The Intersection of Search, Social Media, and Marketing

This year I’ve been able to finagle my way into going to three full days of Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo in NY (March 24th – 26th).  Here is a rundown of the sessions I am most looking forward to:

1. Thinking Outside Your Website: Branding Without Borders – With the popularity of sites like YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook, brands increasingly need to engage with their customers outside their website. The portability of content and viral connectivity that occurs online requires a new approach to branding. Participants will learn strategies for increasing brand awareness and protecting brand equity in today’s socially connected web as well as tactics that can be implemented in today’s resource and budget constrained environment.
2. Key Points in Launching a Global Website – As the world becomes smaller and search marketing becomes more complex, the era of “ranking well in Google” is over. This is especially true for companies who are targeting multiple markets or countries. This new opportunity also brings many new complexities to be considered other than standard SEO. This session tackles these key issues critical to successfully developing, optimizing, and launching the Global Websites that would meet those next generation marketing goals, without losing control or your mind ( I was even lucky enough to have interviewed one of the speakers that will be at this session. Marjorie Madfis, Interactive Marketing Manager and Web Editor at IBM.  Check out the interview over at the Ogilvy PR 360 Digital Influence blog: SES NY Interview Series: Key Points in Launching a Global Website)
3. Video Search Engine Optimization: 2009 and Beyond – According to comScore, nearly 139 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 83 videos per viewer in March 2008, viewing a total of 11.5 billion online videos during the month. However, the average YouTube video receives only 100 views a year. This makes optimizing video for YouTube one of the biggest opportunities in the fast-changing and complex world of search. This session will look at how video search engine optimization (VSEO) has become the most important new use of search engine optimization today.
4. Facebook Workshop: Harnessing the Social Graph – Are you wondering how to effectively advertise on Facebook? Kasey Galang, Product Marketing Manager and Rebecca Sawyer, Online Sales Operations Manager at Facebook will guide you through the social graph and provide tips and tricks for leveraging and optimizing your advertising on Facebook.
5. SEO Through Blogs & Feeds – Not yet running a blog? Not syndicating your content through web feeds? Then you’re missing out on an important area that can help your overall SEO efforts. Learn more about the unique advantages blogs and feeds offer to search engine optimization.
6. News Search SEO – News search engines offer a great way to receive targeted traffic related to breaking topics or to help with a public relations launch. In this session, we look at how to make use of press releases and news content to tap into the power of news search.
7. Online Communities: A Bonanza of Content for Searchers and Search Engines – All the basic SEO best practices should come into play when developing a community based site. This session will discuss techniques for getting your community and review sites indexed, including Google webmaster tools usage, minimizing duplicate content, technical issues that may arise, and tagging. Attendees will learn how to use communities and review sites as part of an internal linking campaign to help the engines understand what pages on your site are important for displaying in search results. Two case studies – 1 B2B and 1 consumer – will be used as examples of well-indexed, well-linked communities.

What sessions / speakers are you most looking forward to?

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