Open Session of ad:tech San Francisco 2009

I’ve been busy writing up articles for the ad:tech San Francisco session for the great folks (like Steve Hall and Angela Natividad) at adtechblog.com.

I have one more article to go, but I thought I’d share what I have so far. Please note these articles were highly rushed – writing in either in the press room or right after a night of free cocktails at an ad:tech after-party – so apologies for the uneven quality of the writing.

1. SEO Tactics for Every Flavor: Mobile, Local, and Video Search
   Today’s search landscape shifting beyond doing using SEO to optimize for your text-based websites for people doing searches on their desktop browser. In the era of search anywhere via mobile and where even your grandparents are sending you YouTube videos, it’s a changed landscape for SEO as well.

   Partnering with the SMX conference series, well known for covering the search marketing space, ad:tech hosted some great panelists on the topics of SEO for mobile, local and video search which introduced the audience to very actionable and tactical information you could implement right away.

2. Targeted Ads for Television: As Elusive As It Ever Was
   One of the interesting aspect of the “digitalization” of media is “traditional” media slow movement to become more trackable and targetable. Televisions, the grand-daddy of all mass media, is one of them. The “TV 3.0: Reach + Targetability” session covered this very topic. Unfortunately, the holy grail of targetable television has proven as elusive as the actual Holy Grail. From the case studies presented, we seem no closer to targetable television advertising than from what I saw from last year’s ad:tech session on the same topic.
3. Employing Data for Insights…in Three Steps
   Being a contrarian, I opted to attend the “Know Thy Customer: Hard Data + Fresh Insights” while next door, the “UGC + Social Media” session with CNN and Facebook had a standing-room only crowd.  This decision was based on how the session intended to address challenges facing a modern agency of continual optimization: 1) how to derive insights from data analysis; and 2) how to connect insights to decision making.
4. The Modern Agency Session: Agencies Continue to Evolve
   The panel included a strong selection of diverse backgrounds and known players in the interactive space: Neo@Ogilvy, Enfatico, Agency.com and Crispin Porter + Bogusky. This year’s panel proved very illuminating. Discussions were not so much defining what the “Modern Agency” is, but rather the external forces that are forcing agencies to change.

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Hello All,

Sorry for the radio silence lately, I’ve been losing my blog mojo with other activities going on. Anywho, ad:tech San Francisco is kicking off next Tuesday! As with last year, yours truly will be working with Steve Hall as one of the official ad:tech bloggers over at http://www.adtechblog.com. I’ll be playing press and covering both the sessions and the going-ons at the million parties going on at ad:tech.

So if you have any topic you feel needs to be more talked about or covered in the interactive advertising world, let me know. I’ll put on my reporter hat and investigate! Also, I will be live twittering at http://twitter.com/danielriveong

Now the parties!

ad:tech San Francisco Party List

BTW: There’s always ad:tech’s blog coverage on the parties for ad:tech San Francisco.

Tuesday April 21

Tattoo Media Party (invite only)
2pm at St. Regis

SFAMA 2:30-6:30pm
2nd Floor of the Metreon

Beer Garden
5:30 to 7:30 on Level 2 of Moscone West

Digital Social Media Networking Party
6:30 to 8:30
http://90421networkingpartysf.eventbrite.com/

Oldtimers Foundation Cocktail Party (Invite Only)
5pm to 7pm
Ettiquette Lounge, 1108 Market Street

Adventive Party with Eric Lewis (Invite Only)
5:30 to 7:30
Sir Francis Drake Hotel San Francisco, CA

San Francisco Bay Area Interactive Group (Members Only)
6:30 – 8:30 pm, following Steve Hayden’s keynote
Location: Moscone West, 3rd level lobby

The Media Social Party
6pm to 9:0pm
roe club & lounge 651 Howard St. San Francisco
RSVP: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=179025225470

ComScore (Clients of Comscore Only)
Press Room, 6-8:30 PM

Wednesday April 22

Notabale.TV Party (RSVP at Twitter: @notabletv)
Aventine 582 Washington Street San Francisco

RockYou Party (5:30 to 8pm ) Invite only
Lobby Lounge Bar 888 Intercontinental Hotel San Francisco, CA

AdverCircus 2, Apr. 6pm to Apr 22 9pm
1015 Folsom San Francisco, CA
RSVP here: http://www.mediablackbook.com/

Moss Networks Mixx + Mingle
6pm to 8pm
Infusion Lounge San Francisco
http://www.mossnetworks.com/mix

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Below is my presentation, which attempts go beyond the usual “Social Media” is the new SEO “linkbait” and also talk a little about the DAO (digtial asset optimization) of social media assets for SEO. (Mouthful, I know!).

