It’s the last session of the day which means a race is upon us: What’s going to last longer — This session or my battery power? I’ll let ya know.

Finishing Day One with us are speakers Dan Zarrella, Brian Breslin and Geoff Livingston. Moderating is my buddy Todd Malicoat. Todd asked if people are excited about PubCon and Tony Adam yells in my ear. Thanks, Tony.

When Todd thinks of tagging he thinks of Technorati. I think of beating boys up when I was 8. That makes me special.

I’m delirious.  Todd says his favorite three letters of search are UGC. I openly laugh and mock him. Sorry, Todd.

Geoff Livingston is up first.  He says he’s more of a PR guy but they do social media, too. How well-rounded of him. Just about every social networking tool uses tags in some way or another. Blogger, Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, they ALL use them.  There are some expections, like Facebook. Tagging throws data into search.

Time Moves Quickly On The Internet: When a blog post happens, thousands and thousands of people read it. You get tons of comments and follow up posts. You see lots of names associated around tags. Geoff shows how #pubcon is now showing up as one of the hot tags on Twitter. We did that. Yes we can!

Inspiring Tags:

• Choose the right medium
• Bookmarks: You can bookmark your post to inspire particular tags
• Whether direct marketing or PR, know what you want searched for
• Campaigns can use specific hashtags
• Encourage the community to use a specific tag
• Have the hashtag or tag associated with the effort or content

Brian Breslin is next.  He has my Favorite Name Of The Day.

He’s talking about tagging in the sense of viral actions. It seems there was some miscommunication about what this session was actually about. Aw, I’m sure it’ll still be relevant. Hugs to Brian!

Todd starts talking about Twitter while Brian gets set up and asks how many people have a Twitter account Everyone but two people. Todd asks how many people will plan their night around Twitter tonight. I laugh and then Todd tells the audience that I plan my whole life around Twitter and use it basically as a life stream. You think that was uncalled for too, right? Todd’s a jerk. [Just kidding, I love Todd! He introduced me to all my SEO peeps.]

Okay, Brian was having technical issues so Dan Zarrella is up. We’ll hear from Brian in a bit.

Twitter is the perfect audience for tagging.

Using Twitter to Leverage Your Visitors

• Match your brand name and avatars
• Find users to follow: He suggests following people who mention the various social media sites because then you know that if they like your stuff, they’ll submit it for you.
• Make friends: It’s called social media for a reason.
• Listen and Respond: Shut up and listen, then do something with what you heard.
• Link to Twitter: WWSGD plugin will ask people to follow you on Twitter the first 5 times they visit your site. [That's pretty cool!]. Autoresponders with your Twitter link.
• Use a Tweet This Button
• Post Social Links to Twiter: Shortened URLs are blind links, so give them a reason to click.
• ReTweeting: Ask for people to retweet but don’t do it too often or people will get annoyed and unfollow. Only do it if you have something that’s really good and worthy.

Okay, back to Brian now! I start clapping and everyone follows. Yey, me! Yey for being delirious!

The Social Web

Social media sites are driving tons of traffic. TONS! Your customers are spending more and more time in them. There is a battle for attention right now.  Are you winning?

Steps to Leveraging Your Community

• Step 1: Realizing you have a community
• Step 2: Enage your community
• Step 3: Cast your nets
• Step 4: Let your Community Bloom.

Your community is everywhere. You can’t fish in a puddle. You have to cast your net where the fish are.

The new socially interegrated Web includes you being in Yahoo, Facebook, etc. These sites are competing with each other so they’re making it easy for you to leverage them and create your own communities.

What this Means To You: Harder to compete for attention of your own. Harder to acquired new users. But people are spending more time on these sites.

He talks about a boating site that used Facebook to leverage their community. What they did was create a Facebook interface for their Web site. Accepted facebook logins as their users. Redefined what a Facebook app was to them. Grew to 20,000 users in 6 weeks!

Is Your Site a Silo? Are you syndicating your content? Are you sharing our site?

What can you do about it? What opportunities are out there? How do we leverage them?

Facebook Connect turns your site into a hybrid Facebook application. People bring their friends. They come to your site, they log in, and they bring their friends with them and syndicate out to Facebook what they’re doing on your site.

Social Graph and You: It’s all about social portability. It about bringing friends in and blowing them out. Make it dead simple for your users to share with their friends.

None of this is easy to implement, no matter what they tell you. A good programmer can tie in your site to any of these platforms. But make sure you think about this stuff BEFORE starting a Web site.

We’re ending a bit early so Todd decides to do some social media site reviews. Seriously, I think Todd is the greatest moderator of all-time.  You’re a rock star, dude!