I’m still going through SXSW notes and will eventually post some great recaps of sessions and events, but I’m still in conference mode.  With that said, it’s just two days away to the Internet Marketers of New York charity party in NYC (during SES NY) which is sponsored by the coolest guys on earth, Best of the Web.

What: A charity party.  Your $40 at the door goes straight to a charity.
When: Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 8PM until 12AM.
Where: Black Finn NY, 218 East 53rd Street
Who: Yours truly and a bunch of awesome people who are flying in to NY to attend the Search Engine Strategies conference
Why: Because you know you want to support a charity and hang out with some of the biggest search industry leaders

Will I see you there?  I hope so!  Make sure to tell Greg Niland that I sent you.

SMX West occurred last week, kicking off a bunch of conferences and meetups for yours truly (I’m headed to SXSW Interactive on Thursday followed by SES NY right after I get back, and then there’s the Saturday night Blogger Social event only a week later). As all conferences I’ve attended, it was a great one, and by far the best part was the smallness of the conference overall which really helped the networking efforts. As for the sessions I liveblogged, there were eleven in total (see the Search Engine Roundtable’s SMX West coverage for details). Here are some of the bigger takeaways for me:

• We all know that the search landscape is changing. Louis Monier’s Wednesday keynote summarized the future in the world of search, as we’re looking at the following elements:
  • Human powered search: you get high quality content but since it’s human driven, the coverage isn’t as vast as we’d like.
  • Personalization: presenting results based on past activity. Monier suggests that it could be flawed, however, as in describing a “diamond:” what if a baseball enthusiast chooses to buy his wife a nice piece of jewelry?

This is a guest post from Pierre Far, who recently launched a very cool program called Social Alerter which notifies you as soon as your website has a solid chance of hitting the Digg or del.icio.us frontpage.

We have all engaged in debates over the past few years about social media. Is it new? If so, how? Even a recent thread on Cre8asite Forums discussed this, kicking off by someone stating they find social media very intimidating.

Then and Now

In the good old days, say from the 1850s onwards, marketing was mostly a one way “communication”: companies advertized their wares via local media like newspapers, magazines, and traveling salespeople. We certainly we had word of mouth back then, but it was geographically limited to a large degree due to travel and communication constraints. Ideas and product use spread slowly: what was a very popular product in one town was not necessarily popular in another nearby town.

Awhile ago, I used Twitter to talk about one of my favorite cold remedy vitamins, Airborne. It was then that two friends suggested Zicam to me. When stocking up on medication for the winter months, the high recommendations of Zicam had me buying the oral mist.

On Sunday night, after a rather interesting Superbowl XLII, I felt the onset of a cold. As most of these cold medicines suggest, you should take the medicine at the first sign of illness. I immediately thought of my Zicam and was eager to try it out to kill the cold before it really gets bad.

Monday morning, to continue to fight off whatever this may be, I took the recommended dosage of Zicam a second time. I went on my day realizing that I had lost the sense of taste. I ate leftover nosh from the game: really spicy salsa and chips. The spiciness did not impact me. I had some Hershey Kisses. The chocolate taste was dull, as if almost not there.

Often, I hear from people who complain that social media doesn’t do anything for their “marketing” efforts. Well, for one, social media users — that is, users on social news sites such as Digg, Mixx, Reddit — are not particularly enthusiastic about the proliferation of marketers in their community. This is a huge challenge for someone who wants to sell their product using social media.

But there’s a lot more to media than just these social networking sites. In fact, a highly underappreciated but heavily trafficked method works just as well: the blog.

If you get your product name out among many blogs, eventually, the word gets out. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. In any marketing campaign, the more you see the product, the more likely you are to be influenced by it, even if you don’t want to be. The takeaway: if you talk about something enough, people will listen (even if they don’t want to). Repeated exposure builds recognition.