If you have any questions, don’t hestiate to contact me – email or a comment below.

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Hello All,

This month we are joined by Jose Nuñez from Hirank and Daniel Riveong from E-Storm who will share tips and best practices on integrating SEO and Social Media, explaining how they relate to and benefit each other.

Bring your list of questions and scenarios as we plan to spend a lot of the time doing a Q&A to make sure you walk out the door ready to implement some strategies.

Please register for the event at http://smcsfsv.eventbrite.com/ - tickets are $10 (plus $.99 fee) online before the event or $15 at the door. Social Media Club Professional Members get in for free.

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Last week, I presented at the Social Media: The Marketing Summit panel on Reputation Management. The SMMS is a sister conference of Online Market World, which is held in San Francisco. Speakers at SMMS included everyone from Best Buy, Nokia and Wells Fargo (real companies!) to the vanguard of Social Media, such as Brian Solis, Charlene Li, and Tara Hunt.

Above is the presentation I gave at the panel. You can find my other presentations at:
http://www.slideshare.net/EmergenceMedia

And as always, any feedback, questions and comments are welcome and encouraged.

Related posts:

1. Fitting in Social Media Marketing within the Agency For the past few months, I’ve been rethinking what it...

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With over 25 speakers from the social media world, the Social Media: The Marketing Summit will be kicking off soon the at Moscone West in San Francisco, October 1-2. If you’d like some discount codes to attend the event, let me know and I’ll get them to you.

I feel very lucky to join such a highly esteemed ensemble of experts and speakers such as:

• Shel Israel:  Naked Conversations co-author
• Tara Hunt: Author of Whuffie Factor, Citizen Agency
• Charlene Li: formerly of Forrester, co-author of The Groundswell
• Brian Solis: CEO of FutureWorks PR, PR 2.0 blogger
• And many speakers from major companies such as Cisco and BestBuy and Peet’s Coffee & Tea and Wells Fargo Bank.

I’ll be speaking with several panelists on the topic of Reputation Monitoring with several other speakers. More info to come!

And of course, if there is a certain issue relating to Reputation Monitoring you’d like to see us cover, please let me know and I’ll pass the word to all the panelists.

And last, but not least: Thanks to Lisa Picarille for inviting me to speak!

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I’ve been busy at ad:tech San Francisco last week, covering sessions for AdTechBlog.com. A great, but slightly taxing experience to write for all of the assigned sessions. I look forward to having the opportunity to do it again next year.

Here’s some of my witting that has been published so far over at the ad:tech blog:

• Mobile Advertising: Does Adidas Show it’s Already Here?
  Showcasing case studies from Transformers, Verizon and a particularly great case study on Adidas’ “Basketball is a Brotherhood” campaign and how mobile helped Adidas’ NBA stars like T-Mac connect with people at a personal level. This was one of my favorite sessions.
• The Modern Agency: We’re Still Trying to Find One
  We’ve been debating the “Modern Agency” for some time. This session, with panelists from Carat to AKQA, shows we know we need a Modern Agency, but it is apparent we still have trouble understanding exactly what that is.
• A Socratic Dialog on Media and Entertainment
  Discussion with people from Martha Stewart Digital, Ogilvy West, CNet and a former Walmart exec on the fracturing of media – from Hulu to Video-on-Demand to podcasting – and how to formulate the right mix of media for your audience.

If anyone has feedback on the articles, please comment on the appropriate page above at AdTechBlog.com.

To everyone that has been twittering and commenting to my articles here at Emergence-Media, thank you for all of your feedback. I’ll be sure to respond to all of them this week. This week is Web 2.0 Expo week, but I’m still feeling exhausted from last week’s ad:tech madness.

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Hi Everyone,

For the duration of the week, I’ll be mostly blogging over at AdTechBlog.com to cover ad:tech San Francisco with Steve Hall and six other fine bloggers journalist.

Catch up on all the ad:tech fun over at:

1. http://AdTechBlog.com/
2. http://twitter.com/danielriveong
3. http://flickr.com/photos/emergencemedia

And if there are any exclusive ad:tech parties, please send an invite my way!

On another note, my employer, e-Storm International, is throwing an ad:tech party in Otis Wednesday night at 6pm. RSVP details over at the e-Storm Blog.

