Leveraging Social Media Networks - SMX London

Filed under: Education and Training, Social Marketing on Friday, November 16th, 2007 by Simon Heseltine

Social Media Networks

This session starred

  • Andrew Girdwood from bigmouthmedia
  • Kelvin Newman from Site Visibility
  • Cam Balzer from Double Click Performics
  • Lisa Ditlefsen from Base one interactive

First up is Kelvin Newman talking about the etiquette of friending and the importance of connections in Social Media Marketing.

Friends make you influential, it’s much easier to make friends online than it is in real life.

How to do it?

  • Make a long term hit list of people that you’d like to be your friends - people that can help you out, and people that you can help out. Look for common interests.
  • Don’t target the hotshots
  • Make yourself easy to find - same identity
  • Never let a friend request be the first contact
  • Give first, take later
  • Limit your friends:- more than 250 friends makes you look like a Floozie, how can you provide value to the relationships?
  • Connect not Collect…Build relationships

Next up is Lisa Ditlefsen with her presentation - SMO - an SEO’s best friend
66% of people visit social media sites
Facebook has a unique audience of 16.5 million users with an audience growth hof 110%

Time per person on Social Media sites has increased

  • Facebook has an average time of 1:07:56 per user
  • YouTube 43:50
  • MySpace 2:38:14

Facebook Demographics

  • 55.53% female
  • 44.47% male
  • 30.78% 25-34 age group

Don’t forget SEO when doing SMO, don’t forget SMO when doing SEO
SMO can generate hundreds of thousands of links in a short period of time
An increase in awareness will increase the number of searches for the brand

Next up Andrew Girdwood talking about Social Media in Europe

In Sweden:

  • Bookmark sites are pretty rare
  • Swedes really like blogs
  • Very few PR sites
  • Sweden has YouTube alternatives - fejmtv.se bubblare.se
  • Swedes like creating content

In Norway:

  • Blogging is much less popular
  • Voting sites are much more popular
  • Norwegians like accessing and rating content

Be careful what you localize, don’t over translate, in Sweden don’t translate Page Rank, use the English, it’s what they use.

If there’s an established player in the market use it

In Germany:

  • 100’s of social networks in Germany - fragmented audience
  • iGoogle very popular
  • Company blogs rare - personal blogging bigger
  • Mr Wong biggest social network site

In Italy:

  • Growing market
  • Corporate blogging has become more fashionable in the last month or so
  • Italian language press releases increasing

In Spain :

  • Blogger is popular there and in Portugal
  • No shortage of soial networks
  • Ranking sites

Just remember it’s a fragmented social network world

  • Second Life investment is global
  • Second life is very popular in Italy
  • Orkut big in Brazil
  • Blogger is big in Portugal

Last presenter is Cam Balzer with his presentations on SEMs: SNA! (Social Network Advertising)
Web 1.0 = finding stuff - SEM
Web 2.0 = Create, share and interact

New functionality coming out in Facebook to allow businesses to have people register for events to branded pages
He then walked through demographic targeting in Facebook - Social Ads. Demographic targeting is easy to set up. The actual ad itself is bigger than 70 characters, and allows you to upload a photo. Price is auction based PPC along with CPM activity.

Is Facebook the next AdWords or the next Overture?

Massive microtargeted campaigns
Optimized in real-time
Managed to very tight metrics
Supported by bespoke technology

Social Media Networks - SMX London

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1 Comment


  1. From everything that I have been reading… The ROI is missing from SMO… and the quality of traffic is not good… It seems that SMO attracts the young and bored and not the buyers. Can anyone please prove me wrong! I want to believe.

    Quote | Posted November 20, 2007, 2:31 pm

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