This year a number of topics specific to online business strategies (of which SEO, social media, data mining and other such great things) come to mind. They are on my drawing board and will receive attention as the year unfolds. Last year allowed for some foundations to be laid and now everything looks a lot clearer. If you’re an expert and have a particular interest in any of these and would like to join in the discussion by posting something here, drop me a line.
In no particular order:
- Keyword research = moving away from traditional user volume data and investigating what can be mined from the web. There are a lot of conversations going on and I reckon that there are useful metrics that haven’t even been poked with a stick yet. What other interesting data can be used? Plenty to do in this area.
- Data visualisation = what is the best way to represent our data and how can we easily and quickly draw conclusions from it? I’m not talking infographics, I’m talking raw data manipulation and representation. The next step should be obvious even to the layman by just looking at it. A specific area of interest here is sitemaps for example.
- Social media metrics = what is the most valuable way to measure the success (or failure) of a social media campaign? Such metrics should also help us see how to improve on the status quo. What tools are genuinely useful and which ones just add more noise to an already chaotic landscape?
- Semantic web = no surprise here! Can we dream up some SEO specific tools to make RDF adoption easier? Can we make use of ontologies? Have you done something interesting with that? How can businesses leverage this online? This is a big open landscape with plenty of room for good ideas.
- Behavioural metrics = going beyond your analytics account, what can you say about your website or app users? How do we measure emotive levels effectively without being invasive? Why do people like or dislike certain things? How does WOM propagate throughout the web for users to reach your site?
- Online communities = how do they differ and how do you ensure that your will succeed? How do you tie in the social aspect of a website with the commercial aspect? How can we ensure that they remain peaceful? What really is ROI here? What is a good ecosystem audit?
- Language = here I’m interested in everything to do with tone and register. I’m also really interested in structuring content effectively and affectively on a website whilst keeping in line with user expectation and behaviour. How do your users speak and what do they expect from your site?
- Online reputation = sentiment analysis is a big favourite here. What different methods and tools can be used to do this effectively? How do we show ROI on this seemingly “fluffy” data?
If you are an expert or you have an interesting tool that you’ve built and you want to showcase it, get in touch and introduce yourself. You don’t have to be a computer scientist and you don’t have to be an SEO either. I would like to present some high quality information to SFS readers though, so I ask that you are an expert in your chosen field.
All contributing experts will receive a fully funded cup of joe from an outlet of their choice 
If you have a really loopy idea that strangely makes a lot of sense, I want to hear it too!
The point of this is to showcase some interesting tools and methods and also to give the opportunity to some really exciting people to share what they are passionate about and inspire us all.