Cheers!

Daniel

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Hello All,

We’re two weeks away from ad:tech San Francisco on April 15-17! I’ll be working with Steve Hall of Adrants and other cool bloggers to cover ad:tech for AdTechBlog.com. I can’t confirm what sessions I’ll be covering yet, but it will be fun.

If you’ll be at ad:tech San Francisco, feel free to drop a comment below, an email or call me at (415)-683-3656. I’ll be twittering the event at twitter.com/danielriveong. Let me know what happening parties will be around or just ping me to grab a drink and exchange war stories.

And thanks to Ariel Waldman of ShakeWellBeforeUse for the connection.

Cheers,

Daniel

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The two businesses we had to do a marketing plan for were for:

• “Open Source” Musician: The musician wanted to recruit and play with other artist virtually via YouTube and Second Life and also promote him/herself purely online.
• Collaboration Service for Carpooling Parents using GoogleMaps: We showed ways how just because you have a web-based software doesn’t meet you cant promote effectively offline: Such as promotions via PTA meetings.

The crowd, while very business savvy, were not necessarily “Web 2.0″ savvy, which was great. We had to answer questions that helped explained why Web 2.0 applies to small business to non high-tech business. Also, in the Q&A sessions, instead of asking us the “difference between Twitter and Pownce“, we were asked what revenue models worked best for online business, what advertising opportunities would be available in 5 years etc. Real Questions.

Overall, it was a spectacular event that had many of us outside our comfort zone and giving us an opportunity to discuss Web 2.0 and Marketing with people outside the usual Web 2.0 San Francisco Bay Area circle.

Thanks to Mitch Posada for organizing the event and inviting me. I hope to return for the follow-up Digital Survivor in December/January.

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Ok, maybe not that well known Survivor show.

This coming Thursday, October 11, I will be a panelist (contestant) at HispanicNet’s “Digital Survivor Challenge”, where I, along with others, will be in a “Digital Survivor” contest to show start-ups and others how to easily set-up “a dynamic business and web presence on the cheap”. I’ll be flexing my Web 2.0 and Social Media that day.

The event will be located at Febwick and West LLP in Mountain View, 6:30 – 9:00. Be There!

Other Contestants:

• Alex Rowland, CEO, CozmoTV.com
• George Revutsky, CEO, ROI.works Search Marketing
• June Dershewitz, VP of Analytics, Semphonic
• Liliana Townsend, TierraNatal.com
• Luis Miguel Ochoa, Stanford University
• Marjorie Kase, President, BloggerReps.com
• Mauricio Perez, Director, Business Development, Ccube.com

HispanicNet Event Information

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Search Engine Strategies 2007 San Jose came and went. While I didn’t find any earth shattering changes in the landscape, it was a good chance to trade SEO tips, meet SEOers like Todd Malicoat and Lee Odden. I could in no way compete in the same way that Lee and his TopRank Team covered SES, but here are my highlights of the conference:

SES San Jose 2006 v. SES San Jose 2007

• Definite Corporate Feel, Less Geeky Hacker of the SEO Olden Days
• More Women: It felt like that the crowd was around 35-40% Women
• Growing Proportion of In-House SEM/SEO teams (30-60% in some sessions):
• This means an even better networking opportunity for Agencies :)

Tools and Reporting

• Definite trend in developing in-house PPC Bid Management tool, everyone expressed general dissatisfaction with their bid management tool
• Companies all knew the value of integrated marketing reporting, but everyone seemed to be at very different levels of archiving that twin holy grail (from no where, to significant integration):
  1. Integrating all marketing activities analytics data as “Marketing Intelligence”
  2. Integrating web analytics as part of a company’s Business Intelligence (BI)

• Universal Search (No, Not Google’s Universal Search):
• Actually saw a few presentations on optimizing or analyzing search on any web platform, not just Google and Yahoo, but anything from Yelp and MySpace to Expedia and YouTube
• Social Media Gaining Prominence (As Expected):
• Social Media Metrics, Campaigns and Marketing ideas appearing in many sessions from the obvious – SMO Session and Linkbait – to discussions on analytics and reputation monitoring
• Facebook as the Trendy Must-Join Network:
• Facebook was something that a lot of attendees just recently joined (~3 months ago or less), at least when a speaker did an informal survey of the room

Oddly Missing

• Social Media relationship with PR, Marketing and Search Marketing:
  Granted SES gears towards more tactical knowledge, alot of people new to Social Media seemed to have a time tough time understanding Social Media. No speakers really help placed Social Media within the greater Marketing context, maybe someone should next year?
• Mobile Search:
  While there was a single session on it, Mobile Search wasn’t big on anyone’s radar
• International SEO:
  Basically no discussion of doing multi-national SEO campaigns other than one mention of behavior differences from Enquiro

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I know I havn’t been active lately, but I’ll be at the Search Engine Strategy conference tomorrow for the whole period from Monday, August 20 to Thursday, August 23. It’ll be an extra busy week because I’ll be at Burning Man after that.

