I'll skip over the trip to Newark and into New York city, as Rebecca's already covered our exciting three-train adventure and "moderately" priced dinner, and cut straight to Day One...
I attended Advertising in Social Media (yeah, of course I did) and listened to Nicole Bogas of BlogAds, Marc Schiller from ElectricArtists and Bill Flitter from Pheedo, Inc. Bill Flitter talked about integrating social media aspects into online advertising, letting people comment on ads and write reviews for advertised products. He made the point that interaction was one very good way of turning disinterested users into potential customers, both by letting them comment and by letting them read the comments of others.
Nicole Bogas talked about how BlogAds creates highly targeted ads for popular blogs such as Perez Hilton, Daily Kos and Cute Overload. The ads are made to look as organic as possible and are specifically designed as click-bait, only presenting readers with a small amount of tantalizing information. She also mentioned testing even successful ads because you never know how a change in an ad's wording or image could improve click-through rates or conversions.
Marc Schiller talked about marketing in Second Life and how ElectricArtists have chosen Second Life to prototype projects that they plan to develop in real life. The company takes users' comments and recommendations into account and make changes to their plans for a glass-and-concrete hotel that will open in 2008.
My question from this session is best described as a stunned "WTF" face at the idea of people "haning out" in Second Life, "waiting" for events such as fashion shows to start. I mean, what? You turned up early for something that was happening on the internet? I do, however, agree that virtual reality probably has great potential and I can well imagine a world where people book real hotel rooms while in Second Life. Twenty-five years ago, our methods of booking things online would have seemed like a virtual reality to most.
... and that was as far as I got going-to-sessions-wise on Tuesday, as Scott Orth had hooked up us with tickets to the Late Show with David Letterman. As a long-time Letterman fan, I was mightily excited about this prospect.
You can see us in the audience when a guy runs down the isle. Yes, I DVRed it. What?
Day Two saw me go to "Writing for Search Engines" with Heather Lloyd-Martin and Jill Whalen. Heather spoke about AmsterdamEscape.com - a site about self-catered apartments in Amsterdam that tourists can rent for the duration of their stays in the city. The site went from having terribly duplicate content issues and being banned from Google for eighteen months to having top-10 and top-20 ratings for many Amsterdam-related searches.
I learned a valuable don't-be-lazy lesson from this session: just editing pages won't help much with conversion. If a page isn't doing well, rewriting it from scratch is the only way to go. Editorial tweaks are the lazy way out of a content problem and won't fix many underlying composition issues.
Jill Whalen spoke about avoiding copy that sounds silly and being careful of WYSIWYG editors that turn great content into a giant graphic. She also went over which formats are definitely indexable and which aren't. I was surprised at how many examples Jill could provide where the cached version of a site showed nothing at all due to the use of beautiful yet totally useless graphics.
Another great point - and one that I'll keep in mind for client work - is that if you are a marriage lawyer in Boston, you don't need to be topping the SERPs for the term "lawyer." People in Northern Ireland or Los Angeles or Singapore can't and won't use your services. Don't waste yours and your SEO's time and money on ranking for such a broad, difficult term.
My question from this session was in regards to alternative spellings. Jill talked about using alternate spellings (such as co-worker versus coworker) on different pages in order to not look silly. I wondered about sites that serve both American and British markets. Do you integrate both American and British spelling? Even spread across multiple pages, that's going to catch people's attention and potentially look like you don't know the difference between the two. Of course, having a .co.uk and a .com version of your site is an option, but then you're splitting your domains which is possibly worse than looking like you can't spell!
I learned a valuable don't-be-lazy lesson from this session: just editing pages won't help much with conversion. If a page isn't doing well, rewriting it from scratch is the only way to go. Editorial tweaks are the lazy way out of a content problem and won't fix many underlying composition issues.
Jill Whalen spoke about avoiding copy that sounds silly and being careful of WYSIWYG editors that turn great content into a giant graphic. She also went over which formats are definitely indexable and which aren't. I was surprised at how many examples Jill could provide where the cached version of a site showed nothing at all due to the use of beautiful yet totally useless graphics.
