SES NY Day 3 - The Conference So Far

by Scott Allen

The SES conference has been a great experience so far. The first major “networking” event of the week - the SES St. Patty’s Day PubCrawl on Monday - went a bit sideways to start, but a few mavericks were able to get things back on track. When we all arrived at the first Irish pub, and there was only enough room for about 5 people and about 50 or more wanted to get in. So someone came up with the brilliant idea of working backwards from the last pub, so we all agreed and set off to find it. In the process we got off course, and decided to just stop and grab beer at the first place available, which happened to be a diner. Um, ok. But it worked out fine - we grabbed a few beers and appetizers and started to find out who everyone was. Before long we got things back on track and spent some time in a few good Irish pubs while getting to know each other. It was a great time - I made some great connections and met some fantastic people (you all know who you are).

By far, the greatest value of conferences is the networking aspects, but it’s always good to keep refining your knowledge as well and keep learning, whether you’re in SEO, web design, or any other industry.

The session in the first two days of the SES conference have been a bit basic in my opinion, so there’s nothing worth mentioning there.

Today there were some great social media sessions, especially the “Successful Tactics for Social Media Optimization (SMO)” session. My favorite speakers from that session were Liana Evans from KeyRelevance and Jennifer Laycock from Search Engine Guide. Liana shared some really useful social media optimization strategies for video. That’s definitely an area we need to get into more. Jen shared some great SMO strategies for Flickr and Twitter, and between her presentation and a talk we had the other night, she sold me on Twitter’s value and motivated me to not only sign up for Twitter, but start incorporating it into our SMO campaigns.

On another note, I observed some consistent repeating elements with the speakers from the large ad agencies that I’d like to share. They generally tended to:

Underestimate the overall intelligence and experience of the crowd. People are here to learn, but they haven’t been living in a cave - give people a little credit.
Speak about Social Media like it was a new thing. Seriously? It’s not new at all - it’s been around for years. We got into it a couple years ago, and I felt we were behind the times even then. We as marketers will always be behind culture (by definition), so it’s important to keep our ear to the ground and feel the pulse of the culture if we have any hope of success with SMM.
Speak in generalities and offer very little info of practical value for the attendees. People need specific, practical info, and I noticed that many of the other speakers that weren’t from large agencies did a much better job of this.
Frequently misused or abused industry terms.

It just felt like the large agency speakers either put in less effort in preparing their presentations, or have less specific expertise than the other non-agency speakers. I wonder, are they banking on their big brand image to wow us? That doesn’t work with the SEO crowd. :)

In a later post, I’ll share some of my own random thoughts and tips that came to mind during the sessions I attended.