More than 60 tips and takeaways from SES London, day 1

This year I thought I'd try sharing my tips and takeaways from the sessions I manage to attend at SES London.

Sometimes the value in conferences comes from those moments of insight and wisdom that pepper the presentations rather than the presentation in its entirety.  Of course, this doesn't mean the best presentations are the ones that produced the most bullet points. Some presentations just lend themselves more to sound bytes.

Beyond Engagement: Harnessing the Power of Social Media
From +Krista Neher

• Have a plan for Engagement.. Success is finding the intersection between business  value and social traction. Social traction can be found without influencing sales at all and that’s not a success. 
• Engagement has brand value. 
• Architect interactions and sharing into content.
• Try to create social proof - it has a multiplier effect. 
• Facebook’s Graph Search makes engagement even more important. 
• Target found that exposure to earned media on Facebook drove a 21% life  in online and offline purchases. 
• MarketForce study; 80% are more likely to try new things based on friends’ suggestions. 

From +Heather Healy

• Four keys to successful engagement

- Know what they want (how do you want us to interact with you?)
- Plan ahead (but be spontaneous too and expect the unexpected)
- Show real passion (and showcase other people’s passion)
- Give them sparkle

• Use Hitwise to see the sites people visit before and after your site  in order to determine what your customers might want. 

Creative Content Marketing: Winning Hearts, Minds & Wallets
From +Lee Odden

• +Econsultancy survey:
• 70% would increase content marketing in 2013
• 99% will maintain or increase content marketing in 2013
• Content Marketing Myth 1: Content marketing simply means creating more content
• Content Marketing Myth 2: Quality content is not sustainable
• Content Marketing Myth 3: A content object only has one life
• When your content is good enough you have the option of running ads on it
• The optimise 360 model: attract -> engage -> convert 
• Visualise trends with wordle.net

- Your own site
- Frontline staff
- Become a publisher
- Customer journey

• Contenting marketing isn’t throwing out a bunch of blog posts each month; it’s architecting a story and narrative 
• Use a hub and spoke model; the “content object” is the hub and the social networks are the spokes. 
• Have a community in place before you need it 

• All content must consider

- Findability
- Engagement
- Shareability

• To stand out to customers and above the competition, brands must take a leadership position with their content marketing. 

The Age of Big Data: The Modern Marketer
From +Experian Hitwise

• There are 15 petabytes created every day. That’s about 200 years of HD video created every day. 
• Experian knows 500 things about 49 million people across 24 million households 
• Onesies were the most searched for product this Christmas. Giraffe was the most popular. 12% of searches for "male Onesies"  
• Searches for contact lenses spike in October; because of Halloween
• Family travellers more likely to search for Dr Who 

From +Jon Myers

• Marin Software has 3.96 billion keywords managed daily (42,000,000 operations per second, 182 TB of data managed) 
• 1 in 3 clicks in US paid search will be mobile 
• 1 in 3 searches will have local intent 
• Google estimated mobile revenue for 2016 will be  $20.7 billion (Cowen and Company) 
• Marin’s stats suggest tablet CPC £0.28 vs desktop £0.30 

How to Earn Visibility & Links Through Killer Content Strategy
From +Kevin Gibbons

• Google knows what a good search bounce rate looks like
• Google looks at multiple signals; data they didn't have years ago
• A big signal is the writer's authority and influence
• Clients have seen uplift in non-brand search after a TV campaign
• Searchmetrics survey shows strong correlation between Facebook shares at ranking factors in the UK
• One link is now longer bad but the client re-education process is really hard. 
• SEO strategy is more important than ever. Content marketing alone might not benefit the SEO.
• Give people a reason to talk/share/link
• Be agile
• For outreach results you need an audience
• Send Google brand signals they can't ignore

From +Max Brockbank

• Trust is the new black; one of the reasons rel=author is important
• Write from your audience (one of many tips learned from newspapers)
• Each new link from the same domain is 1/7th as powerful as the one before