Thursday, April 2, 2009

Web 2.0 Expo - Trip Report

A couple of coworkers and I went to the Web 2.0 Expo at the Mosconi Center in San Francisco, CA today. Although the turn out seemed to be rather sparce. There was still good information to be had. Here are the highlights of what we saw today.

Session -
How to leverage Social Marketing for Search Engine Marketing
We started out with a session called "Optimizing Search Results with Social Media" sponsored by Verio Web Hosting and featuring Heather Lutze, Internet Marketing consultant. She had a wealth of great information. She started off with the important point about search engine ranking and using longer keyword strings to find users that are not casually browsing but in fact ready to perform some kind of action, whether buying a product or service. She contends that a search for "web hosting" while yielding millions of hits, is not as valuable as "web hosting for small business". There are much less hits for "web hosting for small business" but the people that are doing searches using a longer more focused string of keywords are much more likely to buy a service or product than someone using a less descript keyword search. Wehn writing for the web, phrases like that should be put in title tags, meta data and the body of your document whenever possible.

Links from the presentation:
http://www.verio.com/ - Sponsors of the presentation
http://www.lutzeconsulting.com/ - Heather's professional site
http://lutzeconsulting.com/Verio - Slides from W2.0 presentation

Keyword search tools
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

Book Suggestions
Don't Make Me Think - Steve Krug
The Long Tail - Chris Anderson

We then went to the main expo hall where we interacted with several vendors. There were some good and some not so good presentations. Here are the highlights:

Denodo Technologies - Mashup company that claim to organize structured and unstructured data for use by the enterprise.
http://www.denodo.com

Yola - Web building service that allows drag and drop web building that is done in the web browser. Yola's services are targetted towards small businesses and personal web pages. They offer an amazing amount of web tools in the stie construction process.
http://www.yola.com

Jive - Jive provides social media software packages to businesses. Out of the box, their packages include scalable and configurable tools for blogging, forums, and other collaboration.
http://www.jivesoftware.com

Financial Content - Providers of businesss news, stock quotes, company and profiles, executive profiles, currancy rates for display on internet and intranet sites as standalone widgets, xml or rss.
http://www.financialcontent.com

Blue Kiwi - Offers software and services for the creation of collaboritive/social sites and tools.
http://bluekiwi-software.com/

Twinsoft - provides enterprise mashup technologies. We were most impressed with them. Their edge over the other mashup technologies is that they can utilize both screen scraping technologies as well as web services to produce their mashups. They can even utilize the green screen from legacy mainframe technologies in their mashups.
http://www.twinsoft.com/

JackBe - Provides enterprise mashup technologies. They provide some interesting point/click drag/drop tools for visually creating mashups.
http://www.jackbe.com

HiveLive - Provides collaboration tools for the enterprise.
http://www.hivelive.com/

This was a good event for us to go to. Hopefully this will spawn some interesting discussion at work on the implementation of enterprise 2.0 technologies in the near future.

4 comments:

Abigail Shaw said...

Thanks for the summary, Mark. Do you have any followup questions I can ask? I cant wait to compare notes -- at a future point when I calm down...

Unknown said...

Mark - Thank you for your carefully written blog post on my session and your thoughts on Web 2.0 expo. Your overview of my session is excellent and I look forward to presenting at future Web 2.0 events. Thank you again. Heather Lutze, Author of The Findability Formula: The Easy, Non-Technical Guide to Search Engine Marketing (http://www.Findabilityformula.com)

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Unknown said...

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