Instead of posting another round up, I thought I would link to some of the great things that people have already been saying about the conference.

David Towers was liveblogging throughout the day

Sorbet Digital has posted why she thought the conference was great

Simon Wharton has already shared his notes from the day

Azam Marketing has summarised the conference quite nicely

Jaamit was Twitterer extrodinaire

And last but by no means least, Sk8geek has uploaded his amazing pictures of the day

If I have missed any round ups off let me know, and I will try and add more as people sober up and get round to posting their thoughts. Finally, here are the slides from my talk on project management for SEO for anyone who missed it.

from Sarah Carling.

I’m very pleased to annouce that our good friends over at Distilled have agreed a monumental deal with SEOmoz!

SEOmoz and Distilled are consumating their 2008 engagement as global associates with a full blow marriage of skills and minds; Distilled will become the consulting arm of the pair with SEOmoz concentrating on further developing their excellent set of SEO tools  and resources.

This means Distilled are going over the water, opening a US office and Rob is doing everything at once!

Many of the Bloomers here know Tom personally (I still can’t beat him at pool…), and Alex and I have been known to harass Will, Duncan and anyone else we can find at Distilled on a regular basis so I would like to extend our collective congratulations and wish Distilled (and SEOmoz of course) and prosperous year.

In the words of Alan Partridge – Spiceworld!

You can read the official scoop at the Distilled blog, the annoucement on Search Engine Watch as well as Mr Fishkin’s announcement over on SEOmoz.

We have a new vacancy within Bloom (see below) we are happy consider candidates that are on their way to becoming this rather than perhaps being there already.. what we do want is someone really bright, really motivated & excited by the social media revolution and its impact on digital/SEO & PR, really straight talking and personable.. this is a new discipline for us so we are looking for someone from a PR agency background who can add new strings to our bow!

Digital PR vacancy

Bloom Media is a leading digital agency in Leeds west Yorkshire, we are enjoying a buoyant start to 2010 and are expanding our team. Last year we won a prestigious Dadi award for an innovative social media campaign and are looking to strengthen our digital marketing offering with a specialist in online PR, content strategy and social media marketing.

You will be an online and digital PR specialist, you will love online PR and social media like it is your very own offspring! You will be an budding online PR and social media expert with at least two years experience in this field and an excellent understanding of the evolving digital landscape. You will be a digital evangelist, who are able to demonstrate the effectiveness of online PR to existing and potential new clients, as well as helping the agency as a whole stay at the forefront of digital innovation and trends.

You will have solid proven experience working on website content/copy, social media and digital campaigns and understanding of how to develop relationships with key online opinion formers and brand evangelists. A brilliant nose for news and experience working on crisis and issues would be useful as well as the ability to drive and direct campaigns to support traditional PR activity. Bringing blogger contacts would be advantageous and as would stakeholder and media relations and management experience/exposure.

The Role
You will join an existing team: setting the direction for all online PR activity within the agency, working closely with the SEO and development teams on new business pitches, and developing existing client relationships. The ideal candidate will have an excellent knowledge of relevant UK online media.

You will have:

- Great communication skills, both over the phone and face-to-face
- Excellent copy writing skills
- The ability to meet strict deadlines
- Proactive approach with the ability to use own initiative
- Ability to deal effortlessly with several tasks
- Excellent telephone manner and team working skills
- An obsession with digital media!

The Agency
We are vibrant digital agency with a great blue chip client base including some of the UK’s most innovative online brands. We’re passionate about digital and love our jobs, we’re looking for someone who shares this and wants to thrive in an environment full of likeminded individuals with a great team spirit.

Update: Sorry – this position has been filled!

Keep checking back for future opportunities.

There’s a lot of talk about the Digital Economy Bill – and none of it good.

It seems that rather than improve our broadband network and nurture the digital business springing up across the UK, the Government would rather concentrate on brown nosing the entertainment industry in yet another ill conceived attempt to control content.

