DM Days Final and Dinner with Jim Boykin

I was able to sit in on a DM Days site review clinic yesterday with Detlev Johnson and Amanda Watlington who provided great advice to the few audience members. The site owners literally received multiples of their conference admission price in consulting advice. One site had thousands of pages hiding content from the search engines (unintentionally) because of JavaScript. Another was submitting an incomplete sitemap file to Google.

I’d have photo for you, but the DMA representative in the back of the room said I could not take any photos in the session room unless I had a press pass. Being a speaker and the Communications chair for one of the DMA councils didn’t pull any weight. 🙂 This was a bit ironic considering the keynote from the President of the DMA was all about social media, of which blogs and photos are a big part. It’s a long road ahead for the DM community in understanding search and social media I think, but we’ll keep working on it.

In the afternoon I metup with Jim Boykin and one of his link ninjas, Sarah. Jim came to the city from Upstate New York to shoot a little video with me for a very interesting project he’s working on. More on that later. We shot the video at the W hotel where I’m staying and with some highly skilled post shoot editing, it should turn out ok.

After the video, we scooted over to Bobby Van’s on 54th and had a great dinner. As a long time search marketer, Jim has some very interesting stories to tell. One of my favorites is from when he got started in search marketing. He won a free conference pass from Jill Whalen to a SES San Jose event. At the conference he met Matt Cutts who answered two pages (front and back) of questions for Jim and at the Google Dance, introduced Jim to Larry Page and Sergey Brin. On top of all that, he got a copy of “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” signed by Larry, Sergey and Craign Silverstein which now hangs proudly in the WeBuildPages office.

Today, it’s back to Minnesota and hopefully less than two hours waiting on the runway.