Another great point - and one that I'll keep in mind for client work - is that if you are a marriage lawyer in Boston, you don't need to be topping the SERPs for the term "lawyer." People in Northern Ireland or Los Angeles or Singapore can't and won't use your services. Don't waste yours and your SEO's time and money on ranking for such a broad, difficult term.
My question from this session was in regards to alternative spellings. Jill talked about using alternate spellings (such as co-worker versus coworker) on different pages in order to not look silly. I wondered about sites that serve both American and British markets. Do you integrate both American and British spelling? Even spread across multiple pages, that's going to catch people's attention and potentially look like you don't know the difference between the two. Of course, having a .co.uk and a .com version of your site is an option, but then you're splitting your domains which is possibly worse than looking like you can't spell!
Day Two's Microsoft dinner was absolutely great, although Scott was disappointed that the cigar-shaped objects on our table were in fact chocolate and not illicit and smokable.
Despite the lack of tobacco products, Mystery Guest and I were rather pleased with dinner
My favourite session on Day Three was the Organic Listings Forum. Amongst dealing with questions about moving from Blogger to Wordpress and thus losing all of your links, we heard about Todd Friesen deciding to quit the Viagra-spam business due to no longer wishing to work from home in a bathrobe, and Dave Naylor impressing the crowd with his charming Yorkshire accent.
Next up, I attended Wikipedia and SEO, and I got to see Neil Patel wearing a suit. I also learned that it's not okay to "be a dick" on Wikipedia because apparently they don't like that so much. Also, on a more serious note, I never knew quite the extent of Wikipedia's terms and conditions. I was aware that they did not allow people to modify content that stood to benefit them in some way, but I was not aware of the multitude of other rules and regulations the site has in place.
I'm also quite impressed that, given Wikipedia's bazillion pages, the community manage to police their site so well. Despite how much we dislike Wikpedia's dominance of the SERPs and of college citation pages, it's truly impressive that their community cares so much about the integrity of such an enormous site. It's rare for a site of that size to be so well-cared for by its users. Just ask MySpace.
Next up, I attended Wikipedia and SEO, and I got to see Neil Patel wearing a suit. I also learned that it's not okay to "be a dick" on Wikipedia because apparently they don't like that so much. Also, on a more serious note, I never knew quite the extent of Wikipedia's terms and conditions. I was aware that they did not allow people to modify content that stood to benefit them in some way, but I was not aware of the multitude of other rules and regulations the site has in place.
I'm also quite impressed that, given Wikipedia's bazillion pages, the community manage to police their site so well. Despite how much we dislike Wikpedia's dominance of the SERPs and of college citation pages, it's truly impressive that their community cares so much about the integrity of such an enormous site. It's rare for a site of that size to be so well-cared for by its users. Just ask MySpace.
After our great dinner with some fellow SEO ladies, we caught about five hours of sleep before Rand's presentation on link-baiting. As I walked in, only marginally late, Rand said to the crowd, "Oh, here's one of the people responsible for our link-bait right here!" On the screen was an entire post devoted to celebrity nudity. Luckily, I don't embarrass very easily.
In the latter part of the day, the Mozzers got to encounter Grouchy Jane at the airport, who is also known as Don't Mess With Me (Or Just Give Me Ice-Cream) Jane. Having been presented with a chocolate sundae, we boarded our flight for Seattle and I promptly passed out, awaking somewhere over Minnesota. When we got home, it was raining in Seattle and didn't want to see another martini glass for quite some time. Thanks to all of you who had fun with us in New York, bought us drinks, stopped to talk to us in the foyer and hallways of the Hilton and stayed up with us until ungodly hours at the Old Castle pub. We enjoyed ourselves immensely, and hope to see you all in Seattle in June!
Nice recap Jane! Really complements Rebecca's report of the event as well.
As my kiwi wife would say: "sweeet as"
The info on the alternate spelling is interesting too, the business I work in targets a wide range of countries/regions and I know we should mix up the spelling a bit more.
Oh man, I still say "sweet as" too. My husband always gets very frustrated and says, "sweet as what?"
Ha, ha, ha, I said that too.