You can read the bill and see for yourself; the draconian extremes it goes to will only achieve two things:

1. Further alienation of customers from the industries pushing this crap forward (and probably more file sharing)
2. Reductions in the number of people online if it is enforced.

The battle to control content has been going on since the advent of records, there is a great book which sums up the 40 plus years of failure on the part of the record industry to do anything about sharing music which sums up the problems of their approach very nicely:

Bootleg: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Recording Industry – Clinton Heylin

Maybe these industries should try actually moving with the times instead of wandering around railing against them like a pack of lumbering, luddite dinosaurs.

It is my great pleasure to announce that Bloom have bagged a DADI Award for Best Use of Social Networking.

The digital marketing team and I have been beavering away creating a social media campaign on behalf of Anglian Home Improvements which was put into action earlier this year. Sadly we can’t give away our magic social media action plan but needless to say it is AWESOME and we are the proud owners of a shiny new jewel for Bloom Towers!

It was an evening of dinner, drinking and Canadian comedy which we shall not soon forget! Alex Craven and I headed down with the team from Anglian to the award ceremony at the Armouries to enjoy an evening of digital celebration – here are some of the highlights!

Collecting the award.

Go team!

We win - Woop woop! (while I look like a mannequin who's been photoshopped in to make the picture look busier)

Alex shows his manly strength

Celebrations continue after the award ceremony...

You can see the full list of commendations and awards over at the DADI website, as well as the full set of photos from the evening. Well done to all the other winners, it’s great to see such diverse work being celebrated in the greatest city in Yorkshire!

See you all next year.

Yay!

As no doubt many of you are aware, there have been some big changes in Google Analytics lately, especially with the ways you can track how people interact with your site as well as the way you can structure your goal sets without having to create ridiculous numbers of profiles for you to track your 200+ goals! And yes, all of us here at Bloom are HOOGELY excited about it!

Google Analytics now lets you track up to 20 goals, all in the same profile! Each Profile is allocated 4 goal sets, each of these goal sets contain a set of five goals which make it really easy for you to now group similar goal types into one goal set:

Example:

Goal Set 1 – Registrations

Goal 1 – Party Registration

Goal 2 – Meeting Registration

Goal 3 – Conference Registration

Goal 4 – Charity Registration

Goal 5 – Seminar Registration

Goal Set 2 – Downloads

Goal 1 – Yearly Summary PDF Download

Goal 2 – Chairmans Statement PDF Download

Goal 3 – Widget Download

Goal 4 – Flash content Download

Goal 5 – Press Release Download

..and so it goes on.

Of course, you are not limited to the different types of goals that you can track; you can track just about anything! From completed ecommerce transactions to how many clicks you’ve had on your site “Follow us on Twitter” button, time on site, pages per visit, bounce rates, the possibilities are endless!

Engagement Goals

This is the thing which we Bloomers are especially excited about! Google Analytics has listened to the community and responded with a new type of goal called “Engagement Goals” which allows you to track how people are interacting with your website, and is an absolute must have if you are planning a new site launch and wanting to test the overall “stickiness” of the website, or even tweaking the website to improve its usability. This type of goal allows you to set thresholds for Time on Site or Pages per Visit.

Time on Site Goal

Google Analytics now allows you to set a greater than or less than value of time spent on the site for one of your goals.

For example, you can set a specific goal to track how many people spent less than 10 seconds on your site, then another goal to track how many people have spent 10 to 20 seconds, then another for 20 to 30 seconds, and so it goes on. This is particularly useful for when you are launching a new website, wanting to test some linkbait or how well people engage with a form or other facility that you’ve provided.

Pages Per Visit Goal

Google Analytics lets you create a goal that you can set to greater, equal to or less than value to a pages per visit.

For example you can set a specific goal to track how many people made less than 5, 10, 15 (the list goes on!) page views per session. As before, this is particularly useful when you are launching a new site, and you can gauge the success of it by seeing if the number of page views has improved, or God forbid, gone down!

And in case you’re wondering how you’re going to save all that historical data from your old goals, Kaushik tells you how to keep your old goal history in your new goal!

