Chris and I are at Jeremy Schoemaker’s Elite Retreat in New York City, and we’re halfway through Day 1. I’ve heard a wealth of information and my head’s swimming with awesome tips and Internet marketing ideas, but I wanted to take a quick moment to update you guys on 10e20’s conference happenings for the month of October (I can’t believe we’re already diving into fall–seems like Thanksgiving’s just around the corner!). Below is a quick outline of where you can find some of us (well, mostly Chris) this month. If you happen to be attending any of these events, definitely say hello, introduce yourself, shake hands, exchange business cards, all that good stuff. We want to meet and get to know you, so don’t be afraid to come up to any of us and and network your ass off.

Elite Retreat (October 1-2, NYC)

The Elite Retreat is going on right now and it’s pretty awesomesauce. I think it very well might be the best conference I’ve attended, but who knows, maybe Day 2 will be chock full of Facts of Life reruns and I’ll have to eat my words. Neil Patel, Chris and Brian Norgard gave terrific presentations, and after lunch we’re continuing with Aaron Wall and a keynote from Seth Godin. Tomorrow is likely where attendees will derive the most value: it’s nothing but 1 on 1 workshops between the attendees and the experts, so everyone will receive personalized and individual attention. I’m pret-ty, pret-ty excited.

SMX East, (October 5-7, NYC)

After the Elite Retreat concludes, Chris and I are sticking around for SMX East, which takes place October 5-7 in NYC. SMX is going to be a great Internet marketing show that will focus on loads of different tactics (organic, paid, social, business development, etc), so you’re guaranteed to learn a lot about various aspects of Internet marketing. Chris will be presenting about Twitter marketing tactics while I’ll be covering Facebook marketing tactics. Our Director of Internet Marketing, Greg Finn, will also be attending and he and I will provide blog coverage of the event next week. Keep your eye out for Jake, our VP of Being Awesome, who might also be around.

If you’re attending SMX East, definitely hit up our sessions and bug us with any and all questions you have. We also highly recommend attending the IM Charity Party on Monday at the Town Tavern. It costs $50 to attend, but not only will you be networking with some great names and faces from our industry, you’ll also be contributing to Multiple Myeloma and Blood Cancer research. The party is supporting a great cause and it’ll be loads of fun, drinking and getting to know people, so that’s a win/win for sure.

If you don’t have tickets to SMX East and would like to attend, you can still get 15% off the registration price by entering this code: smx15speakers (case sensitive). So act now and hopefully we’ll see you soon!

WebCAM (October 15-16, Bend, OR)

Chris continues his one man show of “Where in the World is Chris Winfield-iago” by flying to Bend, Oregon, and keynoting at WebCAM, a web + creative and marketing conference that will cover web marketing, search marketing, social media, SEO, brand management and marketing communications. There will be a load of great speakers (Laura Lippay, Rhea Drysdale, Todd Friesen, Dave Snyder, David Mihm, Marshall Simmonds…the list goes on), so if you live in the area I recommend checking it out.

That’s about it for October. Stay tuned for our fall/winter conference schedule, coming to a feed reader near you! If you’ll be attending any of the shows we’re at, hit us up on Twitter and we’ll definitely chat.

Last week I attended and spoke at IMC Vancouver. It was a nice little conference that featured a lot of different speakers from the SMX/SES shows. While my sessions focused on SEO, there were a number of panels that discussed social media marketing. I heard a lot of feedback from attendees praising the social media information, saying it was valuable and tactical advice.

When I came back to work I noticed this eMarketer article that highlights a Unisfair survey asking marketers what their top plans and priorities are for 2010. 60% of the marketers surveyed said they were going to focus on acquiring new customers. What I found especially interesting about the survey is that 75% said they plan to increase social media in their 2010 marketing efforts (vs. 51% who said they’d focus more on web search and SEO).

