture on the web for free.

Watch out, free from buying big platform, but still costly in terms development and maintenance. Setting up an online publishing venture is not a game and requires vision, skills and plenty of time material. And yes, some money too – because Freeconomy is good, but then you will find out that to make a great job you still need the premium version of most of the free tools… anyway, Robin’s vision at this regard is pretty clear, and I personally support it. Watch the third and final part of the video interview on internet tools.

Just to make this post complete, I need to post also the videos that Robin Good shot while interviewing me! That’s right, as a Master publisher and video evangelist, he didn’t waste the opportunity to interview me for RobinGood.tv about SEMPO, search and social media marketing.

My videos distributed by Robin Good have been around online for a long time. I can recap them all here in this post for your convenience, and to recreate that cool mood of a sunny december morning in Rome with Robin talking about giving out and sharing on the web.
The first set of videos is an interview in 5 parts titled “SEO and Social Media: Q&A with Massimo Burgio”

Part 1 ……………….. Part 2 ……………….. Part 3 ……………….. Part 4 ……………….. Part 5

Robin Good also edited other two fragments of the interview, one still on SEO topics “SEO: The importance of good content“, the other one “What is SEMPO?” to introduce the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization I proudly represent. Enjoy the videos. Thanks Robin!

SEO: The importance of good content ……………. What is SEMPO?

A couple of months ago I have been hired, via my friends from Spanish search engine agency Overalia, to design and deliver a two-day workshop on the topic of Tourism and Travel 2.0. The workshop, two full days of Spanish content, training, site clinics, tools and exercises, has been offered to CICtourGUNE, the Center for Cooperative Research in Tourism, a Basque governmental agency dedicated to generate knowledge excellence in the areas of tourism and mobility, with offices in the very cool technology Park of San Sebastian (Basque Country, Northern Spain – Euskadi, in Basque).

We had about 25-30 people in the room, all related with the Travel and Tourism industry: some from local hotels and local tourist services, people from a museum and from the local Tourism Board at the San Sebastian City Hall. The rest of the attendees had ideas and business plans to launch in the Travel industry, and were looking for some good advice to be successful on the web.

Good audience at CICtourGUNE – very interested people, strongly motivated to put things in being and to launch projects straight away, but unfortunately lacking of all the foundations about basics of search and internet marketing – difficult for me to get them started in the 2.0 arena, and to vertically enter into the online Travel / Tourism industry topics, so I decided to invest day one of the workshop in providing the audience with a solid understanding of what internet marketing is about, before dedicating day 2 to social media and its applications and declinations for the Travel 2.0 industry.

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Last week I had the pleasure to spend an entire week in London – I generally go in-and-out from London after no more than three days after my arrival, but this time I had a golden excuse to indulge in one of my favorite European capitals for an entire week: I had to speak (and moderate) at two conferences, the International Search and Social Media Summit and SMX London 2009.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t really enjoy the first conference in full, the International Search and Social Media Summit, as I arrived at the very last minute, just before my presentation, at the end of the full day of works and networking – such a shame!

The conference, organized by my good friends at WebCertain, has been a gathering of the best search and social media marketers form all over Europe, from Andy Aktins-Kruger to Krjstian Mar Hauksson, Dixon Jones and more – with guest speakers from the USA such as Anne Kennedy and Nicole Vanderbilt. I shared a panel with Martin Belam, The Guardian’s Information Architect, who gave a great presentation all focused on Star Trek (that gave me an input to work on a LOST presentation!), and said on a post for his blog that he was extremely jealous of my set of slides!

My presentation for the International Search and Social Media Summit (ISS) was pretty much the same as I did at the Search Congress Barcelona – only in english, and with a few new slides. During the weekend between ISS and SMX I even had the time to add a few more slide, making the presentation a little more complete. The final result I showed at SMX London for the “What’s New with Social Media Marketing” panel? Here below for your pleasure!

Basically, my message is to all online marketers, not just search marketers. In a 2.0 era, where brands are user-powered and social media attitude, including sharing, are key, marketers must leave behind their stereotypes and start adopting a new mindset – meaning listening, sharing, not pushing, engaging into conversations, etcetera.

To achieve it I ask the audience to breathe, think, and adopt a new breed of marketing intelligence tools and a new “social” mindset, that can allow to be more effective in online (and offline) brand communication.

A new mindset can even get to redefine the classic 4 Ps of Marketing, creating the new “4 Ps of Social Media Marketing“: Passion, Patience, Perseverance, and Proactivity. As all things Tao, these new 4 Ps get their balance with the new “4 Don’t P of Social Media Marketing“: Don’t Presume, Don’t Panic, Don’t Push, and Don’t Procrastinate! Also the classic ROI (Return On Investment) can be reinterpreted as “Relevant Optimized Traffic” and easily turn into RIOT, “Relevant Interactive Optimized Traffic“!

SMX London 2009, to which I participated also in previous years and at other SMX conferences around the world, has been an interesting and new experience. This time not only I was a speaker, but I also moderated some of the panels, and got enrolled by the Search Cowboys to write an article about…. the Google Gap! What is it? This is another story and will make another post – in the meanwhile watch the guest posts at SearchCowboys.com! And London? I will come back soon again… =)

Last week I enjoyed one of the best events of the year: MediaCamp Roma. Held in Rome in the frame of the Broadband Business Forum, the event has been a real gathering of fresh and deep minds of the Italian social media marketing world, who dedicated a full day in a very informal meeting that has been defined a “permanent open round table“, discussing some key social media marketing topics such as user-generated content, Facebook Marketing, killer platforms and viral tools, corporate blogging, virtual reality worlds (Second Life and beyond), enterprise 2.0 and other topics such as privacy in the 2.0 world and more.