Advanced Table Filtering

A new addition to the reporting power of Google Analytics is the ability to filter the elements on a table based on the different metric conditions.

Example

If you only want to see your top pages that have an average session time of over one minute and received less than 100 pageviews, you can do that by performing the following action:

• Click Advanced Filter at the bottom of the report window:

• Click on “Add new condition” and select the metrics you want to set:

• Set the values you want to monitor:

• Create a new filter using the same process for the number of PageViews
• et Voila! Your Custom Report:

A very useful and powerful addition to the way you can report on your campaigns, I’m sure you’ll agree!

Google Analytics Intelligence Reports

This really is THE most useful new addition to the way Google Analytics reports your data. Google Analytics now tells YOU what’s happening on your website, your campaigns and much more!

Analytics Intelligence provides you with automatic alerts of significant changes that are happening to your website in terms of traffic, bounce rates, conversion rates, and a whole lot more!

Example:

Google Analytics will alert you if you’ve seen a big spike in traffic on a particular day from a referring website or search engine, like your blog, Google, or just about anything. It would also alert you if you saw a drop in Time on Site with visitors from London for instance. So instead of you having to monitor reports constantly, Google Analytics now does it all for you!

You can also set up Custom Alerts which makes it possible for you to tell Google Analytics what trends to look out for. You can set daily, weekly or monthly triggers on different dimensions and metrics and be notified by email or on the interface when the changes actually occur. An extremely powerful addition to Google Analytics indeed!

Fin

And there you have it! It’s easy to see why Google Analytics is one of the top Analytics packages available! Keep the new features rolling!

… or your most efficient and effective route to market??

As an independent business advisor and also Chair at Bloom I get a privileged ‘both sides’ perspective of the use and potential of the Internet. For many enterprises it still remains a black art/hole and I am truly mystified sometimes by the lack of understanding and ‘dabbling’ client side about the use, dynamics and potential of the internet as a major route to market and business development tool for increasing market share. For me, I guess, properly embracing the Internet boils down to the following issues:

a) Developing the confidence to overcome the fear of change often associated with engagement with the Internet

b) Understanding that engaging with the Internet is a dynamic domain and requires commitment, change and learning

c) Appreciation of the ‘click to capture’ inter-dependence of web design, development and SEO/PPC campaigns and the need to get them all right in an appropriate balance (together with traditional marketing campaigns)

d) Appreciating that SEO is a war with your competition and professional strategic and ‘real-time’ tactical campaign management is vital for a sustainable ‘win’.

e) Appreciating the emergence of social media ‘intangibles’ on reputation and brand management and hence your future business development

f) Appreciating that technology and techniques are often leading edge and are changing rapidly; agencies need to be driving this leading edge and the partners need to be flexible in adapting to this change

g) Appreciating that when the dynamic works, the increased traffic must be supported by internal ‘front office’ capacity to convert on line demand

h) Performance analytics from digital ‘pull’ campaigns must be reported in a format that creates tangible feedback for client understanding, response (decision making) and confidence

i) Too many ‘garage’ operators confusing the ‘picture’ and debasing the potential and real RoI for such investment.

However, the situation is changing fast with the Internet now beginning to dominate client marketing spend. The challenge is therefore now not one of ‘why or should we spend’ but ‘what and where we spend’. Working in partnership with a professional agency that understands the dynamics of the whole picture and assists with your decision making is therefore the only way to survive and build sustainability.

‘Dabbling’ is therefore no longer an option as both agency and client must embrace their partnership with professionalism and commitment in a win – win venture. Particularly now when the opportunity exists to invest in grabbing market share from hesitant competitors.

To overcome these obstacles and embrace the challenge and opportunities presented by the internet, my suggested ‘top 10 tips’ for a client-side approach to this engagement are as follows:

1. Have a clearly defined strategic marketing plan which includes the use of the Internet as a major (new?) route to market. This must clearly state your market position objectives, brand value statements and strategic objectives.

