SEM Industry: Trade Shows

As you plan you schedule for the rest of the year, consider attending SES Berlin, which will be held November 24-25, 2009, and SES Chicago, which will be held December 7-11, 2009.

For a sneak preview, watch the interview with Matt McGowan, VP Publishing at Incisive Media, by John Mulligan of SEO-PR. They talk about the upcoming SES Berlin and SES Chicago events.

McGowan says after having SES shows in various cities in Germany, including Hamburg and Munich, it was time to schedule one in Berlin. He says attendance is expected to be around 500 for SES Berlin in November. And SES Chicago is expected to attract thousands of marketing executives, managers, professionals, specialists and consultants in December.

Matt McGowan, VP Publishing, Incisive Media previews SES Chicago and Berlin ‘09

Now, why should you go to one of these shows at the end of the year?

There are a dozen reasons, which I will roll out over the next several weeks. But, let me begin by singing the SEO version of “A Partridge in a Pear Tree.”

If you read my article in Search Engine Watch back in January 2007, you already know the words. If you didn’t, they are: “A Ranking in the Top Three.”

If the search industry didn’t change so rapidly, then you could attend one or two Search Engine Strategies conferences a year and stay up-to-date on the latest market trends.

But, Google issues two to four press releases a month and two to four blog posts a week that impact your search engine ranking or represent a new marketing opportunity. For example, Google Fast Flip was announced just this week.

Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting.

At the same time, Google provides aggregation and search over many top newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, and Newsweek. And it gives you the ability to share content with your friends and community.

Fast Flip also personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content from sources, topics and journalists that you seem to like. In short, you get fast browsing, natural magazine-style navigation, recommendations from friends and other members of the community and a selection of content that is both serendipitous and personalized.

Google has also made a mobile version of Fast Flip with tactile page flipping for the iPhone and Android-powered devices, so you can browse on the go.

And, Microsoft isn’t shy about making announcements early and often, either. Just this week, Microsoft introduced a new Visual Search feature on its Bing search engine to make Web content more visually appealing. Although not directed at news, it displays some categories of search results using thumbnail images instead of text.

So, if you attended SES San Jose in August 2009 and don’t go to another event until SES New York in March 2010, I estimate that you’ll be about seven months behind the eight ball when you get there.

Now, if you don’t mind letting your search engine rankings drop below the top three listings for several months — or if you aren’t worried that your competitors will take advantage of new opportunities before you find out about them — then happy holidays.

However, if falling behind in a rapidly changing world does concern you, then take a serious look at attending SES Berlin, which will be held November 24-25, 2009, and SES Chicago, which will be held December 7-11, 2009.

If anyone asks you why you’re going, simply sing out that you want to get or need to keep “A Ranking in the Top Three.”

A month has passed since SES San Jose 2009 — and you might think that all the good stories to tell have already been told.

But most of the press and blog coverage focused on the conference side of the Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo. And the trade show exhibitors also had a lot of news to share over on the Expo side of the event.

Now, instead of uploading all the videos from SES San Jose to YouTube in the same week, we’ve learned that it’s better to upload a few each week to SESConferenceExpo’s Channel on YouTube. This enables viewers to digest the major stories at a reasonable rate, while also giving them a reason to subscribe to the YouTube channel to get ongoing updates more than five times a year.

Among the trade show exhibitors with good stories to tell was Jennifer Whaley of Century Interactive. John Mulligan of SEO-PR interviewed her on the exhibitor floor at SES San Jose 2009.

Century Interactive links website sessions to phone calls and tracks those phone calls, chats and clicks that result from print and web campaigns. Whaley described the types of clients that Century Interactive caters and, in particular, those clients who don’t sufficiently understand clickthroughs and bounce-rates but understand phone calls and helps them understand what key influences are driving their business such as keyword terms, referring websites, etc.

Whaley went on to describe the analytics that Century Interactive uses when servicing their clients; this includes a java script loaded on a website which captures each website session. To learn more about Century Interactive’s innovative Web technology, watch the video interview below.

Jennifer Whaley, Century Interactive, on driving phone calls to your website at SES San Jose 2009

Another trade show exhibitor with a good story to tell was Steve Wiideman, owner of Local Splash. We gave him a mic at SES San Jose 2009 and asked him to talk about SEO Expert and Local Splash.

