Online Marketing Blog

Where do forward looking industries look when asked to look further?

This was the core question behind the SES San Francisco panel session, ‘Search – Where To Next,’ moderated by Graham Mudd, Vice President, Search & Media, comScore, Inc.

Joining Mudd were the following search marketing professionals / soothsayers:

• Brian Kaminski, Chief Operating Officer, iProspect
• Marc Poirier, Co-Founder and CMO, Acquisio
• Shashi Seth, Senior Vice President, Search Products, Yahoo!

So where are search marketing and social media definitively heading? Would you believe that no one quite knows for sure?

That said, below find 10 actionable clues and predictions that can help guide our direction as search marketers:

How exactly does one become a celebrity CMO?  Jeffrey W. Hayzlett, former CMO of Eastman Kodak Company showed us as he robustly (and at times, profanely) opened the 2010 Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco, CA.

A crowd of thousands, waiting in anticipation after being detained in a lobby holding area for twenty merciless minutes with only designer coffee for sustenance, were eased into the presentation via an excellent introduction by Mike Grehan.

In the conference’s opening remarks, Grehan asked a question that has likely only been asked by most of us in hushed, frightened whispers, “Why do I deserve to rank #1 in Google?”  It’s a difficult question to answer or even to come to terms with.  It’s also a question that each one of us will keep firmly in mind throughout the conference.

The Search Engine Strategies conference from Incisive Media has really taken an amazing turn this year for the West Coast event. Not only have organizers moved the conference from San Jose to San Francisco, but SES is now a part of an event called Connected Marketing Week that involves a coordinated effort from a number of organizations providing a 360 degree digital marketing experience.

San Francisco is one of my favorite cities and I think it’s a very smart move to change venues but also to evolve SES into being part of a much larger event. Involving other organizations will give attendees an impressive selection of content to choose from plus even more ways to connect with industry experts, peers, vendors and attendees in general. This year I’ll be giving a solo presentation on Aug 18th called, Content Marketing Optimization. Here’s the official description: