It's hard enough presenting in front of an audience of a dozens or hundreds of your peers, let alone to be paying attention to what's happening on Twitter at the same time. But that's exactly what a good presenter or good moderator needs to do these days. Particularly if you're presenting to a tech-savvy audience.

Checking for real-time online feedback on your session is called "monitoring the backchannel." One of the most famous recent incidents where a speaker should have monitored the back channel but didn't was Sarah Lacy's interview of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg at the South by Southwest conference this year. That session went very pear-shaped for Sarah as she pursued lines of questioning that frustrated and aggravated the audience. Sarah was blissfully ignorant as the audience began to turn on her.

That thankfully hasn't happened to me (yet). But I did get a reminder that the audience is twittering about you while you're on stage. Last week when I presented at the SEOmoz Expert Training intensive, I preceded Danny Sullivan. He was sitting in the audience during my session. I was doing a solo presentation, so I didn't have time to check the back channel. After I was finished, I saw that I suddenly had dozens of new Twitter followers. That was a surprise. "What the heck happened?" I thought to myself. I found the answer soon enough. It was all instigated by Danny's tweets about me:

watching @sspencer explain new loophole for shooting to the top of google rankings in one day. amazing stuff, wow. 01:34 PM August 20, 2008 from twhirl

@mattcutts just joshing. @sspencer is being very good, doing amazing job talking about vertical search and seo opps and tactics 01:34 PM August 20, 2008 from twhirl in reply to mattcutts

@presellpageman @sspencer is presenting at the seomoz.org training seminar. i was ses yesterday; seomoz today; gnomedex on friday. busy week 01:39 PM August 20, 2008 from twhirl in reply to PresellPageMan

If only I were better at multitasking while presenting, I'd have picked up on this and worked some funny quips about it into my presentation.

I remember from Dan Lyons' (Fake Steve Jobs') keynote at Web 2.0 Expo he was poking fun at Robert Scoble's suggestion that speakers take a "Twitter break" every 10 minutes or so to keep on top of the backchannel. It's actually not a bad suggestion, although it may not be for everybody (such as Dan Lyons, for instance!).

I had the pleasure of interviewing via email Tony Hsieh, the CEO of online shoe retailer Zappos.com, for an article I wrote for the August issue of Multichannel Merchant. Zappos is a real innovator among online retailers in a lot of areas, not the least of which is social media. They have taken Twitter by storm, with 440 twittering employees - including their CEO (Tony) and their COO (Alfred). They even launched a microsite dedicated to their Twitter presence.

I thought it would be interesting to share the interview with you here. The final article is now online, so be sure to check that out too.

Stephan: Can you share a bit of background about you and Zappos, and how the company culture plays into your inclination to jump headfirst into new online marketing channels? What were your objectives in entering the Twitterverse? twitter.zappos.com from a social media standpoint is pretty impressive and in the corporate world a rather unheard of large-scale embracing of Twitter. What is the big picture idea behind this / how did this come about?

Tony: Background on the company is here. My bio is here. You can get a glimpse inside our company culture here.

Our #1 priority as a company is our company culture. We believe that if we get the culture right, most of the other stuff, including great customer service, will fall into place on its own. Long term, we want the Zappos brand to be about the very best customer service and the very best customer experience.

For Twitter, we don't really view it as a marketing channel so much as a way to connect on a more personal level, whether it's with our employees or our existing customers.

Initially, we started getting the entire company more involved with Twitter because we saw it as a great way to help build our company culture. But then we discovered it was also a great way to connect with
customers as well.

Stephan: Are you viewing this as an experiment to be evaluated over some trial period or are you committed to engaging with customers via Twitter over the long term?

Tony: We are committed to connecting with our customers on a personal level. The telephone is actually a really great way to do this, which is why we have our 1-800 number at the top of every page of our web site. We found that Twitter is another great way to do this, and if something else comes along in the future, then we would definitely explore that as well.