He discussed his local search engine marketing solution for businesses that are regional or local. Local Splash has a proprietary application that helps businesses get higher ranking in the map section of Google, Yahoo and Bing. Local Splash also helps businesses by verifying their information, lock down the account and optimize it so it gets better ranking.

For example, by syndicating a client’s business information across the Web to business directories and search sites, Local Splash in turns adds new destinations to their list such as superpages and over time, ranking improves. Local Splash also looks at categories for all of your competitors to understand the best possible sequence of categories that a business can be placed in.

Steve Wiideman on Local Splash, search engine marketing solution at SES San Jose 2009

Another trade show exhibitor with a good story to tell was Tim Musgrove of Digger. We also gave him the mic at SES San Jose 2009 to tell it.

Musgrove discussed the free trial accounts that Digger gave away at the conference. He also talked about Digger’s auto-generated topic pages which auto-creates landing pages for content-rich websites.

Tim Musgrove, Digger, at SES San Jose 2009 on semantic technology and free trial software

Wendy Roe of Pixelsilk also talked about exhibiting for the first time at SES San Jose 2009. She discussed the company’s content management system.

Pixelsilk debuted Bruce Clay’s SEO toolset inside the company’s Search Advice so you can get advice and recommendations for your SEO next to the content editor.

Wendy Roe, Pixelsilk, on exhibiting for the first time at SES San Jose 2009

And last but not least, Mulligan interviewed Frank Rocco of Adfare Video Solutions in front of the exhibitor’s booth at SES San Jose 2009.

Adfare produces video ads in a short time frame and deliver them in less than $150 per video. Adfare can produce cheap video ads because it can take existing content, anything the customer or advertiser has online, and download those images or footage and build a script and produce a high powered, effective video within 48 hours.

Adfare works across a variety of platforms, including mobile. In the interview below, Rocco discussed one example of local video being used in a mobile platform.

Frank Rocco, Adfare Video Solutions discusses cheap video advertising at SES San Jose 2009

There are more good stories to tell — but I save those for another day. Hey, it’s a long time between now and SES Chicago 2009. So, come back again for an update.

SES San Jose 2009 ended last week, but attendees are still talking about the conference and expo. And they’re giving the event high marks.

You can get a sense of that by looking at the photos in the SESConferenceSeries’ photostream on Flickr. For example, hundreds of marketers attended the Extreme Makeover: Live Site Clinic on Thursday, August 14, 2009. It was moderated by Elisabeth Osmeloski, Director of Online Media at Advertures in Search, and speakers included Matt Cutts, the Software Engineer Guru at Google, Tiffany Lane, Search Quality Team at Google, and Greg Boser, President of WebGuerrilla LLC at the session.

You can also get a sense of the quality of the conference content by watching the YouTube videos below that feature attendees of SES San Jose 2009. Each was handed them the microphone and asked what they thought of the event.

Greg Alexander, The Net Impact, on attending SES San Jose ‘09

Aditi Jasra of Web Analytics World describes attending SES San Jose ‘09


Ryan Guerra shares his experience attending SES San Jose 2009

Tiffany Phan, CEO Training, describes her experience at SES San Jose 2009

Michael Balistreri, iMOS, describes his first experience at SES San Jose 2009

Lauren Balistreri, iMOS, on attending SES San Jose 2009

Patricia Santos Fontes, Globo.com and Ines Goncalves, Google on being at SES San Jose 2009

Now, if you’ve just received the email from Jackie Ortez asking you to fill out the SES San Jose Survey, please take the time to respond. The organizers of the conference use the feedback from attendees to get a better perspective on the event. As Jackie says in her email, “Your opinion is highly valuable to helping us continue to improve the SES conferences.”

Over the past couple of years, I’ve seen speakers and whole sessions dropped because attendees didn’t give them high marks. So, treat the SES San Jose Survey seriously — because the results are really, really taken seriously.

Truth is stranger than fiction. Yesterday, Clay Shirky gave the keynote speech at SES San Jose 2009. In his keynote, he discussed the Grobanites for Charity, which works with Josh Groban fans and the Josh Groban Foundation to raise money and support underfunded charities.

If you don’t know who Josh Groban is, ask your daughter or mother. He is a Grammy-nominated U.S. singer-songwriter.

The video interview with Shirky was uploaded to YouTube yesterday.

