Web 2.0 Expo Day 1 Notes

Here are my notes from the Web 2.0 Expo Day 1.

Community Building: Good, Bad, and Ugly

Dawn Foster (Jive Software), Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research), Bob Duffy (Intel), Kellie Parker (PC World & Macworld)

• Community managers represent the company to the community and the community to the company
• What if you build a community and no one comes? Find the most passionate people and make them informal evangelists. And start blogging and podcasting. Offer incentives, t-shirts, drawings, and contests.
• No mention of Drupal. Unsurprising because Jive was on the panel.

Creating a Coherent Social Strategy for Business

Charlene Li (Forrester Research), Josh Bernoff (Forrester Research)

• New book: Groundswell by Charlene and Josh
• Need to start with objectives for building a community
• Generic objectives
  1. Listening: doing customer research (dog food research powered by Communispace)
  2. Talking: getting people talking around your brand (Brides.com countdown calendar widget. Beinggirl.com)
  3. Support: solving customer issues (blueshirtnation.com - they didn't mention that it's a Drupal site built by Achieve!)
  4. Energizing: ?
  5. Embracing: make suggestions (My Starbucks Idea produces free wi fi in stores based on suggestions)
• They have an ROI template for corporate blogging that shows $285K expense in training infrasructure, production, $353K benefit in visibility, PR, WoM, support savings. Those are huge numbers. I'm glad my blog didn't cost that much, but I hope we get that much benefit.
• 
• Keys to success
  1. Start with customer needs
  2. Choose an objective you can measure
  3. Line up executive backing (this is hard)
  4. Romance the naysayers (legal, reg affairs)
  5. Start small, think big

From the Q&A

• If your customers are already on a community, join it and participate rather than rolling your own totally separate thing (Ernst & Young on Facebook)

Best-kept Secrets to Search Engine Optimization Success: the Art and the Science

Stephan Spencer (Netconcepts)

Slides at http://netconcepts.com/learn/seo101.ppt

• Lots of little tricks. I hope my SEO company knows them all :-)
• I'm glad that Drupal automatically handles a lot of these things well
• Image replacement sounds interesting. It's like accessibility for Google.
• Keyword density and prominence sounds hard (ranks.nl)
• Thin slicing how to SEO your pages: focus on the most important elements (title tags)
• Resources
  • Seomoz.org
  • internetmarketingninjas.com
• Yahoo link explorer is interesting http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
• Build a database of high page rank sites and then try to network into them
• Buying a site for SEO purposes helps you inherit their trust

Expo Show Floor Crawl

I think the most interesting thing I saw was this wonderful little old lady getting an earnest demo and pitch from ThoughtFarmer. Here's the photo. You just never know what you're going to see at Web 2.0.