Online Marketing Blog

Spotlight on Search Interview with Matt McGowan of Incisive Media: Search Engine Watch, ClickZ, Search Engine Strategies.

The Search Engine Strategies conference in New York undoubtedly one of my favorites and the next SES NYC show is coming up fast, March 17-20, 2008. Since SES has changed its format starting with the New York show, I pinged Incisive Media’s Marketing VP Matt McGowan with a few questions on format, speakers, Yahoo/Microsoft, recession and his 5 top reasons for attending a SEM conference in the Big Apple.

Matt, this is our first time interviewing you. Can you share a bit about your background and how exactly you became the “007 VP of Marketing” for Incisive Media and what you do? (Make it good because we’ll do our best to make sure this interview ranks well on Google )

I was able to do just two video interviews before my camera got dropped in a glass of water. I’ll have to explain that in another post.

Here’s Michael Gray, aka graywolf, just before our session with Todd Mailicoat and Neil Patel on “Social Bookmark Strategies” where he talks about tips for conference goers. Coverage of that session can be found at The Lisa, Search Engine Roundtable, Small Business SEM and CenterNetworks.

I also caught up with Mona Elesseily from Page Zero where she talks about Yahoo Panama pros and cons. Also two new Panama enhancements: Quality based bidding and being able to opt out of Yahoo’s content network.

            Subscribe to this Feed

Here I am writing about the Search Engine Strategies conference in NYC and I’m in an airport in Minneapolis – go figure. Even though I’m not at the event physically, I’m certainly there in spirit. Here are the sessions during day one that I would be attending:

The 9-10:30am session is a tough one for me between Video Search Optimization and In House: Big SEO. Both are hot for our SEO firm right now as our PR agency expands its multi media and social media offerings with video and as TopRank continues to add very large companies as SEO clients. Bill Hunt and Marshall Simmonds always put out some great information and I would love to ask National Geographic as well as HP a few questions about their programs.

Joe Morin tells us the official 2007 SES NYC Party & Events Schedule is up over at the Search Engine Watch forums.  After conference events are a great place to network with other like minded search marketers as well as potential clients if you’re on the agency side of things. Some of the best tactics info is traded at these events since SEO and libations mix together so well.

Since we have an obligation to cover the conference including after-conference events, Online Marketing Blog will do it’s part and humbly suffer for the greater good of the search marketing community and attend at least 1 event Monday, Tues and Wed of the conference.  Photos and video are to be counted on. 

            Subscribe to this Feed

Last week I posted a well received rundown of five reasons you should attend the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in New York, April 10-13. A few additional items regarding TopRank’s involvement were not included and I’ve been getting a little chiding from our “gratuitous self promotion” department about that.

First, Online Marketing Blog has been named an official media sponsor for Search Engine Strategies conferences as well as the ClickZ events. This might not be news for the likes of WebProNews, BtoB, TARGET Marketing, Search Marketing Standard, Entrepreneur.com or Jupiter Research who are the other media sponsors, but it’s certainly big news for TopRank because it’s the first time a blog has been included as a media sponsor.

Also, readers of our blog can get a 10% discount by using this code “10TRR” when registering.

The eighth SES New York conference is coming up pretty quickly and as one of the last “Danny” programmed events, it should be a great one. I’ve been blogging SES shows for several years now and have advanced both knowledge and industry contacts tremendously by doing so. Barry, Chris and Ben have also done a bang up job in the past with triple and sometimes quadruple coverage of the event.

Whether you are an old hand SEO and online marketer or a noob, large conferences like Search Engine Strategies offer a number of excellent benefits. Here are my top five: