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 will be coming up in the next month, 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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What is the best content for social media? This is the question that I’ve been asked to respond to at the recent Social Media Economy Days event in Munich, Germany. I was scheduled as speaker on day 1 but unfortunately I missed my flight and it was difficult for the organizers to arrange a change in the agenda – so I ended up not giving the presentation, after working hard on it. But – since it is now ready, let’s share it! Here is my Social Media Economy Days presentation for everybody to enjoy!

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Today I stumbled upon a very interesting infographic and related blog article published by the young Mexican social media marketing expert Rosaura Ochoa who lives in Minneapolis. Rosaura wrote an important checklist, also supported by the stunning infographic below, for all those brands who want to succeed when engaging with their target audience through social media network: the Six Basic Principles for Social Brands.

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A couple of weeks ago I replied to an email request of a friend who asked me, for a presentation to its client, if I was able to help him out with a brief check-list for social media operations. Not so difficult, since I always tend to create such lists for my clients, as a list – a decalogue in this case – is generally easier to remember, mostly when built in a progressive sequence of logical points.

Of course designing, planning and managing a social media marketing campaign is not as easy, as each of the points in my decalogue include plenty of sub-activities and campaign modules, so don’t think things are going to be easy as counting to 10. First of all, like Spinal Tap, my Social Media Marketing Decalogue has 11 points instead of 10. This is why I think there must be some sort of “ground zero” or “zero step” from where taking the first step, before actually do that step – and the zero step of course is the definition of social media marketing goals! But let’s see all the step of the process!

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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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Earlier this month I had the pleasure and the honor to be invited at the International Search Summit (ISS) in Berlin. I already spoke at ISS in the past (ISS London 2009), as the series of conferences hits some of the major cities in Northern Europe, including Oslo in the Scandinavian region.

ISS is a series of conferences organized by WebCertain focused on a specific vertical in search: multi-country, multi-language search marketing. This is also the reason why the ISS Berlin show is included in the much larger Localization World Conference, another international show with a global coverage, focusing on everything local global business.

For ISS Berlin I got back to a search topic after speaking a lot about social media strategies in the latest month: video SEO optimization. Well, the topic is borderline, as the online video optimization lays is somewhere between SEO and the “new” social media optimization techniques, so I could have bridged search engine optimization and social media marketing.

Just to get straight to the point, here is my presentation on video SEO optimization for ISS Berlin, posted on Slideshare as usual and embedded here below.

Just to give a brief summary of the presentation, I started with the now classic SEO Detox Clinic, my idea of 12-step program for hard core SEOs who want to step into SMO (social media optimization). I thought it was very appropriated since the focus of the presentation, and it is always a slide well received by the SEOs in the audience.

The presentation continued with a definition of video SEO, actually the only solid one around, provided by the video search engine Blinkx: “Simply put, video SEO is the art and science of ensuring that your video content attracts as much traffic as possible“. As simple as that. But not so simple…

I contextualized the topic of video SEO talking about the how video are important in the new social web, touching base on social media enablers, that include Google’s blended search results as well as RSS, mash-ups and social networks. I took the opportunity to introduce the Conversation Prism designed by Brian Solis and Jess3 Thomas, the one in the great infographic below, which I love to call “social media mandala“.

After talking a bit about videos on SERPs (including the now classic eye-tracking study by Enquiro) and the new video search features at Google, I introduced a research by German search engine marketing agency SEOlytics that showed the change in video penetration in German search engine results (Google only, as it’s the predominant search engine in Germany) from January 2009 to January 2010. The presence of videos on SERPs grew over the last year from 4.53% to 17.58%, and the presence of organic search results among the ”blended” Google results “shrinked” from 82.74% to 39.62%. Very interesting (see presentation above for detailed charts).

“After all, video is better than porn“ is an always popular line when I speak it out at conferences, specially when it is associated with the image in the slide below, where Google Insight for Search shows that the volume of searches for “youtube“, “video” or “videos” is bigger then the volume of searches for terms like “sex” or “porn“. This is an analysis that stands also for a comparison of those terms, that once were “kings of the web“, with other search terms such as “facebook” or “social networks“.