2. Develop a balanced traditional and digital sales and marketing plan with appropriately balanced budget allocation

3. Allocate a competent senior digital campaign champion to avoid conflict of interest or internal power struggles

4. Research prospective agencies online before requesting a pitch. In my experience, too often time and effort is wasted on the pitch process and confusion reigns. Better to get your ‘ideal’ agency profile defined, do your back-ground research properly and invite 1 or 2 in to pitch. Then move to point 5 et al. …. Be demanding but open minded!

5. Select and engage with a professional agency as a business partner based upon:
a. All round capability on creative, technical, strategic and commercial skills for Web Design & Development, Internet Marketing and Statistical Reporting

b. Provenance, client testimonials and professionalism

c. Ability & willingness to provide an unfair share of mind to your campaign

d. Confidence to project ideas and add value to your decision making process

e. Flexibility to work with existing professional partners

f. Chemistry & culture

g. RoI …. NOT cost! …. You want to WIN not simply save money.

6. Establish the professional rules of engagement and reporting format and process in conjunction with your selected partner

7. Establish both campaign objectives and internal resources to manage anticipated increased demand

8. Be prepared for and maintain flexibility for change

9. Depending upon your revenue and growth ambitions, be prepared to negotiate a payment on results SEO fee with your agency

10. Be prepared to engage your agency as part of your decision making forum with expert input on digital techniques and be aggressive and determined for a win -win

Cats are good for SEO. Fact.

So, how to capture this in words… The 19th and 20th of October 2009 were the best two days any SEO (in house, agency or hobbyist) could have taken out of their calendar year.

OK so that doesn’t make for a very exciting blog post but I don’t say that lightly; the last two days have been filled with genuine actionable tips and tricks, hardcore analytics and the unholy love between one man and Excel.

My problem with conferences and gatherings throughout the search world is that you always get one of two things; great content (i.e. aimed at the right crowd – which as an agency SEO is not usually me) OR great people.

Distilled and SEOmoz however have managed to pull together both for a fascinating and useful two day session. Will Critchlow cemented my opinion on this afterward ‘We told people don’t bring your slides telling people how to do stuff, just bring the tips’ (apologies for the terrible paraphrasing Will but you get the gist!).

So my top self improvement takeaways from the Pro Training sessions this year are:

1. Excel
I thought I was good, I was wrong.

Will kicked off the two days with a hard core session of advanced (and amazing) analytics. What he also showed us was how Excel can not only make kick ass graphs but can be your best friend – how? With pivot tables. I actually need to learn more about these and how to use them properly before I say more but if you want to know – as Will!

Will went on to discuss (as did almost every other speaker – don’t want to do anyone a disservice!) how we can all use Analytics to inform action, rather than just reporting. This may seem like an obvious thing to say bit the categorisation of types of data into ‘leading indicators’ and ‘signature analytics’. This essentially is the ‘does it look like it will work’ and ‘does it look like it has worked’ basis of using analytics to inform action for yourself or your clients.

The whole session was amazing and illustrated an intelligent, strategic use of data analysis and analytics which everyone can use to improve their campaigns or business.

2. Excel
When you’re good at Excel, get even better at Excel.

Excel kind of became a running theme really – Duncan did an awesome sign to illustrate this, get the DVD to see him in action!

3. Recruiting SEOs
I’m sure everyone has had this problem; there is not formal training or qualification for SEO outside of the industry itself, so how do you know if a sparky young junior will be a great SEO rockstar a year down the line? Richard Baxter (of SEO Gadget fame!) provided the excellent recommendation of group interviews. According to this (proven) theory; grab 8 people, get them in a room and set them paired tasks. I believe Richard’s example was ‘pair up and sell me your partner in two minutes’.

This allows you to assess their communication skills, how well they listen and generally how personable they are. Depending on the complexity or nature of your task you can basically assess whatever you like and save time with this method – great tip Richard!

4. Penalties vs Filters
Lovely Jane Copland gave an excellent presentation on why you probably don’t have a penalty. Google has massively increased their algorithmic filtering to (try) to increase the quality of their top results. As such a lot of sites can get filtered and assume they have been slapped with a penalty.