Stephan: How are Zappos employees using Twitter? Is there any competitive aspect amongst employees about follower acquisition? Is there an overarching theme to their tweets or are they just twittering about their cats? Do they twitter about Zappos products and blog posts? What's the level of supervision of them in their twittering? e.g. any employee guidelines for twittering? and are they trained? How do they know not to pose as a random consumer and post pro-Zappos tweets while hiding their corporate employee status? What would an employee have to tweet to get fired? What's the procedure for employees handling tweets directed directly at them from customers?

Tony: We do offer Twitter classes, but those are optional and are more for employees to learn how to sign up for Twitter and use various features and third party applications. We really don't give any specific guidelines except to tell them to use their best judgement.

It's up to employees what they want to Twitter about. As I mentioned earlier, the primary focus was to get employees to connect with each other, so the vast majority of the posts are about their personal lives.

In terms of what an employee would have to tweet in order to get fired, it would be if they did something that was not consistent with our core values, which are here.

But this is not twitter-specific: If an employee does anything that's not consistent with our core values, whether through twitter, telephone, or in person, then we need to consider whether that employee is Zappos material for the long term.

We currently don't have any standard procedures for responding to tweets from customers.

Stephan: What (if any) kind of ROI are you seeing by having your employees spend time being active on Twitter? What are your success metrics?

Tony: We're not really looking at short-term ROI in terms of sales. We're looking to form life-long relationships with our customers, and we think Twitter helps us do this.

However, we've also found that Twitter has been great for recruiting because people can get a glimpse into what our culture is like just by observing how we interact with each other on Twitter.

Stephan: What's the response from customers been? What was the response to your tweet asking for feedback to the idea of a zappos.org site that donates a percentage of the revenue to charity? Have you heard if any of your mentions of companies/products/restaurants resulted in an increase in sales for what you've endorsed?

Tony: The customers that are following @zappos on Twitter seem to really enjoy it because it allows them to interact with us on a much more personal level. I've heard anecdotally of people buying from us because of our Twitter presence, but as I mentioned earlier, we're not really looking at the short term ROI.

Stephan: Has Zappos embraced or have plans to embrace any other social networks on such a large scale? Digg? Propeller? Etc?

Tony: Not at this time.

Stephan: Could you describe some of the contests you've been conducting over Twitter and how successful you feel they've been? Any big plans for upcoming Twitter contests?

Tony: We don't have a formal contest plan or program.

Stephan: Have you considered Twitter as a customer service tool to crowd-source customer questions and set up an employee guru status where employees get points for answering customers' questions effectively?

Tony: Not at this time.

Stephan: You seem very open in sharing what you're doing and where you're going at any given moment. Do you feel too exposed sometimes by being so open? Do you fear making some statements on Twitter that might come back to haunt you in some way?

Tony: Almost any statement that's taken out of context can be interpreted negatively. But part of the beauty of Twitter is that you can see what we have all been doing over time and make your own judgement on what you think of Zappos based on the sum total of everything, not a single tweet.

Stephan: Do you randomly twitter stuff, or do you try to schedule entries consistently?

Tony: I think it's important to be authentic, so I don't have a schedule. I'll tweet if I feel like it, and I won't if I don't.

Stephan: What would be your advice to other CEOs out there who would like to try twittering?

Tony: Just be real and use it as a way to connect more deeply with people. Don't think of it as a marketing tool you have to leverage. And you actually have to be passionate about twittering or it's not going to work. So if you're not passionate about it, then don't do it.

I'd like to add some additional context to my last post on Social Media Power User "Hacks". In that post I provided some power user tips for social media marketing and optimization. These power user tips are meant to augment or supplement the necessary prerequisites of creating great content, being a valuable member of the social site/community, and being authentic your interactions (rather than deceitful or dishonest). Guerrilla tactics aren't a replacement for adding real value.

