Amber MacArthur will be the opening keynote speaker at SES Toronto 2011. Better known as Amber Mac, the Canadian television and netcasting personality will be sharing social media tips and tactics on Monday, June 13, which is Day 1 of the event.
MacArthur is a technology host, journalist, and strategist who writes a regular column for The Globe and Mail, Yahoo!Tech, American Express Open Forum, and other outlets.
She hosts a live TV show called Webnation on Toronto’s number one news station. And she has worked as a technology TV host on the popular how-to call-in show G4TechTV with tech guru Leo Laporte, who was a colleague of mine at Ziff-Davis in the 1990s.
Both Google and Bing have been making changes as of recent, each in their own way. Most noticeably, Google has been experimenting with Twitter data and, more recently, its +1 feature. Google +1 adds tagging of search results for sharing those results to contacts in your Google Account. Bing has their partnership with Facebook, integrating Likes into results and has also been leveraging and integrating social sites directly into search results.
Google’s Take on Social
By releasing +1, Google has created their own feature that, at the moment, appears to mimic Facebook’s Like button. This appears to be more of a business move by Google, promoting their own Google accounts and profile service. Google’s dashboard and toolbar also seem to promote this end.
Starting today, you will be seeing what Google calls “social search results” interspersed throughout the traditional Google search results, based on Google’s idea of relevance. If you are connected to people on Blogger, Twitter, flickr and similar publicly available sites, Google will be letting you know who shared or published the information contained in the content returned in the SERP.
Hoping for more personalized and relevant results, Google’s justification is they want to help you find the most relevant information possible.
Last week, Google announced two more acquisitions of companies into their collective. SayNow, a voice/telephone service was announced first. The very net day, YouTube, one of Google’s many properties, announced the acquisition of fflick, a 6-month-old startup that used sentiment analysis to recommend movies to people. Both of these companies are social services.
What could Google want with such companies?
Fellow blogger Jonathan Allen speculated on Google’s reasons for wanting fflick. It’s sentiment analyzing engine is not only beneficial socially, but could also help Google avoid future situations like the embarrassment of the DecorMyEyes story last year.
Davanti Digital Media, a full-service digital marketing agency specializing in social media solutions for businesses of all sizes, has just uploaded a new YouTube video entitled, “Social Media For All: How Social Media Changed Small Business Marketing.”
According to the video description, “Businesses no longer have a choice: if they are not using Social Media, they are missing out on the conversation that people are having about their products and services.”
The search and social media landscape is changing so fast that half of what we knew a year ago is now obsolete.
If you want to see evidence of the pace of change, just check out the conference agenda for SES New York 2011 and compare it with the conference agenda for SES New York 2010. At least 50 percent of the sessions at the upcoming search and social marketing event weren’t even on the agenda a year ago.
And that percentage is likely to increase as some of the slots reserved for late-breaking topics get filled in.
SES London 2011 is just around the corner. It will be held Feb. 21-25, 2011, in a new location. And it will feature a number of significant changes to the conference agenda that reflect the new branding of SES as “The Leading Search and Social Marketing Event.”
Let’s start with the new location: The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Broad Sanctuary, Westminster, London. As you can see from the photo below, the Centre is uniquely situated amongst Big Ben, Westminster Abbey an The Houses of Parliament.
SES is collaborating with OMS to hold a one-day event for the experienced marketer on Feb. 10, 2011, that is dedicated to learning advanced topics in Search & Social. Called SES Accelerator, it’s part of the annual Online Marketing Summit, which will be held in San Diego from Feb. 7 to 11, 2011.
The keynote speaker for SES Search & Social Accelerator will be Mikel Chertudi, Vice President of Online & Demand Marketing at Adobe and a member of the SES Advisory Board.
The Rutgers Mini MBA Program is offering an accelerated Social Media Marketing Course from December 6 through 10, 2010, on the Piscataway campus.
Heidi Cohen, who writes for ClickZ, is teaching the session on Social Media Strategy. Liana Evans, who also writes for ClickZ, is teaching the sesson on Consumer Behavior Drivers of Social Media. And I should disclose that I’m teaching the session on Videos & Social Media.
SES Chicago 2010 gets underway next week. I’m planning to attend the Marketing Virtuoso Session entitled “Shoes, Cupcakes and Social Media: Building an Army of Brand Ambassadors.”
The speaker is Mari Luangrath, Head Cupcakeologist at Foiled Cupcakes, Chicago’s most talked about gourmet cupcake company.
Mari Luangrath, Head Cupcakeologist at Foiled Cupcakes
Luangrath is obsessed with shoes. She is so obsessed that she launched her cupcake business by talking about . . . shoes. She’s also passionate about bringing people together, fostering personal relationships, and providing the absolute best in personal service, delivery and quality.