I also found this chart to be really interesting. It depicts which social networks marketers find most valuable:

Based on the survey and what I heard at IMC Vancouver, I think a lot’s been said about social media marketing lately. Namely:

1. Social media success is multi-faceted. I still hear a lot of people touting Digg as a huge piece of the social media pie, yet only 1% of the marketers surveyed felt that Digg was the most valuable social networking tool. Yes, Digg is extremely beneficial from a traffic-driving standpoint and can bring links into your site. However, there are tons of other important social sites that are equally as valuable as Digg, especially if you’re looking to build relationships by networking and if you want to seek out and acquire new customers. Lots of people are finding value in LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, so it’s important to cast a wide net as well as figure out where your time is best spent. Some people will get the most value out of Digg, while others benefit from networking on LinkedIn or CafeMom. It depends on what your goals are, where your audience is, and what’s the best, most logical fit for your brand.
2. People want to hear about tactics, not have their time wasted with anything else. Mona Elesseily, the Director of Marketing Strategy for Page Zero Media, presented at IMC Vancouver and said that she was really impressed by the quality of social media information being given at the show. She mentioned that a lot of conferences are more basic and introductory when it comes to dispensing social media marketing advice, but at IMC people drilled down into specific tactics and shared valuable information. When a new(ish) marketing strategy like social media emerges, people want to know how they can use it to their advantage and to bring success to their business. They don’t want to waste time hearing about how “social media is the future!” and other pointless, fluffy claims and generic speak. They want useful, applicable advice on what they need to do on these sites in order to use them efficiently.
3. Social media is being accepted as an important facet of marketing. More people plan to focus their efforts on social media than on SEO in 2010, and I think that’s because they see a clearer line that attaches social media to marketing than the one that attaches SEO to marketing. Don’t get me wrong, I see obvious benefits of SEO, but I think that to businesses, social media marketing is an easier and more valuable concept to grasp because it’s simply marketing across a new medium. It holds the same principles of marketing and customer interaction and networking and relationship building, only it’s over the Internet and using new websites and tools.
4. Email campaigns aren’t dead! I know that email marketing is considered more old school while social media marketing is the NKOTB (that’s New Kid on the Block for those of you who weren’t adolescent girls in the early 90’s), but 49% of the marketers surveyed said they plan to ramp up their email marketing efforts next year. I think that email campaigns can be very valuable if they’re done right. If you’re able to bring a social element into your email newsletters and marketing materials (Yelp does a great job of marrying traditional and social in their newsletters), I think you can have a very successful campaign.
5. Social media marketing isn’t a fad. I’ve heard some SEOs and marketers grumble about how sick they are of social media marketing, thinking that it’s just the next big thing that will blow over soon and get replaced with a new up and coming fad. I think the problem is that, as with SEO, there are a lot of people in the industry who can give the craft a bad reputation because they’re messing around in a sphere they don’t know much about. However, like I said, I think that social media marketing is just an evolution of traditional marketing and will continue to be important as the Internet remains an essential part of our everyday lives. The core of marketing is all about promoting, selling and distributing a product or service, and the best way to do that has always been reaching out to your audience and resonating with them in a way that will make you memorable. Social media is exactly that — it provides you a new medium to reach out to your audience and make some sort of imprint. To say that social media marketing is a fad is to dismiss marketing itself as a fad, and we all know that marketing’s been around for hundreds of years and doesn’t show signs of slowing.

I’m happy to see that there’s an increased awareness of social media marketing and its importance/benefits. It’s rewarding and promising to hear about people wanting to hear more about it at conferences and planning to dive into it more in the coming years.

Social networking and the establishment and maintenance of relationships isn’t new to marketing. Businesses have been doing that for years. However, only recently have we moved to a new method of interaction – online participatory marketing.

Business to Consumer (B2C) and Business to Business (B2B) marketers still have to interact with their audience, but now they’re doing it in a much more personal way thanks to the proliferation of online Social Networks. They can now meet their potential customers on their own turf. Whereas, consumers used to only have advertising forced upon them through mediums like television, magazines and radio.

Roles have also evolved thanks to the Internet. For example, consumers now hold the trump card – the card of choice. Pop-up ads can be blocked, spammy emails can be filtered, and annoying Twitter users can be blocked. That has led to a marketing approach that requires authenticity, trust and transparency.

How B2B Marketers Can Take Advantage of Social Media

• Recruiting
• Evangelizing
• Lead Creation

How B2C Marketers Can Take Advantage of Social Media

• Support
• Announcements
• Providing Consumer Resources
• Lead Creation

Without the use of Social Networks, all of the above reasons would require face-to-face communication. There are now several Social Media sites you can use to engage potential customers. The list below provides just a few of the social networking options available to businesses.