There are some ethical must-haves (underpinnings) of social media interaction such as engaging in meaningful conversation, instilling trust, being authentic, etc. Entering the social space without an internal moral compass is a recipe for disaster. Although such ethical must-haves wasn't part of my preso (you're rarely allocated more than 10 minutes to speak on an SES or SMX panel), don't think it's not important. It's THE most important thing.

Put another way, social media marketing isn't just a bunch of tricks and shortcuts, it's mostly about being adding value in an honest way, with the tricks and shortcuts added on to give you that little edge over your competition.

And when applying those aforementioned guerrilla tactics to gain the edge, you must exercise restraint and use good judgment. Don't just go hog wild and use every "trick in the book" and do it to excess.

Now consider this example of moderation versus excess... Sending a good friend a site with the StumbleUpon toolbar is totally acceptable. But compare that with sending an army of "friends" that you don't know a truckload of URLs to sift through. The latter is spammy, unethical, and reckless; you'd be foolish to engage in such behavior. You'd torch your account, burn relationships and ruin your reputation.

In line with that thought, you certainly don't need to employ the whole kit and caboodle of guerrilla tactics. For example, that tip for friending bands in MySpace may be totally unnecessary. Hopefully you can get to a critical mass of friends on MySpace without adding low-value friends (low value as in not likely to have meaningful interactions with you and not in your target market) such as all the bands and musicians that you like. But if you are at only a handful of friends and can't seem to get over the hump, it's nice to know that there's something you can do besides just sit and wait for people to friend you; you can proactively friend bands that you like. Granted an artist like Weird Al Yankovic isn't going to be terribly interactive with you, so at some point in the future you're likely to remove that friend from your ranks. Incidentally, that particular tip of friending bands came from a jewelry retailer I interviewed for the Marketing on MySpace article I wrote for MarketingProfs last year. Here's the quote:

...when starting off, you need to get Friends. It's kind of a bragging right on MySpace. If you have too few friends, it'll be tough to get the good ones—the ones who will end up buying from you. So, before you go after those, get a few hundred "bad" friends—bands are the easiest. They'll give you a respectable number on your Friends list, and will leave comments on your page—giving a little realism boost to your profile—making the addition of friends of the "good" type that much easier.

Finally, your focus in your social media marketing shouldn't be solely on gaining links. The links are mainly a byproduct of being a good social citizen. Of course they're still an essential byproduct nonetheless if you are an SEO. But it shouldn't be your main driver for participating in social media. Taking such a self-centered and short-sighted view will backfire. People will see through it. Operate by the principle of "pay it forward". Karma, in other words.

Live long and prosper.

Here in Toronto, I just finished my presentation on the Social Media Success panel. I shared some "hacks" for some social sites and services -- and when I say "hacks" -- I mean in the good sense of the word, not the evil sense. In other words, the way that the book publisher O'Reilly uses the word in their series of books such as Google Hacks. O'Reilly define "hacks" as "tools, tips, and tricks that help users solve problems." Such hacks tend to be aimed at intermediate-level power users. Here's what I covered:

Wikipedia

• Build up your street cred (long & virtuous contribution history, user profile page with Barnstar awards) before doing anything that could be construed as self-serving. It's not good enough to be altruistic on Wikipedia unless you demonstrate it. i.e. It has to be visible as a track record (i.e. do squash spam and fix typos and add valuable content, but don't do it anonymously).
• A link on a high-profile article is worth gold, as it builds your credibility and visibility with journalists and bloggers. Negotiate with an article's "owner" (the main editor who most polices the article) before making such an edit to get their blessing first.
• Monitor your articles-of-interest with a tool that emails you (e.g. trackengine, changenotes, urlywarning, changedetect). Don’t just rely on Wikipedia’s “Watch” function.
• The flow of PageRank can be directed internally within Wikipedia with Disambiguation pages, Redirects, Categories.
• Make friends. They will be invaluable in times of trouble, such as if an article you care about gets an "Article for Deletion" nomination.
• Don’t edit anonymously from work. This could come back to haunt you. Have you heard of WikiScanner??

