A visionary in the world of Social Media and PR, Shankman is the founder of HARO the largest free source repository for journalists anywhere in the world. During his keynote, he made some great points on the importance of listening and connectivity for brands, individuals, and corporations–in real-life or on the internet.

Shankman’s 4 Critical Points of Social Media are:

1-Transparency (openness)

2-Relevance (pertinent, connected, and applicable conversation)

3-Brevity (keep it short and to the point)

4-Top of Mind (Being on individual’s mind for certain topics and reference)

Peter’s advice for companies “engaging” in Social Media:

-Give stellar customer service

- Do you know your customer?

-  What do they want?

-  And how can you deliver it?

Here are some great highlight quotes  and antecdotes from his speech:”

- When he became editor of AOL news, without any experience, he went in every day and tried something new. “If it went well, we did it again. If not, we didn’t.”

- “You can’t make anything viral. But you can make something good.” Shankman gave the example of the video produced by Matt Hardy for Stride Gum as quality work that gained mass popularity:

-”I have ADOS - Attention Deficit OOH SHINY!” As proclaimed by Investor’s Business Daily as “crazy, but effective”, Peter is a great example of someone who uses his ADHD to his advantage.

-”We are going as fast as we can. If something gets in our way we find a way around it and keep going.”

-”In my personal experience, social media does not exist. In my opinion, social media is a way to screw up in front of a lot more people a lot faster.”

-”HARO has taught me that 99% of people are intelligent and mean well, and that I would take a bullet for; but then there is the 1% that are just stupid.”

-He sold t-shirts that said “It sank. Get over it.” during the release of Titanic, the movie. He sold 500 shirts in 6 hrs  at $10/shirt in Times Square. Then called a reporter to pitch story, who asked him immediately whether he had a website, which he promptly built. He then crashed a majority of his hosting provider’s servers and was featured on the front page of the newspaper.

-”When people have a horrible flight experience they wait until it lands and get on their phones, ‘That was the worst flight ever!’” He makes this point because he says people aren’t miserable until they have made others miserable–by proclaiming bad news.

Shankman said that our job within social media is no longer to do our own PR, but instead to get others to do it for us. If you walk into a bar and tell someone, “I’M AWESOME!”  They’ll throw their drink in your face and carry on.  But instead if a hot girl’s best friend looks at her and says, “He’s AWESOME!”, you will go home with her. That’s having someone do your PR.

The best way to accomplish this is to provide stellar customer service to begin with. Find out what they want, help them get it and they’ll do your PR for you.

He closed the speech that social media will become like a lava lamp in which  globules of oil will automatically control irrelevance–some globules will stick together, some will sink, and some will float according to conversation and relevance.

For a more candid look at the keynote, take a look at Lisa Barone’s blog post.

1. Unclear call to action.

Focus your visitors on one thing. What it is that you want people to do on each of your pages? 1-800 Flowers is one of the big companies that was messing this up (on their product detail page).

Use Attention Wizard heatmap to find where people are looking on your page.

2. Too many options – steps.

Reduce the friction between the user and the product they are seeking. Show main categories that are most popular on your page – not every subcategory and product on each page.

3. Asking for too much information.

Require less information in your forms to increase conversions. Do not ask questions that are not absolutely unnecessary, or inappropriate. Read Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing.

4. Too much text.

Do not make your visitors to suffer. Do not write in paragraph form. Instead use headlines and bullet points.

5. Not keeping your promises.

Intent is the number one factor in conversion. If a user clicks on a pay-per-click ad that says “Best Digital Camera” then they expect to come across the best digital camera. If they land on a page that does not match that query and the promise of seeing reviews of the best digital cameras, then they will promptly leave.

6. Too many visual distractions.

Use visual hierarchy to organize information, just like in an outline. Only important things should be bright and bold. Use other colors/sizes to organize information. Do not make everything equally important or unimportant.

7. Lack of trust.

Provide trust symbols in visible places (top 2/3 of the area visible through a monitor). This can be a “McCaffee Secure” symbol, brands that you work with, mentions in the press – whatever will increase trust by association.

For real-time news from Affiliate Summit East 2009, follow me on Twitter!

More and more Fortune 500 companies are having trouble connecting to their target audience. What it comes down to, as Brogan said, is an attention war against “everything in the world” – spam emails, real world events, and their friends. Companies are in constant competition against other attention grabbers. The way to reach them is ultimately by building trust.

To begin a social media campaign, the key is to stand out. Brogan outlined the following steps:

• - Find your value differentiation. What makes you special?
• - Create a new word for yourself. If all of your competitors are using the same words to describe their services, come up with something new and different.
• - Learn the system. How can you dominate the field?

The next step is to get on the inside. It is key to make your target audience feel like you are part of their “clique”.

• - Find the agent zero. Who are the influencers in your target audience?
• - Seek frictionless distribution. What is the shortest path to your target audience?
• - Be everywhere – create & maintain bonds. It is important that once you are a member of a community, that you upkeep the bonds that you’ve created and continue to build new ones.
• - All knowledge is vocabulary. Having insider vocabulary is key to being accepted by a community.

It is important to use each success to build off of like poker chips and move to a bigger table.

• - Build off of your previous success.
• - Never start from nothing.
• - Its all chips: wining the game is table stakes for the next game  (always go to bigger table). See success as a currency – Twitter followers, group members, etc. – instead of just looking at money as a currency, look at social currency that can also be used to leverage future successes.

Becoming agent zero is the key to success in the long run.

• - Be the priest  – build the church. Become the go-to place for your target audience.
• - Be the relationship before the sale. Don’t always mention your company, instead just focus on building relationships.
• - You live or die by your database. If you are following someone on Twitter, make sure you also connect with them on LinkedIn, etc so that you have more influence in more places.
• - Be part of everyone’s 150. You need to be within those 150 people who matter to someone.At this point – around 10:50, Brogan started running out of time since the speech began a few minutes late.

Another key to becoming a trust agent, is the human aspect of social media.

• - Connect people constantly.
• - Share instead of hoard.
• - Practice simple touch points of loyalty.
• - Self aware vs self involved. When meeting someone considered to be a “celebrity” it is key to treat them as normal people, just like yourself.

The ultimate outcome of social media work should be to developing a mass following.

• - Give your ideas handles. Make yourself understood easily by giving them the tools to be part of your following.
• - Teach them to fish. Help your audience do what you are doing by providing insight.
• - Bring your own dial tone. Do not trust Twitter, Facebook, or any other social network. It is about where the people are, not what the medium is.

Brogan also presented his trust equation. It builds off of social capital and the web, which has the potential for exponential growth:

Trust equation:

• trust = social capital
• social capital + web = links
• social capital + web = social proof
• social capital + web = a big f’n network

For a more candid look at the keynote, take a look at Lisa Barone’s blog post. To get real time news from Affiliate Summit East 2009, follow me on Twitter.