I’ll be blogging through the week so leave comments here if you’re at SES and want to go grab lunch, or if you have questions you’d like to ask those attending or presenting at SES.

Cheers!

Daniel

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Last Saturday, I attended the CommunityNext Viral Marketing conference in Silicon Valley. The Conference, by Noah Kagan and Adam Kalamchi, brought together an interesting array of speakers to talk about Viral Marketing – from tactics, strategy, philosophy to viral marketing as Facebook widgets to community building.

Most of the speakers ranged from the experienced serial entrepreneurs (Dave McClure: PayPal, SimplyHired) to founders of accidental start-ups (Eric Nakagawa of icanhascheezurger). The atmosphere was very much on the casual side, with some point reaching nearly 1990s dot-com humor with of Adam Rifkin of Booze Mail making a cocktail during a talk to clearly very sharp and serious with Keith Rabois of Slide.

Below are my notes on:

1. Widgets – Metrics, Key Points on Facebook Widgets
2. Notes from Keith Rabois, one of the most impressive speaker at CommunityNext (Definitely Read This)
3. Flickr Photos: Including PowerPoint Slides given by Speakers. Plus: All Photos of the event
4. Feedback for the next CommunityNext Conference

** General Notes by Theme **
The Power of Leveraging Existing Networks: iLike v. last.fm

• The long established music discovery service from 2002, Last.FM, has been quickly overtaken by iLike which grew quickly once it launched the iLike widget for Facebook. (Tom Conrad of Pandora)
• Leveraging Existing Off-site Networks: It is a simple feature for your product to ask if the user if wants to import her Gmail Address book (or Yahoo, etc) and see who else is on the site and to “friend” existing contacts.

The Appeal of Widgets on User Profiles – Unique, Media, not Technology (From Jia of RockYou)

• “It’s like the first day of highschool” and you want to show-off how you’re different.
• Think of Widgets as a Media tool and a product, not a technological gadget
• It is not about “being technologically cool” but “being cool to use”

Facebook v. MySpace Widget Marketing Channels (Flickr Slide)

• There are 14 channels (opportunities) for spreading widgets, such as from the mini-feed, refer a friend (shown when adding a widget) and the profile page. (From Jia from Rock You).
• MySpace channels were mainly focused on In-Profile, Profile Comments, Bulletin Messages (e.g. “Your Friend Daniel has added Widget X”), and Forums (not often talked about, but highly effective).

MySpace v. Facebook Differences, Openness (From Jia of Rock You)

• FaceBook: Users do not necessarily browse around by visiting profiles, they have more reliance on using the FaceBook Mini-Feed on keeping touch on their friends
• In FaceBook, you need to rely on the Mini-Feed to place your call to action, e.g. “Daniel Riveong has just added the widget ZYZ, you should too”
• In Facebook, a user can only invite 10 friends a day to add a widget, making the friends feel more special

UGC Challenges

• With Yelp.com: Debate the use of paid-reviews to seed reviews. How authentic is it?
• Use MyBlogLog, Friendster and Others: Spam. Black-Hat marketers will always look for cheap tricks to hijack a platform for spam marketing tactics.
• From Friendster: The need to constant “prune” bad content to help develop the culture of the community and thus the brand

Miscellaneous Viral and Widgets Metrics

• Booze Mail on Facebook was able to grow its userbase at 30% per day
• RocketYou achived 9 million users in Facebook in 1.5 months
• Friendster: For every 1 (Exhibitionist) profile, there is 5,000-10,000 (Voyeurs) viewers
• Development of Widgets: ranged from 2 days to 4 weeks, using 1-2 programmers.

** Keith Rabois of Slide **

Lesson 1: “Viral Growth is Really Hard”
A very, very good reminder that Viral marketing and growth (user adoption) is just not magic and not just putting a YouTube video of a “funny video” and expecting traffic. It’s a mix of luck and strategy.