The Deon Designs blog embedded the video in a post entitled, “Clay Shirky discusses the shift in user behavior in a Web 2.0 World at SES San Jose 2009.”

This triggered a large number of tweets — and 28% of the views the video has received so far have come from Twitter.

Another one of the external links to the video is from the Josh Groban Official Message Board.

Oh, and the first comment on the video came from freim93, who said, “Very cool shout out to the Grobanites!!!!” The second comment came from Rocker742, who says, “Yeah!!! Grobanites for Charity rocks!”

And 16% of the views of the video can from YouTube Search. And the top search term is “Josh Groban.” The second term is “SES San Jose.”

So, Shirky is an adjunct professor at New York University in the graduate interactive telecommunications program, where he teaches courses on the interrelationships of social and technological networks, particularly how they shape culture and vice versa.

But, this video interview with him could be just another example for his course. Check it out. This is the link between search and social that everyone has been talking about.

Clay Shirky discusses the shift in user behavior in a Web 2.0 World at SES San Jose 2009

If you register to attend SES San Jose 2009 by Friday, July 24, you can save up to $200. But you already knew that.

The bigger question that you — and other Chief Marketing Officers — are looking to answer is this: How do you measure the return on investment in going to a search engine marketing conference?

Now, measuring marketing ROI isn’t a hard science. It’s more of a social science. But there some reasonable approaches that you can use to figure out the value of attending SES San Jose 2009.

Ask yourself this question: Can I afford to skip this event? The answer will depend on how rapidly you think the search engine marketing industry is changing. And, unless you’ve been cryogenically frozen for the past year, you’ll know that a lot has changed since SES San Jose 2008.

That will be the theme of the Opening Keynote by Clay Shirky, the author of the new book, “Here Comes Everybody.” Shirky is a writer, educator, and consultant on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He is an adjunct professor at New York University in the graduate interactive telecommunications program, where he teaches courses on the interrelationships of social and technological networks, particularly how they shape culture and vice versa. He consults to a variety of organizations on network technologies, and is an acknowledged expert on collaboration tools, social networks, peer-to-peer sharing, collaborative filtering, and open source development. Shirky has spoken and written extensively on the Internet since 1996, with regular columns in Business 2.0, FEED, OpenP2P.com and his own shirky.com blogsite. He has appeared in The New York Times, Time, The Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, and others. In his new book, Shirky explores how organizations and industries are being upended by open networks, collaboration, and user appropriation of content production and dissemination.

Shirky’s keynote will be followed by a session on Day 1 of the conference entitled, “The Adaptive CMO: A New Paradigm for Digital Marketing.” This session sets the stage for the C-Suite track and provides a strategic view of how marketing is constantly evolving and will define the critical role that search must play. The rules have all changed and all bets are off. Brian Featherstonhaugh, chairman and CEO of OgilvyOne Worldwide, will present his point of view on how brands are built, why the “four Ps” are no longer valid, how corporate cultures are created, and what happens as the world goes digital.

The next session in the C-Suite track is entitled, “The View From the CMO’s Office.” Search marketers and non-search marketers have traditionally had difficulty communicating in the language of their disciplines, often creating friction and unnecessary conflict. This session will walk you through the day-by-day challenges of the CMO from two viewpoints: the traditional CMO and the CMO who has made the move to digital. This session will explore how both disciplines can educate each other and explore such issues as the nominal percentage of marketing spend that is allocated to search.

During the afternoon on Day 1, there is another session in the C-Suite track entitled, “Integration: The New CMO Imperative.” With the popularity of sites like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter, brands increasingly need to engage with their customers outside their website. The portability of content and viral connectivity that occurs online requires a new approach to branding. If you attend this session, you will learn strategies for increasing brand awareness and protecting brand equity in today’s socially connected web as well as tactics that can be implemented in today’s resource and budget constrained environment.

Next in the C-Suite track is a session entitled, “Budget Migration: Going Digital Without Impacting Your Brand.” The move to a predominantly digital marketing strategy can be overwhelming. Migrating from staid traditional channels to the open waters of the web can be daunting — especially for companies that are unsure of how to properly measure search, display, email and social media. This session will arm you with the information you need to know about migrating budget to digital without impacting your brand awareness or the equity you have built up in your brand. If you attend, you will learn from companies that have started moving significant resources away from TV, radio and print and into search, social, display and email. Lessons learned will be discussed as well as the metrics and tools need to gauge the success of a balanced digital marketing program.

