Online Marketing Blog

Jeremiah Owyang posted recently asking his readers what conferences they would be attending in the coming months and I thought that would be a great question for Online Marketing Blog readers as well.

Over the past 3 years we’ve been focused on search marketing conferences but have expanded more into direct marketing, interactive and PR. We’ll continue that trend the rest of this year but with more conferences outside of search as our online marketing agency evolves.

Conferences that I’m attending in the coming months include:

• May: ACCM in Florida
• Jun: PRSA Digital Impact in NYC

Since I arrived on the tail end of the DMA07 show, I haven’t taken as many photos as I’d like, but here are a few so far.

Welcome to DMA07

Matt Bailey, Heather Lloyd Martin, Detlev Johnson

Wrestling a microphone on the Link Building Panel

Daron Babin Glamour Shot

Exhibit Hall - Where are all the SEM vendors?

The DMA ECHO Awards included a search marketing category for the first time and I was a judge.

Upgraded room view at the W Hotel. Nice!

Next week starts one heck of a week starting with DMA07 in Chicago, the largest marketing conference in the world.  On Tuesday afternoon I am speaking on a panel called “Desperately Seeking Links Baiting, Buying and Socializing for Links” with Stephan Spencer, Seth, Besmertnik and Eric Ward.

Then on Thursday, I will be presenting as part of a post conference workshop on new media, specifically social media, with Joseph Jaffee of Crayon. Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning Joseph is covering blogs, podcasting, video casting and Second Life/virtual worlds. Thursday afternoon I will be presenting on social bookmarking and SEO as well as a grab bag session on Yahoo! Answers, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. I might have picked a slightly different mix of applications to talk about but then again the topic selection wasn’t my call.

This week will be some light blogging for me as I’ll be on vacation for the rest of the week. We decided it would be a Cirque du Soleil - fest so where better to go for that than Las Vegas? We’ll see 3 of the Cirque shows there so hopefully it will satisfy any urges for peculiar French inspired circus acts for a while.

When I attend or speak at conferences, I always, like to visit the exhibit areas to see how they’re laid out, scope out which search marketing agencies are exhibiting and to visit friends from other companies and search engines. While checking out the Interactive exhibit hall here at DMA06, I noticed a few things:

There were hardly any search marketing agencies. Kevin Lee was there with Did-It and I believe I saw iCrossing. That was it. Apparently SEOInc had a booth in the other monstrous Exhibit hall that was made up of list brokers, direct mail companies,etc.

WebmasterRadio.FM man of many talents, Daron Babin, gave a little video interview at DMA 06.

Be sure to check out WebmasterRadio.FM for live interviews and the best Internet radio shows on search marketing.

I believe their next stop will be WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon conference in Las Vegas Nov 14-17, which will be one hell of an event. There will be four keynote presentations including John Battelle, Danny Sullivan, Guy Kawasaki and Jon S. von Tetzchner, the fellow behind the Opera browser.

Later today I’ll be presenting here at DMA-06 on a panel called, Blogs, RSS and Podcasting with Amanda Watlington from Searching for Profit and Stephan Spencer from Netconcepts. Basically, my presentation will cover how blogs can be used as public relations tools in the context of “Push and Pull PR”. The presentation is broken up into:

• Opportunity
• Push and Pull PR
• Blog Optimization & PR
• Blogger Relations
• Case Study

The DMA06 conference is getting rev’d up with pre conference sessions Satuday and Sunday. The new search engine marketing certification program started on Saturday with Jeannette Kocsis, VP of Digital Marketing at Harte-Hanks, presenting on “Introduction to Search Engine Marketing” and I followed up with “Search Engine Basics”.

Unfortunatley, I was not able to sit in on Jeannette’s session, but Amanda Watlington said there was great feedback. Here’s the description of the module:

The Direct Marketing Association has officially announced their Certification Program in Search Engine Marketing today. The first modules are being offered at DMA06 in San Francisco in October. There will be two levels of certification focused on agency and in-house marketers:

• Level 1: Designed for individuals able to work under the direction of an advanced search engine marketer. These individuals would know and be able to employ current best practices in organic or paid search marketing.
• Level 2: Designed for individuals who are capable of devising, creating, and managing effective search engine marketing programs within agencies or as lead members of in-house marketing teams. At this level, individuals can seek advanced certification in organic or paid search.

I’ll catch hell from our PR people if I don’t mention somewhere that I am speaking at 2 and possibly 3 different sessions at the DMA06 conference Oct 14-19. The DMA annual conference is the largest marketing conference in the world.

One session is a 2 1/2 hour SEO 101 class on the search engine landscape and the other is on blogs, RSS and podcasting with Amanda Watlington and Stephan Spencer.

After that I’ll be doing a presentation on social media optimization for the eComXpo vitrual tradeshow Oct 24 followed up by a session on SEO for a local event, VISI Data Center 2.0 on Nov 2.

If you’re looking for sources of information on search marketing, conferences can be a great resource. Or. if you’re a conference junkie like me, then you’ll find the SEOBook “Must See SEO Events” calendar exceptionally useful.¬† Some disclosure here, I am editing the calendar along with Aaron.

Some of the conferences listed include:

• Search Engine Strategies
• WebmasterWorld Pubcon
• ad:tech
• DMA conferences
• MIMA
• eMetrics Summit
• eTail
• Shop.org Summit
• Search Insider Summit
• OMMA
• Affiliate Summit
• SEO Roadshow
• SEO Bash
• And more