More than 60 lessons and learnings from SES London, day 2

This is my little round-up of the second day, mid-way through, SES London. This format rather favours presentations that deliver lots of little chunks of information but it does allow me to cover the whole search (and social, they say) conference in a single post.

I rather like the Google+ integration but please be aware that some profiles are not always up to date.

The keynote speaker today changed from Dara Nasr to Oliver Snoddy due to illness.

Maximising Realtime Marketing Opportunities
From +Oliver Snoddy

• There are 1 billion Tweets every 2.5 days.
• First tweet from the London helicopter crashn came in at 8.03 AM - with a picture. The second, with a picture, came in at 8.05 AM Eight minutes later BBC 5 Live had the first "media" tweet. 8:17 AM  the BBC wrote the first official story.
• The Department of Health recognized the #wenurse hashtag community on Twitter as an influence on policy making.
• Twitter has 10m active users in the UK, 200m globally.
• In the UK 80% Twitter users access via mobile. In the US that's around 55%.
• There are some UK TV programs for which 75% to 80% of Tweets come from mobile devices.
• 95% of online public conversations are on Twitter, 60% of UK Twitter users use Twitter while watching TV and 40% of all Twitter traffic peak time is about TV (Source: SecondSync & Crimson Hexagon).
• The value of conversations overtakes the value of the individual when its heard by a large audience

Analyse the Searcher Workflow from Intent through Engagement to Conversion
From +Jon Quinton

• Begin by identifying the needs and intent of your audience
• Find what people are asking for by researching Q&A sites (you can use Google Docs and xPath to automate and scale)
• Measure multiple goals for your content
• Monitor support tickets and customer feedback for sentiment

From +Crispin Sheridan

• SAP has an annual revenue of €16.22 bn; central SEO team and PPC budget and their customers produce 72% of the world's beer.
• Think about the "levers" you can control to improve the searcher experience; Title, URL, Snippet/Copy, site links, microformats and rich media, natural and paid search interplay, rank, etc.
• Awareness -> Interest -> Consideration -> Purchase -> Retention -> Awareness
• Don't let brand terminology determine content/keywords; use the terms searchers are using
• SAP saw a 31.5% improvement in conversions from one page by changing a picture; making it more relevant to the searcher's intent.
• SAP have lost about 27% of their natural search keywords to (not found) which makes understanding searcher intent more challenging.

Content-Driven SEO on a Shoestring

From +simon penson

• What is content marketing? Lots of debate but what about "create targeted audiences of value with content"
• You need both left brain and right brain people for content marketing; technical/analysts/seos as well as creative/copy
• Create a process to ensure your technical/seo people get what they need from your creative/copy people.
• Work through a magazine (some paper device) and understand their layout techniques, create your own "flatplan" 
• Create personas and plan for each type.
• Ensure "creative" covers  off every touch point; on-page, off-page and social.
• Recommends Keyhole to find influencers and Buzzstream to organise
• Use CognitiveSEO to find backlink data
• Use Crawlytics to find most shared content
• Use long term personas to build relationships
• Always consider content amplification; even paid for stuff

From Catherine Toole

• To be a successful publisher you need to embrace something of what publishing is about
• Dell improved customer satisfaction by 10% by reorganising content
• Get content ideas by collecting call centre feeedback
• Sometimes anecdotal evidence  is lost in the analytics
• Editorial ideas can be found in both negative and positive reviews
• Journalists are lazy, says the ex-journalist, they want 5 things out of any interview
• Catherine suggests that if  you're not an authority on a subject then don't write on that subject

Activating the Social-Search Dynamic
From +Bas van den Beld

• The reason behind Google+ is to collect  our trust data. 
• Google Now is a good example of serendipity
• There are two types of authority; people around us and people we look up to
• The rel=author relationship will be really important. It lends credibility to the search result.
• It's too easy to game Klout. Stop looking at it.

From Nick Beck

• Is this right; "Social search is the increased connection and overlap between searchengines  and social networks and the behaviours that their users share"? The big players can't seem the agree - Facebook has a very different approach from Bing, from Google, from LinkedIn, etc
• Google wants to show timely news - so consider newjacking (and is it social search)
• Use Facebook Notes to rank quickly and well.
• Content is king for  SEO. Conversation is king for Social.
• Authority is queen for SEO. Influence is queen for Social

Social Media, Meet ROI: The Secrets to Social Commerce
From +Krista LaRiviere

• People are willing to invest  in social - even without ROI
• Donaldson Brown credited with the first mention ROI in 1920. He worked for Dupont.
• Brown used his ROI studies to compare dynamite to dye.
• "Return on Impact" - Krista's method for understanding the value of Social
• LaRiviere believes you can't do SEO without Social and Content; all three go together
• gShift use unique short  URLs to help track the spread of content across social; used in conjunction with tracking code on site/landing page.

From +Aaron Kahlow

• The big three trends  in 2013; Facebook, Video and Mobile
• Facebook is responsible for 1 in every 5 page views
• 71% of all internet users have made use of online video
• By 2014 mobile use will over take desktop use
• How it works: Fan Reach + Engagement + Amplification
• 0.1% CTR for Display v 1% for Facebook
• Cisco.com's users are twice as likely to engage on a page when it has video. They are 41% more likely to return to Cisco.com.
• People are 10 times  more likely to share video on Facebook or Twitter (source: Unruly)
• Tech-related videos are not restricted to work days; 27% of such videos are watched before office hours.