Last Monday I flew into Long Beach Airport to attend SMX Social Media 2008 in Long Beach.

All in all, the event was very good. It was a small group but it really gave the attendees a chance to corner us and ask all their questions.

I spoke a little on Tuesday about the various categories for social media linkbaits and the process of actually creating a linkbait.

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I won’t go through the entire break down of the session, basically because if you want to know, then you should come see us speak, but I will link you to one of the session recaps here – Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites.

Crafting a Social Linkbait

Research: Content creation is the most important part of your linkbait campaign. Your content has to perform. It has to get the links. Use Google to search Digg and Reddit by using a site search. It helps you dig (heh) into the content a little deeper.

Title and Description: The most important thing you can do with your content is title it appropriately. You can create titles that have the keywords in there even if they’re not necessarily related to what you’re trying to push. Don’t get too clever or crafty with your titles. Make it short and sweet and to the point. It should be focused and have a point so that it tells people what your content is about immediately. Capitalizing the first letter of each word can help it stand out from the crowd and get someone to click on it.

Interact and Share: Once you create the content, you’re going to submit it to a social community. You’re going to think you’re done but you’re not. You have to follow your piece and interact with it. If someone comes in and buries it, you have to make sure that doesn’t start a trend of others doing the same thing. Follow the comments, participate. Get your friends to leave positive comments. Once you actually submit to a social media site, you’re no longer worried about anything but votes. If you have to throw in a link to more information to get users excited, do it. The social news site all say they hate gaming, but they provide options that allow the activity. Like Diggs, “shout” feature, for example. These features are in place for a purpose. Use them.

I promised a few people I would post the slides up here so that they could download them so here they are:

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I really enjoyed having the opportunity to meet and talk with Steven Marder, CEO of Eurekster (Swicki). We ended up speaking for a couple hours about social media and social search.

I had a really great time at the conference and enjoyed meeting and talking about social media with so many like minded people. Can’t wait to see you all again at the next conference or somewhere down the road.

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