The first time I heard her say "sweet as", I thought she was commenting on my butt...
Funny. My initial reaction was to wonder "sweet as what?" too. I suppose that's natural. Any idea on the origin of the expression? I take it that it means the same as if I just replied "sweet" to something and left off the "as."
I imagine it comes from the idea that something is as sweet as it can be. Anything sweet that you could dream of, "it" is as sweet as that thing. But it's still a stupid thing to say :)
That makes sense. Maybe it was someone who couldn't think of a good ending to the similie and just dropped the comparison.
I found a site from New Zealand called Sweet As selling brand name clothing. Warnning: Loud sounds of the ocean and rattlesnakes playing in the background.
Haha, this makes sense. A friend of mine has a bunch of stuff from this site that he parades all over the world. I heard that Australians are starting to say "sweet as" now, too. Don't go there, Australia! It's not a smart expression!
Jane, you were a good roommate and a (mostly) responsible mozzer. I must scold you, though, for your penchant for taking dozens of photos with me. I could compile a flip book of The Adventures of Jane and Rebecca, with us getting progressively drunker, more exhausted, and grin-widening.
Aw, I was a good roommate. I shared Visine and showered quickly. This has been a lot more successful than the last time I shared living arrangements with someone called Rebecca. Curse broken!
rewrite the page, instead of fixing it! yes! that's a valuable lesson!
thanks
/rant mode on.
I cringe each time Second Life* is mentioned by media. The corporations, political parties and entrepreneurs are the driving force of SL. Put plainly, Second Life is about provider adoption. These providers that are developing their islands and creating products are behind all the media hype. I think SL is a brilliant & exciting experiment, with emphasis on 'experiment'. The question you have to ask Linden Labs is "How do you expect us (corporations) to sell to just 36,000 peak concurrent users (PCU)?" (Feb07 figures)
In China alone, World of Warcraft hit 660,000 peak concurrent users last year, with that number sure to approach a million if WOW's Chinese distributors ever decide to release the WOW Burning Crusade expansion that has been available for half a year to Western gamers.
So if you want to make money in a 3D virtual world, I would try to tap into the 8 million World of Warcraft players or any one of the many other virtual worlds that dwarf Second Life's PCU. The upcoming Playstation Home also looks to be very promising, at least from the perspective of mass consumerism. The compelling gameplay of these platforms = user adoption, so while SL gets a lot of "I'm curious" users (check out SL's churn rate), WOW is filled with "I'm addicted" users.
I know who I'd want to sell to.
*My opinion is completely bias as I'm a MMOG player that found Second Life incredibly monotonous :)
I thought this was really interesting and it would seem to go against what most of us probably do as common practice.
I happen to be a fan of the beat writers and Jack Kerouac took a very similar approach to editing his work. If a passage wasn't working his view was you shouldn't make fixes to that passage, but scrap the whole thing and rewrite it again from scratch.
Great recap. Bummer about the car. Stupid limo drivers. I too was quite intrigued by the "rewriting it from scratch" comment. I know over the years, I have simply gone back and rewritten a sentance or paragraph here or there. That is something to definitely consider next time.
Completely AGREE! I wish that clients would learn this early on... I actually once had a client submit the term "sales" to me in the KW research process... I'm not sure I agree; however, with having to write a page from scratch to help with conversion. The fact is that 100% of a web page is not read by the end user. I think that people should also concentrate on providing a next step or call-to-action to help increase conversion. Plus I think that re-writing a page that has high visibility could run the risk of changing your SE positioning.
That's what titles, alt tags and meta stuff are for!
Seriously though, if you have got alternate spelling problems (combined/apart/with hyphen) I'll tend to take the hit on choosing one main one and then sprinkling in others. And then there is also the old standby *cough* glossary...
you got ice cream?
LUCKY!
Hi Jane,
Sounds like a fab trip! So jealous =) Hoping to come to SMX in Seattle in June though.
God, I look like a drag queen in that photo.
What?! You look ADORABLE! That's why I used it - because we both look nice. It's my Facebook picture now, too. :D
As soon as I figure out what the hell Facebook is (if you are over 25, they won't tell you), I'll be very angry.