Finally, the C-Suite track wraps up on Day 1 of SES San Jose 2009 with a session entitled, “Performance Pricing Models: What Every CMO Must Know!” With many marketing organizations feeling the pain of financial pressures, pay for performance pricing models are gaining popularity in search today. At this stage of the game, chances are that you’ve either thought about trying this type of pricing model but held back because you were unsure of what’s involved or perhaps you tried to pursue it in the past, but had trouble making it work for you and your vendor. Designed to maximize results, a performance based compensation model can truly be a win/win for you and your search engine marketing partner. Not only will it help to drive results and bring your partners’ goals in alignment with your own, it will also allow you to reward your search partner for superior performance while keeping your overall ROI in mind. In this session, the panelists will cover the keys to developing a successful pay for performance pricing model including a thorough overview of the concept, how it can be applicable to both PPC and SEO, the chief benefits it offers, and why marketers should consider it. In addition the panelists will delve into what marketers need to know before adopting a pay for performance model, including how to assess if it’s right for you, popular misconceptions, and the common problems that can arise along the way. If you attend, you will be provided with actionable advice on the critical success factors needed to make a pay for performance model work, including the role of goals, benchmarking, performance metrics, historical data, scenario analysis, and tracking.

So, what’s the marketing ROI of attending the first day of SES San Jose? Well, ask yourself this question: What’s the cost of skipping this event?

Now, if you’ve done the risk benefit analysis of attending SES San Jose for a day, what are the incremental costs and benefits of attending for two days?

Take a close look at the SES San Jose agenda overview for Day 2 and you’ll see lots of sessions that a CMO who is making the move to digital should attend.

Here are a few that I would recommend:

Igniting Viral Campaigns: Leveraging Consumer-Generated Content — How can businesses leverage social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and more to break through and create buzz, encourage word of mouth, and establish relationships with potential customers? This session unveils the secrets of Web 2.0 techniques and technologies that enable companies to stand out and be talked about.

Facebook Ads: Reaching Prospects Earlier In The Decision Cycle — You know how powerful search marketing ads are. They get in front of consumers who are already raising their hands for more information about your business. But wouldn’t it be great to influence that decision earlier to a much larger target audience? With over 200 million active users sharing authentic information, you can precisely reach the right people before they start searching. Learn how to target your exact audience, create compelling ads, optimize for the greatest ROI and generate demand for your business on Facebook.

Afternoon Keynote — Nicholas Fox, a business product management director on Google’s AdWords team, is giving the afternoon keynote. Fox leads product management for Google’s ads quality efforts, focused on optimizing the end user experience with ads displayed through Google’s AdWords program. He is responsible for the development and improvement of the algorithms that determine the display, ranking, and pricing of AdWords ads on Google and its partners. Fox also leads product management for AdWords bidding features, which enable advertisers to maximize their ad performance and simplify their bid management. Prior to joining Google in 2003, Fox was a consultant with McKinsey & Company in Palo Alto, Calif., focusing on corporate finance and strategy for technology companies. He studied economics at Harvard College, from which he graduated magna cum laude.

Four Paths to Success in a Tough Travel Economy — Travel marketers discuss the challenges of smart search marketing in tough economic times, when leisure travelers are hard to come by and businesses slash budgets. Experts in four key areas of travel search marketing – Organic, Paid, Social and Local/Mobile – share successful strategies and creative campaign ideas to attract and increase traffic, proving that it is possible to generate positive ROI with limited resources.

The BuyerSphere Project: Understanding B2B Buyer Patterns — A major B2B research initiative, conducted by Enquiro with input from Google, Business.com, Covario, Marketo and DemandBase, showed that most marketers aren’t effectively leveraging online assets to their best potential. Among other things, the notion of a strictly followed, traditional buying funnel is simply not accurate in many instances, risk dictates buying behavior, search is incredibly important as an integrator across online and offline channels and face-to-face persuasion is still necessary in many high risk, complex purchases. The BuyerSphere project looks at how online strategies became artificially separated from traditional best practices, how they can be more effectively integrated and the part search plays as a major influencer. This panel will review the research from over 100 face-to-face interviews, hundreds of eye tracking sessions and over 3,000 survey responses in total. The project represents a major step forward in understanding B2B buyer patterns and the part online marketing can play in influencing them.

