The New Information Authorities?

I attended SearchFest '08 yesterday at the Portland Zoo. The lack of cellular and wireless internet coverage made for unforeseen levels of attention from those in attendance. It was amazing to watch internet professionals pay actual full attention to something for once. On the other hand, the panelists HAD ethernet connections and seemed to be furiously blogging whenever not engaged with presentation tasks. I found this to be an apt analogy for the state of the web as described by both Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz and Marty Weintraub of aimClear.

Rand made it clear that the people that you are marketing to, especially with social media related SEO efforts, are NOT your customers but rather the "linkerati" - the small group of bloggers and high authority sites/hubs that can immensely boost your visibility in both natural search and social media sites like Digg, Delicious, etc. And as Marty said: "Don't piss off the natives". In other words, be genuine (or simulate it....?), don't try to sell (blatantly), and be unique.

So as I looked at these panelists furiously Twittering and blogging about what they were doing at the moment, I could only help but think that this is just a new version of traditional media. You've got power users who have built up authority, sometimes due to compelling and engaging content, sometimes because they are the loudest/most persistence voice with the most technical tricks up their sleeves. They hold the keys to your customers. You've go to figure out how to talk to THEM.

Anyway, cynicism aside, it really was a good conference. Hats off to Rebecca from SEOmoz, who had a Towelie (from South Park fame) slide. I learned a lot of details that will be helpful to our SEO practice here, including a bunch of new tools to check out. Paid link detection seems to be something that is really changing the face of the industry as well, so we'll see how that shakes out.