Wikis
There are plenty of other wikis out there that are a lot more edit-friendly than Wikipedia where you could contribute valuable content, get links, and build relationships. Examples include ShopWiki, The NewPR Wiki, WordPress Codex, conference wikis such as the Web20Expo. Some even pass link juice, which is a nice bonus.

Digg

• Strip away all commercial links during the initial Digg swarm. Digg alpha geeks are repelled / repulsed by overly commercial sites.
• Friend popular Diggers. Better yet, if you can convince a popular Digger to submit your story, you'll significantly increase your chances of the story hitting the Digg home page. Consult the Top 100 list of Diggers for the most popular "power users".
• Time your presence on the Digg front page for daylight hours
• Craft a killer title using this formula from Muhammad Saleem: number + adjective + key phrase. E.g. “13 Most Chilling Haunted Hotels” or “16 Incredibly Unconventional Hotel Rooms”

StumbleUpon
You can "force" your friends to view your request to stumble a particular URL using the “Send to” function in the StumbleUpon toolbar. They have to view your URL before they can continue with their random channel surfing. Don't abuse it, or your tick your friends off.

YouTube

• With most popular YouTube promotions, YouTube gets the links and the original site usually does not. Stack the odds more in your favor by creating a microsite and making the microsite URL your username. e.g. “willitblend.com” is BlendTec’s username.
• Use as many tags as possible while still being accurate.
• Run a contest and recruit popular YouTube users to enter. Their video submission will get pushed out to all their subscribers. e.g. Intuit’s brilliant Tax Rap contest.
• Be creative but unpolished. A great example of this is SolarDave’s SES San Jose spoof with cut-out figures as the actors.
• Some other examples of successful YouTube videos include Eepybird’s Bellagio Fountain of Diet Coke + Mentos, BlendTec’s “Will It Blend?” series, the Heroes spoof commercial (“Zeroes”) – an NBC creation, and John Cleese Backup Trauma webisode

MySpace

• You need a good number of friends. No friends and you look like a loser, just like in the real world. You can establish critical mass quickly simply by friending bands. They’ll take anybody! Also models (male and female), fiction authors, actors, go-go dancers, and DJs work too. Find them using the “Search Profiles for People with Similar Career Interests” as part of MySpace’s Search function. You can remove them later on when you no longer need them.
• Long page load time will drive your profile visitors away. Disable HTML in your comments so users can’t fill your page with slow-loading pictures of LOLcats etc.

LinkedIn

• Add links to your website, blog, and one other URL and select “Other” so you can specify the anchor text. Don’t use the pre-selected categories “My website” etc.
• Add a LION (LinkedIn Open Networker) or two to your network. i.e. a “promiscuous sneezer” (in Seth Godin-speak). You can find LIONs on the TopLinked.com list. e.g. Flip Filipowski
• Add your email address to your “professional headline” so folks 4+ degrees away don’t have to waste an InMail to contact you.
• Questions posted to LinkedIn Answers can also serve your own purposes e.g. “We’re looking to hire an SEO analyst and are willing to pay whatever it takes to get a top-notch person. What job boards do you recommend?”

Flickr

• Always use tags – as many as possible while still being accurate. Put multiple word tags in surrounded by quotation marks
• Make descriptive titles for your photos
• Create thematic Sets for your photos
• Links on profile, set and collection pages are not nofollowed
• If the photo is location specific, go into Flickr’s tools and geotag the picture.
• Go into the Flickr set tools, and locate the location on the Yahoo! Map, then drag the picture onto the map to pinpoint its location.
• Creative Commons license your photo and put how you want the user to credit you in your photo’s description.

Meetup.com
Get involved with local Meetups and get your meetup.com member profile page linked from the meetup’s page, which will pass juice to your profile then on to your site.

Actually there are many social sites with profile pages that pass link juice. Here is a nice list of some of them.

