Social Media and SEO: January 2009 SMC SF/SV Meeting

Last week in San Francisco we kicked off 2009 #SMCSFSV with an excellent gathering at the offices of Zannel where we discussed Social Media and SEO, with presentations from some great people who are deserving of the title ‘expert’. It was one of our biggest events in a while locally, reflecting the interest around the topic as well as the growth of Social Media Club, with about 90 people attending. As is usually the case with our events, there was a great mix of developers, pr folks, community managers, web 2.0 entrepreneurs, real estate agents, non-profits, social media consultants, media makers and others.

As promised, though a few days late, we wanted to share the knowledge and insights from our evening together here. In fact, Kristie Wells is a woman on a mission, focused on trying to find more ways that each local group can better share their conversations, insights and recommendations. She has been incessantly nagging me to get this post done since last Wednesday morning, so that we can serve as an example for others. So let’s all do our best to publish our lessons the next day after a meeting, but no more then a week later. In fact, we should have a dScribe (a digital scribe) responsible for capturing all the media from each event and getting it organized on the site.

In addition to the presentations below and the photos on Flickr (chrisheuer, ken yeung) you may also watch the raw/unedited ustream video from the SEO and Social Media presentations. This video still has about 30 minutes of pre-presentation noise in front of it (if anyone can edit the video and get us a better version, we would gladly replace this). Going forward I am thinking we might

The evening started off with an excellent overview of the interconnectedness of SEO and Social Media with a discussion of Rohit Bhargava’s 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization presented by Jose Nunez and Jacob Morgan from HiRank. The original 5 elements Rohit presented are:

1. Increase your linkability
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3. Reward inbound links
4. Help your content travel
5. Encourage mashups

Jose’s presentation was very informative.

Next up was Daniel Riveong, from e-Storm who was sharing more tactically focused case studies.  Daniel was also sharing some examples of missed opportunities, where great social media marketing was missing the SEO elements that would have made it even more succesful on many different levels.  It’s a very compelling case as to why SEO should have a prominent seat at the social media strategy table.

It was clear from the quality of the content being presented that we needed to take less time for discussion and more time for presentation this night.  This was especially clear when Brent Csutoras started his presentation which really capped up a great series of lessons with the special insider insight that everyone needs to take their work to the next level.  You can download his presentation (and also access the video) from his blog post recapping the night.

It was a great way to kick off what is going to be an exciting, albeit difficult, 2009.  While there was plenty of food and beverages for all, the night was not without its glitches.  While Zanel has an incredible space, its clear that SMCSFSV needs to get some portable sound amplification and a better microphone setup for each event.  I also would have liked to have had more time for discussion, but I, as emcee, let each presenattion continue longer since it was valuable information and everyone was engaged.

So for next month’s event, we can really use your help.  Please contact us at smcsfsv —at— socialmediaclub —dot— org if you are interested in volunteering or have suggestions on how to make our time together more valuable. More information about upcoming events will be posted on our Facebook group soon, so stay tuned