The first Pubcon session took off really well with a good turnout. The session was detailed enough for retail audience and had some good pointers for professionals in this area. I particularly liked what Andy Beal had to say and his presentation slides. It was interesting to know that Rhea Dry Sdale, COO Outspoken Media, saved the term “SEO” from being trademarked!

Also good to know that no one likes Google Instant!

Here are a few quick takeaways for those who don’t want to go through the huge literatures available:

-  Make an early decision to invest in your reputation management, instead of waiting for a crisis. At times it’s impossible to get a specific negative post out of the results if you didn’t plan things in advance.

- The easiest way to go about the most basic online brand management would be to host your authorized pages on all free user generated content channels like Facebook/Wordpress etc.

- When investing in Blogs for reputation management, create them on a sub-domain orbetter still a new domain instead of a sub folder. You want to cover more and more of the available real estate on the first page results and creating a sub directory blog will not help that.

- With Goolgle’s real time search results update (2009), managing the social media has become an intrinsic part of online brand management.

- Nice one… you can check Google suggested results using this query - http://google.com/complete/search?output=toolbar&q=”your keyword”

- Focus on reviews on your local search results, with latest update (local results have been integrated in the universal search for all those who were sleeping) they are anyway all over.

- There are many different things to track for your online reputation, the easiest way is to keep an eye on your analytics and look at any sudden inflow through a channel where you never promoted your site. Top things to track as per Andy Beal:

1. Google Alerts, subscribe to them

2. Blog posts, use tools like icerocket.com & keotag.com

3. You analytics data

4. Google search results

- No tool gives 100% relevant data, do a manual audit too.

- If you didn’t monitor and manage your reputation online on time and you got your first negative comment, should you panic? Well you can… base your reaction to the comment on the following factors:

1. In fluence of the poster

2. Tone of the content

3. Follow-ups on the post

4.  Viral effect

- For a wholistic reputation management approach, have a clear social media policy and educate your staff about it. Just giving your social media management to HR wouldn’t work. Any employee of the company can invite negative comments about it.

- The best approach would be to have your staff direct happy customers to your social media profiles and share positive comments, that’s the most natural way of building a positive online reputation that can be hard to break through with a few negative comments.

That’s about it. With reputation management climbing its way up the corporate priority, it’s important to start out early.

As opposed to traditional online advertising, which involves a lot of money, social media optimization, has literally marked the beginning of an era which involves free-of-cost online advertising and marketing. It integrates brands with social networking websites which offer extended visibility to the brands, inside their networks, free-of-cost. And then they enable their users to directly interact with brands. In the long run, this situation is definitely going to re-structure the field of PR and market communications as communicating to a “disperse crowd” is a huge difference from directly getting in touch with one’s customers.

Although quite a popular Internet marketing tool now, social media campaigning still does not have a clear definition and well charted methods to achieve the goal of marketing. This is probably because the communities, targeted during SMO activities, are strongly dependent on the brand. For example, social media optimization for a mountain bike vendor differs a lot from SMO for a music label. However, there are still some basic questions, the answers of which, if you find before the initiation of your SMO campaign, can guide you, quite a bit with the whole process. They are:

• Where do Internet users interested in my brand spend maximum time online?
• Which placement possibilities do these communities offer?
• Which type of media can be used to leverage brand awareness?
• How much effort has to be put into daily routine? (There’s nothing worse than a “dead” profile)

In the current era, video communication, through Internet, is one of the most efficient means of reaching your prospective customers and promoting your products or services. In fact, video optimization over the web can get you whooping rise in your sales because visual marketing has the maximum capacity to influence and convince people. To have an effective video optimization, here are few suggestions:-

1. Use Keywords – Insert the most popular keywords in the file name of the video. Also, while tagging the videos, after uploading them on the video networks, use relevant keywords so as to make it easier for people to find your video.

2. Create Video Feed - Create RSS feeds of all videos in a collection; with each feed containing a different video in the enclosure field. Then go for optimizing the feeds using related keywords.

3. Increase Exposure – Host your videos not only on your website but reputed social networking portals like YouTube.

4. Create relevant video name and description – Create the video name and description fields using keywords that relate to the content of the video. Also try to make the title and description interesting and relevant so as to encourage viewers to click-through.

5. Create Google Video Sitemap - Create a video sitemap for the search engines. If you need any help on what to include in these sitemaps, you can contact Google Webmaster Central Blog at  http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. … emaps.html .

6. Optimize Landing Page - Optimize the landing page of your website and follow it with embedding the video in any of your web pages. Finally, use standard SEO techniques to optimize that webpage for the search engines. Use keywords that relate to the video on the page that contains the video.

7. Embed logo and URL in the video - Brand the video with your logo in the initial video splash screen, and include your website address at the bottom of the video to increase your brand exposure.

8. Leave them wanting for more - Every promotional video that you create should be a teaser and leave the audience asking for more. Engage the audience, but try to encourage the viewer to visit the website or view other videos to learn more.

9. Promote on the YouTube Feed - YouTube creates an RSS feed for every user account. In addition to manually creating an RSS feed, you can also use the YouTube feed to promote your videos. The formatting details for the YouTube video feeds can be found at  http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/username/uploads (replace “username” in the url with your own YouTube account username).

10. Anchor Text – Anchor text, which is used to link to the videos, should be created using keywords which relate to the video.

11. Video Submission - Submit your video to all the video and video podcast websites. Here are a couple of resource sites you can start with:

a)  Podcast & Video Submissions at http://www.podcasting-tools.com/submit-podcasts.htm

b) 140 Places to Submit Your Video List at http://www.stephanmiller.com/my-link-li … ideo-list/

12. Views tracking and revision - Track and review the number of views that a video receives. It helps you gauge the strengths and flaws of your creation. For example, if you keep a track of whether the viewers watch the full video or not and subsequently, find that a substantial number of viewers are abandoning the video before completion, you can get the idea that your video is unduly long and could benefit from trimming.

14. Use social bookmarking - To draw additional attention to the videos, use social bookmarking. This will also help in receiving greater number of incoming links, which will, in turn, help improve search engine ranking.

Tweeting via SMS has been an option that was available to many in different countries but not in India. Recently Twitter made an announcement that it has secured an SMS deal with one of the India’s largest mobile phone operators Bharti Airtel. The subscribers of Airtel can now text or message 140 characters via their mobile phone directly to the twitter.

This will further broaden the reach of Twitter as they will have access to millions of potential users. India has one of the largest base of mobile phone users which keeps on increasing day by day. Such kind of growth has the capacity to fuel excellent growth for twitter. This will further fuel the growth of Web 2.0 concept in India.