Blogs

• First, get involved via comments and build rapport. Careful about making the commenter name keyword-rich. That can look spammy and get your comment deleted by the blogger.
• It's helpful from a PageRank perspective to comment on blogs that “dofollow” comment links. e.g. Mark Cuban’s Blogmaverick.com, Rimm-Kaufman Group's blog.
• Submit to blog carnivals. Host one (requires that you have a blog). Start a new one.
• Be a contributor to a group blog (e.g. BusinessBlogConsulting.com, Shop.org Blog)
• Be a guest blogger on someone else’s blog (e.g. TechGazing.com, Problogger.net)
• A Tip Jar indicates the blogger is desperate for cash and is open to having sponsors help support them.

Twitter

• Create a microsite dedicated to Twitter e.g. twitter.zappos.com
• Avoid getting your message junked by a recipient's email spam filter or adding to an already overflowing inbox by using Twitter's direct messages.
• Influence the top influencers in your Twitter network by influencing those in common with you. Identify the common “friends” with tweetwheel.com. You can send your request for them (e.g. to check out your latest post) as a direct message.

And finally, here is my PowerPoint from the session. Enjoy!

When you sign up for just about any social network, you have the option to upload an image that will represent you. No matter what the social site, you'll want to associate an image with your online identify. This image is your "avatar." It's your online persona. It's the way the online community will see you. With it, your profile appears more real, more tangible, more human. A good avatar will help people relate to you as a fellow human being, to take notice of you, to remember you, and to listen to what you have to say.

Sure, you could choose not to upload an image, but why would you? Then you'd be a faceless user that no one remembers or identifies with - making gaining traction in the network much more difficult.

You don't want to blend into the woodwork and be ignored, right?

Choosing your avatar doesn’t need to be difficult. Your image can be a simple picture of your face or just of something you like or identify with. Using the same avatar on many social networks helps brand you and helps people remember who you are. When people recognize your avatar across many platforms, they are more likely to want to be your friend and vote for your story submissions.

What avatar do I use? It depends. If it's a persona that I don't want necessarily tied to me / my company, then I go for an illustration - something distinctive. (No I'm not going to show any of them to you here.) If the profile is one I've associated with my own name, then I use this headshot photo of me:

With the amount of time needed to stay at the top of the game in social media, it is inevitable that you will eventually burn yourself out. No matter how much you enjoy being on these sites, and no matter how good of friendships you have made, after a while it becomes tedious. This happens most often to the users who have been trying to become power users, and it continues to happen to the super stars.

So what is the secret to no letting yourself burn out? Taking breaks. This might sound obvious but, if you are like me, social media can become an addiction if you let it. You enjoy the social aspect and you love the traffic benefits... and you constantly want more. You get so caught up in it; everything you do online revolves around getting to the front page of your favorite site.

There is an entire world outside of social media (believe it or not ) and you need the real one as much as you need the virtual one. It might sound crazy, but this weekend I'm going to be out in the sun WITHOUT my computer. I suggest you try it sometime. I might send a Twitter update or two from my cell phone, but don't count on it.

From a social media marketing standpoint, YouTube isn't an ideal social site because of the way it hoards PageRank (video pages can't have external links on them, and external links are nofollowed everywhere anyways, including on your user page), so it can't be leveraged to increase your site's rankings in the same way that a site like Digg can. That's why a lot of SEOs and SMOs prefer submitting link bait articles to social news sites versus making videos for YouTube. When a video goes viral, it's YouTube that tends to benefit in terms of inbound links rather than the original site. So, if the link juice and thus the search engine visibility benefits don't transfer to your site, what's the point you may ask?

True, YouTube limits your opportunities to add external links and then nofollows them. But you can be at peace with that fact. Instead, get the YouTube video itself to rank in the SERPs. Long live Google's "universal search"!

With universal search, YouTube now wields a lot of power to rank in Google's web search results -- which means that getting into video is a good idea. Video blogging or trying to create something that has the potential to go viral can be a great thing for your business.

