I keep reading about companies and brands “investing” in very expensive internet marketing and social media “executive reports“, where the only things they get is aggregated data that doesn’t reflect at all their business, their market and, most of all, the level of skills their employees can actually deploy in such fields. But it’s cool for many executives to be able to talk about internet marketing trends, the latest social media strategies, or to sort out data such as those I recently heard at a meeting with a potential client who came out with “Do you know that on Instagram there are 58 pictures uploads per second, 5 million pictures per month“? I look at him and, with my best “consultant’s smile” I said “Sure!” – but at the same time I was thinking “And what do you care, when your website is not even optimized for search engines and your social media presence is risible?“.

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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!

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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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… =)