Last night I presented at Calgary SEO and Online Marketing Meetup hosted by Jimmy of Foundpages and Kath of Lunchbox Theatre. It was a cozy room full of good people looking to learn more about my Barb Higgins campaign story. For those of you who missed it here’s the deck I used to present:

The presentation itself went ok, but the questions that followed were amazing! Thanks to organizers and participants! Wishing all of you a very happy holiday season and plenty of success in 2011!

About the event

• What: Election Dissection: The role of social media in Election 2010 Calgary
• When: Monday, December 6, 2010 5:30 PM
• Where: (A location has not been chosen yet.)

There’s no question social media came to life for the first time in a Calgary civic election this fall. The question is, what role did it play in the final outcome? Did tweets and posts elect our new mayor as many claim? Or was it a case of a good mix of strategy and all forms of media?

Four of Calgary’s finest politicos, pundits, and digerati will come together in what is sure to be a lively panel discussion “Election Dissection”. Troy Wason will moderate, joined by panelists Stephen Carter, DJ Kelly, and Alexander Zagoumenov.

Don’t miss this lively discussion on a recent election that, in some ways, may represent a turning point in Canadian politics.

About our panel

Alexander Zagoumenov

Alexander Zagoumenov is a digital marketing and communications professional living in Calgary. He started as a front-end web developer in 2001, fell in love with SEO in 2002 and, as an intern at Critical Mass, got married to the concept of digital marketing in 2006.

Over the years Alex had opportunities to work on great projects varying from luxury brands like Mercedes-Benz and Rolex to starting cultural blog networks like RussianHerald.com, to working with local start-ups defining the next steps in digital communications practices. Alex’s strength is in identifying the most suitable combination of digital marketing tactics (SEO, paid search and display, viral marketing, email marketing, etc) to achieve overall business and communications objectives.

Alex is a CSIA Level III ski instructor, performing musician (just released an album) and a strong believer in creating value by sharing his experiences with others. Follow Alex on Twitter @zagoumenov and learn more at zagoumenov.com.

Stephen Carter

Stephen Carter, campaign strategist for The Nenshi for Mayor campaign and president of BBOLD public relations. Follow Stephen on Twitter @carter_bbold.

DJ Kelly

DJ Kelly is a Calgary-based marketing and communications professional. He is a political blogger and a columnist with CBC Radio One and Metro Calgary. Follow DJ on Twitter @djkelly.

Troy Wason

Troy Wason has over 15 years experience developing and driving integrated strategic planning processes that deliver on long-term business objectives, including social media strategies, community engagement and marketing.

Most recently working with Alberta Government Caucus, Troy was responsible for using social media and computing tools to reach, connect, and build communities around their brand. He holds a masters of arts degree in intellectual history from the University of Calgary.

Troy is a founding partner of WMS Communication Inc., specializing in social media strategies & digital communications. Follow Troy on Twitter @imparo.

RSVP to this Meetup:

http://www.meetup.com/third-tuesday-calgary/calendar/15480299/

Cost Effective Marketing Strategies for Today’s SME

What will you do to increase sales this year? Join John Jantsch, the founder of Duct Tape Marketing and the"World’s Most Practical Small Business Expert" as he shares 7 practical steps to creating a simple, effective and affordable marketing system for a small to mid size business.
You will learn how to:

• develop a strategy that creates momentum
• create marketing materials that educate
• generate leads from multiple sources, and
• leverage the best of all the online marketing tools available these days.

It’s easy to fall into the chaotic cycle of producing the ‘marketing idea of the week’ and miss an opportunity to product significant and sustainable marketing results. Don’t miss this once in a lifetime opportunity to get one of the leading strategic approaches for a marketing system that works.

Register at Calgary CMA Events

About John Jantsch

John Jantsch is a marketing and digital technology coach, award winning social media publisher and author of two leading marketing books – “Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine. He has made it his mission to bring the simple, effective and affordable Duct Tape Marketing approach to the millions of struggling SME’s (Small to Midsize Enterprises)all over the world through workshops, the Duct Tape Marketing system and the Duct Tape Marketing Authorized Coach Network.

His Duct Tape Marketing Blog was chosen as a Forbes favorite for small business and marketing and is a Harvard Business School featured marketing site. John will share a savvy and cost-effective approach guaranteed to get results in today’s dynamic marketing environment.

