Yesterday evening Jen and I headed down to Dave & Buster’s in Austin for the Austin Internet Marketing Meetup featuring Brett Tabke of Webmaster World and PubCon. Brett spoke for about an hour around social media SEO and protecting your web efforts from rogue SEO tactics.
It’s All About Location
Brett made a prediction that Foursquare is getting ready to tip into something big. The reason for this is the folks at Foursquare have managed to figure out how to match location (of potential customers) and advertisers. I’ve seen a lot of debate over recent weeks about Foursquare and other location-based services (LBS) (notably in Aaron Strout’s blog with this post entitled “Are FourSquare and Gowalla Just Shiny Objects?” I think there is a lot of potential for LBS and Foursquare in particular, especially for businesses in location clusters. If someone were to mash up an LBS with a rating site (like SocialSmack, for instance) I think it would skyrocket because it would be immensely useful.
(Update: Just after I finished this post I saw this tweet from Brett reiterating his prediction from past night.)
Social Versus Paid Advertising
Brett also talked about how they stopped paying for advertising to promote PubCon and switched to what he calls “All Twitter, All the Time.” In 2008 PubCon was faced with a lot of uncertainty with the economy going south. People were not going to conferences and it was looking bad for them. They reached out to some influential bloggers and started a social media campaign which was highly successful. In the end, the show was well-attended with an increase year over year – in a down year with lots of bad economic stuff going on. Not only did PubCon benefit, but the hotels who worked with the conference noted the positive value of social as the attendees tweeted and blogged about their good experiences. All in all, this is a great case study for the power of social – if it’s done right.
Black Hat Strategies
Brett also talked about some Black Hat SEO stuff. This was not presented in the usual way, which is: these are tricks you can use to game the system but don’t get caught or Google will ban your site. This talk was in the context of how to protect yourself if a competitor or someone with an ax to grind uses these tactics against you or tries to make it look like you’re using “black hat” techniques, in an attempt to ruin your reputation. This was quite an interesting addition to some of the reputation management stuff I’ve been reading, such as Andy Beal’s Radically Transparent.
Plugs
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Brett gave us just a small sample of what his PubCon conference offers for those who attend. To be sure, other conferences are good and offer lots of good information, but there’s something about PubCon I really enjoy. It seems to me a bit more laid back and informal compared to other conferences I’ve attended. The price is great, too. If you sign up before the end of August the cost is less than $1000. If you go, pay attention and learn some stuff you can go back to you job or business and make up more than that cost rather quickly. The next PubCon is in Vegas in November, then there will be one in a yet undisclosed “Tropical” location in in the Winter and then one in Texas in March.
Galaga!
One of my favorite games as a teenager was Galaga. Dave & Buster’s in Austin has an old Galaga machine. I’m not as skilled as I once was in my nimbled-fingered youth, but I do OK. It was a lot of fun to relive my miscreant days. Well, I wasn’t that much of a miscreant, but I did have long hair and liked to hang out at the arcade.
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