This article is the first for my blog since the new year started. I know, I’m a lazy blogger, but I’ve also been pretty busy with business and conferences that brought me all the way to a conference in Iran, to give classes in a couple of European universities, and to travel further more both for business and sure – also for pleasure! More conferences and classes this year, from speaking at Search Congress Barcelona, Search Engine Strategies London and at the Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference, to teaching more classes at the Master for Community Managers organized by M4F in Bilbao.

At my next speaking/reaching commitments I will be talking about some of the topics I already explored a lot over the last year or two: social media strategies, social media optimization, video optimization, and social media policies – of course updated to the latest news and insights. But I want to take advantage of this post to share the presentations I created on a new topic: social fundraising – a topic I’m particularly proud of since the two case histories are related to one of the most inspiring communities I ever been part of: Burning Man.

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I love to work with my colleagues and friends at xister, the Italian cutting edge interactive agency I have been involved with since its launch almost 10 years ago, when we all spinned-off Deepend Italy, sinking with all its (awesome) international network through he black hole of the internet bubble of 2001. Some of my Deependers friends founded a new agency with the same design/strategic-driven approach but completely (much better) philosophy. Since then we have crossed paths several times and worked together on several projects, putting also a strong focus on training to the constantly growing xister team (and “sister” company’s Art Attack Adv). GSI is currently working with xister on a couple of projects for major Italian food brands, with GSI supporting xister and its clients on social media marketing, both strategy and operations.

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Training is the major trend in search and social media marketing today, and professional training it’s wanted in any form: in-house training for advertisers’ marketing teams or for agencies who want to skill up their resources for the search and social media marketing arena, in-class training at workshops organized by the smartest industry conferences and shows, by agencies or public administrations, including universities and training centers.

Over the last 6 months, and for the forthcoming months of this year, my agenda has been more populated by training and teaching commitments than conferences – that’s besides clients’ projects, of course. Everybody seems to understand that the key to engage on the web in a successful way is to “know what you’re doing“. And everybody in the online marketing industry, both on advertisers’ and agencies’ sides, needs to know exactly what they are doing when engaging with their online audience.

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At the end of September a new breed of interactive marketing event kicked off in Málaga, (Andalusia, Spain).
A spin-off from the classic series of Search Congress events, Web Congress Málaga is also the brain child of Ouali Benmeziane and his team, and featured an interesting new format: six different track on search marketing, social media marketing, interactive marketing and also on web design, development and hosting.

Add a line up of top speakers for the conference on day one, a series of workshops on day two, a great participative audience, amazing networking opportunities and, as always, a stunning event location (the brand new Palacio de Ferias y Congresos de Málaga), and Web Congress Málaga easily turn into the best online marketing conference I moderated this year.

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Autumn is finally here, blowing away the laziness of the last days of summer and bringing me back to full activity not only on clients’ projects, but also with a full schedule of European search marketing and social media marketing conferences. And yes, also sporting the amazing colors of the season, that our blog replicates as we always do, changing the template and colors of our blog at each solstice and equinox.

The first conference of the season I have been invited to happened right on September 23, the autumn equinox day, the same day we changed the template to the Global Search Interactive blog. I participated to a round table in Rome on Contemporary Direct Marketing organized by Business International, where I contributed to the interesting discussion wearing my SEMPO Board of Directors hat and talking about search engine marketing as “online direct marketing on demand” – but also giving good tips on how, rather than cannibalizing direct marketing, search and social media marketing can represent a huge opportunity for direct marketers when integrated in direct marketing practices, from targeting to conversion.

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Spain keeps amazing me for the vitality of its digital market and the dynamism of the local players. I have been living, working and networking in Spain over the last few years, moving to Oviedo, Asturias, back in 2007 to be able to follow closely and launch the Asturias Paraiso Cultural project, a project that unfortunately didn’t take off. Bummer.

Since then, while keeping speaking at conferences around Europe and the United States, I also started to be more and more active on the Spanish online market, scene, and network, mostly thanks to my good friends at SEMPO Spain who kept me inviting me at the events they were partnering, calling me in to speak at conferences such as SMX Madrid, OME Barcelona, and the awesome local search marketing conference series Search Congress, for which I turned out to be involved at all Search Congress events to date held in Barcelona, Valencia and Bilbao.

Even if I have been professionally active in the Spanish Basque Country (Euskadi, in basque), offering Travel 2.0 training workshops at the Parque Tecnologico of San Sebastian, search and social media marketing workshops at CEBEK in Bilbao, and several collaborations with my friends of the spanish search marketing agency Overalia, it has been thanks to Search Congress Bilbao last January that I got involved with the event that possibly gave me the most satisfaction since I started conferencing around: the Nonick Conference.