Examples:
Only 1 really great viral video every 6 months
Facebook Widgets: LinkedIn and Yelp.com have 2 widgets each, all have so far failed to reach beyond 4000 users each.

Lesson 2: Knowing the Value of a User: Viral Marketing v. E-Commerce Projection
E-commerce (Online Retailers) have data on the “tangible of users”, and so there is no real need for viral marketing. They know how much they are willing to spend for each user.

In a space where the value of each new user value is unknown viral marketing becomes very attractive; it has potentially the “lowest marginal cost for user acquition”. It is the safe choice to go far, when you don’t know how much you should spend, so you spend as little as possible.

Lesson 3: Is PR helpful in Viral Marketing? Not Really.
Keith felt that the best PR is done in-house, based on his experience and from talking to others. He cites the story that out of 5-6 start-ups in a room, only 1 company raised their hand when asked if they were happy with their PR firm. Other speakers repeated a similar theme.

Lesson 4: Viral/Social Network Structures & Business Model Changes
Yelp was originally an “Ask a friend where to eat tonight” referral service. YouTube was more focused as a dating service, but changed after utterly failure in the Los Angeles market. Slides was originally desktop-based before going into the Widget space with Facebook.

** For Next Time: Suggestions for Improvements **

Noah, Adam and the rest of the CommunityNext gang pulled off a heck of a conference. So I’m providing suggestions here, but in no way are they intended to criticize either the CommunityNext team or their invited speakers. This is stuff both CommunityNext and the speakers will hopefully (I hope that is) find constructive and useful.

Overall, I think a quick 30 minute session on refreshing one’s presentation skill will go a long way in making many of the speaker’s performance. We all need reminders! Also, maybe invite folks from the Marketing Agency world too to talk about their experience, especially working with a client to understand the viral/social-media space…of course, I’m not suggesting merely me. :)

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Following-up on the Social Media Club round-table discussions on Blog Disclosure (EM’s roundup here), Chris Heuer has encouraged me to participate in a the “Disclosure Cafe” discussions at the Web 2point2 Unconference in San Francisco (November 9-10).

It will be held in a “World Cafe Style Format” (See PDF here), which is a very effective way of creating small, but dynamic brainstorming groups that share gained knowledge among each other. Its like a group, offline-form of P2P networking.

Cafe Questions: Agency Responsibility

As part of the “Disclosure Cafe” discussions, I’d like to focus on the issue of the responsibilities of the agencies (marketers like me and our PR cousins) and by extension WOMMA (which is the professional face of this segment of the industry).

I believe WOMMA has pushed this issue off to a good start with the “Ethics 20 Questions” draft guidelines on blogging, but there’s a lot of room for discussion. Here are the questions I’d like to propose for the Disclosure Cafe:

• Educational Outreach: As a member of the blogosphere, what should an agency/company/WOMMA do to help educate the general audience to assess blogs intelligently?
• WOMMA Training: What training or certification should help WOMMA provide to agency and company employees? Regular re-training like CPR?
• Blog Disclosure Policy: If every corporate website has a “Privacy Policy”, why doesn’t every agency or corporate run blog have a “Blog Disclosure Policy”?

I’m looking forward to getting overall feedback from Chris on this and hopefully I’ll get his overall approval and adjust were needed.

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If you’re curious about my pause in blogging, it is because my colleague and I are at SES 2006 San Jose. We’ve been talking to/meeting with Andy Beal, Rand Fiskin, Todd Mailcoat among others and not to mention vendors and clients as well.
I’ll be posting my review on the “Social Media” and “PR” tracks among others. I’d post a transcript, but no way I can beat Barry Schwartz et al’s coverage on Search Engine Roundtable.
By the way, on the bus ride back from Google Dance, does anyone know who those four girls singing “My Love Lady Lumps” are or who they work for? Just Curious.

Some Google Dance 2006 Photos

The Google Dance 2006 Handout

Du: “Dunk the Google Guy”

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Hey All,

My colleague and I are going to be driving down from San Francisco to San Jose for SES 2006. We’ll be very busy, but if anyone is interested in trying to meet up…let me know!

And course, feel free to invite us to your smashing SES parties! Wooty, woot!
Shoot me an email (mail – emergence-media.com) or post a comment.

Cheers,

Daniel

PS: Yeah, I know not enough people read this blog to generate any response, but I thought I’d give it a shot.

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