Giovanni Gallucci spoke at WordCamp Dallas 2009 on using social media for online promotion. As with most multi-speaker events, there was not enough time for Giovanni to finish his presentation at WordCamp. So, Tony Cecala offered up the Dallas WordPress Meetup group as a space to finish his talk. This months meeting was held at the Art Institute of Dallas on the 8th floor, complete with free wifi, good food, and a nice sound system.

Here are a few notes from his presentation.

What to consider when getting into social media:

• Read and understand the terms of service for social media sites so you know what you can’t do and what you can do
• Traditional PR people are scared to engage audiences by bending the rules
• Do testing in the social media space before you drop your entire traditional media campaigns
• Personal opinion is not the same thing as terms of service

What is social media about?

• Social media is about influencing people, not selling to them
• Social media is about long term relationships and not one time sales
• Spend time online helping people, even if you don’t directly financially benefit from doing so
• People want to deal with other people, so be a real people to others

Is social media cheaper?

• Advertisers are interested in getting their products and services in front of eyeballs
• Advertisers will gladly spend their money with non-celebrities who attract the same number of eyeballs

Should you use automated Twitter tools?

• Don’t abuse automated Twitter tools to spam people
• Do use automated tools to be more efficient with your time

Automated Twitter Tools

• Use TwitterHawk to automatically post on Twitter based on keywords
• Use TwitterFeed to tweet updates to RSS feeds
• Use TweetLater to schedule tweets
• Use search.twitter.com to narrow tweets by geographic area
• Use TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop to manage multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts
• Use Tweet Adder to automatically grow your Twitter followers
• Use Huitter to bulk unfollow Twitter Followers

Giovanni openly advocates “blue hat” promotional hacks. I recommend you take the advice of focusing on building on long term relationships over trying to game social media sites. Do keep in mind though that sometimes black and white isn’t that easy to define and use your best judgement.

UPDATE

Thank you JohnP for shooting and posting this video of Giovanni’s presentation.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Matt Mullenweg State of the Word Presentation

Matt Mullenweg on B2

Matt Mullenweg Blogging Software Dilemma Post

World Wide WordCamp Events

Indonesian WordPress Books

WordPress Logo T-Shirts

P2 Faster Blogging

Real WordPress Tatoo

Question And Answer Resource Mentions

• TypeKit – working on embeddable fonts
• Custom Content Types
• VideoPress
• BuddyPress
• TalkPress

Consider this before you go:

“Newspapers are in trouble, journalism is not.”
– Matt Mullenweg, WordCamp Dallas 2009

WordCamp was fantastic. If you have a chance to attend a WordCamp in your local area, do it! The people you will meet and the things you will learn will blow you away and will be well worth your time. Thanks to Matt and all the WordCamp Dallas 2009 crew who made it all happen and was kind enough to share it with us all.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Randy Hoyt spoke at WordCamp Dallas 2009 on putting custom fields to work on a WordPress blog. Custom fields give you the ability to extend the type of meta-data that can be associated with your WordPress posts. This session topic was covered in extreme detail so I won’t try to reproduce the bulk of the session materials here. But, the important take away is that WordPress is extremely flexible and gives you the ability to create the solution you need.

Here are a few key resources from the session:

• WordPress Codex on Custom Fields
• Custom Field Template Plugin
• WordPress Category Functions
• WordPress Filters
• Query Posts Plugin

Watch the video Randy presented on adding custom fields to WordPress.

More on this later…

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

John P moderating the WordCamp Dallas 2009 Discussion Panel

Liz Strauss on the WordCamp Dallas 2009 Discussion Panel

Mark Hopkins on the WordCamp Dallas 2009 Discussion Panel

WordCamp Dallas 2009 Discussion Panel

Cali Lewis on the WordCamp Dallas 2009 Discussion Panel

Dave Moyer and Matt Mullenweg on the WordCamp Dallas 2009 Discussion Panel

Gio Galluci on the WordCamp Dallas 2009 Discussion Panel

Matt Mullenweg on the WordCamp Dallas 2009 Discussion Panel

Liz Strauss on the WordCamp Dallas 2009 Discussion Panel

I recorded audio and video for this session as well. I will post one or both of them here as long as the quality is worth sharing.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Douglas Hanna spoke at WordCamp Dallas 2009 on the WordPress showcase to help people understand how WordPress can be used. WordPress can be used for blogging (of course), CMS, eCommerce, community building, etc.

Here are a few key points from the session:

Here is a list of information you can find out about a site that is listed in the WordPress showcase.

• Site name and url
• Screenshot
• Description
• Why it was included in the showcase.
• Rating
• Flavor
• WordCamp Dallas 2009, WordCamp, WordPress, #wcdfw09s
• Trackbacks

If you’re looking for a way to further establish your credibility as an authority site within your topic of interest, being listed in the WordPress Showcase is the way to go.

Is your site in the WordPress Showcase?

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

DB Ferguson gave an insightful talk at WordCamp Dallas 2009 on authority. DB runs No Fact Zone, one of the top Stephen Colbert fan sites on the Internet. She has spent a lot of time reporting on news and information that surrounds Stephen Colbert and his tv show The Colbert Report.

Here are a few excellent key points from the session:

• Speak with the voice of authority or gravitas
• Present yourself as a professional
• Write with a neutral tone
• Stay positive and avoid negativity
• Make sure your content is accurate and relevant to your readers
• Present original content that adds value to the conversation
• Credit all primary news sources
• Create exclusive, valuable content
• Networking with credible people who can share valuable information with you
• Monitor existing authority blogs and contact people with authority in your field
• Develop contacts within your fan site and grow your community base
• Make sure your server can handle website traffic bursts
• Pass information back to your network of contacts to attract backlink and be helpful
• Use WP-Supercache to deliver a stored copy of your content to handle large amounts of traffic
• Use WP Greet Box to greet readers and prompt them to take some action, like subscribing to your rss feed

More on this later…

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Gio Galluci spoke at WordCamp Dallas 2009 on extreme social media promotion hacks. The overall theme of the talk was to add value to existing conversations, be helpful, and stop trying to hard sell and start attracting people by really living and owning the space you talk about.