This tied in with some later content about Google’s ingenius ‘learning’ tests which seem to be happening a lot lately… However the important takeway is don’t panic, your haven’t been banned! Do some analysis and check your link profile and/or content for anything that might cause your site to be seen as anything less than the answer people are searching for.

5. Data. Is . Sweet.
Ben Hendrickson from SEOmoz did the most amazing data analysis which said everything and nothing at the same time. Awesome. You should probably contact him direct for more because I’m still digesting his presentation.

6. Use PPC to inform your SEO campaigns
PPC is easy right? Just joshing PPC guys it really really hard… Do you look at a PPC campaign and use it to inform organic keywords to target? PPC can tell you quickly what is converting and how much, thus you have a quick cheeky win to help you shape your campaign early on.

7. Use Your Assets
A big theme from the Pro Training was engaging with your site, your client or your industry and really leveraging your USPs to help you Linkbuild and form lasting business relationships. Rand, Tom, Will, Duncan, Rob – pretty much everyone touched on this subject and it’s easy to say – but harder to do. As Tom so succinctly put it ‘I can stand up here and tell you to go do it (linkbuilding), but you actually have to do it.’ Seems obvious but it’s not the flippant point it appears to be.

8. Google loves video (probably too much)
A very interesting post from Patrick Altoft over at Branded 3 highlighted Google’s current hunger for video indexing. HE even noted that they are actually indexing some flash files which are not video (admittedly on pretty long tail search) in an effort to universalise the results.

Patrick also talked about how to maximise your use of image and video in a number of ways, such as branding up your images and hosting your own video to increase your CTR. Good stuff!

I won’t leak any more super secret SEO tips as I know there is a DVD coming of the whole session which I would highly recommend you buy – it’s well worth the money.

So I suppose my final thoughts are that the last two days have been filled with useful, actionable, interesting content which has literally set my mind racing with ways I can now improve what we do internally at Bloom – the team and I are clearly having a weekend in the office to watch the DVD and eat pizza – win!

Ok final final thought – get yourself down next year.

On the 1st December 2009 new changes to the FTC Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising come into effect.   This is potentially big news for our industry as the new guides address the fact that advertisers are increasingly harnessing Web 2:0 technologies and social networks for word-of-mouth marketing.

A legal perspective on the FTC guides was posted by a leading city law firm Field Fisher Waterhouse last week and includes some interesting comments.

The new guides recognise the common practice of payment for reviews on Blog sites as a form of advertising and seek to regulate this practice in much the same way as other similar activities or advertising. The FTC have given specific examples quoted in the Field Fisher Waterhouse commentary but include;

“Paying a blogger to post a review clearly requires disclosure as does a word-of-mouth marketing program that periodically sends consumers products for review. Sending a free sample to a blogger with a request to post a review may qualify as a “material connection” depending on the value of the product and the frequency that this occurs.” (for more visit the Field Fisher Waterhouse site).

Also made clear from the guide is that the responsibility for disclosure is placed upon the Blogger not the advertiser.

As I see it this will impact the SEO/Social media communities in the following ways, but mainly this rasies a lot of questions:

1.    Bloggers that receive payment for posting reviews/other content are obliged to disclose this fact.. but will they? and how will this be enforced?
2.    If posts with the appropriate disclosure are identified by Google, will Google react negatively? Will these be seen as paid for link sources and penalised?
3.    Given the method of disclosure is not specified then actually wont it be pretty easy to disguise the disclosure from Google in any case? (i.e. the disclosure could be placed in an image)
4.    Following on from above will this unleash a spate of people reporting blogs they suspect of receiving payment without disclosing to the relevant authorities/Google?
5.    What are the FTC expecting bloggers to do about all of the historical content/reviews that were paid for before these guides came into play?
6.    Does anyone else think that potentially this bites off more than it can chew given the sheer volume of content?

I’d be interested to hear comments from others to see if this can be clarified any further…