John S. Wolfe

This is another in a series of reports about the Social Media Marketing 2010 conference, held June 17 in London.

Stefan Hull didn’t mince words.

Every website needs to be managed, every keyword or tag needs to be promoted. The name of the game is search engine optimization.

“You should already be having that done, like hygiene,” the business director of Propellernet told the June 17 Social Media Marketing conference in London.

Now it’s about outreach and engagement.

“Links are the currency,” he said. “Brands are either networked or invisible.”

Marketing today is search, social media, online public relations and offline collateral.

“Google listens to conversations,” Hull said. “Links differentiate you.”

Stefan Hull discusses SEO at the Social Media Marketing event in London.

Hull presented two case studies.

The first involved Westfield Village, an upscale shopping center in London.

The customer sought to “own” the search phrase “London shopping.”

Westfield was planning a big event, “The Greatest Fashion Show on Earth.”

Propellernet proposed a strategy to work with “key influencers.”

They created a “blogger relations” team, Googled the keywords and identified the names and websites that came up most frequently.

Then they phoned them.

They shared information about the event, offered them backstage passes to the show, and provided exclusive content to them.

“The key was doing it in person,” Hull said.

He emphasized that Westfield sought to act ethically and to create genuine relationships.

All the company asked was, in covering the event for the blog, to include a link to Westfield Village and to use the words “London shopping” in the write-up.

Search engines would then quantify the links and the presence of the “London shopping” words — “anchor text” in SEO parlance — within the blogs and, voila, Westfield Village would move up the list.

“We wanted the inbound links to Westfield Village,” Hull said.

With more visitors coming to the site, Westfield was ready. It had created a video that through “hotspotting” would allow users to click on any particular item to stop the video and get more information.

“We called it ‘the Virus,’” he said.

Westfield is now third or fourth on the “London shopping” search.

“And I predict it will be No. 1 by the end of the year,” Hull said. “We know the number of links needed to move up!”

Hull’s second case study involved sportsshoes.com.

Another client was sportsshoes.com. It was looking for ways to boost sales of running shoes.

In search marketing, this could be tricky. “Running shoes” may be used by hardcore runners, regular exercisers, “Race for the Cure”-type enthusiasts or simple “mud” runners.

Hull’s company asked, “Where do hardcore runners ‘live’ online?”

In running clubs.

The firm targeted the top 30 running clubs they could find and asked runners – “real people,” he said – to write reviews of their products.

While some companies might be fearful of inviting criticism in such a forum, sportshoes.com looked at it differently.

“Even bad ones helped the company, in identifying problems or asking for new features,” he said.

“The Running Blog” offered a kit for runners, a badge, and a link to the sportshoes.com company page.

“In 2008 we were not in the top 100 in search,” Hull said. “Today we are No. 1.”

This is crucial because studies have shown that searchers rarely venture “below the fold” on the search screen. About 66% click on the first three listings, he said.

The lesson: “Social networks and searches reflect people’s motivations,” Hull concluded.