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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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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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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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?

As I often say, it is good to serve at the SEMPO’s Board of Directors, as I can have very good exchanges with some of the smartest minds in the search and online marketing industry. A couple of months ago (maybe a little more) fellow SEMPO Board Director Duane Forrester asked a question: Search or Discoverability? What’s your search strategy?

I believe Duane is in the process of writing a(nother) online marketing book, and the search versus discoverability topic surely seemed to be of some interest to him.

A good conversation raised around the topic, in a closed circle of emails with inputs from the likes of Dana Todd, Sara Holoubek, Jessica Bowman and Chris Boggs among the others, so I dropped my 2 percent to the conversation.

Today I found that old thread and decided to copy and paste my input on the matter, so to share it with you all – I would like to get your comments and your opinion on the search versus discoverability discussion, use the comment box below and feel free to tweet about this article.

Here we go – enjoy the reading!

Rock on – I like the question. In my opinion it is all a matter of positioning and target audience. Some “things” (businesses, events, organizations, brands, products) are not meant for a broad publicity, and do not need to be visible to everybody, but are meant to be discovered – by the right audience.

Some example? The first that comes to my mind is, of course, the Burning Man Festival and year-round community, but this can be applied also to products (niche-specific products such as specialty medical treatments or specialized construction or boating gear etc), organizations (i.e. Rotary Clubs, Masonic groups, exclusive Golf clubs, Museums Donors Funds, etcetera), businesses (highly specialized products and services) and brands (cult underground clothing brands, cult alternative music bands or film productions, etc.).

Basically, there is a whole word out there who doesn’t need to be slapped into everybody’s face – in advertising terms, they will never buy Superbowl airtime nor outdoor advertising.

These brand, products, organizations, etc. need to be discovered – not to be visible to everybody. In marketing-advertising terms, this can be achieved thanks to the recommendations and trust circles generated by the 2.0-social world (discovery by trusted input) or (and) thanks to search marketing, of course! =)

Search marketing (SEO and SEM) can definitely fit both needs, allowing to achieve either the largest possible audience (full-on visibility) or a very niche-specific, long tail target (can I call “meet the demand” a “piloted discovery“?).

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Third Italian MediaCamp unconference after MediaCamp Sicilia and MediaCamp Roma, the first MediaCamp Perugia was hosted last sunday april 5 at the International Festival of Journalism of Perugia.

Of course in this case the MediaCamp topics were about media as information/news, not as marketing/advertising!

MediaCamp Perugia has been brief, but intense. It started at 2PM on Sunday and, even if scheduled to close at 7PM, I had to rush to the train station at 5.30PM in order to catch the last train to Milan, where I has a client meeting the next morning. Bummer, I would have liked to stay a little bit more to be more active within the final Q/A session.

The event has been very successful, and I enjoyed it even if I had to go away early. Kudos to Vittorio Pasteris, journalist of the Italian newspaper La Stampa, who organized the event and moderated the entire unconference. Great first intervention by Carmela Modica aka Asia Connell (my partner in the MediaCamp Italia initiative), who talked about information and dynamics of communication in the Second Life 3D world.

I followed on agenda with my presentation on Personal Broadcasting and Citizen Journalism embedded above (you can also download it from Slideshare). As you can see, I couldn’t resist to put my SEMPO and search marketing hats, and spend a few words about the importance of optimizing any piece of content, from copywriting to links, images, and videos, specially when hitting the social networks. I also proposed a new paradygm shift for the journalist 2.0, as well s for the information ecosystem, and for those “people formerly known as audience“, the users, now at the core of the information revolution. Find it all in my presentation.

After my intervention, scheduled as second in the stream of unconference interventions, I started tweetting live, of course. If you browse my Twitter profile you can still find all the live tweets, that I choose to produce in Italian to better share among the Italian community of MediaCamp.

I really enjoyed the presentation from the students and Alumni of the School of Communication of Perugia, and mostly the passionate intervention from the RAI2 journalist Francesca Romana Elisei, who unveiled the generation gap in journalism, “one of the bottlenecks to innovation in information“, she said.

Stefano Valentino, a free-lance journalist, presented FreeReporter.info, a project for a collaborative journalism platform that actually remunerates bloggers/journalists for their articles, and aims at being the marketplace of citizen journalism.

Leonida Reitano, President of Giornalismo Investigativo, a school for investigation journalism, scared the hell out of me for the depth of topics they are expert on, from the “basic” of computer forensic to international and terrorism investigations. Wow, a true school for 007s!

Asia Connell told me this is nothing, with terrorists and militant groups of all sort being active on the Second Life grid. Now I got even more scared…

I took a break to have some late lunch and a talk with Michele Moro, a long time virtual friends from Facebook chats and LinkedIn groups, so it was the first time we met.

