ThinkVisibility

This past weekend Wiebke and myself headed to Leeds for ThinkVisibility. It was the first industry conference either of us had been to, so we had no idea what to expect. We definitely didn’t expect it to be quite as great as it was!

Pre-conference Booze

Friday night started well with us meeting Paul and James of NorthSouthMedia. I’ve "known" Paul for what seems like an eternity but it was the first time we’d actually met. What a thoroughly stellar chap he is, as is James.
As luck would have it the next two we met also greeted us with West Coast Scottish accents (which if you don’t know it is like an East Coast Scottish accent, only not as good :p). I’ve seen a lot of Shaun and his company Hobo-Web online, but had never spoken to him. Shaun is extremely social and someone you really should get drunk with if you have the chance! Chris of Sunshine was making sure that we did get drunk with exceptional generosity in the form of beer and vodka redbulls. I’d not heard of Chris before, but seriously what a great guy!
The only other couple we encountered were Dave and Elaine from Allkids.co.uk, we met these lovely people (I hope) just in time before I started slurring my words.
Ok, this is where it starts to get a bit hazy… but I think we met Alastair of WebsiteDoctor and Al from SelfMadeMinds both of whom are sterling gents too, though there’s more about them to come later…

The Conference Proper

TheHodge welcomed us all to ThinkVisibility and I’d like to give him a little extra attention just now, because he deserves it. Thinkvisibility was full of brilliant presentations which I will come to. The other phenomenal thing for me was the broad spectrum of people there. I have written about the people we met before the conference above and will write about those we met after too. So Mr. Thehodge, I would like heap praise upon you for organising ThinkVisibility to entice all these fine people away from their desktop! Well done Dom.

Tim Nash

Tim Nash Tim’s presentation was a great start to the day. He told us how he’d been challenged to explain how a search engine works to pre-school children. He then had buckets with red water in them – apparently gJuice is red, who knew? By using holes in the buckets he showed how gJuice is transferred but by bunging up those holes only a few drops escaped. At some point he expected the buckets to explode, despite this not happening it was a wonderful analogy which I haven’t heard before. Ranking for white coat SEO would have worked had Dave Naylor not have hijacked him ;)

Chris Garrett

Chris Garrett‘s presentation fitted ThinkVisibility very well: "25 ways to get visibility with blogs". Chris ensured everybody knew to use quality as opposed to tricks, concentrated on people over numbers and realised there were only 3 sources of traffic. He then went on to share his 25 ways of getting visibility (sounds almost like a linkbait resource post, doesn’t it?) including some that I had never considered. Q&A sites for example, sheer genius.

Tom Smith

Tom Smith came the closer to Twitter that I have ever seen any live person come. His style of presenting and evident enthusiasm for Social Media left eery second sentence unended. I must admit to never having heard of Tom prior to Thinkvisibility but anyone with such passion and energy is worth keeping an eye out for!

Guy Redwood

Guy Redwood did a phenomenal job of debunking the F pattern myth that I, as many others in the room, had subscribed to wholeheartedly. Despite having seen eyetracking usability testing from "both sides of the mirror" in the past, Guy’s presentation gave much more insight into the whole field of usability testing – the fact that male and female users don’t differ on the whole was new to me for example.

Lunch

Lunch was a buffet and a chance to retank some electrolytes in the form of scotch eggs and crisps to help with the dehydration from the night before. We did get a couple of offers of going to the pub, but being the lightest of lightweights declined graciously.
Just before the next presentation started poor Chris Garrett got caught between two hatted and booze fuming Scotsmen:

Dave Naylor

Dave Naylor answered more questions than anyone else and was frank and open throughout it all. He gave both sides of the coin: From the 3 month old website that had 1500 pages of exceptional content outranking older more established domains without a single backlink, to sites being disappeared in a Van Helsing stylee ;) Buying links is bad kids m’kay.

Tom Critchlow

Tom Critchlow had a raft of advice and knowledge on reputation management to share. From putting stories straight, to the evil wikipedia-press-wikipedia cycle that can take months and legal proceedings to fix. Ryanair of course got a wee mention too, but Tom’s presentation will be remembered above all for informing us of the current market value for Thai brides ;)

Patrick Altoft

Patrick Altoft gave a great talk on linkbuilding, underlining that the vast majority of people forget to figure out what type of links their site needs. He then went on to describe 3 main types of links and how to go about getting them, truly invaluable. The Q&A at the end of his presentation also revealed a further Van Helsingesque technique ;)

Kieron Donoghue

Kieron Donoghue enlightened us about affiliate marketing. Some of his successes with older content getting found again really drove home the point that you should archive and not delete! Announcing to all that Chris would be buying beers in the pub was a great finish to his presentation too ;)

Post Conference Dinner

After leaving the conference and heading back to our hotel Chris, Dave & Elaine really kindly asked us if we’d come along for dinner with them later on. We went with them all to meet Kieron and Ray / @befuddle for a cracking Thai meal. The name of the restaurant escapes me for it to get a link too. Good food is always all the better when shared with good people :)

Booze upon Booze

The Hog’s Head was our after dinner booze destination to catch up with the other good folk. From this point on my hat got passed around a fair bit as my lovely assistant helped to capture:





After the Hog’s Head we went back to our hotel bar where we got more and more drinks in with Tim, Chris C, @Caius, @Peterc, Shaun and Alastair joining us after retrieving his passport ;) More hat swapping ensued:




At some point I fell over, in a spectacular fashion it must be said!

