He titled the keynote, “Twitter As A Tool For Social Media: Nobodies are the new Somebody.” While 80% of the audience at SES NY admitted to be “twittering” while Guy was talking, his keynote read like an intro to Twitter, but that is not to say that it was not without a few new nifty tools.

This is an interesting keynote topic of a “Search Engine Strategy” conference, but this base thread seemingly weaved into all of the first day sessions.

1. Forget the “A” list - don’t worry about the big Twitter names. It is not about a “trickle down” interaction. Twitter is about a “bubbling up” of excitement and evangelism.

2. Defocus

3. Get lots followers – it is important

• Autofollow everyone that follows you. You can use SocialToo to do this automatically.
• Retweetist. Retweeting is the sincerest form of flattery.
• Epenis.nl - How do you measure up?
• Twitalyzer 100 Most Influential
• Funny: Top Oddities News
• Timely: Top Most Popular News
• Adjix
• TwitterCounter
• Twitter Suggestions

4. Monitor

What are people saying about you or things that you care about? Construct advanced queries and feed that to a reader.

For example, use “contractor” within a geographic radius. Are there any painters on Twitter?

Or, look at the use of negative terms: “floyd -landis -pink.”

5. Copy – What are others doing?

• Twibs.com monitor what companies are doing on Twitter
• @comcastcares is a great model of using Twitter in business.
• @jetblue airlines. Does company stuff and personal.
• Amazondeals
• CirqueLasVegas

6. Search

• Use advanced search. Term + zip.
• Term OR term NOT RT
• Simple search: Scion
• Advanced Twitter Search
• Advanced search: Scion 100 miles
• Advanced search: SEO 100 miles

7. Tools.

• TweetDeck – Great to organize information.
  
• Twhirl – Nice if you have mutliple accounts
  
• CoTweet - nice for a team to use a single twitter account
  
• Tynt Tracer – copy and paste text with reference to source.
• How to Change the World
• Tweetie

8. Squeeze the trigger.

TwitterHawk – Keyword based tweets. Automatically generate tweets.

9. Make it easy to share.
Share on facebook button. Share on Twitter button.
Twitterfeed – rss reader to tweet.

10. Heat

Alltop All

MyAlltop

As a supplement, here is a comprehensive list of Twitter apps.

If you are like me, you woke up thinking about meta tags role in SEO. Probably not, but I had a meeting with a guy last night and he had 1999 understanding of the web, and he proceeded to question my statement, “Meta Tags don’t matter anymore.”

If you keep up with SEO, you probably will tend to agree with that statement, but meta descriptions, on the other hand, still have a role in search results. I like to think of the meta description as the elevator speech of the page. Why is the page here? What is the page about in a very short succinct sentence? How is it going to benefit the reader?

<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Insert Elevator Speech here.”>

Meta descriptions, you probably know, are generally used for the page description first when displaying search results.  If you don’t have a meta description, the search engine will likely take some text that is cached from the page. Be creative, but be accurate because the browser is making split second decsions.  Just like your elevator pitch of a new idea, set the hook and beg the click.

A friend told me today that he thinks God says, from time to time, in the best Jeff Foxworthy voice, “Watch this…”  Then someone’s life is totally uprooted and changed around.

That is what is happening right now.  This summer I found out that we are expecting number three, and this week I found out that I am probably starting my own internet / seo / marketing / real estate business. . . Watch this.

FYI – I am looking for a good company name. If you know one, comment it.