The presentation then moved on to analyze the opportunities and the strategies for video optimization, with tips for optimizing both “hosted” and “posted” videos, meaning both videos published on a company website, or published on third parties sites, such as video sharing sites as YouTube, Metacafe, Dailymotion, Yahoo! Video, MySpace Video and more.

I shared a list of 10 video SEO tips for hosted videos – nothing new, for those already engaging in SEO:

1 – Content is king, make it relevant and interesting
2 – Title: make it catchy and keyword-rich
3 – Video formats: make different formats available (file type, size)
4 – Use optimized tags and video thumbnails
5 – Video length: internet-wise timing
6 – Keyword-rich localized descriptions / transcriptions
7 – Include URLs at the beginning of description
8 – Share it: allow rating, responses, embed, download, share/send to friends
9 - Distribute it: adopt RSS/ MRSS feeds, video sitemaps and social bookmarking
10 - Localize your videos: replicate content in multiple languages or replicate videos with subtitles + create local video sites

Followed by 10 video upload SEO tips for posted videos:

1 - Make sure video tags are relevant to the video content
2 - Be generous with tags, and adopt keywords variations
3 - Match video title and description with top tags / keywords
4 - Have one common tag for all your videos (related videos)
5 - Don’t use natural language and conjunctions in video title
6 - Choose clear, appealing, creative and HD thumbnails
7 – Use one video channel per language, and optimize it
8 - Try to make it to the “Most view” or “Most discussed” tabs
9 - Generate more views by changing Title and Headline
10 - Try the new features: inclusions and annotations

The ISS Berlin presentation concluded with more advice about the use of some of my favorite video upload tools, such as Tubemogul or TrafficGeyser, who allow maximum distribution with little effort, and with a quick view both at video long tail, video analytics, and how to create video RSS, MRSS and video XML sitemaps.

My final advice at ISS Berlin was to always hear a word on the topic from Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz, and I introduced one of the “SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday” educational search videos featuring Randy giving always good SEO advice. I embed here below the suggested video SEO optimization podcast, but I strongly suggest to browse the entire series of the SEOmoz videos on Vimeo, you’ll find plenty of SEO good tips!

Beside of my presentation, other speakers delivered very interesting presentations, such as those by Andy Atkins-Krüger on Top 10 Tips for International SEO, Isabella Ballanti on SEO Localisation, Dixon Jones on Identifying and exploiting local links, Sébastien Monnier on Achieving European Search Success and Thomas Bindl on PPC Techniques for long tail optimization. Unfortunately I missed most of the presentations as I have been working a lot that day on urgent projects, but of course I managed to have a look at the presentation and to keep the conversation going with some of the speakers also during the networking moments!

ISS Berlin has been a great experience for me, also thanks to the great organization support provided by Gemma Birch of ISS, and also because – you won’t believe it since I travel so much – this has been my first time ever in Berlin, and I really enjoyed it!

Also, did I mention that I have been awarded a ISS Medallion Speaker Award for getting (ex-equo with my friend Dixon Jones) the most votes from the audience as best speaker? This put me in the International Search Summit Hall of Fame, in good company with other great speakers such as Dixon Jones and online PR legend Greg Jarboe? =)

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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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Last week the cutting edge online magazine and knowledge sharing community Mashable published an interesting article on Social Media Marketing for B2B, asking 13 top experts what was the biggest lesson they learned in B2B social media marketing.

The 13 answers, all enlightening, make a perfect list that all B2B marketers should review before deciding to engage on social media marketing (and they are a good list also for the B2C marketers, too!). I shortened some of the longest ones from the original version published on Mashable, and added a final recap of the learnings at the end of the article.

But it’s not all – the lesson learned are 13+3+1 because I republish here also three very interesting contributions to the online conversation by members of the Mashable community, and I added my own lesson learned too! Let’s review all these insights and experiences in social media marketing for B2B.

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