OK, disclaimer needed – I organized MediaCamp Roma after a good friend of mine, Chris Hambly, who started MediaCamp in the UK (MediaCamp Buckingham, MediaCamp London, MediaCamp Bristol) asked me to take the MediaCamp flag outside of the UK. I thought it was a great opportunity to start an Italian social media marketing network in Italy, so I started talking with some fellow social media marketers about it and, when I got the opportunity from the BB Forum organizers to contribute to the event with some content (I have been speaker and moderator at the event), I proposed to dedicate a day to a roman MediaCamp event – this is how MediaCamp Roma started. 

OK, second disclaimer – MediaCamp Roma was not the first Italian MediaCamp event. Chris Hambly and I started talking about MediaCamp Roma about one year ago, at the SMX London 2007 Conference (where I was appointed as speaker), and it took me an entire year before finding the right opportunity to set up the event. In the meanwhile Carmela Modica, an Italian social media expert living in Sicily and a friend of Chris since many years, aggregated the first Italian MediaCamp community in Noto, Sicily, in September 2008, 3 months before MediaCamp Roma.

Carmela, who is also a journalist and a pioneer of the new media and the 3D virtual worlds such as Second Life and Cyberlandia (the Italian 3D virtual grid, totally open-source), has been a fundamental pillar and my major support in the organization of MediaCamp Roma. Other Italian social media experts (and friends) such as Paolo Furini, Michela Simoncini, Michele Ficara, Khaled Kilzie, Nicola Gasperini, Roldano De Persio, Patrizia Filippetti, Pasquale Borriello, www.mediacamproma.com for more details on the format, content, participants and more – and we’ll definitely blog more about MediaCamp in the future, as the community will keep growing, with more and more initiatives and events, in Rome and across Italy.

Two more things to say in this blog post: the first is about MediaCamp Roma’s format, an open unconference that we set up through a blog that invited people to sign up to share their experience in the social media space. The knowledge sharing side of the event, joint with the open participation and free-flow conversation, has been and will always be the soul of the event, and has been fun, too.

The second thing I’d rather leave it to the MediaCamp Roma participants to say with their own words – the pleasure of being part of such a social media experiment, community and entourage – enjoy the videos (in Italian) here below (just mouse-over to start the first 20 seconds, click on them to access the full videos on DailyMotion).

To close this blog post, let me say thank you to all the participants to the event, to the organizers of the BBForum, to Chris Hambly and the international MediaCamp community and of course to Carmela Modica for being on my side to organize the entire knowledge sharing day!

Stay tuned with us and with the MediaCamp Roma blog and Facebook page and FB group to be updated with the next MediaCamp initiatives – you might want to be part of it!

SEMPO Italy, the Italian Working Group of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization to which I proudly belong and serve as Board of Directors member, is finally going public in Italy with a bold move.

After few sporadic public appearances over this last year, mostly search marketing presentation from myself and fellow SEMPO Italia friends Marco Loguercio and Miriam Bertoli at online and interactive events across Italy, tomorrow SEMPO Italia will offer a free full day of search marketing workshop in the frame of the big double event ExpoComm Italia / Broadband Business Forum in Rome, Italy.

SEMPO Italia’s search marketing workshop will take place during the entire day tomorrow December 2, 2008, starting at 10 am and closing at 5.30 pm with a search networking party. Top Italian search marketers will be sharing their search knowledge with the audience talking about basics and advanced topics of search, and running also “site clinic” sessions with the participants in the audience.

Topics of the SEMPO Italia Search Marketing Workshop, moderated by Nereo Sciutto (WebRanking), will be: Basics of Search Engine Optimization (Sante Achille, Sintesi), Basic of paid search (Daniela Trifone, SEMS), Copywriting for search engines (Marco Conte, TSW), Search 3.0, blogs e social media (this would be my presentation for tomorrow), and Web Analytic (Nicola Tanzini, InTarget.net).

Following the full day of search workshop SEMPO Italia will throw a networking party with the italian search industry – undisclosed guests are expected, and I will surely blog some more about this event.

For more info on the SEMPO Italia Search Workshop of December 2, 2008, please refer to the SEMPO Italia blog.

See you in Rome tomorrow for the workshop or the after-party!

Here we go, I’m writing this post from 8.000 mt of altitude, flying back to Rome from London, after speaking at the SMX London 2008 Conference, the most advanced search marketing event in the industry, organized in London by search guru Chris Sherman.

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Not really the “case” of the month, but surely I will publish in this section cases, presentations, interviews, research and more insight content on the topics of online marketing and, of course, search.

As a first episode of this “case of the month” series, I will start sharing a presentation I prepared for the SMX Stockholm conference last month, the SEO Detox presentation!

SEO Detox is a funny idea I had after a nice chat with Kevin Ryan in New York, right after SES NY 2008. It is a 12-step program for SEO-addicted, so that they clean up their minds from SEO stereotypes, and successfully move into Social Media Optimization!

I know the online interactive market of Eastern Europe pretty well, as I already got invited to speak at conferences in Prague and Warsaw over the last year, but I wasn’t expecting such a lively and dynamic scene at the TREND Conferenzie in Bratislava, Slovakia, where I was invited to speak last week.

The market in Slovakia is very awake indeed, and I got to get a little bit closer with my friends and SEM guru of E-target, the Bratislava-based search agency who is already into another 7 local markets in the region. Way to go, E-target!

Here is the presentation I brought to the Slovak online advertising conference – the conference topic was on new trends, so I approached search 3.0 under the social search and universal search angle, before entering the social media marketing and social media optimization arena, with a bunch of tips for the audience.

Here is my presentation from Slideshare (click this link if the embed doesn’t work)! Enjoy and rate it!!!