Learning more about social media on the Monterey Peninsula

I took these photos along the shoreline near Pebble Beach last Thursday before my bike ‘encounter’ with the door of a Mercedes Benz. Not sure how the door fared, but I was pretty shook up and bruised (and still am!)  I was in too much of a daze after it happened to see if the door was damaged or not. At least that’s replaceable but my head is not!

Regardless, Monterey is a beautiful part of the country and it was a beautiful setting to learn about social media from Brett Giles and Andrew Bagley out of Sitewire in Tempe, Arizona.  They work on all aspects of search marketing for national clients like Olive Garden and Red Lobster. This field of social media and search marketing is evolving so quickly and there are so many different ways of getting involved with it that I find it extremely stimulating and fun.

Some of the people in my agency group  (through Dave Wood’s Agency Management Roundtable) talked about how time consuming it must be to create blogs and podcasts, as well as listings on facebook, myspace or linkedin. I suppose you could look at it that way but I look at it as my new great hobby (in addition to being an important service of my agency going forward).

We talked about the concept of the “long tail,” which is what Andrew described as “niche en masse.”  I think of it as the opposite of “mass media.”  For example, this blog would not be interesting to everyone in the world (much to my amazement), however I hope that it is interesting and engaging to those people who are interested in social media marketing, particularly in the PR realm.  Andrew used the example of the difference between the search terms “Chicago Real Estate” or “Woodland Hills Ranch Style Home in Chicago.”  There would be a huge number of people searching for Chicago Real Estate, and, as a marketer, you would have a really hard time getting traction with those key words. However with the second search phrase, “Woodland Hills Ranch Style Home in Chicago,” it has more appeal to a niche audience. Thus the concept of the long tail.

Andrew had a cool photo on his PowerPoint of an animal with a long tail. Was it a lynx?  I’m not sure. Maybe he would send it to me so I could post in on my blog.

The other thing that was interesting was the concept of dominating both paid search and organic search so you can have your client (or yourself) on both sides of the page (the paid side and the organic side) when people search for your specific key words. This is yet another example of how the organic search and the paid search are complementary, just like advertising and public relations complement each other.

They told us that when people are given a choice of clicking on the ‘natural’ side of the page (the ‘organic’ listings) or the ‘paid’ side of the page, 72% click on the natural side, according to Nielson.

The aspect of the session that most fascinated me was the discussion of online public relations efforts. I’ll blog more about that tomorrow, so stay tuned.