White Hat + Black Hat = Blue Hat

Here are a few key points from the session:

• Don’t blast your brand out to everyone. It doesn’t work.
• Be Honest
• We need to get over ourselves
• Add value to the conversations that are already going on
• Don’t be a “marketer”
• Integrate your blog into your current marketing mix
• Spot selling and start influencing
• Marketing and social media deal in the same currency, social capital.

SEO Focal Points

• Click thrus are about humans
• keywords and phrases are about  humans
• backlinks are about search engines
• anchor text is about search engines
• big and small search engines share data

Hacks

• Create content that generates conversations within your community.
• Controversial content generates traffic
• You don’t always have to agree with your audience. In fact always agreeing is boring.
• Research what keywords people use to search for your topic so you can taylor your content.
• SEO Optimize your YouTube videos
• SEO Optimize photos on Flickr by using descriptive anchor text and link back to your site.
• TweetAdder let’s you keyword search Twitter profiles without breaking Twitter’s terms of service.
• Tube Toolbox let’s you optimize your YouTube traffic with breaking YouTube’s terms of service.

Measuring Success

• Reach
• Relevance
• Influence
• Authority
• Engagement

Consider this as you move around within the online social space.

Social capital = reputation = access to resources / access to more connections = reciprocity (favors added up) = public accomplushments = increased levels of trust = reputation = more social capital: wash rinse repeat. You’re not selling, your helping people solve their problems.

More on this later…

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Scott Kingsley Clark from ViZion Interactive spoke at WordCamp Dallas 2009 on using WordPress as a content management system (CMS). To kick the session off Scott highlighted the fact that WordPress plugins can extend WordPress blogs for many forms of content management.

There are plugins to manage a variety of content such as:

• Social Networking
• Photo Galleries
• Products
• Ads
• Events
• Polls
• Audio / Video content
• Exteral Content

Managing WordPress CMS Content

• Custom Field Templates
• Flutter Plugin
• Pods Plugin

Scotts presentation was short but sweet. He highlighted a lot of what plugins can do to extend WordPress and open up a world of ideas for managing content on your WordPress blog. This topic is much to big to cover all in one session so check out each plugin mentioned here to see which one works for you.

More on this topic later…

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Dave Curlee spoke at WordCamp Dallas 2009 about adding video to your WordPress blog.

Here are some of the highlights from that session:

• People have different learning styles including visual, auditory, reading and writing, tactile learning
• Budget does not necessary to produce a quality video product
• Video software does not replace skills
• Continual practice is key to improvement
• Low budget does not equate to low quality video
• Start with what you have available to you (web cam, still camera with video, higher end cell phone video etc.)
• Use cameras with higher quality lens glass if you can afford it
• Increase your budget as your skills increase

Recommended Cameras

• Flip HD pocket camera
• Creative Vado
• Canon Vixia or Sony Camera

Key Production Factors

• Lighting is important to creating good quality video (backlight, key light, and fill light)
• Professional lighting can be costly so use Halogen work lights to cut costs. Bounce the light off of the ceiling to diffuse the light.
• Flood lights work well on a tight budget as do daylight fluorescent lights with a reflector.
• Use tripods to lock down the camera for better image stabilization. Jerky video is distracting to the viewer.
• Use the rule of thirds for framing your shot. Don’t center your subject matter.
• Get tight with your video framing. Get close to your subject.
• Treat your webcam / isight camera like a real camera by elevating it and put it out in front of you so it doesn’t look like a web cam video.

Video on WordPress

• Use video sharing sites for video hosting (Viddler, Blip.tv, YouTube, etc.)
• Use embed code in your posts
• Use WordPress video plugins to make life easier

More on this topic later…

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Chris Silver Smith from Search Engine Land gave a very informative talk on using social images sharing sites to get more traffic to your blog using SEO techniques. He gave some valuable insight to using Google Image Search and popular image sharing sites to grab more traffic for your blog.

Here is a handy formula for considering how to get good traction for your images in Google Image Search:

Google Image Search + Universal Search = Image SEO

Keys to ranking in Google Image Search

• Image filename
• Title of Page with Image
• Keyword found in text on the page and near the image
• alt text of image
• anchor text of links pointing to page or image
• Image EXIF data – geotaging information defines data about an image
• Freshness of image
• Type of Image
• <H1> tag content on the page
• Number of pages and pagerank of pages linking to image page
• Good caption text near image
• Use keywords in image names
• Make photos publicly viewable

Popular Photo Sharing Sites

• Flickr
• Photobucket
• PBase
• Webshots
• 23
• Fotki
• MySpace

Photo Tips

• Take good quality pictures
• High contrast pictures do better at smaller sizes
• Add a unique photo
• Create comparative photo mashups
• License your photos so other people can use
• Require news sources to link to you if they want to use your photos
• Optimize your images in Flickr using geotag location information
• Create thematic set of photos to create related groups of photos to build value for people are interested in that topic
• Post Fickr pics directly into your blog articles and tweak the local style to match your blog
• Post as many pictures as possible to Flickr to increase your surface area and draw more traffic
• Bookmark your Flickr images on Delicious. Yahoo owns both Flickr and Delicious and they use these services to understand how content should be indexed in their search listing.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com