Archive for March, 2009
There are some great upcoming social media and search marketing events next month. You can get takeaway some valuable lessons from any of these events that can help you grow your business! Check back with us for more upcoming events in the next coming months.
April 1, 2009 – NextWeb’s coming to Philadelphia and this is their first event in PA at Mikey’s American Grill & Sports Bar.
Entrepreneurs and professionals from all verticals can come network and discuss Social Media, Networking, and New Technologies. Join them for networking, appetizers, and drink specials all night long. This is a ticketed event. Tickets cost $10 and can be purchased here.
April 21-23, 2009, San Francisco: ad:tech is thrilled to partner with Danny Sullivan and his groundbreaking SMX conference series to bring you the current techniques, best practices, and emerging trends for SEO and SEM, local search, mobile search, and how social media and search are being utilized in concert to create entirely new marketing platforms. The opening keynote features Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia (Wikipedia reviews).org, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy and CEO of Hulu! Use code: BRSFZ5 to save 20%: www.ad-tech.com/sf
April 28-29, 2009, San Francisco: The Inbound Marketing Summit is where the online marketing community gathers to solve today’s marketing and business communications challenges. Your event features the brightest minds in the business, including world-renowned authors and practitioners, as well as leaders from some of the companies already using the new tools and strategies. This fast-paced and information-packed event is your check-up on your existing business communications strategies, and your prescription for the coming months. Speakers include: Tim O’Reilly, Charlene Li, Loic LeMeur, Tim Ferriss, Jason Falls, Brian Solis, and many more. For more details please visit their website (and use code MASH200 for a $200 discount!)
April 28, 2009, New York City: The second Mashable NextUp NYC will bring together will bring together 4 successful local New York startups, Snooth, Behance, Boxee and Aviary. The night will comprise of networking, a presentations session from the startups followed by a panel moderated by Mashable’s Editor-in-Chief, Adam Ostrow. There are only 300 public tickets available per event. Tickets are on sale now through 92YTribeca, a non-profit organization.
Just getting to read the March 9 issue of ComputerWorld magazine… there’s an interesting article by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols speculating that Linux-based phone operating system by Google – Android – is being considered for development as an OS for mobile Internet devices like netbooks. Asus Computers is already working on the marriage of Android with the “desktop” environment so, by year’s end, it’s thought that someone may come out with a low-cost laptop powered by Android.
I do wonder about software… would the proposed netbooks run purely on web-based solutions? Run OpenOffice? I suppose the answer would be whatever the Google phone can use could be run. Let’s see where this goes.
This year’s Search Engine Strategies New York was here and is gone again. This year’s was held – as in previous years – at the Hilton Towers Hotel on 53rd and 6th (Avenue of the Americas) in the heart of the city. This year’s event ran from Tues the 24th through Thurs 26th with an additional, optional day of sessions on Monday the 23rd.
I had blogged about 2009 SEO events on another of my sites, CaseDetails.com and listed SES as the first major show of the year. It featured industry leaders commenting on topics along the lines of SEO 101, small business, metrics/analytics and commerce within the “fear economy”. The analytics & vertical track sessions were the ones I found to be most informative with, specifically, the comments by Scott Brinker of ion interactive & Ian Harris, CEO, Search Laboratory Ltd during the Advanced B2B session to be particularly interesting. Their focus was on maximizing PPC traffic through customer segmentation – using A/B landing page testing to find ways to help customers easily identify that you have a product… a message just for them. The discussion went deeper into use of multi-page landing pages and how they, contrary to perception, may end up increasing your conversions 3×4 times over baseline.
The expo had lots of good vendors, weighted heavily toward PPC software providers (”SEM solutions”) but I actually spent some time talking to the teams from Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery, SiteCore and Blogsvertise.com. Of course, industry gorillas Google, Yahoo!, MSN and even Facebook were there, but oddly sequestered to the 2nd floor expo hall – oddly detached. Hearing rumors of the decline of Idearc, I interested to see their booth open and bustling with optimistic staffers.
I didn’t get to attend any of Thursday’s sessions, but my overall experience was just a hare better than so-so for Tues and Wed. The vendors were sharp and the sessions had bright spots, but much of it seemed to be the same old story. Market research & website positioning is important, conversions are king and, as the search landscape matures, proof of value ultimately relies on providing return on investment in a measurable way.