Okay, if you are in for a penny, are you in for a pound? What is the marketing ROI of attending SES San Jose for a third day?

Again, take a close look at the conference agenda and decide for yourself. Nevertheless, here are some sessions that you might want to consider attending:

How to Prepare for the Future of Search — The morning keynote will be given by Charlene Li, an influential thought leader on emerging technologies, with a specific focus on social technologies, interactive media, and marketing. She is the co-author of the business best-seller, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, published by Harvard Business Press in May 2008. Named “one of the most influential women in technology” by Fast Company, Li is the founder of Altimeter Group, which provides speaking and consulting services to organizations looking to understand and thrive in a new economy driven by social media tools and techniques. She is one of the most frequently-quoted industry analysts and has appeared on 60 Minutes, The McNeil NewsHour, ABC News, CNN, and CNBC. She is also frequently quoted by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, Reuters, and The Associated Press. A sought-after public speaker, she has presented frequently at top technology conferences such as Web 2.0 Expo, SXSW, and ad:Tech. Most recently, Li was a VP and principal analyst at Forrester Research. She joined Forrester in 1999, after spending five years in online and newspaper publishing with the San Jose Mercury Newsand Community Newspaper Company. She is a graduate of Harvard Business School and received a magna cum laude degree from Harvard College.

SEO Through Blogs & Feeds — Not yet running a blog? Not syndicating your content through web feeds? Then you’re missing out on an important area that can help your overall SEO efforts. Learn more about the unique advantages blogs and feeds offer to search engine optimization.

The New Search ROI: Measuring More than Conversion — Search marketing has a great advantage over other forms of marketing: It is extremely measurable and actionable. Advertisers have access to detailed click and conversion data about their campaigns, so they know which keywords are leading to the most sales. But smart search marketers today realize it’s not enough to simply measure conversion to get an accurate picture of the overall ROI of their paid search programs. Internet sales typically account for 5 to 20 percent of a company’s revenue (depending on the industry), but influence as much as 40 percent of sales. Therefore, measuring paid search ROI in relation to only online transactions significantly underreports SEM’s overall contribution to company revenue. Also, remember that paid search conversions are influenced by more than just the last click; many times a conversion happens a few hours, days, or weeks after a series of clicks and searches. This practical and informative session will focus on best practices and practical techniques that marketers can use to get started with “multi-conversion” measurement. If you attend, you will walk away with actionable strategies for using industry-tested approaches that can help you effectively analyze key performance metrics of their campaigns — whether a click results in a purchase online, a purchase offline, a call to a call center, or another conversion metric. You’ll learn how to use freely available techniques to make sure you’re measuring the real effectiveness of every click, to make better, more accurate keyword buying decisions, and more accurately gauge the real ROI of search programs.

Advanced Keyword Research — Mark Twain famously said that the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. When it comes to effective keyword research, nothing could be more true. Carefully tailored keyword research not only helps determine the success or failure of your entire search marketing campaign, but it can also provide a way of better understanding your visitors and their intentions. This in-depth discussion will move beyond the basic keyword research tools to zero in on advanced tips and techniques for taking your SEO or PPC campaign to the next stage.

Extreme Makeover Live! Why Am I Not Making Enough Sales? — There are many companies out there for which traffic is not a problem. Are you one of those companies that gets plenty of visitors but only about 2% of those that visit convert into a sale or a lead? This session takes volunteers from the audience and examines their websites live to show you why you aren’t making enough sales. Do you know the main issues holding your website from converting visitors? The panel of experts will make sure you walk away from this session with a great deal more insight about the factors that cause your website to act like a leaky bucket and what to do about them.

Okay, spending three days at a search engine marketing conference is a serious investment of your time. And measuring the marketing ROI of attending SES San Jose isn’t trivial.

But that’s why CMOs get paid the big bucks. And with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke seeing signs of an economic recovery, now is the time for you to chart a course to the digital world that is reshaping marketing as we know it.

So, if you are going to attend SES San Jose 2009, then register by Friday, July 24. Save up to $200. But that’s small potatoes compared to the even bigger benefits to be gained from learning how to navigate through the ever-changing search engine marketing industry.