Event Details

Date:
Tuesday October 26th, 2010

Time:
5:30 PM – 6:30 PM Registration & Networking
6:30 PM Dinner & Speaker
8:30 PM Expected Finish

Place:
The Fairmont Palliser, 133 -9th Avenue SW

Cost:

Special Deal : SAVE $60 on Non-Member Early Bird Pricing  (Early Bird Pricing ends October 15th)

Enter Code  ECMAL

Last Wednesday I helped organize a Third Tuesday Calgary event. I wanted to volunteer for an event like this for some time and I’m glad Doug Lacombe asked me if I wanted to participate this time. The idea of the event came from Doug. I was trying my best to execute on it and I think we did well. Here’s a quick summary of what what special about it.

Venue

This time Doug wanted to have a different venue that will allow for more relaxed atmosphere with maybe a few beers flowing around. My search for the venue ended at Metropolitan Grill Mount Royal  Village location.

The private room fit all 50 guests and it was perfect for this type of event. The only problem was that the music in the main area was a bit too loud as the doors into the private room were not closing completely.

Setup

Here’s one of the key things about the event. Only one of 4 presenters was physically in the room. The other three guest speakers joined us over a GoToMeeting setup. We had to ensure the hard-line internet connection to have a stable signal, and it worked out.

Note: if you plan to have a similar setup, make sure you buy a 100-foot Ethernet cable at London Drugs around the corner for that, you’ll be able to return it after you’re done.

We used a Snowball by Blue microphone to talk back at presenters. The venue had a good sound system that got the sound into the room. Video was transferred through an RGB cable, so make sure you either have a Mac with adapter or your PC has RGB input.

We started with a quick intro by Doug (to the Third Tuesday Calgary) and myself (to the idea, agenda and speakers). Then each presenter took 15 mins to do a quick demo of their product. Once each speaker was done I transferred to the next one.

Speakers

We were fortunate that some of the leaders in the industry of social media monitoring were presenting. Among presenters were Radian6, Post Rank and Sysomos. Although these products go the entire social media monitoring circle (Listen, Analyze, Engage, Monitor), we wanted to focus on Listening primarily, so most of the presentations were about ways the product is able to listen.

I was speaker #4 and concluded with a quick review of how one can setup a social media / web monitor using Google Reader. It was definitely a budget solution to monitor social web comparing to the leading products, but I believe that Google Reader is a great place to start you social media monitoring efforts. After my presentation I committed to prepare a visual guide on how to monitor the web, so the guide is coming up into the Online marketing resources section.

Value

The most important thing about such events is if they deliver value to its participants (both speakers and the audience) in balanced way. I hope this one has achieved a certain level of that.

Audience was presented with some of the best social media monitoring products out there. Now they can schedule a personal demo with any or all of these vendors, and hopefully make a better decision on selecting the product.

Presenters, of course, got exposure to 50 potential clients in Calgary. However, I really hope we continue engaging the vendors with our audience even after the event. The first idea offered by Doug is that we encourage the audience to ask questions through the Meetup.com and the vendors will address these questions.

In conclusion

In the end, the preps took us about 1.5 months and I think it was well worth it. I hope I see you at Third Tuesday Calgary events in the future. Here’s the Social media monitoring deck from the event:

This one will be short and as concise as possible. I just came from a great event put together by the team at FoundPages. It was about 5 easy-to-use tools to improve your online marketing efforts. Great turnout! 5 presentations followed by a few discussions were quick, to the point and very well moderated by Jimmy Wong. Presenters line-up was a follows:

• Twitter Basics by Terence Fong of Business Instincts
• Google Places for Businesses by Kathryn Blair of FoundPages
• Google Alerts by Shannon Bowen-Kelsick of sbk MARKETING
• Posterous.com by Bryanne Miller of Be Real Communications
• ActiveProspects by Ritu Singh of ActiveConversion

Feel free to contact each of the presenters using the links above to request a copy of the presentation. Lear more about the event and sign up for the next one at Meetup.com. I’ll definitely be looking for more events by this group!

As promised, below are some notes from the second day of the event. Please note that it only includes notes for presentations by the following people: Shawn Ohler, Ernest Barbaric and Ken Chapman. I had to leave at the lunch break.