Organized by the Basque public TV broadcaster EITB (Euskadi Irratio Telebista), Nonick 010 is the successor of a previous event called Blogak (“blogs” in Basque), created in 2006 as the first Web 2.0 event in Spain.

Last May 14 and 15, 2010, the new and improved Nonick 010 focused on online communities, exploring the topic not only with a conference packed with international keynote speakers, but also with workshops, the first European Community Managers Summit, a Start-up 2.0 Competition and Award, and great networking moments.

How did I get involved with Nonick and EITB? As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I moderated Search Congress Bilbao back in January and EITB was one of the media partners of the search engine marketing event. With their TV experience and state-of-the-art studio technology, IETB secured a stable and continuous web streaming for Search Congress, and secured also some TV passages. The web streaming went very well, with hundred people following Search Congress Bilbao from the entire Spain, South America and the United States, and interactions and input also via Twitter. Very good job from EITB. Kudos.

So, when at the end of the conference Lorenzo Sainz Nieto of EITB told me about the upcoming Nonick conference and invited me to moderate the event, I immediately knew that I was going to work with top TV professionals who would have secured the success of the conference. Lorenzo (also known as Lontzo), myself and Euskara star Maite Goñi Eizmendi, also with the support of the amazing EITB team, have been working for a few months to make sure that Nonick 010 would have had compelling international content, and awesome networking, knowledge sharing and learning opportunities. I think we made it, and I feel proud of my contribution to the event. But let’s see what Nonick 010 has been, and let’s have Lontzo telling us in the video here below (in Spanish, with subtitles in English and Spanish).

As Lontzo sais in the video, we had the original challenge to get all the speakers to Bilbao from all over Europe and the United States, as the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull went for the second wave of trouble in European skies right the day before the kick off of Nonick 010, and several speakers got stuck in Madrid with no available flights to Bilbao (we had to arrange some cars to go get them in the middle of the night).

Even with this initial challenge, on Friday morning May 14 we kicked off the event in a very successful way, also thanks to the amazing line up of international speakers.

The event started with the great video about the State of the Internet 2010 by Jesse Thomas (video embedded here below), that officially opened Nonick. After a brief introduction and welcome by Maite and myself, the stage was all for Jennifer Preston, the Social Media Editor-in-chief of The New York Times, who delivered a very interesting keynote about social media and news, and “how they do it” at The New York Times.

Right after Jennifer Preston’s presentation, Washington DC-based branding experts Jesse Thomas (also known as Jess3) and his partner (at work as well in real life) Leslie Bradshaw took the stage for a powerful presentation on branding and design for social media. By the way, Jesse Thomas is the co-author (with Brian Solis) of the Conversation Prism, one of the most inspiring social media infographics seen over the last months (that I call “social media mandala“).

The conversation prism (click on the image to view a larger version) is a global analysis of the social media network ecosystem but it’s still too focused on the major US social media landscape, so Jesse and Brian started collaborating with people from other parts of the world to create localized Conversation Prisms – if I remember well Jess told me they are working for a Russian and a Japanese Prism, and we discussed my support to create some localized versions for European countries – stay tuned on that! =)

After the opening keynotes, the stage of the Euskalduna Conference Center hosted the presentation of the European Start-Up 2.0 Competition, with the presentation of the smart ideas for new 2.0 start-ups by the 5 finalists voted among more than 100 ideas participating to the contest.
The finalists 2.0 start-ups at Nonick were:

Stereomood.com – Italian start-up presented by founders Eleonora Viviani and Daniele Novaga for a community that shares music playlists in tune with emotions and moods. The free music (no registration required) served by Stereomood emotional radio through a brilliant mashed-up interface goes with users’ moods, and aims to be the perfect soundtrack to whatever activity users are involved with.

Askaro.com – presented by Cuban founder Ubaldo Huerta, this new Spanish social site let you explore and discover new places recommended by local users at several destinations worldwide. Neat interface and “Craigslist-like” navigation with mash-ups, the site is ready to be launched worldwide, while now is mostly focused on Spain.

Sopo.it – another Italian finalist idea for the start-up of a site, presented by founders Stefano Parisi and Amalia Mariotti. Sopo.it is an independent user-generated portal where to learn about workplaces though the (anonymous) opinion of other users who rate their companies and their workplace. The site (also in english) allows to compare workplaces by parameters chosen by the user, and helps take the best desicion about accepting that job offer or not.

Submate.com – presented by French founder Laurent Kretz, this new web/mobile social network (also available as iPhone application free to download) allow people who commute to get to know people with the same interest who commute every day on the same route using subways / metro, bus, or trains, and to discover cool things to do close to where people works, live, and in the commute in between.