• LinkedIn – Establishing and developing business connections (for all industries)
• GovLoop – Social networking for government employees
• LawLink - Social networking for attorneys
• Fohboh – Social networking for those in the restaurant industry
• Sales Spider – Social networking site dedicated to the small and mid-sized business owner and executive

There is a misnomer in search marketing and SEO that things change all the time. I think I stopped consuming SEO blogs and news sites on a daily basis about 2 or 3 years ago when I decided enter full time consultancy with no one else’s safety net. There was no extra time for anything accept a low information consumption diet. I had to develop unflinching confidence in the work I was doing to execute on various strategies based on my understanding of how search engines have historically worked, and the assumption that they will continue to function in basically the same manner for some time to come.

This is from a conclusion that there have only been a handful of changes that affected how I conducted my business. I learned from both blackhats and search engineers both to come up with a strategy that fit my ethical code while indulging my competitive nature and hunger for success. I am convinced that the cat/mouse dynamic between blackhats and engineers has helped to form the current state of information retrieval based on strong needs to stay relevant in certain areas that were exploited solely for capitalistic monetary gain.

I’ve found some great posts and articles about search history and how search engines have evolved over time, but not many mentions of how search optimizers have changed their strategies over time. There are a few good resources listed below, but none quite summed up the changes that affected what I like to refer to as the “SEO mentality”. I’m hoping to create a fairly comprehensive document for Market Motive Internet Marketing Training (where I’ll be discussing this shortly with legendary SEO’s Greg Boser and Marshall Simmonds, to help add to the increasingly comprehensive body of SEO training we’ve developed over the past two years (Over 40 Videos now!).

I learned what SEO was in about 2002 – shortly after offpage factors started to strongly determine relevance. I spent several years and thousands of hours on forums reading, learning, an interacting and teaching to figure out how search engines worked. When I made the choice to work for myself at home after another great year of learning and consulting at We Build Pages (with Jim Boykin – one of the sharpest SEO’s I’ve ever known), I decided it was time to start doing. I built sites, and strategies for myself, using consulting money to fund development of website projects, and parlaying to thinks like being able to even afford the insane cost of living in the SF Bay area. It was based on the unwritten understanding of the changes that are mentioned below, and not listening to a lot of the SEO garbage that is spewed all over on the interwebs.

When I started doing – I realized that not much changes with SEO in terms of strategic execution. It is a pretty logical art and science of determining risk to reward ratios, and implementing strategies in a sequential fashion following certain established rules based on intended outcome. I’ve developed a playbook and these SEO rulesets by understanding the HISTORICAL GAMECHANGERS in SEO. Feel free to add some on twitter with #seogamechangers

I’ve been taking a mental inventory of these game changes for a few months, and here is what I have them broke down to:

1. Onpage factors (1995 – 1999)
2. Offpage factors (2000)
3. Florida update (2003)
4. Fresh Crawl/ Everflux (2004)
5. Sandbox effect (2005)
6. Duplicate content filtering (2006)
7. Human editorial (2006)
8. Onebox/ Universal Search (2007)
9. Paid linking handling (2007)
10. No follow (2008)
11. User data validation and segmentation (2009)
12. Brand Mentions (update Vince – 2009)

Some of my dates may be a bit off, but for the most part these are the major factors that affect my actionable SEO Strategies. These are the major changes that contribute to the hurdles, filters, and challenges of ranking a site on a search engine.

I’d love to hear from other folks on the things that you think should be included in the list. There are MANY minor things that full under these categories, but after revisiting most and asking twitter, I think this is pretty comprehensive, as things like local search 10 pack, personalization, geotargetting all fall under one of these other areas (even if the dates aren’t exact). Please let me know if you can think of anything I missed. I’ll try to watch the comments on the post closely for once:) Please post any great resources, or suggestions for adding/updating to the list.

Resources

• Brett Tabke
• Danny Sullivan
• Aaron Wall’s extensive writing on SE history
• Jim Boykin
• James Svoboda
• Rand Fishkin
• Mark Knowles
• Funny from Pat

I’ve been meaning to revise some old posts for quite some time, and am starting to finally get around to it. I’ll likely go down the list of some of my favorite posts, and do edits to what I feel has changed in the past 2 or 3 years with regards to search and social. I thought I’d start with my general theory marketing manifesto originally posted in November of 2006. These are principles that I’ve based my personal efforts in marketing and business in on for the past few years (to varying degrees of success).

