Early this year, Burger King made waves with a "Whopper Sacrifice" Facebook app.  Google, meanwhile, has achieved Twitter omnipresence with 87 official accounts.  But not every company has tons of free hamburgers and/or employees lying around, so a like-named session at SES Chicago addressed the matter of "Social Media for the Little Guy."

(Coverage of SES Chicago continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Jennifer Evans Laycock, Search Engine Guide's editor-in-chief, started the session by expressing a dislike for the phrase "social media marketing."  She prefers to think of it as a dating experience - "social media dating for small business marketers," if you will - and went on to explain why.

Laycock believes there are seven common rules.  First, people must listen.  They must learn to be romantic (using what already exists for their own benefit), and not expect sex on the first date (think patience and persistence).  It's also important to be yourself (look at how Blendtec embraced its identity), to make yourself available, to seek out the right match, and to value long-term relationships.

Jessica Kornacki, the vice president of marketing for Endless Vacation Rentals by Wyndham Worldwide, spoke next.  She talked about brand awareness.  One good example of drumming it up involved YourFatChance.com and asking people to share stories involving bad luck.  Their stories were used to show that everyone needs a vacation.

Then Eric Brown, founder of Urbane Apartments, made his presentation.  Brown stressed, "You can participate in the conversation, but you can't control it."  You may not even want to.  After turning his blog over to the community, Brown saw site traffic go up 108 percent and actual rentals increase by 69 percent.

Finally, Brett Tabke, the CEO of WebmasterWorld.com, shared some thoughts (and numbers).  Tabke revealed that he spent absolutely nothing on marketing and ads for PubCon 2009, instead going all-Twitter-all-the-time.  Things went up 30 percent in a down year as a result, leading him to observe, "Retweet is a marketing arm."

Tabke also said, "Afternoons are disproportionately retweet heavy . . . time of day is everything."  And Tabke recommended Klout for Twitter analytics.

WebProNews Reporter/Anchor Abby Johnson contributed to this report.

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Obeying a court order and revealing the identity of a formerly anonymous blogger might not work out so well for Google.  Rosemary Port, who was exposed as the author of the now infamous "Skanks in NYC" blog, has said that she intends to sue the search giant for $15 million.

A little history: Port's blog uses Google's Blogger software.  Port used her blog to call model Liskula Cohen a skank.  Cohen then sued in order to find out who was behind the insult, and following a legal skirmish, a federal judge forced Google to hand over the relevant information.

That brings us to the $15 million lawsuit-in-the-making.  Port told George Rush, "Without any warning, I was put on a silver platter for the press to attack me.  I would think that a multi-billion dollar conglomerate would protect the rights of all its users."

And according to Port's lawyer, Salvatore Strazzullo, Google "breached its fiduciary duty to protect her expectation of anonymity."  He also said, "I'm ready to take this all the way to the Supreme Court."

Either a win or a loss could have a significant impact on how anonymous bloggers operate.  We'll keep an eye on the matter.

A little more than one month ago, we discussed how Google was asking regular people to give their thoughts about the National Broadband Plan.  Now, the FCC's doing something similar, with a fresh blog and Twitter account apparently intended to reach out to the public.

The Twitter account will perhaps be a sort of general-purpose thing, as it goes by the handle "fccdotgov" rather than anything broadband-related.  Still, since there have been three tweets in the five or so hours since the account went live, the FCC's done a good job of keeping it updated so far.

As for the blog, the first post explained, "Blogband is part of the FCC's commitment to an open and participatory process.  Blogband will keep people up-to-date about the work the FCC is doing and the progress we're making.  But we want it to be a two-way conversation.  The feedback, ideas, and discussions generated on this blog will be critical in developing the best possible National Broadband Plan."

It should be interesting to see how the FCC's critics respond to these overtures.  Given that the organization's often been called out of touch, it seems to be taking a good stab at modernizing its image.

Anyway, there are just 183 days left before the FCC is supposed to forward the National Broadband Plan to Congress, so don't wait too long before entering the conversation.

Tending to a website can take a lot of time and energy, and the people who run them deserve nothing but applause.  At the same time, though, blogs and RSS feeds can really benefit an SEO campaign, and so a session at SES San Jose focused on how and why to incorporate them.

