City's Digital Media Community on a Mission

Dan Freund has always known that Portsmouth is a really savvy Social Media city with thousands of Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare users who can't get enough tweets and posts about their city.

Now the Portsmouth digital media specialist and several other digital media professionals in the Portsmouth area are combining their time and talents to get a company called SEOMoz in Seattle, Wash., to visit.

From now until Thursday, July 26, Freund and other members of the Portsmouth's digital media community are working to get as many city residents to tweet to SEOMoz from Portsmouth to prove Portsmouth's worthiness as a future destination for that company's members.

On his Facebook page, Freund wrote, "...if you would be so kind as to create your own content in this effort, please be sure to use the hashtags #mozcation AND either #03801moz or #seonh. It's most important that the folks in Seattle see #mozcation and realize you're tweeting from NH. So have at it."

Freund said Wednesday that Brian DeKoning of Raka is putting together a blog that will contain some of Freund's videos as part of the official submission that will be sent to SEOMoz. Freund has also created a Storify post on his web site. So far, hundreds of tweets from members of the Portsmouth area's digital media community bearing those hashtags have been generated since the effort was launched on Monday, he said.

The Seattle company specializes in developing search engine optimization software and is running a contest to determine which two cities they will visit for what Freund describes as a "family MozCation - kind of like a vacation, but one in which most of th...e conversation centers around SEO software, analytics, measurement."

is pretty established, but if Freund and other digital media folks who live in the city can get SEOMoz to come here, the city's Social Media status would soar to new dizzying heights.

Freund said that if they are successful in getting SEOMoz to come to Portsmouth, it will benefit the city's business community because they will learn more about how search engine optimization technology benefits them. "There are a lot of businesses that don't understand how search affects their businesses," he said.

Freund is confident that Portsmouth can make this happen because their efforts have already been picked up on SEOMoz's radar. "We have a legitimate shot to be selected," he added.

SEOMoz would equally benefit from coming to Portsmouth because Freund said "we have such a high concentration of socially media savvy people who connect on a regular basis."

He also said that regardless of the outcome of the effort to get SEOMoz to come to Portsmouth, "the real take away is that his is an experiment" where the digital media community can learn how best to help Portsmouth area businesses utilize search and other digital media tools.