It’s been almost 2.5 years since v. 1.0 of the stuntrain seo manifesto, so I figured it was time for an update. I’ve always seen SEO as my philosophy on marketing and success, so the manifesto was ready for a dab of 2.0 polish. The new thought process and goals are in black, and the old ones are in red.

Stunt Train Search and Social Marketing Manifesto 2.0

1 SEO is executing on content and link development strategy for higher ranking, traffic, and ROI. (SEO is not software packages for reciprocal linking and blogspam).

1. SEO is a marketing school of thought…not a process.

2. Plan websites, don’t retrofit them (and don’t break sites that already work in search engines)

2. It’s much easier to plan a website than to retrofit it.

3. Every form of media increasingly impacts search.

3. Search increasingly impacts every form of media.

4. Link building and traffic acquisition through social media is the new brand building. Generic keywords are the new brands.

4. It’s all about the links (but also about the exposure, rankings, conversation, and conversion)

5. Any change WILL affect your search rankings (you only get better or worse, you never stay the same)

5. Any marketing decision impacts search engine rankings – and vice versa

6. Markets are conversations. Hyperlinks still subvert heirarchy. Refrain from maintaining mainstream marketing. Create conversations and inspire links.

6. Creating a “purple” idea is much easier than begging for links

7. Social media is being optimized while you read this. If you’re not participating in the conversation, someone else is controlling it.

7. Social media can be optimized

8. Be defensible and sustainable – You can’t sell 15 mb of fame or vaporware.

8. Top rankings won’t fix a shitty product

9. There are no hats. Only goals. Talking keeps you from doing.

9. Blackhat is lying to clients, customers, partners, or vendors.

10. Lose to win. Conversion rate is a metric for failure that only tells us about our unrealized victories.

10. It’s all about the results

I also thought I’d reorganize them a bit.

Feel free to repost:

• 1. Markets are still conversations. Hyperlinks still subvert heirarchy. Refrain from maintaining mainstream marketing. Create conversations, and inspire links.
  
• 2. Plan websites, don’t retrofit them (and don’t break sites that already rank and sell.)
  
• 3. SEO is executing on content and link development strategy for higher ranking, traffic, and ROI. (SEO is not software packages for reciprocal linking and blogspam).
  
• 4. Link building and traffic acquisition through social media is the new brand building. Generic keywords are the new brands.
  
• 5. Every form of media increasingly impacts search.
  
• 6. Any change WILL affect your search rankings (you only get better or worse, you never stay the same)
  
• 7. Be defensible and sustainable – You can’t sell 15 mb of fame or vaporware.
  
• 8. Social media is being optimized while you read this. If you’re not creating and participating your conversation, someone else is.
  
• 9. There are no hats. Only goals. Talking keeps you from doing.
  
• 10. Lose to win. Conversion rate is a metric for failure that only tells us about our unrealized victories.

Hmmm…I think I have a pretty solid next 2 year strategy for my corkboard.

Social networking and the establishment and maintenance of relationships isn’t new to marketing. Businesses have been doing that for years. However, only recently have we moved to a new method of interaction – online participatory marketing.

Business to Consumer (B2C) and Business to Business (B2B) marketers still have to interact with their audience, but now they’re doing it in a much more personal way thanks to the proliferation of online Social Networks. They can now meet their potential customers on their own turf. Whereas, consumers used to only have advertising forced upon them through mediums like television, magazines and radio.

Roles have also evolved thanks to the Internet. For example, consumers now hold the trump card – the card of choice. Pop-up ads can be blocked, spammy emails can be filtered, and annoying Twitter users can be blocked. That has led to a marketing approach that requires authenticity, trust and transparency.

How B2B Marketers Can Take Advantage of Social Media

• Recruiting
• Evangelizing
• Lead Creation

How B2C Marketers Can Take Advantage of Social Media

• Support
• Announcements
• Providing Consumer Resources
• Lead Creation

Without the use of Social Networks, all of the above reasons would require face-to-face communication. There are now several Social Media sites you can use to engage potential customers. The list below provides just a few of the social networking options available to businesses.

• LinkedIn – Establishing and developing business connections (for all industries)
• GovLoop – Social networking for government employees
• LawLink - Social networking for attorneys
• Fohboh – Social networking for those in the restaurant industry
• Sales Spider – Social networking site dedicated to the small and mid-sized business owner and executive