January 26th, 2010 February 1, 2010 – Write it down. Happy Hour for the New Year.

More details to come, but it’ll be some place in Austin, with drinks, and food, and search marketers kicking back.

UPDATE: We will be at Chuy’s on 183 after work on Monday Feb 1. Come join us!

It’s almost that time!

The AustinSEM BBQ/Potluck will be held at Jack Leblond’s house on October 24th at 11am. Time to be determined once the Longhorn’s determine when they are playing Missouri that day. Remember that families are welcome! Just be sure to let us know how many are coming.

If you are planning on attending, sign up for what you are bringing ASAP. It’s first come, first serve. We will email you with a total head count a few days before.

Can’t wait to meet everyone!

Alright, to start with is the September plans. On September 29th we will be meeting at NXNW in North Austin off of Loop 360. You can find more information on their site (directions, menu, etc.). Be there around 6pm! I’ll update the site when I get there with our location. Check out twitter as well.

October BBQ!

We had a great idea. Socials are always after work. So we are doing a BBQ at Jack Leblond’s house on October 24, 2009, weather permitting. More details to come, but if you want to be updated personally, shoot me an email that you are interested. katemorris at gmail dot com

November Social

For November, we will be having our “What Happened at PubCon” Social. There are tons of people going this year. If you are interested in going and need help convincing a boss or something let me know. There are tons of members that can provide proof of this conference’s value. Taylor Pratt and myself are speaking too! If you can make the trip to Vegas, it’ll be a great time. If not, we’ll keep ya updated on events and news.

Tentative Date: November 17th, 2009

December Party!

Not calling it a Christmas party, but we’ll so something special for that time of year. If you want to help plan, please let me know! katemorris at gmail dot com

Tentative Date: December 29th, 2009

Where: Opal Divine, Marina – 12709 Mopac & Parmer Lane
When: 6pm-ish, Tuesday, August 25th

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Place: Third Base
1717 West 6th Street
Austin, TX 78703
(512) 476-2273

Please note that we welcome all Austin area search marketing professionals. We want to keep these events to those working in the space, no salesmen, etc.

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I know a lot of you are looking for avenues for your talents so I asked Chris questions regarding opportunities in the video industry. Being that my own company’s expertise is in technology forecasting and trend analysis, I found Chris’ answers to be particularly interesting. To get an idea of what is on the tape, my questions include:

1. Where do you see the trend of video in the short and long term?
2. Where do you see opportunities for individual, small and larger companies in the future?
3. What changes do you see in video in the future?
4. What would you like to see people leaving with today?
5. Can you tell a funny experience you had doing video?

Carrie Vanston, Technology Futures, Inc., cvanston at tfi.com

Editors note: We decided to do the recap as one post and the video as another. The video will be published tomorrow in Carrie’s followup.

VMX Video Marketing
The expo opened with Ingrid Venderveldt who gave encouragement with saying “Yes, it is worth finishing, it’s not stupid!” The overarching theme of this show seemed to be that businesses needed to not be afraid of video, but embrace it.

Brigette Dale and Lan and Vu Bui talked about the future of entertainment and TV. They said the most important things are that videos should teach you something and, ideally, end with a smile. They suggested www.Freevlog.org and www.thebuibrothers.com as having tons of stuff on how to get going. They all made the point that what your audience really wants is to see you are a person.

Next I attended Track 2 with Troy Lanier and DadLabs on the essentials for producing online video. One nugget that jumped out was www.tubemogul.com allows you to put your video out to 15 plus social sites.

Then we went on to learn about online video marketing strategies with Jim Warren from Infomercial.com and Giovanni Gallucci with The Agency Blog.

Jim’s 3 steps for successful video marketing:

1. Call to action
2. Offer
3. Hook
   • Exclusive web offer;
   • Limited time offer or TV offer;
   • Lack of availability to purchase elsewhere;
   • Credibility of spokesperson.

