This session speakers were Amanda Watlington, Lee Odden & Massimo Burgio. The discussion started off about SEO for blogs and blogs used as CMS systems. The general feeling is that WordPress, Movable Type and Drupal (the latter is more difficult to use) are the three top Blogging systems around today.

Each of these systems can be used as a CMS or blog and you need to customize it as well as the RSS feeds. To start, you need to do your keyword research first, then make sure you align the outcome of the Blog with the content team or blogger. Lastly you need to socialize the blog and create a community around it.

To customize the CMS:

• Set up archiving
• Use CSS
• Use Page Titles
• Use Permalinks
• Set up robots.txt file, favicon and sitemaps
• Use widgets – be careful though, you need to make sure they don’t slow your site down, perhaps look at “blidgets”

Feeds

• Create proprietary feeds or use feedburner to set up your feeds
• Use simple coding
• Validate your Feeds
• Subscribe to your own feeds
• don’t forget to ping

Final Tips:

• optimize your blog like you would optimize your site
• submit your blog to all sources
• submit your feed to add feed sources

More and more the balance of power is changing in favour of what the consumer decides a Brand is all about. Many factors have contributed to this but the most significant being technology and the ability to rapidly disperse information in a totally transparent manner giving the person-on-the-street that ability to voice her/his voice.

The internet and specifically web 2.0 has provided the various platform for this with blogs, social networking sites, forums, wikis to name a few. Marketers need to embrace this change, understand the conversations that are happening around Brands in this space and continuously find ways through passive engagement adding “content” value and allowing consumers to then “pull their Brands in” rather than aggresively pushing our one-sided messages onto them.

See Andy Rice of Yellowwood in an interview on eTV talking about this trend.