The hotel bar had closed so, as is customary it was decided MacDonald’s was a good idea. The last men standing were snapped by the last lady standing, and proud of her I was too!

Other Posts About Thinkvisibility

Chris C at pfft

Shaun at Hobo

Paul at NorthSouthMedia

Lynne at PoLR

Andy at mmmeeja

Tom C at SEOmoz

Why I am an idiot

I am an idiot for many reasons really, but I realised on Saturday is that:

• I should write a lot more often
• WebArchitecture is a dozy tag
• Half of the photos I should have taken I didn’t
• AndrewBurnett.com should be my personal blog
• Realising you’re an idiot is better than not realising it!
• I’m still hosted on this server.

If you can think of any other reasons I’m an idiot I would genuinely love to hear them!
 

How to Create a Skittles.com TwitterSearch Front Page Yourself

It could not be simpler ladies and gentlemen.

Go to this page, copy the source code and replace “andrewburnett” with whatever it is you want to appear in the TwitterSearch. (You’ll also want to delete or change the Google Analytics script).

You Are Known By Your Avatar And Name

You are known within that community by your name and your avatar. On popular social sites and services there will be many users listed together. The “Who Dugg This” panel on Digg is an extremely good example:

The Who Dugg It panel on Digg

It is much easier to spot someone if they have an avatar that sticks out, even at 16×16 pixels.

Be Consistently Visible

If you use many social sites and services where you have the same friends, it makes sense to have the same avatar so they can spot you in the crowd. Wherever possible use the same username too. If someone else has already got your username of choice at least your avatar will let them know it’s you. After all, they are friends with you, not your username. It’s all about people.

Very Visible Avatars

Avatars which work well are highly visible. To test my theory I’d like to conduct a little experiment with you.

Andrew Burnett is a very common name. Unfortunately “andrewburnett” was taken on Digg so I had to choose another username. The experiment is very simple:

What is my username in the picture at the top of this post?:

andrewburnett avatar

Is Being Visible Important?

You tell me, I know I’d like people to be able to spot me quickly.

@clarocada's tweet

When I clicked on the link to Top 83 Tweets of 2008 I got a wonderful surprise! There was @andrewburnett at the top of the list!

When People Feel Good

They tell other people. They retweet. They StumbleUpon. They Friendfeed. I know I do :)

When people tell other people through their various channels wonderful things start to happen:

Most popular blog post of last 6 months

Traffic up 334%

Silly amounts of traffic

traffic up 665% over yesterday's high!

Make People Feel Good

Making people feel good means more people visit your website, it is that simple. Even better, if more people visit your site how are you going to feel?

How are you going to feel if more than 3 times as many people visit your website today compared with yesterday? How are you going to feel if 6 times today’s visitors come tomorrow? Thought so, me too.

Is Social Media Worth It?

Of course it is. Not only can you make others feel good but you can feel good doing it too!

Twitter As Social Media

Since May last year I have been twittering away on twitter [@andrewburnett ]. All the while I’ve been following others who entertain, interest and often educate me.

It has all felt very very social. But until this week I didn’t realise I was missing out on possibly the single greatest benefit of twitter: Meeting fellow twitts

Social Media In Real Life

This week I took the plunge and headed along to RefreshEdinburgh on Wednesday evening where I met (in no particular order):
@nonimage [Andy Lobban]
@sneeu [John Sutherland]
@roryf [Rory Fitzpatrick]
@nelstrom [Andrew Neil]
@EdinburghMenus [he who hath no card getteth his real name forgotten ;)].

Thursday evening my good lady wife accompanied me to a talk on social media (of all things) by Mike Coulter for the Edinburgh Internet Marketing Meetup Group . First and foremost it was a great talk with many insights, but it also brought many twitts together in one room. I met (again in no particular order):
@jimwolffman
@dav_hamill
@colingilchrist
and of course @mikecoulter.

If I’d managed to go to the pub afterwards no doubt I’d have collected even more @s! Mike plugged the Edinburgh Coffee Morning meet up which is every Friday morning – you’ve guessed it, I went.

This morning (Friday) I met (along with others from last night)
@jonmountjoy
@darciec
[edit]I didn’t get your twitter handles at the time, but found you since:
@hazelh
@nevstokes
[/edit]

So What?

As much as you can squeeze into 140 characters nothing beats meeting people face to face, talking over a coffee and exchanging knowledge and ideas. That’s what!