Online Marketing Blog

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?

This week was my first MediaPost Search Insider Summit event and I was glad to have been able to participate. I’ve been a reader of MediaPost publications on and offline for several years and have been a big fan of the Search Insider, which is pretty much the only email format search marketing content that I’ll actually read outside of my ClickZ subscriptions.

To answer a question I had posted to Gord Hotchkiss in an interview last week, “What’s different about the Search Insider Summit conference from other search marketing related conferences?”, is that both the content and the conversations were weighted more towards the strategic side of search marketing. In fact, I overheard Gord at the end of the conference say he had more strategic discussions about the future of the search marketing industry this week than he’d had at any other conference.

Competitive Intelligence — One of the most powerful aspects of search engine marketing is the intelligence you can gain from it, both about your own brands and your competitors. Just how much can you find out about the competition? What tools and strategies should you use? Here you’ll learn how to gain or retain your competitive edge.

This session featured Patrick Lopez from iCrossing, Tom O’Grady from AdGooRoo, LeeAnn Prescott from Hitwise, Matt Roche from Offermatica and moderation duties were handled by Cam Balzer from DoubleClick Performics, who I interviewed early in the conference.

Overall, this session was a bit light, but it was great to get specific numbers from HitWise, as I would expect, and also both Tom O’Grady and Matt Roche did a great job explaining their products. Matt Roche offered an excellent strategic perspective on online competitive intelligence and he was a standout person on the panel.

I went the lazy but entertaining route and took some video of the “Search Insiders Tell All” session yesterday afternoon that included David Berkowitz, Aaron Goldman, Bob Heyman and Gord Hotchkiss.

Here the “Search Insiders” about personalization, brand stewardship, Google DoubleClick and the disparity in standards applied to search marketing that are not applied to TV or direct response marketing.

Here is a discussion of video search, advertising and marketing.

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Day two of the Search Insider Summit was full of great presentations and commentary, so be sure to read the frequently updated MediaPost Raw blog.

Since many of the attendees of the Summit are the kinds of companies, marketers and agencies that employ various types of marketing channels, both on and offline, the opportunity to present examples and case studies of integration with search was ideal.

Some of the high level takeaways from this session include the importance for company marketers to set expectations when enegaging in an integrated campaign as well as the importance of coordination. Larger agencies that are capable of managing multi channel programs including search may have an easier time than a situation where a company uses multiple agencies to manage their various marketing programs.

We are all about the social media on this blog and our coverage of conferences with interviews, photos and below a few videos.

Here is the programming chair of the conference, David Berkowitz talking about how this is the biggest Search Insider Summit yet as well as the kinds of topics that drove the programming ranging from innovative search technology to click fraud to mobile marketing.

I also caught up with Cam Balzer of GoogleClick Performics oops, I mean DoubleClick Performics. As tempting as it was to ask Cam about Google’s acquisition of a company that provides natural and paid search marketing services, I kept it PC.

Cam moderated a competitive intelligence panel and he shares his insights about CI for ROI versus branding campaigns and does provide a well coached answer about Google/DoubleClick. You’ve got to love that media training.

The first of the breakout sessions was a choice between click fraud and this session on video search optimization. This was an easy choice since video optimization is an important component of social media campaigns and we like the social media here at Online Marketing Blog.

The session was moderated by Matt Spiegel of Resolution Media and speakers included: Chase Norlin from Pixsy, Scott Rhodes of VeoTag, Christy Tanner of TV Guide and Dan Perry from Cars.com.

Matt Spiegel: Is online video search for entertainment or other purposes?

Christy Tanner: Increasingly people are watching TV online and not conforming to old models of “turning on the TV”. There are also science, news and technology applications for online video.

From the conference session handbook: The Future of Search Engine Innovation – As search engines evolve, so must the methods of the marketers. We’re seeing the emergence of smart mashups, of visual search engines and personalized search. What does the future hold for search marketers and advertisers as they struggle to match speed of improvement being set by the engines themselves?

This session was moderated by David Berkowitz of 360i and included: Ron Belanger of Yahoo!, Paul Martino of Aggregate Knowledge, Chase Norlin of Pixsy filling in for Dr. Barney Pell of Powerset, and Ravi Raj from Kosmix.

First up is Ron Belanger who basically sums up three areas of focus for Yahoo in terms of search engine innovation. They include:
1. Getting search to mobile

Esther Dyson of Edventure Holdings and David Vise of BreakingViews.com and author of “The Google Story” took their seats on the stage as the first keynote for MediaPost’s Search Insider Summit here in sunny Florida. The schedule says Esther will be interviewed about the semantic web, but we get much more than that from this impromptu interview that includes some mystic channeling.

Q and A style presentations are, as you might imagine, a bit challenging to blog. So I’ve not captured everything exactly but my notes should give a good indication of the exchange. Keep in mind, some of the content below is verbatim and some is my characterization.

David: I’m Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. I turned down a huge offer from Microsoft. Did I make a smart decision?

As Media Post’s Search Insider Summit opened up, everyone fresh with coffee and battles with the bagel toasting machine, the smell of change in the search industry was in the air. Of course we know that change is a key component of search marketing and it’s what makes this industry so interesting and challenging.

Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro, who was tasked as the event emcee, kicked off the Summit with opening remarks about search as a connection to social change. While innovations with search features and functionality are occurring every day, Gord reminds us that technology changes much faster than people do.

As an agent of change the internet has the potential of having a far greater impact than something like TV. However, we won’t see the real impact of the internet on society for 10-15 years, just like it took many years for TV to change society.

The day started with a sponsored breakfast by Compete.com with a presentation by Jeremy Crane on Compete functionality. I came a bit late so I did not catch the entire presentation, but one interesting tidbit that I caught concerned the reporting of an Attention metric. What percent of users are visiting a particular site compared to others over time. This is particularly interesting considering sites that are engaged in significant PR and buzz generation.

Compete is also offering search marketing related competitive intelligence reporting similar to Keyword Discovery CI and basic levels of Hitwise. Compete is looking for beta testers also.

MC, I mean Emcee Gord Hotchkiss kicked things off with his thoughts about search as a connector.