I especially love the "plus box" in universal search -- the clickable plus sign in a YouTube video containing Google SERP that allows searchers to watch the video right there, without leaving the page. It's a great opportunity to make a brand impression over a course of minutes, while the viewer watches your video.

So how do you optimize video content?

Obviously the spiders can't see what you say in the video so how are these things going to rank? When you upload a video to YouTube, there are a few important areas to optimize are:

• the title
• the description
• tags (keywords)
• and your YouTube username

What you call your video, the words you use in the description, and what tags you assign it, will make a difference when it comes to its ranking in the SERPs and for which keywords.

Step 1: When coming up with a good title and description for your video, remember to use the words you are trying to rank for. This might sound obvious, but it's just like if you were writing good titles and descriptions for a regular page on a site you were trying to optimize. Do not be too exact, but don't be too broad either. YouTube has the ability to rank for some fairly competitive words especially if there are not many videos about it. At the same time, however, if you title your video "Sports video" you're just wasting your time.

Make copious use of tags on your videos (assuming the tags are all relevant to the content), spread your tags out among your clips, use adjectives to make your videos more visible to folks searching based on their mood, have some category descriptor tags (bearing in mind that YouTube's default search settings are Videos, Relevance and All Categories), match your title and description with your most important tags, and don't use throwaway words like "and" or "to."

Your YouTube username is an often neglected but important piece, because it can drive traffic to your site and help burn your brand in the viewer's brain. Consider the famous "Will It Blend?" videos from Blendtec, where they blend iPods, rake handles, light bulbs and the like. Blendtec cleverly set their username to "willitblend.com" to promote their microsite. Granted, it's not actually an external link (it still points to a YouTube user page), but it provides bloggers and journalists with a URL to use in their blog post or article besides (or in addition to) the YouTube video URL.

Read more on YouTube marketing in this article I wrote for MarketingProfs last year.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Neil Patel, leading practitioner in social media optimization, recently by phone and by email. Social media optimization is the new art of wielding tools, strategies and influence for the purpose of gaining visiblity on social media networks and sites like Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, NewsVine, Netscape.com, MySpace and even Wikipedia.

There was a great Wall Street Journal article in February talking about social media and the top influencers. Neil was featured as one of the top influencers on Digg.com.

When Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point (a book I highly recommend, btw!), wrote about "connectors" and the power that they wielded to influence large populations of people -- to infect them with new ideas, fashions, fads and so forth -- I really think of people like Neil as the online equivalent. When Neil submits something on Digg, it can yield 20,000-30,000 visitors and cause the featured story's web server to crash!

Making it on to the Digg.com home page is a laudable goal for social media optimization but, as Neil points out, it is not always appropriate or feasible. Digg users are alpha geeks. They are not going to be terribly receptive to articles about home decor or feng shui.

StumbleUpon is another great social media network worth targeting. For those who are unfamiliar with StumbleUpon, it is like channel surfing -- but on the Web. There is a plugin that you install on your web browser that provides a button that you can press to channel surf. As part of the installation process, you select which topics you are interested in. Then, when you hit the StumbleUpon button, you are taken to websites which are given a "thumbs up" by other StumbleUpon users and which are in your areas of interest. I've found some really neat websites just by "stumbling upon" them.

Each social media site network has its own quirks and nuances and politics. Getting high visibility on reddit requires a very different submitter profile, story, topic and so forth than Digg. Getting visibility in Wikipedia is a real quagmire. Stumble Upon is certainly more straightforward than Wikipedia but it has its own quirks and tricks.

Have a listen to my 15-minute podcast interview with Neil, and also check out the text interview (conducted separately by email) which is in the Netconcepts' Cool Friends library of interviews.

Neil will be speaking at the American Marketing Association's Hot Topic: Search Engine Marketing, in San Francisco on April 22, NYC on May 25, and Chicago on June 22. I highly recommend attending. I'm chairing the conferences, so I'll be there too!