Once again another convention rocks the San Francisco Bay Area. And what you may suspect may be an ongoing rant about what I’ve learned relating to social media, it’s not going to happen…well maybe.
The 2009 edition of the Search Engine Strategies conference came into town with a roar as hundreds, if not thousands, visited the McEnery Convention Center in beautiful San Jose. A three-day event, I found it quite tiresome although that’s probably because I had to wake up early each day to drive down to San Jose since I live in San Francisco – as did probably most of the attendees that lived in the area. Nevertheless, I looked forward to hearing the latest and greatest ideas coming out of search and how businesses could take advantage of it.
When I was planning my conference, I found myself very much overwhelmed by the schedule. With at least five different tracks to choose from, it seemed nearly impossible to decide – not because the organization was cluttered, but because the titles of some were pretty good that I needed to really look at the descriptions to figure out which ones to go to. But looking back, the tracks were pretty educational – by that I mean that it offers you different themes to choose from at a different “evolutionary” level. There was one where you could learn search fundamentals or perhaps get educated on search & community. Or from a more top-level and possibly “strategic” standpoint, you could look at search for the C-suite, or learn about metrics through the search & measurement track. The last track gave you a glimpse into search’s future with search & the future.
For the most part, the sessions and the keynotes were a hit or miss. I happened to catch the first two keynotes featuring the author of Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky who presented an awesome talk about how technology has changed our behaviors and how companies could potentially adapt. It really helped to set the tone of the conference and interesting how there was a bias in his talk towards social media at a search conference, but many of what was said could be adopted towards search as well. The next day’s keynote featured Google’s Business Product Management Director for AdWords, Nicholas Fox who spoke on what Google is doing in the search industry – yes, you read that right. I imagine that most of his talk was Google self-promotion informing the audience of the greatness and achievements made by the company.
The sessions themselves were actually pretty good. The first one I attended was related to the Adaptive CMO: New Digital Marketing where I got to hear search advertising from the vantage point of Brian Fetherstonhaugh, the Chairman & CEO of OgilvyOne Worldwide, whose takeaway was that the traditional “Four P’s” of marketing no longer were sufficient to be successful and that search marketing had a long way to go to be considered “mainstream” by CMOs.
After Fetherstonhaugh’s session, I stayed on that track to get a better understanding of what marketing officers are facing so I attended The View From the CMO’s Office which featured three successful marketing professionals, but I felt didn’t really offer much in the form of value that was needed to be actionable. From what I remember, it seemed to me that they were pretty much saying that if you wanted to try a search marketing campaign, then go ahead and approach your CMO – they’re ordinary people as well.
SES had an interesting panel called Turning the Social Web Into Real ROI that didn’t really offer a lecture-style seminar. Instead, you were treated to life lessons learned by people out there “in the field” that you can take back as examples. I felt that the value people got from this panel was by asking them questions about how they addressed a certain issue – almost like an interactive case study.
One of the cool things about SES is that they have all these sponsored sessions so the content should be pretty awesome. ClickZ had sponsored a whole track on the first day that focused on social media & video strategies. Facebook was not going to be any different, so one of them I decided to check out. In sitting down at the Facebook Ads: Reaching Prospects Earlier in the Decision Cycle, the focus was on (what else?) Facebook’s ad system and how advertisers could be more targeted and apply a better search execution to achieve a higher click-through rate and even higher ROI.
The last session I attended featured a pretty good panel of folks that centered around Social Media: Managing Conversations & Reputations When the User Is In Control. This panel featured HubSpot’s own Mike Volpe, Serengeti Communication’s director of social media Liana Evans, the VP of Digital Voodoo Dave Evans, and a long-time veteran of shoe retailer Zappos, Brian Kalma. While the centerpiece of SES was around search, this panel discussed social media as an extension of search and how to use it to enhance reputation and engage customers in conversations. Life lessons were also taught during this 1hr and 15 min discussion.
Overall, the SES conference was a pretty good one that I’d love to be a part of next year. Most of the conferences that I go to emphasize social media as simply social media, but the panelists here didn’t really worship social media as a medium, but rather how does search marketing play into the whole profession. They leveraged other mediums to create great panels. Plus, how many conferences do you go to that teach you stuff about search?
But there are downfalls to the SES conference that would hinder me from attending again. The wi-fi in the convention center was up, but wasn’t up to speed and the rooms seemed so far apart from each other (I’m sure that was probably just my own impression). But where were the electrical outlets for people to charge their laptops, phones, cameras while in sessions? It was nice to have blogging stations way outside of the actual rooms, but you think people are going to take time to go out there to post stories rather than live blog? This isn’t the 1940s or so when reporters rushed out of the building to find a pay phone to call in their story.
Rumor has it that SES will move to San Francisco next year. If that’s the case, I’m sure that it’ll be better. I’m not done learning about search yet.
Photo Credit: All photos featured here are courtesy of Kenneth Yeung.
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