Michele has great ideas on the business front of the social web, and wants to work together on the organization of a next Italian Mediacamp in Florence! Excellent, I’m in! You will be hearing soon about MediaCamp Florence!

Went back for the last part of MediaCamp Perugia – at least for me since I had to escape to catch that last train.

The closing of MediaCamp Perugia has been very interesting, with an intervention of Luca De Biase and Guido Romeo of Nòva24, who talked about the journalism of innovation, and innovation in journalism.

I started shooting a video, but I was tweetering from my phone at the same time (because, again, this was a room full of bloggers with no free-wifi….), so the video quality is bad, while the audio is good, and you can have the chance to hear Luca De Biase talking about the methodologies for a true innovation. Audio in Italian language.

Very passionate, firing up questions at the Q&A session, was also Enrica Garzilli: journalist, blogger, hacker and into robotics, who asked Luca De Biase about the possibility to predict innovation through the analysis of trends happening at the Nòva24 platform – interesting question, let’s see where this can take the conversation, and the innovation…

Last intervention on the MediaCamp Perugia agenda, and last before I left the room, was the one from Luca Schibuola, University of Udine, who presented a research project on usability and advertising in online newspapers - very interesting, but mostly academic. It was time to go for me…

Wow, such a rush! I thought I wasn’t going to make it to Perugia, but I did it – and I was again on my way towards other destinations, this time Milan, where I hope we could organize a MediaCamp soon! In the meantime, big kudos again to Vittorio Pasteris for organizing MediaCamp Perugia, to the International Festival of Journalism for hosting the event, to all speaker participants for sharing, and to all people in the audience for contributing! Want to see who was at MediaCamp Perugia 2009? Check out the photo set on Flickr.com!

Another successful Italian MediaCamp! Now on to MediaCamp Firenze!

The Search Congress in Barcelona has been a truly interesting experience. Organized by my good friend Ouali Benmeziane, the Search Congress not only has been the first Spanish search marketing event in Barcelona (all events tend to concentrate in Madrid), but also the first event in a roadshow series that is already aiming at hitting Valencia later on this year with Search Congress Valencia – and I already signed up for it, of course!

The location and the fluid organization were not the only reasons for which the Search Congress Barcelona has been a refreshing experience to me, after being a conference speakers across three continents. The format has been interesting, too – with keynotes, round tables, speaking panels, workshop area, game corners, and of course night parties like only the Spaniards…. pardon, the Catalans, can throw. Nice.

And, even for an hard core conference animal like me, it has been though to go through an entire day of conference moderation (day two), but it has been definitely worthy to get to know the real online issues of the audience.

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I feel proud to serve as a re-elected Director at the SEMPO Board, and flattered when the NASDAQ invites our Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization to ring the bell of the opening session as influential organization in the tech community!

Last week SEMPO Chairman Dana Todd and 40 or so SEMPO members attended the NASDAQ Opening Ceremony in New York. The great news is that the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization has been invited for a formal ceremony (ringing the bell, plus a couple of minutes of speech from our Chairman) as influential organization in the tech community.

The catchphrase “influential organization in the tech community“, the official invitation headline from NASDAQ to SEMPO, has been buzzing in my head for a few days now.

How influential is SEMPO? Is SEMPO influential only in the tech community or also in the marketing community? And most of all, how influential SEMPO can be?

I wear many hats at SEMPO – Board of Directors, SEMPO Global Chair and SEMPO Europe Chairs, beside my support to SEMPO Italy, SEMPO Spain and other SEMPO Working Groups around the world, including my good friends at SEMPO Central Eastern Europe. From my involvement and, most of all, from the Global overview I get from our organization, I can get to the conclusion that SEMPO is very influential indeed.

The organization is always very present at search, online and interactive marketing events around the world with educational presentations, workshop sessions, networking events and more. The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization also dialogue with other marketers’ professional associations such as DMA (Direct Marketing Association), WAA (Web Analytics Association) and of course IAB, the Interactive Advertising Bureau which, by its nature, is more cooperative with us SEMPO and other professional associations in some countries rather than in others.

Also in Italy we started this month with a search education activity, and the SEMPO Italia Search Workshop we created for ExpoComm Italia will be likely to be replicated, under different formats, in partership with Chambers of Commerce, colleges, a tech research center, and even be part of a Master in Marketing Management by the University of Rome. Not only, the same format of workshop day will be replicated by SEMPO Spain at the Search Congress in Barcelona, in January next year – I’m working on this supporting my Spanish SEMPO fellas.

Are we influential enough? Maybe not yes, maybe not enough, let’s see if in 2009, with the spread-out of research and educational projects all across the world by the several local SEMPO groups, SEMPO can ring more than a bell around, and proceed being influential towards both the industry and the marketers about the importance of search marketing in the overall marketing mix, and how essential the search thinking is for a solid online marketing strategy!