WordCamp Minneapolis St. Paul has officially been announced! WordCamp is a community organized and hosted conference focused on discussing the open source WordPress blogging platform. The first WordCamp event was held in San Francisco in 2006. Since then, the event has spread around the world. Previously, the closest WordCamp to the Twin Cities was in Chicago.

WordCamp MSP will be on Saturday November 13, 2010 at the Eagan Community Center. Registration starts on March 1st, and the limited spots typically fill fast. Minneapolis is a very active online marketing community, and WordPress is a favorite tool in this crowd, so I predict a full house.

The organizers are looking for program ideas, speakers, volunteers and sponsors. For anyone looking to market to a highly targeted and enthusiastic online marketing and technology audience, this will be a great opportunity. Find out more at the WordCamp Minneapolis St. Paul website.

• Follow @wordcampmsp on twitter
• Become a fan on Facebook

In more ways than one, Facebook is becoming just as important as Google to online marketers. Today’s wake up call is news from Compete.com that Facebook is the leading referrer (source of traffic) to big portal and news sites like MSN and Yahoo!, sending significantly MORE traffic than Google. Social media, and Facebook in particular, is not a fad, or limited to Internet experts. Social media is becoming just as important as search to users, and in turn, should be a high priority to those planning and approving marketing campaigns.

Many businesses are taking a wait and see approach to social media. Decision makers want to see case studies and ROI, which is fine and good. There are plenty of examples of social media success, but truthfully many are relatively shallow this early in the game. Getting in the game and figuring out what works for your customer, for your audience and for your business is a process of trial and error. Laggards will have an uphill fight because lessons learned will not be easily applicable across businesses. And earning an audience is a long-term process, so getting started now will only help you when you do have formulas that are effective.

What is clear at this point is that social media is here, its a big online movement, and any serious online marketing campaign should be incorporating social elements.

E-commerce companies have seen a recent surge in traffic from Google and Bing, as the two dominating search companies up the ante with rich search results for shopping.  Google has released a number of important feature enhancements including showing product images in regular search engine results pages (SERP), offering Product Listing Ads in Product Search (formerly Froogle), and Ad SiteLinks, which allows retailers to display up to four links for each PPC ad.

Google allows e-commerce companies to upload their product databases for free using Google Merchant Services. Google serves up these products in their organic listings, including product descriptions, images, prices, shipping rates and local store results. To get products listed in Bing, merchants need to participate in Microsoft’s Bing Cashback program, which gives shoppers rebates that merchant’s fund through PPC ads. Yahoo! recently announced that they are partnering with PriceGrabber.com to power their popular Yahoo! Shopping site. This seems strange since Bing will soon power regular search for most of Yahoo! content properties.

Marketers are happy to see Bing’s emergence with rich features pushing Google to increase the pace of innovation. Having two strong companies dueling for marketer’s and shopper’s attention can only help those of us who focus energy on attracting business through search. The remaining shopping comparison sites, most of which require PPC funds to get products listed, have suffered as a result of consumers moving more and more of their product and local searches to the big guys.

Shopping sites losing share to search engines

(number of unique visitors in thousands)