Mozcon 2013 - Actionable Stuff from Seattle to Brainerd

Mozcon 2012's touchstone throughout was Inbound Marketing this year already (half way through) the compelling message is that Branding is critically important and can no longer be ignored by serious Marketers whether or not you're search-focused like Matter Solutions. Joanna Lord summed it up with a single slide about Brand Marketing - "Make it our damn business."

Wind it back...

I was so excited about 5 months ago when the tickets came out for Mozcon, I then got distracted, we've been insanely busy working on our internal system MatterData (coming soon) and handling our move to the new office in South Brainerd in early June.

In the last week I've swung full force back into learning and exploring the evolving world of Inbound Marketing with the help of sites like Moz.com, Inbound.org, Quora and LinkedIn.

At Mozcon...

Despite the odd hiccup flying here (involving bats) I am at Mozcon again its currently lunchtime so pretty much exactly half way through. I'm so excited to get something written down about the outstanding presentations so far.

Knowing they're hugely applicable for the work we're already doing and want to do more of I can't wait to pass information onto members of the team back in Brainerd so here goes... an open post back to the Matter Team in Brainerd.

Day One: Avinash Kaushik's Simplifying Complexity: Three Ideas For Higher ROI

Considering the customer's experience of your marketing in terms of THINK, SEE &DO. Lots of passion and clear statements about what's wrong with so many websites, I loved it.

Marty & Lauren - This is going to have a huge impact on our view of the new Matter Solutions website and how we set out metrics and tracking across the entire website - ditto for clients that we're working on Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

Day One: Richard Baxter's Really Targeted Outreach

Excel with Google Docs as a data source, Data pulled dynamically into the Google Doc from the Twitter API. Magic, data-mining-targeting magic. I can't wait to get in front of a decent internet connection for a few hours.

We are going to build a tool around this. Whether it makes its way into MatterData who knows at this stage but this is just a super concept and totally actionable for the outreach link building process we've already got in place.

Day One: Ross Hudgen's Rapid Fire Link Building Tips for Your Content

Taking the content out and about and using it again and again. The SUCCES model for creating great content...

• simplicity
• unexpectedness
• concreteness
• credential
• emotions
• stories

... we're definitely going to be looking at this.

Joe - Take a look and have a chat with Ruth about how you two can use it in the copywriting. I especially like the idea of using this like a check-list for content creation, i.e. making sure everything is clear and uses emotion - just like we talked about last week. It's just too easy to create content that is devoid of emotion.

Day Two: Phil Nottingham's Rapid Fire Link Building Tips for Your Content

This presentation was full of fun, especially the moustache, and absolutely clear insights into splitting video content creation into three objectives.

• Conversions & Traffic
• Branding & Awareness
• Links & Social Shares

He gave some excellent examples about the technical implementation of each to explain why You Tube should or should NOT be used to host the video depending upon the Goal for the piece of content.

Nathan, you Joe and I will need to catch up about this. It seems so simple but the realisation that we need to use video on or off whichever platform, You Tube, Vimeo, Wistia to achieve tactical results like embeds, which work like links, or inbound links to your own website for us and clients will take the exciting web video work we've been doing to more tangible results.

Get ready for a call from me this morning, pen and paper at the ready 🙂 and download this presentation too.

The simple take outs here are that for Link Acquisition you need to use a private platform to ensure the video is only shared on your on website. The traffic benefit from using an open platform like You Tube DO NOT outweigh the upside of link acquisition and social shares of your very own URL.

Day Two: Joanna Lord Let's Play for Keeps: Building Customer Loyalty

The idea that we're headed for a new level of loyalty with "Reciprocal Loyalty" where the brand is loyal to the customers. What a great way to explain company's that care for their clients.

Nige, the General Manager, and I will look at incorporating this into the company wide brief for customer services and using our skills to add value for clients across the wide range of services we offer and drill down and down into our core specialist areas.

Like a "T", spread wide but with depth too. Loved it - thanks Joanna.

Coming soon

I'm really excited to see User Behaviour feature by a heavy weight of the industry - Will Critchlow this afternoon.

As a big part of what we do is often local SEO I'm interested to see David Mihm.

There's a whole bunch of really cool stuff coming tomorrow. I hope the wi-fi continues working so I can write some more. I'm especially looking forward to...

• Wil Reyolds
• Dr Pete
• Jenn Lopez
• and the Ultimate Q & A at the end

Get the slides for Mozcon here.

Meanwhile...

Meanwhile back in the office in Brainerd I can see the guys have had fun with a "South Park-ify" version of me. Nice job guys 🙂

PS.

The Wi-fi here at Mozcon and my hotel have been pretty lame. Telstra strangely didn't allow roaming, yes this is the first time overseas with my phone. It's a weird experience to be offline so much but it might be good for me, a change at least.