Highlights from SMX Social Media 2007: Social Media Marketing Essentials

Yesterday was the first day of the SMX Social Media 2007 conference in NYC. The sessions were as follows:

• Social Media Marketing Essentials
• Linkbait - Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
• Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites
• A Marketer's Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging
• Keynote Q&A: Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us & Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon

I'm going to talk about individual sessions in subsequent posts. For this one, I'll discuss Social Media Marketing Essentials.

Social Media Marketing Essentials

This session will orient you to the world of social media. You'll learn the leading sites, the functionality they provide, and best practices for interacting in these virtual places.

Rand Fishkin, CEO and Co-founder of SEOmoz, presented on the social media landscape. This was one of the best presentations of the morning. I took away several great ideas to implement.

One of my biggest takeaways from Rand was the 8 categories of social media sites (or sites taking advantage of social media technology:

1. News aggregates
Examples: Reddit, Propeller, Digg, Sphinn, Techmeme, Newsvine

2. Social networks
Examples: Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace

3. User-generated content sites
Examples: YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, Yahoo Answers, Yelp

4. Popular blogs (large user bases)
Examples: TechCrunch, Boing Boing, Gizmodo, Engadget, Huffington Post, lifehacker, Gawker, Mighty Goods

5. Social bookmarking sites
Examples: StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, Yahoo My Web

6. Niche and topical participatory sites
Examples: Slashdot, Fark, Truemors, Upcoming.org

7. Long tail of blogs, forums and groups (small, but engaged audiences)

8. Mainstream news and media portals
Examples: Google News, WSJ.com, NYTimes, SFGate, CNN, USAToday

What Other Bloggers are Saying About This Session

• Social Media 2007: Rand Fishkin
• Session: SMX Social Media Marketing Essentials