15/11/2009
We’re back from the Big Apple after attending the 2009 Web 2.0 Expo. After being invited to the Expo by our well established employment consultancy client Right Management, our CEO Mark Walton and SEO Consultant Polly Pospyelova, who heads up our Leeds SEO team, visited the prestigious event, held at the Javits Centre in the heart of New York City.
The Web 2.0 Expo is a conference and exhibition which attracts thousands of industry professionals every year and aims to inspire individuals who are passionate about implementing the new opportunities that Web 2.0 technologies create.
The conference featured a range of discussions and workshops based on topics such as landscape and strategy, social media and using Web 2.0 in the workplace. The aim of these sessions was to enhance attendees’ knowledge and understanding of these key topics and inform them of ways in which they can apply the skills and strategies to their own business model. These sessions also enabled the attendees to see for themselves how other companies using Web 2.0 identify new business opportunities and penetrate into new markets.
Below is a run down of all the sessions we attended at the Expo:
Day One
Search as Strategy: Connecting with Customers in the Age of Google
Vanessa Fox, creator of Google’s Webmaster Central and author of the upcoming book Marketing in the Age of Google, showed why our evolution into a searching culture requires a fundamental shift in how we think about the user experience, beyond simply accommodating search engine optimisation (SEO).
We learnt how to:
- Create searcher personas based on search behaviour that increase web site usability, customer engagement and overall visitors.
- Use free search data to augment market research, customer surveys and focus groups for compelling features and content.
- Build search-friendly technical architecture
Day Two
Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media
Danah Boyd discussed people’s incentives for spreading information and how and why they distribute content. She also considered what social and structural barriers exist that configure how information is disseminated and how we understand the flows of content in the context of everyday practices.
Content First: Why Content Strategy Will Save the Web
Kristina Halvorson discussed how content strategy is the key to delivering useful, usable content to online audiences, when and where they need it most.
At this session we:
- Learnt how content strategy is defined and explained in plain language
- Found out why so many web projects implode in the content development phase … and how to avoid the associated, unnecessary costs and delays
- Discovered simple ways to introduce content strategy into our user experience design process
- Learnt about the easy-to-use tools that are necessary to plan for, create and govern online content
- Gathered practical advice on staffing and resource allocation for web editorial roles and responsibilities
The Future of Web Search: From Static to Social to Realtime
Erick Schonfeld (TechCrunch), Akhil Wable (Facebook), Tobias Peggs (OneRiot), Vik Singh (Yahoo Inc.), Gerry Campbell (Collecta) discussed the persistent democratisation of the internet and how social behaviour and graphing plays a major part to index the realtime web. Other topics of discussion around realtime search included monetisation strategies, the challenges facing traditional search engines, creating viable business models and the pervasive issues of spam and scalability.
We left this session with:
- A better understanding of the challenges, the consumer and business opportunities and the value of delivering a new breed of search that is social and realtime.
HTML 5 and the Future of Web Apps
Tom Hughes-Croucher (Yahoo!) explored some of the latest shiny toys we can play with and the potentially disruptive technologies largely packaged under the HTML 5 banner that just might upset the status quo.
Designing the Experience Curve
In this session Andy Budd looked at the 7 key factors that go into designing the perfect customer experience, from initial first impressions, through to game like interactions and immersive experiences. By taking examples from the world around us and drawing on fields as diverse as social psychology, theme park design and persuasive computing, Andy also discussed how we can turn pragmatic experiences into something more.
Advertising Strategies in Social Media: Adapt or Die
Marissa Louie (AD-Village), Tom Bedecarre (AKQA), Steve Hall (Adrants), Rob Beeler (AdMonsters), Alisa Leonard-Hansen (iCrossing) explored several advertising tactics and opportunities that social media websites can consider in the current turbulent times.
The panel also considered how to involve advertisers in the solution, examine the tradeoff between user experience and advertising revenue and address privacy concerns regarding sharing personal data on social media sites as it relates to advertising targeting.
Day Three
Business and Community in the Facebook Era: Preparing for a New Kind of Customer Relationship
Clara Shuh explored how companies are successfully tapping the rich data and communication media on services like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace to virally reach new audiences and transform existing customers into a loyal sales force. She explained how new social networking concepts such as transitive trust, hypertargeted campaigns, persona profiles and fringe-relationship “options” are rewriting the rules of sales and marketing. Clara also commented on what companies and developers must do to thrive and win in the Facebook Era.
Effective Twitter for Business
Sarah Milstein looked at businesses that are using Twitter for effective customer-facing communication and how companies are integrating their products with Twitter. The discussion looked at best practices you can use, along with mistakes you can avoid.
Social Media Protocols: What You Need to Know BEFORE Your Team Starts Posting, Tweeting and Commenting
In this session, Veronica Fielding covered an extensive list of social media do’s and don’ts for brands and presented a set of social media protocols that all companies should have in place before any employees begin talking about the brand within any social media community.
We learnt:
- How sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are being utilised not only by brand marketers, but by sales teams, customer service representatives and others to create a total brand experience online.
- How company-wide consistency in profile design and content as well as messaging can improve brand value.
Day Four
Getting to (Near) Real-time with Your SEO
In this session, Stephan Spencer taught us how to:
- Make our CMS pliable and our internal linking structure fluid—to drive continuous improvement through the fuse8 website
- Use past performance as a predictor of future performance
- Leverage third-party tools and tools supplied by the search engines themselves for rapid feedback
- Anticipate which keywords are high performers before you have the tracking data to back it up
- Automate the evaluation of SEO and the application of optimisations—to scale across even the largest of sites
Marketing via Fan Boys/Fan Girls: Your Customers As Your Brand Evangelists
In this session, Lisa Conquergood gave examples of companies that utilise word of mouth marketing as main touch points with their audiences and techniques for allowing fuse8 customers to become our brand evangelists successfully. Customer feedback was also discussed, as well as the reasons why engagement at this level is key to business growth.
Our attendance at this event proved to be a massive success in terms of providing fuse8 with a fantastic opportunity to further develop its understanding of Web 2.0 technologies. It enabled us to heighten our perspective of new markets, such as e-mail marketing, and also exposed new opportunities for us to put Web 2.0 technologies into practice.
We’ll be attending this event next year and if you fancy meeting up with us whilst in New York, please call 0113 2604600 to arrange a meeting.