Coverage of the SES San Jose conference continues at WebProNews Videos.  Stay with WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.

Amanda Watlington, who's the owner of Searching for Profit, suggested integrating blogging into your marketing efforts.  She warned that you can't view this as a tactical SEO project, and "me too" positioning and content won't do the trick.  Instead, think about the long term.

Watlington recommended creating an editorial battle plan to maintain quality and sustain readers' interest over a period of time.  Try to treat every post like a miniature campaign, too, using social media to announce your posts and extend your reach.  And show that you value your readers by responding to their comments in a timely manner, and perhaps highlighting popular posts.

As for some SEO-specific tips, she proposed leveraging the SEO benefits of the blog by customizing the templates, and using a keyword list when building content.

Dixon Jones, the managing director of Receptional LTD, then said his piece.  He started by pointing out that blogs can be pretty significant; Dave Naylor's blog has ties to more than 6,000 referring domains, for example.  People who are just getting started may want to know that Jones favors Drupal over WordPress, as well, and believes it's important to use multiple bloggers.

With regards to RSS feeds, Jones also added that RSS feed widgets can confer SEO benefits.

And that brings us to Sally Falkow, who's the president of PRESSfeed.  She emphasized that search engines pay attention to sites with RSS feeds.  "Share this" links are also helpful in a strictly human sense, since people will be able to drive new audiences to your website.

Next, the subject of blogging came up again thanks to Lee Odden, the CEO of TopRank Online Marketing.  Odden named a full eight blog link tips, starting with "quality in, quality out."  "Link out" was his second recommendation, since links are often seen as a currency among bloggers.  Tips three and four are then rather reciprocal: make a big list, and get on other big lists.

Recommendation five is trickier, but make a killer tool if possible.  Spread goodwill (and your name) by writing guest posts, too.  Power up retweets, and don't forget to network offline.

Finally, we have Jim Hedger, Webmaster Radio's lead blogger.  Hedger mentioned that he assigns each show a unique RSS feed, title, tags, and descriptive text.  But Hedger stressed that, whatever approach you take, you must know your audience.  From there, you can tackle the fine art of narrow-casting to a wide audience or wide-casting to a narrow one.

Blog posts that aren't less than two days old no longer have to be considered lost for all time.  Google's made the Custom Search AJAX gadget available to all Blogger users, and as a result, it's become much easier to call up entries from the past along with other info.

A post on the Official Google Blog explains, "You can configure this gadget to help your readers search all the information that's relevant to your blog - your posts, webpages that you link to, and sites that you link to from the sidebar - all in one shot.  When your readers search using this gadget, the results are displayed with the look and feel of your blog.  And they show up inline, so readers don't have to leave your blog."

 

Not bad, all in all.  Making it even better is the fact that adding the Custom Search AJAX gadget just involves opting to edit your blog's layout, clicking "Add a Gadget," and next selecting the new offering.  Plus, since the feature's undergone a period of testing thanks to Blogger in draft, there shouldn't be many bugs.

Rajat Mukherjee, a Group Product Manager, requested feedback, so feel free to let Google know what you think of all this.

In the meantime, test how it feels to have blog posts from beyond the last 36 hours remain findable.

One of the reasons Google gets so much press coverage is, frankly, that its representatives are so good about discussing corporate developments.  And now things have been taken an informative/slightly ridiculous step further with a blog post summing up Google's blogging habits this year.

 

Perhaps Susan Straccia, member of the Google Blog Team and author of the Official Google Blog post, is a fan of movies like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Synecdoche, New York.  There certainly seems to be a "meta" element here.

Anyway, Straccia wrote, "This is our 368th post of the year on the main Google blog, which is 23% more than in 2007.  In addition to more posts, we are thrilled to know that we have many more readers now - 78% more, to be exact.  The number of unique visitors jumped from 6,738,830 last year to more than 12 million (12,000,723) in 2008."

She later continued, "[N]othing caused as much excitement as our earlier-than-planned unveiling of Google Chrome.  This post alone had 1,735,093 unique visitors and generated 12% of our total-year pageviews on the blog! . . . .  And the Google blog network keeps on growing: 44 new blogs launched this year, for a total of 127 active company blogs."

Is your mind boggled yet?  Ah, well.  For better or for worse, we can probably expect to see another introspective post and some even bigger numbers next year.