SMX East rocked! After being back two weeks from my trip to the Big Apple, I’m gearing up and already deploying a few key nuggets. There are three main points:
There is nothing like a fast-moving conference to get those Tweeting fingers in shape and help one grow followers at the same time.
SMX’s 3Cs are so true: content (is king), connections (are awesome) and conveniences (and efficiencies so necessary in these times).
While there were hundreds of messages shared, I’ve encapsulated my time away from the office into five takeaways:
1. Social signals affect search. Gotta have it. While Google folks mentioned that it is not yet including +1 into its algorithm, it’s only a matter of time. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, StumbleUpon, Instagram (… and the list goes on) are thrown into the search engine’s algo stew and out the other side is the search results page. Gotta have community involvement and dialogue. One of the presenters shared his research showing the impact of users’ seeing the Tweet button on pages increases social mentions: http://searchengineland.com/pages-that-display-tweet-buttons-see-7-more-social-mentions-91407
2. Personas and info architecture. Giving the user the best experience on the Web was a consistent message from all the search engines and SEO experts. It’s imperative if you want users to read/view what’s on your site and purchase your widget. It’s so totally refreshing that the science of consumer psychology is the rave, from demographics, psychographics, project context, goals, and the like. At Dirigo, we develop personas (you know, the dream user, the anti-dream user, and someone in between on the challenging side), and then run ‘em through project scenarios to identify features, functions, and the like. This has been part of our modus for some time. Our team interprets the inputs and outputs to create functional and creative wireframes that then become creative concepts, and voila, we execute. [NOTE: I’ve oversimplified the process a bit but you get where I’m going, right?]
3. Data rocks. I think there was a time when the pendulum swung too much to the side of creativity and aesthetics (I love the creative staff at Dirigo and my colleagues in the biz and am one of them too). You gotta have function and features to engage users these days. I was in my element with the data geeks and I glowed …
4. Big brother? The search engines continue to refine/adapt search based on users’ search and click behaviors. Great … but is it over the top and an invasion of privacy? Depends upon who you ask (frankly). Google’s term of art was personalization … Bing’s was adaptive search. Call it what you want, more refinements will continue. Is it too much?
5. Schemas. An amazingly simple concept. Web masters help search engines understand what’s on pages and provide users with what they want on the search results page. Of course, there’s much more to schema, check it out: www.schema.org. HTML5 is going to provide that better schema if Web masters take the time to deploy things correctly.
As always, please let me know your thoughts on Facebook (victorialkuhn or dirigodev), Twitter (@victorialkuhn or @dirigodev), LinkedIn (victoriakuhn), via e-mail, or ring me 207-358-2990.
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