Video and Podcast Optimization Session at Philly PodCamp 2008

Philly PodCamp was a great event, the horrible weather didn't stop all the social media enthusiasts from gathering in Tuttleman Learning Center at Temple University in Philadelphia .
I attended a few sessions and one the first one was "Universal Search, Podcasts & Video" by Li Evans.
Li talked about tips and tricks on how to optimize your video and podcast for search engines.
The Basic Video and Audio Optimization Rules are:
1. Select relevant and eye-catching title
2. Put important keywords in the title if it will be a part of your URL
3. Tag videos properly on video sharing sites
4. SEO your video description just like you would SEO your webpage and make sure you 5. Always provide pod/video transcript and make sure you optimize it for your keywords, include header tags and do your usual SEO spiel.
6. Provide people with a code so they can embedd your video easily to their blogs/sites
7. Give your video some link juice - link to it from all your web properties if you can
8. Use hyphens as opposed to underscores or + signs for video file names
9. Use multiple feeds for multiple file types (mp3, wav, etc)
10. Create and submit Google Video Site Map
11. Use automatic submission site like TubeMogul.

Your LinkedIn Profile: Keep It Professional

I always kept my LinkedIn profile strictly professional. It has always been reserved only for people I either had worked with in the past, or people I crossed paths in the Industry I belong.
I really liked the feature that you have to select the position and/or the company from the drop-down box, or have to actually add the job to your "LinkedIn Resume", and it's like a whole new story. I have a little over 100 contacts and never raced to become 500+ superstar. The 500 past and current colleagues? Gee, you're either a hell of a job hopper or had worked for huge corporations and added everyone from the executive team to the tech support people.

Some people even post their email address to the profile, since an email address is required to be added to your network. Also I often come across the message on personal blogs "I believe in networking power, connect with me on LinkedIn, my email address is xyz@comapny.com!"
Interesting enough, I came accross the List of Social Computing Strategists at Enterprise Corporations.
As you can see the majority of these Industry leaders have less than 300 LinkedIn contacts in their networks. And I am sure they receive dozens of connection requests daily and they know WAY many more people in their respective industries, and they do have MANY friends, but they chose to be selective and only add those they had a professional ties with.
To me LinkedIn profile were more like an addition to your resume and employment verification at the same time. I still get amused when HR department requires people fill out these obsolete employment applications with a last 3 places you worked and 3 references. Just look at my LinkedIn profile and please spare me from all these useless paperwork!
To my surprise LinkedIn claimed 47% of the UK's web users are mixing their social and professional lives by accepting networking invitations from "frolleagues" - basically from your friends or from the people you really had zero professional interaction, just know them socially outside the work.
It was nice to find out that the majority of LinkedIn users (73%) feel the same way and they wanted to keep them separate. However, 36% of workers feel an obligation to accept friend request from colleagues, even though they don't really have any professional relationship with.
"It's becoming increasingly important that we keep our professional and social lives separate and manage our online reputation as effectively as possible," said a LinkedIn spokeswoman.
So I would only add people I worked with, for everything else is a Facebook.

Social Media Camp NYC Recap

Social Media Camp that took place on August 7th, 2008. About 200 social media enthusiasts gathered @ Sun Microsystems headquarters in Midtown and again, much like all un-conferences it was a great success. Unfortunately there were no wi-fi and I couldn't blog so I rely on my tweets to re-capture the event.


Sessions I Attended
Online Community Best Practices by Jay Bryant
This presentation is a great resource for any online community manager out there. Jay shared the tips and advice on how to grow and promote the community using tvguides.com as an example.
There are 5 ways to socialize the brand:
1. Understand the culture
2. Integration
3. Participation
4. Trust
5. Leadership
Interesting enough, Jay pointed out that organic search is responsible for 30% of all traffic and stressed out the importance of SEO in the community promotion process.

Agencies Role In Communities

View SlideShare presentation (tags: networks social communities online)

Do City-TLDs Provide the Basis for City-Based Social Media? by Thomas Lowenhaupt
The session was dedicated to the concept of the Top Level Domains for the cities, particularly for NYC as the start.
The audience came up with some great ideas on how NYC and its residents can benefit from having .nyc domain name for different purposes.

