3 Helpful Trends from BlogWorld 2011 (#BWELA) - Story From: The Official Infusionsoft Blog

I attended BlogWorld last week and it was exciting to hear from businesses that are driving results with social media marketing. Most importantly, I was able to meet with people I’ve known for years and meet many more amazing people that I poetically work alongside with. Hanging out with them was great. I want to share three helpful tips and trends from this year’s BlogWorld Expo.

If you’re trying to generate sales, make sure social media activities connect to business objectives.

The topic on the minds of attendees at BlogWorld was business intent in using social media. Comparing my experience from last year, social media marketing is maturing and more people are correlating value of social media to their business. That is, the discussions have matured from the “recreational” side of social media (which I contend is still very important) towards the ability to generate leads, shorten sales cycles and provide value to a captive audience through compelling content.

Keynote speaker and HARO founder, Peter Shankman, captured this best in saying that we’re in the business of earning people’s time across the platforms of social media. He made his point by drawing from his days at the AOL News team (during the dial-up days) and the value of keeping users online and engaged to today’s prolific use of new media. Time and people’s attention are the currency to measure success.

Don’t rely on other people’s research. Do your own work.

Look up “social media infographics” and you’ll come across thousands of great charts and graphs, mind-blowing conclusions and something else … cheap attempts to provide meaning to the meaningless. With measurement services and so many different metrics to choose from, marketers (specifically, social media marketers) should define their own methodology for defining success. Like the point above, your metrics of success should relate to the business objectives. Not Klout; not Tweets; not Facebook Likes; but rather metrics that stand on their own merit to the business.

Session speaker and VP of Strategy at Edison Research, Tom Webster, shared a number of examples showing meaningful measurement and was quite vocal about calling out the meaningless stats like “what time to tweet” and “best day to publish a blog post” type of stats. Instead, he suggested (as marketers), we do our own work to discover what works, what doesn’t and form our own conclusions. Similarly, he suggested that marketers need to be asking better questions and perform unbiased research in an attempt to disprove hypotheses – not necessarily validate them.

Blogger demographics, blogger outreach and FTC compliance are a big deal.

In the 2011 State of the Blogosphere Survey released from Technorati attendees drowned in facts compiled from the blog indexing giant. You can pour over the data yourself to see what’s hot on the minds of bloggers, but it comes down to this: Blogging is experiencing some healthy and unhealthy changes in light of new and popular social networks. This change includes a variety of income sources, how they interact with brands, how they promote their content and how they maintain compliance with the FTC. Most bloggers who have a material relationship with a business properly disclose any concessions, but those who don’t (14%) risk damaging the credibility of bloggers at large.

Keynote speaker and CEO of Technorati, Shani Higgins, shared some great insights with the attendees. A few that caught my attention are that only 25% of bloggers update their blog weekly or more (wow!). Only 58% of bloggers stated they disclosed if they received a free product for review despite current FTC mandates. 61% of bloggers call themselves “hobbyists.” Interesting stuff, indeed. Check out survey results to learn more.

Here are also a few additional perspectives from some BlogWorld attendees. If you really want to see what the buzz was about from this three-day conference, then fire up #BWELA in your Twitter Search and have at it.