Chris kicked off proceedings and outlined the benefits of using infographics for viral marketing/link bait. He said that marketers get hung up on text and video but infographics can be incredibly successful. One piece they created was featured in the national press and generated 30,000+ completely natural backlinks. Another good point Chris made was that virals like these create a link profile that can never be 100% replicated. He recommended submitting pieces to Stumble Upon, Digg and Twitter.

He also recommended offering to provide guest virals to high profile content sites. They are often glad for the user engagement these pieces provide and will gladly provide a followed link.

He validated what had been mentioned by Rob Kerry (Ayima) on Day 1: cross domain 301s don’t seem to be passing the authority they once did. I’m not 100% convinced on this one myself – I have data which suggests otherwise – but the effects may be more pronounced in particular sectors.

His other top tip was keeping a rolodex of Social Media users who regularly link to or promote your content. That way you can build reaching out to them into your comms plan.

Next up was Parks Blackwell who took us through her approach to Social Media strategy and engagement. Said there was real value, particularly for luxury brands, in reaching our personally to disgruntled customers. This can be prefaced online with a simple : “Sorry to hear that, somebody will contact you directly to help resolve this.”

She also recommended having a variation on strategy for each channel : “Twitter is its own beast.” Amen to that.

I also liked her tip to look within for your social media coordinator. A good customer service rep who is au fait with social channels can make a scalable difference to customer sentiment online in comparison to fielding calls and enjoy themselves doing so. A win-win situation.

Melissa Campbell was up next and took us through some of the salient points from UK legislation applicable to Social Media marketing. This included the much maligned Digital Economy Act. She said impersonating a consumer was a big legal no-no and could lead to high profile embarassment. She did state however that while some of the approaches you take may trangsress the boundaries, the biggest risk comes from causing offence. As, if your activities are reported to the industry body you are likely to be investigated and the full scale of any transgressions will be uncovered. So behave yourselves out there!

Melissa had some issues with her PPT which interrupted her flow, so in the interests of fairness here’s a link to it.

Kevin Ryan threw some contrary statements into the mix to close matters, asking the panel to prove the improvement to a company’s bottom line or conversely the opportunity cost (to C-level executives) of doing nothing. Chris et al mentioned improved natural rankings leading to increased revenue as an ROI. I would add the potential to retain customers who are openly declaring: ‘about to cancel my subscription’ or ‘at the end of my tether’ as something very measurable.

So, that was it for “Social Media: Give It Up!”, a practical and informative session with Chris Bennett’s talk the undoubted highlight.

Eli Goodman, Comscore was up first and took us through a whole heap of stats, worthy of note was the data on European search usage – Spain up over 50% YonY to March 2010, showing that the market is really maturing, men aged 25-44 were said to be the largest group in that country. Interestingly the UK has the highest number of searches per searcher indicating a high level of sophistication and the importance of understanding your user’s click paths.

Martijn Bertisen of Google was up next and spoke about real-time insights – Google tools include: YouTube Insights, Insights for Search, Keyword Tool, AdPlanner, Search Options and Insights for Audiences (coming soon). Really plugged Wonder Wheel – understand how Google view topics semantically, the related synonyms and sub-topics. It really helps with keyword targeting and understanding searcher behaviour he said.

Moved on to AdPlanner – you can segment by ‘keywords your audience searches for’ and then your target demographics. This allows you to see the sites where individuals with the desired intent are likely to spend their time.

Josh Smith from facebook: facebook’s reach is akin to a major television show. Advertisers can target by keywords in status updates – ‘looking for holiday’, a new  gym etc. facebook holds this data for 30 days for adtargeting or you’re tagged with that keyword for 30 days, it wasn’t clear which.

He said it’s important to think about personas – a company targeting young men from market towns who like to fight targeted users with mispellings in their profiles – controversial but true. And it worked!

Robert Barnard from Decode up next and said that 35% of Generation Y (15-29) have less than 10 online friends they interact with regularly, despite the received wisdom to the contrary. He showed an interesting chart showing that for Generation Y the number of online friends dips when they become young couples and rises again considerably when they become young parents.

He also said that we need to understand online behaviour in terms of stunts vs. sustainability, your 1 hit YouTube wonders like OK Go (little commercial success) vs. Lady Gaga (phenomenal brand).

Those were the main takeaways from the session for me. It was kind of insightful but fairly basic. Luckily there was much more meaty stuff to come later in the day so stay tuned for more filleted chunks.

With this in mind, Justin Hayward along with Econsultancy will be presenting ‘Five steps to better PPC’  in London on 26th November.  If you can’t make it to the event Econsultancy will also be running this session as their first ever webinar on 1st December!

We’ll be covering:

1. KPIs and objectives – What do you really want to achieve and is it feasible?

2. Keywords & account structure – Long tail, brand, ad groups, have you got it right?

3. Creative ad writing – Is your message better than the rest?

4. Site landing pages and SEO integration – What happens when they get to your site? Designing for conversion.

5. Tracking & technology – Data blindness? Are you analysing the right stats?

All details can be found at the Econsultancy site

The event is on Wednesday 4th November at the iab offices from 9am.  There’s a number of great speakers including our own Justin Hayward who will be presenting ‘Understanding the relationship between search and social media’ which is an extremely hot topic right now.

You can now download the presentations from all speakers over at the iab site.