Greetings everyone! Currently the EngineWorks team is at the SMX Social Media Marketing conference in Long Beach, California. The weather is great here, much better then the rain/sleet/snow in Portland! I am very excited to discuss social media marketing strategies with my industry piers. Throughout the conference I am going to post reviews of each session. So visit often!
EngineWorks is attending the innovative SMX Social Media Marketing conference in Long Beach this week (April 22nd and 23rd). This industry-wide event is being presented by online search veteran Danny Sullivan as a one-of-a-kind event to learn the secrets of driving qualified visits from social media networks and applications such as Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and Wikipedia.
In an announcement this morning, AOL revealed that it is paying $850 million in cash to buy Bebo, a social networking site with more than 40 million users. While that is surely a substantial number of individuals, it’s considerably less than the top two social networking sites, MySpace and Facebook, which both have more than 100 million users world-wide.
Gaining exposure for your brand through social media marketing channels is all about reaching “influencers” in your target audience. Influencers are individuals or sources (such as a Web site, blog, or forum) that are turned-to by a large number of target audience members for current information and trends.
As noted in my post yesterday, Kent Schnepp, our Vice President of Operations here at EngineWorks, participated as a panelist at last night’s SEMpdx Hot Seat. Here is a wonderful post from a fellow member of this association recapping the very informative evening: Syzlak’s SEM.
In a report today, eMarketer is reporting that the marketers of Consumer Packaged Goods (i.e., food, beverages, cosmetics, baby care, etc.) are shifting a greater amount of their advertising budgets to online search marketing and other interactive media. In fact, these companies are projected to spend $920 million on all types of online advertising this year, which is an increase of more than 33 percent compared to 2006, according to this eMarketer report.
DMNews is reporting this morning that Google has released a new social platform that provides Web developers with a set of APIs for including social media enhancements into any Web site. The platform is called OpenSocial, and Google claims that it offers a centralized tool-set to simplify development and distribution of social content across the Internet.
Danny Sullivan, founder of Search Engine Land, announced the launch of Sphinn, a social site created for Internet marketing professionals. The site is similar to Digg, with user generated articles and comment voting.
