Last week, I attended the eMetrics conference in Alexandria, VA. Yes, for once a local conference…meaning no flying time. This one was a little bit different for me, as it was totally focused on Analytics and Metrics, rather than search, but was still very worthwhile.

Unfortunately, due to a busy schedule here, I was only able to attend a few sessions, but those that I did attend were enjoyable and informative. If you’d like to read my write-ups on these sessions that I did over on Li Evans of Key Relevance’s blog, here are the links:

• eMetrics – Navigating a University Website
• eMetrics – The View from the CMOs office

…and, if you were interested in the answer to the question of how many adult conference attendees you can fit in the back of a standard taxi…

Jim Sterne, Mike Grehan, Simon Heseltine & Andrea

Unless you belong to Manassas Community Toastmasters, your next best chance to hear me, Simon Heseltine, talk is going to be online at our Webinar Wednesday sessions.

On Wednesday, August 6th (in 2 short days) – I’ll be presenting a webinar on Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC), on Wednesday August 13th I’ll be talking about Reputation Management and your business, and on August 20th the topic will be Blogging and Social Media for your business.

The price doesn’t reflect the quality of these presentations, as they’ll all be free.  So, jump on over to register for them now, as space is limited.

If you miss the webinars, or you quite simply prefer the in-person thing, we offer personalized training sessions for your company.  Or, I will be presenting at 3 sessions at Search Camp Philly in September (6th – 7th), and at the Specialized Information Publishers Association (SIPA) mid-year marketing conference in Las Vegas in December (8th – 10th). There will probably be a few other opportunities to hear me speak in between, but none that are confirmed as of yet.

Photo by Tamar Weinberg

For those that aren’t aware, Twitter is a social network that allows ‘friends’ to communicate with each other in brief 140 character bursts of text (known as tweets). You can send these tweets directly through the twitter website, or through one of many twitter applications (such as the desktop based twhirl, or the Blackberry based Twitterberry).

It doesn’t sound too tempting does it? Personally I put off joining it for quite a while, not wanting to have to decipher the “WOT RU Doing?” and “I Dunt no u?”s of the world.

But then I actually tried it, and I found that it was actually a good communication tool. People talk in full English, and hold conversations that are interesting and, because of the tool, interactive. Obviously there are some people out there that try to take advantage of the tool to try and spam or over push their services / sites / products, but you’ll get that with most media, so it’s not unexpected.

But how can twitter help your business?

• It can group people interested in your company, products, or cause together, helping them communicate, and enabling them to work together to spread the message about you.
• It can help you to broadcast news and events about your company to subscribers, showing that there’s a ‘beyond P.O.S.’ side to your firm.
• It can help you to know what’s going on with your users, giving them the ability to give you feedback as to what they like / don’t like, and what they feel your company can do better. Although if you’d prefer to lurk rather than engage, twitter has a search function (formerly known as Summize)that you can use to search all twitter conversations for a mention of your company / product / etc.

So should Twitter be a part of your social media strategy? Well, as is the usual theme with these social media sites, you need to have time set aside to build up and maintain an account, so just signing up, and adding a bunch of friends, then not doing much won’t work. You have to tweet, and interact with other people, answering their tweets. Eventually you’ll build up an account that can serve you and your organization well.

Oh, and if you’re interested in following the tweets of the Serengeti Team, you can do so at https://twitter.com/endlessplain.

Since the introduction of Universal or Blended search last year, where images and videos can now show up alongside the regular search listings, it makes sense for businesses to go ahead and work on getting videos and images indexed and ranked by the search engines, if for no other reason than to take up more of that valuable search engine shelf space.

But how can you do it for your company? Videos take time and money to produce don’t they? After all, if you want it to look good you need to have a flashy title sequence, and so on. Well, not really, as long as what you say is relevant and interesting enough. The lack of flashiness doesn’t hurt, in fact it may even help you as viewers may see your home produced video as being more real to them.

These days most laptops come with a built in webcam, so there’s no real excuse not to go ahead and record something. Your first few efforts don’t even have to go on the web, use them as practice, finding out what works and what doesn’t. After all, it may be disconcerting for you the first time you’re looking at the screen and you turn left while the image turns right…

How long does it take? Well this took 5 minutes to write the script, and substantially less to record. In fact I expect it’ll take longer to upload this video than it’s taken to create.

What do you do after you record and upload the video? Well, you need to make sure you use the right keywords when you upload it, so that the engines know what it’s about. You can link to it, or easily embed it on your blog or site, encouraging people to comment on and / or rate the video. If it’s good enough people will link to it, or embed it themselves on their sites. On some video sites, such as YouTube, you can create a channel which people can subscribe to, so they know whenever you release a new video.

More likely than not you won’t have an instant viral hit on your hands, but that’s fine. If you can use your videos to either build up or engage an existing user base, a base of people who are interested in your company, products or cause, then, search engines aside, that’s a pretty good tool that you should be using…