Online Marketing Blog

Conferences are a big part of TopRank’s marketing and content promotion strategy and it looks like a busy summer is ahead of us. Numerous events are coming up quickly - enough to make your head spin. Here is a summary of our involvement with PRSA, DMA, PUSH, SIS, SES and SMX events over the next 30 days:

05/14/08 - MIMA: Duality Reality - Who Controls Social Media in the Enterprise?
The local interactive marketing association along with inspiration and motivation from Doug Pollei, there will be a very interesting panel of in-house Interactives discussing how large companies (General Mills, Best Buy, Target, Fingerhut and OptumHealth) are adopting and measuring social media programs. If you’re in the Twin Cities this week and involved with social marketing now or in the future, this is a MUST ATTEND event.

This weekend completed a successful wrap up of MediaPost’s second Search Insider Summit show for 2007. TopRank’s participation with the event involved both speaking (moderating actually) and serving as a media sponsor.

The Stein Eriksen Lodge in Park City, Utah was an excellent location for a winter event, especially for those that participated in the snowshoeing, skiing and snowmobiling activities. Next year the two SIS event will be held in May (down South maybe?) and another Winter event in December. Below is a wrap up of blog posts, images, video and even a few PowerPoint presentations.

The sponsored lunch today at Search Insider Summit comes from Microsoft adCenter which included a demo of their new Keyword Services Platform and add-in to Excel 2007.

Stacy Harris:
Feedback from marketers is that traffic is good, but they want more of it. Marketers also want AdCenter to be easier to use.

Natala Menezes is up next and promptly announces Stacy was engaged last night!

Key points for current and future development of adCenter: Quality, Transparency and Simplicity.

As has become the practice for me while blogging conferences, I take a lot of photos. Not as many as Tamar Weinberg, Barry Schwartz or even David Berkowitz, but quite a few. Out of those photos there are daily favorites that give a visual of what the conference day was like.

Day one of Search Insider Summit here in Park City Utah was fast paced and information rich. The Compete.com opening VIP breakfast warmed things up while snow started to fall out side.

Sessions covered included Gord Hotchkiss’ opening remarks and keynote debate with Mike Margolin.

10:45am: Leveraging Local Search on a National Basis with:
Moderator: Aaron Goldman, VP, Marketing & Strategic Partnerships
Marc Barach, CMO, Ingenio
Mike Margolin, VP, Interactive Marketing Director, RPA
Christopher Knoch, Principle Consultant, Omniture Consulting Group, Omniture, Inc.

Aaron excitedly shows slides/stats from eMarketer supporting that budgets are going to local, “local is here”. 20% of all queries are local based but over half of all queries are for local info but do not include geographic terms in the query (according to SEMPO)

9:45am: Managing Search in an Uncertain Economy with:
LeeAnn Prescott, Director, Research & Communications, Efficient Frontier
Roger Barnette, President, SearchIgnite
Joe Charlson, CMO, EDMC
Moderator, Cam Balzer from DoubleClick Performics

Cam: “What uncertain economy?”. Panel will offer two perspectives: Agency (LeeAnn and Roger) and a client side marketer or CMO perspective (Joe).

LeeAnn from Efficient Frontier, manages 300-400 million in paid search management. EFF has seen an increase in spend of 35% over the past year.

Roger from SearchIgnite explains their technology platform and says they haven’t had that much fluctuation.

9:00am: Keynote address - FaceOff: Will Agencies Ever “Get” Search? with:
Gord Hotchkiss, CEO & President, Enquiro
Mike Margolin, VP, Interactive Marketing Director, RPA

To present his point about whether agencies “get” search or not, Gord started things out by telling a story. He brings up John from MediaPost to be a human map of Ontario, points out some factual information about Ontario.

Gord asks the audience, “Based on that, would you want to visit?”  Not really. To find out more about Ontario, what would you do? Search.

Opening remarks: Gord Hotchkiss, CEO & President, Enquiro —Emcee of the Search Insider Summit

Where is search at? This year was the first time seeing a major change to what users see via universal or combined search, as well as the beginning of personalization and search term suggestions or query refinement.

Gord recently talked to usability people at the major search engines via a webinar which can be found at enquiroresearch.com

The “holy grail” of search is disambiguation, i.e. understanding user intent.

Four things that came out of the webinar.

Despite the snowy, blowy mountains outside it’s going to be hot inside at the Search Insider Summit conference with the following sessions on my plate for attending and some for blogging:

8:00am-8:45am
VIP Breakfast: Compete, Inc. - “Carving Up the Market in Park City - Your guide to segmenting the marketplace for better ad targeting”

8:45 am:
Opening remarks: Gord Hotchkiss, CEO & President, Enquiro —Emcee of the Search Insider Summit

9:00am:
Keynote address - FaceOff: Will Agencies Ever “Get” Search? with Gord Hotchkiss, CEO & President, Enquiro and Mike Margolin, VP, Interactive Marketing Director, RPA

You know those stories you hear once in a while about people who “blog in the nude”? Well, that will never be me but I am in a plush robe courtesy of Stein Eriksen Lodge, the place where Mediapost’s Search Insider Summit is being held the rest of this week and on Saturday. I just returned from the opening reception where hours’dourves and drinks were served along with smart conversation.

A whirlwind conference schedule winds up this year with Mediapost’s Search Insider Summit being held in Park City Utah at the Stein Eriksen Lodge Dec 12-15, 2007.  As part of our media sponsorship duties, I caught up with conference chair, David Berkowitz from 360i and the host/MC, Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro for a quick interview:

Please tell us a little about yourself - a mini bio if you will.

A lot has changed in the search marketing conference industry in the past year. The biggest news being the addition of Kevin Ryan to oversee Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Strategies along with the departure of Danny Sullivan from SES to start his own venture, Third Door Media and the Search Marketing Expo or SMX series of conferences.

Additional news includes the success of new conferences like MediaPost’s Search Insider Summit, programmed by David Berkowitz as well as the reduction in conference dates for Brett Tabke’s WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon down to one (albeit, temporarily) in Las Vegas. With the number of new and niche conferences popping up it begs the question as to whether the market demand can support so many events?