There was an all-star panel that included Rand Fishkin, Micheal Gray (graywolf), Barbara Boser, and Neil Patel with Vanessa Fox moderating. 34% of influencers are using blogs, the power of social media has been established from the get go, thanks Rand. With Google now looking at the intent of links and content alot more, the best way to benefit is to connect with “trusted sites” and get links from the “likaratti.” Can anyone say, eVisibility robots.txt schwag t-shirts? We have generated a ton of buzz at this conference with our funny and cool shwag t-shirts. The result will be lots of link love and subscribers to our blog. The power of networking at industry conferences simply cannot be measured…. well kind of.

Neil Patel stepped up to the plate next talking about link bait and social media. He gave examples of uber large companies all the way down to mom and pops. He illistrated the power of doing creative content and how no matter how boring the topic is that you can find a twist to make it interesting.

Barbara Boser was next, letting us know that she has hit the homepage of Digg 60 times and has been given the prestigious label of top stumbler! I think that this qualifies her as a social media expert. She notes that one must understand what the different social sites/communities like or dislike in order to be successful. A great way to do this is to study what the top sites in each social site do; subscribe to their RSS feed. Try to remain un-obvious by setting up unique name and a cool avatar, use a unique Gmail address, get an IM attached to that Gmail account, and participate. Other things to do are comment alot, vote, respond to people’s Digg requests, stumble when you vote, do not submit more than 2-3 stories per day, do not submit your own site, send stories to others that send you stories, encourage people to contact you, do not create multiple accounts on the same IP, and do not take things personal. Whew! Barbara REALLY knows her stuff!

Now the Graywolf eagerly steps up to the plate in his usual controversial manner, dogging on others that give the same slides at different conferences. First thing I noticed is that he talks really fast, no wonder he Twitters so much! He first notes the idea of jumping on current hot topics or seasonality to target social media sites with your content like the Oscars, going Green, etc. Again, get creative with your writing and your approach. Next he talks about Twitter, noting that it is typically a younger/hipper crowd that uses it. Twitter takes advantage of pull technology, like RSS. Tie your blog posts to twitter, broadcasting your latest posts. Try to not spam twitter, post useful stuff as much as possible and not just your blog posts. The way to utilize twitter is to announce things. Graywolf gets a really high CTR and uses scheduling tools to broadcast his twitters. Of course use tracking URLs for your tweets. Graywolf notes that he has several Twitter accounts for specific niches that he promotes, other than his Graywolf profile. Reply to people that address you via Twitter, it lets people know that you are for real and that you are paying attention. Large brands utilize Twitter as a sales channel and to keep fans updated, JetBlue, Disney, Amazon, Woot, etc.

A question from the audience brought about the idea of getting your office banned from the social sites for having too many people from your office, or same building, vote things in the same day. Graywolf commented that he know of people that have gotten their entire building banned for this and Rand admitted that the SEOmoz team was victimized by the same kind of activity. It stinks that even though the intent is not spammy, it is legitimate, that you can still get penalized by the social sites. I guess that is the price we all pay for all the spammers out there!

Barbara Boser noted that you need to be careful about the way you approach social media profiles. That you need to setup unique accounts tied to unique Gmail accounts with IM accounts that match your Gmail account. You really need to make sure that you appear to be unique and disconnected from your brand or industry or else the social sites will bury you. You also need to make sure that you submit during the optimal times. And to pad yourself from a corporate branding standpoint you need to secure your brand name with all the social sites, before someone else claims them and start running havoc!

This was one of the best sessions so far. There was an all-star cast and the advice was stellar. The audience questions were also very good and the session was much more “fun” than most.