Minube.com – presented by the creator team guided by Eduardo Gomez de la Mata, Minube.com is a travel community for travel lovers that allow its users to get inspirations and travel tips from media shared by other users on several destinations worldwide. Minube focuses on travel experience and presents the mash-upped user-generated content in a cool editorial way.

The finalist got the final vote from the Nonick public, and the winner has been announced, after the screening of all the votes, before closing the conference on saturday. So I will keep a little suspence also in this blog post and will announce the winner of the European Start-up 2.0 Competition a little further down. Just let me say that all the idea that got to the final were amazing, as I’m sure were also most of the other 100+ start-up submissions, that i didn’t had the pleasure to screen. Bravo! to everybody!

After a lunch break with incredibly tasty and well presented food (Euskadi has a tradition for top cuisine), Nonick continued with the 1st European Community Managers Session, that started with very interesting presentations by Petur Johannes Oskarsson, Community Manager at EVE Online (multigame community) and Alberto Knapp Bjeren, presenting the social network The Cocktail, of which he is the CEO. Incredibly, while Petur from EVE Online, headquartered in Reykjavik, made it to Bibao, Luca Messaggi, Managing Director Europe at Zooppa.com, the user-generated advertising platform and community with offices in Italy, was the only one speaker that got irremediably stuck with flights and couldn’t make it to Nonick. Sorry Luca!

After Petur and Alberto’s presentations, the Nonick stage has been dedicated to the 1st European Community Managers Session, with an experiential round table that included Petur, Alberto and also Mark Ralea of the German Community Management Association, Kirsten Wagenaar of Netherland’s Community Management Association, Blaise Grimes-Viort, Head of Communities & Social Media for The National Magazine Company, and Gabriel Aldamiz-Echevarria of Spanish web portal Chicisimo.com. The Community Managers Session has been moderated by Jose Antonio Gallego of the Spanish Community Managers Association. The output from the round table confrontation channeled into the last Nonick activity for the day 1 of the event, the creation of a wiki for Community Managers’ best practices, coordinated by Amaia García.

The first day of event has been so successful that the #nonick hashtag on Twitter climbed its way up to be number two Twitter trending topic for Spain on Friday May 14, and couldn’t get to number one as it was impossible to beat #followfriday! Do you want to know more about the first day of Nonick? Let’s ask Monica, Virginia and Isabel, three among the participants to Nonick 010!

At the end of day one we had a great networking “dinner and drinks” night at the iconic Kafe Antzokia, an institution of the Bilbao nightlife, which was a follow-up of the speaker-only dinner we had the previous night – not really a dinner, more than a sensorial experience involving food and all senses prepared using molecular cuisine techniques by the Chefs at the Michelin-starred Etxanobe Restaurant. Here are some pictures from the networking moments – just click on the image to see the full photo set on Flickr.

The second day of the Nonick Conference started with a full morning of workshops about several online marketing topics, including a workshop on search marketing held by my good friend Ouali Benmeziane of Search Congress. Right after the workshops, distributed across several meeting rooms of the EITB headquarters, we got back to the EITB Auditorium with two great closing keynotes, the first one from the one and only Andie Grace from the Communication Team of the Burning Man organization in San Francisco.

Andie inspired the audience with the visuals and the values of the Burning man community and pointed out the fact that, while the Burning Man community is a real life one, the “burners” worldwide keep in touch and develop collaborative projects all year round using a wide range of online tools, from newsletters to blog, wikis, social networks and even video podcasting, like the one on Current.tv and iTunes.

Also like the multi-author blog created pro-bono by Global Search Interactive for the Nowhere Festival (the European Burning Man regional festival), more specifically for the Growing Nowhere art retreat, when 25 artists from all over Europe (including myself) met in Reus, Catalunya (Spain) last November to discuss and create collective art projects.

As you can probably imagine, I was the one who proposed to invite Burning Man at Nonick 010 and I have been the happiest conference moderator (and burner) in the world when Andie Grace accepted our invitation to the Nonick Conference.

I am always evangelizing Burning Man, its (our) community and the values that are inspiring hundreds of thousands people around the world, and to me the participation of the Burning Man organization to a world class online marketing event I moderate it’s just the perfect match between the things I like most in both personal and professional life.

I have a brief video interview to Andie Grace for you. Sorry the audio quality is not excellent as it has been recorded on a very windy day, but yet you can enjoy a nice message from Andie! Thank you, Actiongrrrrrl!