Giovanni says Google owns YouTube and therefore it is very valuable to your overall marketing presence to optimize your videos.

1. Title in description in YouTube should be 100-300 words
2. 5 keywords per 100
3. Put keyword either before or after the link in video description;
4. Google loves Flicker, so do stills of your video and put them up.

Next up was producing and syndicating online video from the Bui Brothers. Being a super neophyte regarding internet and video, I had no idea how video even got onto websites. Now I know they get there by living on a host site and then being embedded onto a website. Some of these sites are free–if your content is non-commercial–and some are kind of lax even if the video could be considered commercial.

Their favorite was blip.tv, but they agreed that for low quality video, the product isn’t that great. Blip does let you encode information about your own company. Vimeo.com was 2nd favorite and better with lower quality video, but more picky about commercial content. The brothers had experienced being cut off without notice on one of their ads. They mentioned that having YouTube host your video on their website gives them a lot of rights that you may not feel comfortable with. You can always have it hosted somewhere else and just put it on YouTube. For a tutorial on getting a video shot and up, go to http://thebuibrothers.com/store/.

Brian Rutledge from GetPageOne says the nice thing about video is the search engines might pick it up if it’s optimized. Video transcribing (putting video text onto the page) can help with rankings. He suggested maybe putting a little of transcript on the page and then putting “more” leading to the rest of the transcription. His favorite metric tool is tubemogul.com. He said seomoz.com has a lot of useful information.

Hank Jones talked about copywriting, legal compliance, and rules of ownership. He suggested to

1. Always cover “what-ifs” in contract;
2. Deconstruct definitions in contracts;
3. Cover industry and technology “processes” with samples, exclusion;
4. Register copyrights early, often, and right;
5. Learn from other copyright groups.

We finished up the day with Brian Brushwood with Scam School giving a fascinating presentation about branding. He recommended a book entitled “Origin of Brands” by Al and Laura Ries. How to win:

1. Be first;
2. If can’t be first, be first in category;
3. Be first in the mind;
4. Be 2nd, but be as opposite of everything first is as you can.

Brian of the wild hair used the techniques to successfully become “the magician of the internet.”

Awards followed with a great reception of Japanese food. Wow, the food was great all day!

Several sessions and interviews from the day are available at VMX2009, including the session by Chris Justice about  live streaming and webcasting that I wasn’t able to attend. I also interview Chris about his thoughts on the opportunities and future trends in video on a separate, upcoming post.

Carrie Vanston, Technology Futures, Inc., cvanston at tfi.com

May Social Pictures

We had a fantastic time last month at Third Base doing the Table Topics (thanks Nadia!), and now it’s time to kick back and relax. There is graduation going on, Summer Break, and school is out. Let’s celebrate spring (already feels like summer) in style with a good old fashioned social. Hope to see everyone there with some search marketing friends.

Where: Cool River Cafe, Austin (Thanks for the suggestion Matt!)
When: 6pm-ish, Tuesday, May 26th
RSVP: Email katemorris at the Google mail … if you are attending please, or comment.
(And be sure you are signed up with the group to get all emails and reminders!)

Please pass this along to everyone you know in Austin in the search marketing industry. Just as a reminder, this group is for search marketing professionals. We welcome everyone from beginners to advanced, but try to keep it to those who perform search marketing related tasks. Invite in-house people you know … and agencies, grab your specialists. We want them to learn, we want to learn from them. This is a group just for those of us that are tackling the exciting world of search marketing!

• Blog Writer – Help recapping new and past events, plus whatever else is going on in Austin.
• Social Planner – I will help the most with this, but I need someone to contact places to arrange meetings and such. Someone that is good at locating great Austin spots to have socials and such.
• Events Calendar – Keeping up to date with the Austin Tech scene to let the group know via our calendar what is going on, what events to attend and all the juicy details of future tweetups and the like.

If you are interested in helping in any of these areas, even for a small time, please let me know! I’ll give anyone a login to the WordPress account that wants to write a few blog posts now and then.