"Content is King, but Quality is The Queen" by Rob Blatt and Chris Cavs.
The discussion spinned around of the importance of the quality of pod- and video-casts. The question whether professionally done videos are more likely to go viral was left unanswered. Yes, Internet is flooded with "look at me" videos where everyone with webcamera can produce them a dozen/day. However, will the professional equipment help if you don't have a well-thought idea behind it? Or the random shot videos or Chris Crocker's phenomenon rule?
Personally I don't consider myself an expert in this particular topic so I was just observing and learning.
I found this "Quantity vs Quality" article by Chris Cavs very interesting.
And maybe yes, in ideal world I would totally prefer a professionally done video with a great original idea and a killer screenplay. Sigh.


"Twitter 101" by Howard Greenstein
Howard started the session by asking the question “How do you use Twitter for business?"
Some responses included:
1. To gather information
2. News
3. The dialog with Industry's leaders
4. Community participation
The interesting question came from the audience "How do you make friends on Twitter?"
To sum it all up:
1. Create an account
2. Find out if people you know are already on twitter and start following them
3. Locate people that talk about the topics you are interested in using http://search.twitter.com and start following them
4. Start participating in the conversation - offer an advice or help if needed
5. Talk about something you are expert in
6. Install twitter on your phone and respond to your friends timely
7. Get addicted :)

"How To Deal With Big Social Networking Sites"
This session was hosted by Jason Kinner, CTO of Ringside Networks
Jason talked about how to make your website integrated with the major social networks.
Ringside Networks enable you:
• Connect your website members to the Social Web
• Connect members to friends on your website, Facebook, or any OpenSocial site
• Connect social applications to your website, Facebook, or any OpenSocial site
• Connect your social applications to your content, data, and systems


Sessions I Wish I Attended

"Customers, Clients and Social Mediators, When the Wiki Becomes CoLaboratory" by Loretta Donovan

What Old Media can teach New Media: Media Convergence & Integration, Social Media, and Professionalism by Howard Greenstein

What Old Media can teach New Media: Media Convergence & Integration, Social Media, and Professionalism

View SlideShare presentation (tags: 3 world oldmedia newmedia)

So a big Thank You to the presenters and organizers of Social Media Camp for making this event great.

Social Media Camp NY

I am looking forward to Social Media BarCamp tomorrow. Hopefully I will be liveblogging and meeting lots of cool social media peeps.

Social media foe Agencies

I am attending Agency Bootcamp in NYC!

Visit Agency Bootcamp

If You Google Knol

So, we are all excited - Knol is here.
The official URL is http://knol.google.com
I just entered Knol in Google and the official page of Knol can not be found. Yet :)



Just a thought about Google results relevancy

How to Stay Productive With So Much Social Media

How to stay productive with SO MUCH social media by Jared Goralnick at PodCamp Boston.
Jared opened his speech with a video of Gary Vainerchuk about how to cut the noise.

Social Media Tools to save your time:
Jott.com - transcribe your thoughts to the email

Transfer your voice mail to text messages (GotVoice, PhoneTag)

Textexpander or texter - custom keyword abbreviations to insert frequent phrases

Timesnapper or RescueTime - track your activities and time with screenshots and text filters. Compare your productivity with coworkers.

Mailexpire or Mailinator - sign up with temporally email addresses

BugMeNot - if you don't feel like signing up

Stop clicking next in your Google result - increase your number to first 100

Change your contact preferences - get rid of unnecessary notifications and alerts.
Stop Email Auto-Check

Once you reach the number of people in your network that following them all and responding to their messages becomes unmanageable - jump out and turn it off.

"Get your value and then get away"

Monitor your brad with a separate account - Google Alerts, Twitter

Develop a filter habit and clean up your mailbox.

Create your own "Cone of Silence" - give yourself a time to focus and don't let anything distract you. Multitasking is not efficient.

Be responsive, not TOO available