I know I’m very passionate about the Nonick Conference, but I cannot go on forever with this post, so let’s go back to the Nonick content. After Andie Grace, the closing keynote was a very interesting speech by Zaryn Dentzel, the founder of Spanish successful social network Tuenti, who talked about friendship and collaboration in local communities. Beside of stressing out the importance of being very relevant locally and to real friends and connections (hence Tuenti’s focus on Spain and the private, invite-only access to the social network), the most important take in Zaryn’s talk has been about privacy on social networks. In the days of concerns about Facebook privacy, Zaryn Dentzel confirmed that Tuenti gives the user full control over their privacy settings, as in the EIBT video below (in Spanish).

Final act for Nonick 010 was the award to the best European Start-up 2.0, as voted by the Nonick pubblic. And the winner of the European Start-up 2.0 Award is… Submate.com! Here is an interview to Laurent Kretz, the owner and founder of Submate, interviewed before he knew he was the recipient of the award. Congratulations, Laurant!

Final word on Nonick: thank you very much to all the Nonick speakers, the public, the Basque Government (one of the few in Europe with cutting edge vision on digital society) and, most of all, Eskerrik Asko (thank you in Euskara) to the amazing team at EITB, who made a great job to secure a great success for the Nonick Conference! I hope to work again soon with Lontzo and the EITB team, stay tuned for updates from Euskadi!

This year I won’t be able to participate to MediaCamp Perugia like I did last year =(

Part of the International Festival of Journalism, an event that every year attracts and hosts in beautiful Perugia the most brilliant minds in journalism and communication, MediaCamp Perugia is a very animated unconference that usually takes part the last day of the main Festival of Journalism, after 4 days of intense networking. I participated to its latest edition last year with a presentation about Personal Broadcasting and Citizen Journalism from a search / social media marketing point of view, and it was a great knowledge sharing experience, as I learned a lot from information gurus such as Luca De Biase, Vittorio Pasteris and Francesca Romana Elisei, but also from other experts such as my good friend and Second Life artist Carmela Modica aka Asia Connell, who also shared with me the experience of organizing MediaCamp Roma back in December 2008.

The reason why I cannot attend this year’s MediaCamp Perugia is that one of my best friend gets married on the same day, so I had to make a choice and f course I couldn’t let my friend down! I hesitated for a couple of minutes in front of the MediaCamp Perugia’s wiki page before deleting my name from the list of presenter for this year and, with a broken heart, I finally did it – but not before adding a link to this article in the session “Who’s talking about us”…. when I saw….

Since I’m addicted to unconferences, while I was editing the BarCamp wiki I couldn’t help noticing the next brilliant unconference idea and event, Social Innovation Camp // Food, a double event that will take place in Milan on May 6, and in Rome on May 11. I couldn’t resist, so I signed up to participate and contribute with a couple of social innovation ideas to the roman date of Social Innovation Camp // Food.

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Last month I attended to SES London 2010 – Search Engine Strategies London 2010: amazing event, both in terms of quality of content and of community networking. I have been attending and speaking at Search Engine Strategies conferences across Europe and the United States since 2003. My first Search Engine Strategies in London as a speaker was in 2004, and I have been a regular speaker at SES London since then.

So trust me if I tell you that SES London 2010 went really above the usual high standards of the classic search marketing London show. I hope you enjoy this post where I recap the major learnings from the event, and give voice to speakers and attendees with a few video interviews!

This year I missed the deadline to pitch as a speaker for SES London 2010 and couldn’t get in the agenda with a social media topic, but I have been invited nevertheless by the great guys at Incisive Media (who runs the SES shows) to take action anyway as moderator for “Tough Love: Get Your Site Tuned Up“, a SEO live site clinic with British SEO master Dave Naylor (also known as Bronco) and international search expert Erica Schmidt on the panel. Note: the session was on Thursday February 18, on the last day of SES London, and the next day Friday 19 both Erica and I were participating to a round table at SEO Campus Paris 2010!

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I came back last week from the amazing experience of discovering Iceland, where I spent a week to participate to the Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference 2010 (RIMC 2010) organized by my good friend the “Viking of search marketing” and now also a fellow Director at the new SEMPO Board of Directors Kristjan Mar Hauksson, who has been the perfect host for the Icelandic event.

Even if I find challenging and honored when I get invited to speak or moderate panels at great conferences at big venues, (like SES London 2010 the week before), I still love the atmosphere, mood and networking of smaller conferences like RIMC 2010. When there are less than 300-400 people in the room I feel free to walk among the audience with a microphone (or two) in my hand, make eye contact with the attendees and shoot the occasional question to the audience, even during my presentation and not just for Q&A.

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I am very passionate with things I love, and one of those surely is search marketing. I got involved with the search industry almost by chance in 2002 after many years in interactive marketing, but I got immediately hooked with search, and with a community of search marketers that built “a family” beyond the industry, to which SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization is “home”. And definitely one of the “things I love”.

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