Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient at Bend WebCAM and Liveblog Roundup

Lifetime Achievement Award for Bruce Clay

When Bruce Clay took off for Bend WebCAM, he knew he would be sitting on a Hot Seat Panel and presenting a three-hour workshop on SEO for the Non-SEO. What Clay didn’t know was that he was going to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award, putting him in the company of last year’s recipient Danny Sullivan and inaugural honoree John Audette.

“It was an easy decision,” said Mark Knowles, co-chair of Bend WebCAM, CEO of Pixelsilk and curator of The History of SEO. “Bruce is a legendary pioneer.”

According to Knowles, Clay impacted the SEO industry early on, and “today’s thought leaders were influenced by (him).”

“It is definitely an honor to receive any award for service to the industry, and receiving this award is certainly a major event in the history of Bruce Clay, Inc.,” Clay said. “I have always tried to contribute either through the website, the training, the event speaking, and the frequent free advice. Being available, approachable and involved is clearly appreciated by colleagues, and it is really nice that my efforts have been broadly appreciated. I am truly excited that I have joined the few that have already received this prestigious award.”

Bend WebCAM Liveblog Roundup

BCI Content/Media Manager Virginia Nussey was on scene, liveblogging the following keynote addresses and sessions:

Mad Women: A Herstory of Advertising

Speaker: Christina Knight, Creative Director

She explains:

• What the “pink ghetto” is.
• The importance of both quality and equality.
• What changes still need to be made.

Quotable moment: “No society is all male, white and middle class. Modern society is characterized by multitude and diversity. Agencies need to be as inclusive to be relevant and interesting.”

The Importance of Building a Community for Your Brand, Website, Customer Base and General Well Being

Speaker: Marshall Simmonds, CEO and Founder of Define Media Group

Learn why:

• The word’s top publishers are so successful.
• It is necessary to identify a goal — and use Google Analytics to track it.
• You should leverage Google+, a major influencer in search results (even in your audience isn’t on Google+).

Quotable moment: “Google says it has found more than 30 trillion unique URLs on the web, crawls 20 billion sites a day and processes 100 billion searches every month.”

Our Future: The Web of Things

Speaker: Duane Forrester, Bing Senior Product Manager

Discover:

• How social behavior impacts search results
• How the digital universe is  expanding through entities and actions.
  How to create and curate content … offline.

Quotable moment: “Search continues to evolve. New devices demand different search experiences other than links. The ability for these devices to feed in real time signals help us handle intent better and therefore can provide a more tailored experience.”

Everything I Need to Know About Marketing I Learned Playing Dungeons and Dragons

Speaker: Ian Lurie, Founder and CEO of Portent

He notes:

• There is a lot of valuable information to be gleaned from analyzing on-site search data, Facebook interests, Amazon product searches and Followerwonk.
• Content is your first product, so you should invest in it.
• The data you focus on should be the relevant data — don’t get distracted by irrelevant data.

Quotable moment: “People selling links by the thousands are sending businesses straight into the wood chipper. Marketing is one of the most powerful forms of communication and it’s only going to become more influential and prevalent. He invites marketers to do chaotic good.”

Top 10 Things You Need to Know About People

Speaker: Susan Weinschenk, Director of The Weinschenk Institute (and author of How to Get People to Do Stuff: Master the Art and Science of Persuasion and Motivation)

She reveals:

• People have mental models of how things should work, and your design should reflect and understanding of those models.
• There are two systems of thinking, and system 2 — which we utilize 80 percent of the time — is intuitive and fast.
• People are more motivated by fear of loss than anticipation of gain.

Quotable moment: “People use peripheral vision to get the gist … Don’t discount stuff on the edges of the screen. That can be an important part of the design as you’re trying to get across a certain feeling or message.”

10 Tips for Marketing Your Business on Pinterest

Speaker: Janet Thaeler, Co-Found of Pinalerts and author of I Need a Killer Press Release

She shares:

• It’s better to create a business account than a personal account because you can wield analytics. If you already have a personal account, you can transfer it to a business account.
• If you have a physical product and put a $ in the description, the item will show up in the gifts category of Pinterest.
• Her favorite Pinterest tools: PicMonkey, Pin Alerts, ViralTag and #pinchat.

Quotable moment: “The main demographic for Pinterest is MOMs! Moms are smart, economically-savvy women who are leading technology usage. They are power sharers if they love your product, they are an excellent demographic — 75% of women say they are making the primary decisions for the household.”

Co-blogged with Wendy Roe.

How to Get People to Do Stuff

Speaker: Susan Weinschenk, Director of The Weinschenk Institute (and author of How to Get People to Do Stuff)

She points out:

• Calls-to-action are more compelling if presented as a noun rather than a verb, i.e. those that define the person. “Be a Voter,” “Be a Participant,” “Be a Commenter” are more effective “Vote,” “Participate,” “Comment.”
• Creating habits can happen rapidly (in much less time than the three months that are typically touted). The trick is implementing a new habit to interfere with the previous habit.
• People gravitate toward tasks that require special knowledge and skills, offer autonomy or provide lots of objective feedback.

Quotable moment: “People process info best in story format. The term used in research is ‘narrative.’ The other way stories are important are self stories. We tell ourselves stories about who we are and why we do what we do. They are powerful moderators of behavior.”

Co-blogged with Wendy Roe.

How to Create Immortal Content/Scaling Quality

Speakers: Ben Cook, Owner of Direct Match Media, and Michael King, Director of Inbound Marketing at iAcquire

They noted:

• Content should be shareable — ask people to share, make sharing a call-to-action, provide quotes to tweet, provide thumbnails for Facebook, provide embed codes and only include the buttons your audience will use.
• There are many different kinds of content, and they work differently at different times in the conversion funnel.
• There’s nothing wrong with outsourcing content creation.

Quotable moment: “Over time content marketing has a lower cost per lead (CPL) than paid search. At the same time, you’ll get more leads for the same spend with content marketing compared to paid search. But today there’s no excuse for bad content. There are so many great content creators, unemployed journalists and out of school designers.”

Find all the Bend WebCAM liveblog coverage here.

Kristi Kellogg is a journalist, news hound, professional copywriter, and social (media) butterfly. Currently, she is a senior SEO content writer for Conde Nast. Her articles appear in newspapers, magazines, across the Internet and in books such as "Content Marketing Strategies for Professionals" and "The Media Relations Guidebook." Formerly, she was the social media editor at Bruce Clay Inc.

See Kristi's author page for links to connect on social media.