Social meida insights from Shawn Ohler, ATB Financial

• Social media campaigns are rarely a success, but when they work, the results are amazing.
• Asking audience “what do you know about our company?” is often a good first step to solve a brand recognition problem.
• Many companies say they care about communities, but in fact they rarely do. So, identifying a strong value and sticking to it is very important. The idea is to create a value that resonates with the entire company. ATB Financial found it as “we are Alberta“.
• WeAreAlberta.ca, or any other social campaign site is not a place to sell your product. The company treats it as a place where conversations start.
• According to 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer, the top 3 corporate reputation factors are: transparency, quality of product / service being offered and trust.
• Based on ATB Financial’s experience, traditional media started the conversation and social media picked it up and continued.
• Asking your Facebook friends to contribute to your social campaign does not work. Instead, look at relevant conversations in relevant online communities, offer help, contribute, share value, then ask for help.
• According to Shawn, any social media project should accomplish 3 things: publishing (content development and distribution), engaging (starting conversations with the target audience), and influence (ability to influence audience’s decisions based on the relationship formed during the campaign).

Social media trainer and consultant, Ernest Barbaric, Ernest Media

Ernest’s presentation was of two parts: trends and social media campaign steps. Below is the summary of key points.

• Trend 1: Mobile. Smart phones are taking over the market. According to admob data, 50% of all phones are smart phones. 30% of mobile users access social networks from their phone. In short, our experience is becoming increasingly mobile. As marketers, we need to make sure we strongly consider this mobile revolution.
• Trend 2: Location-based services. It’s about here and now. Yelp and FourSquare are two example of location based services that have been growing substantially in their user base. Google Places is a good example of bigger company concerned with location-based services.
• Trend 3: Augmented Reality. Conversations are happening outside of places they originated. For example, I wrote an article on my blog, distributed to my social networks profiles. As a result, my article is discussed on those networks, not on my blog. Another lesson is that conversations are happening where it’s most comfortable for your audience, not you. Learn more about Microsoft Augmented Reality Research.

To be continued with more from Ernest Barbaric and Ken Chapman.

I just came from another great Third Tuesday Calgary event. This time we had Jeff Nelson of Anduro Marketing talking about social media and SEO. Specifically, does engaging in social media help your SEO efforts? Below are some notes from the talk.

• One of the main arguments was that social media is NOT good for SEO because most of the social networking sites have a nofollow attribute in links.
• Jeff used seo-browser.com tool to parse a few social media sites including Twitter, Wikipedia, Youtube, etc.
• Results showed that neither Twitter nor Wikipedia pass the Google juice to external pages, therefore these sites were almost useless in contributing to SEO efforts.
• I sincerely believed that Twitter passes the link to your site in the right-hand sidebar (where it talks about the user). The reason for this was that I’ve seen a link count through SEOmoz’s OpenSiteExplorer.org.
• On the other hand, YouTube had one link that actually lead to a site and passed authority (the link to your site in YouTube channel profile). Unfortunately you’re not able to customize the anchor text.
• Jeff briefly talked about three characteristics of a link: anchor text, whether it passes the value (not nofollow), and the context (text content surrounding the link).
• Then Jeff went into a bit of history of when social media started to matter for SEO. He showed a list of links to resources talking about it starting in 2006. One of the articles by Rand Fishkin was the most valuable.
• Finally, Jeff got into discussing the three reasons to use social media to help your SEO: brand promotion, link bait, and viral distribution. Meaning that social media is not the best friend of SEO but can be a good buddy to hang out with sometimes.
  • brand promotion: although you’re not getting tons of link value from social networks, it’s definitely worth participating in social media for the reason of promoting your brand with the relevant audiences.
  • link bait: or developing valuable content on your site (in form of a blog post most often) that others will link back to. The emphasis is on the value of that content. Just writing frequent articles will not help. Make then infrequent, but super valuable. Here’s an article Jeff shared that’ll help you with creating such content.
  • viral distribution: somewhat related to link bait, yet a separate reason. The goal here is to create valuable content and ensure that it’s as simple as possible to pass along. Jeff gave a couple of examples of principles behind successful viral distribution. Then, we all watched “will it blend” as a great example of a viral campaign.
• Here’s a couple of great links on the topic Jeff shared:
  • 10 of the smartest big brands in social media, an article by mashable
  • social media marketing guide, an article by SEOmoz

I hope this summary of key points helps those who missed the event and those of you who are not in Calgary. Feel free to comment on other ways you know of where social media can be helpful in reaching your SEO objectives.

Here’s the link to a copy of Jeff’s presentation at SlideShare.net