Lee Odden

Internet Marketing Conference Tips: David Berkowitz Search Insider Summit

Lee Odden     Interactive Marketing, Marketing PR Conferences, Online Marketing, Search Engine Strategies, Search Insider Summit

It’s hump day during SES San Jose week and it reminds us there are many avenues for interacting with marketing conferences. It’s one thing to focus on programming events like our last few tipsters, it’s another thing to have spent numerous conference hours in the shoes of an attendee, speaker and conference programmer.

David Berkowitz is Director of Emerging Media & Client Strategy at 360i and Programming Chair of MediaPost’s Search Insider Summit with a short but very important tip:

Make time for the activities and dinners. The [SIS] Summit has far more shmooze time than time in sessions, and that’s for a reason. As excited as I am about the program and the speakers, the lasting relationships come during the downtime, as do the most meaningful conversations.


Internet Marketing Conference Tips: David Berkowitz Search Insider Summit
Lee Odden

How Many Conferences Can You Attend in 30 Days?

Lee Odden     Marketing PR Conferences, Online Marketing, PR Conferences, Search Engine Strategies, Search Insider Summit, Search Marketing Expo

Audience

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.


How Many Conferences Can You Attend in 30 Days?
Lee Odden

Search Insider Wrap Up – Utah 2007

Lee Odden     Interactive Marketing, Online Marketing, Search Insider Summit

Welcome to Search Insider Summit
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.

Stein Eriksen Lodge
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.

Blog Posts and Live Coverage:


Search Insider Wrap Up – Utah 2007
Lee Odden

SIS Session: Microsoft New Keyword Services Platform

Lee Odden     Interactive Marketing, Microsoft Bing, Online Marketing, Search Insider Summit

Microsoft adCenter

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 from Microsoft adCenter

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 Microsoft adCenter

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.

What does this mean to keyword research, optimization and analysis? Access to real data, not just graphs including demographic and geographic information. It also means easy to use tools including keyword libraries and an adCenter add-in for Excel 2007 which focuses Keyword research, forecasting and monetization data.


SIS Session: Microsoft New Keyword Services Platform
Lee Odden

Search Insider Summit Day 1 Photos

Lee Odden     Interactive Marketing, Online Marketing, Search Insider Summit

Intermission Hall

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.

Sun Rising Over Mountains

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.

Gord Hotchkiss

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

Managing Search in an Uncertain Economy

Those lively presentations were followed by Managing Search in an Uncertain Economy and a breakout, Leveraging Local Search on a National Basis.

SIS Audience


Search Insider Summit Day 1 Photos
Lee Odden

SIS Session: Leveraging Local Search on a National Basis

Lee Odden     Interactive Marketing, Local SEO, Online Marketing, Search Insider Summit

Aaron Goldman

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)

Leveraging Local Search on a National Basis

Local campaigns
Chris describes the importance of having locations of all offices your company operates in as well as having a store locator. Don’t overuse brands and use geo phrases in ads.

Aaron: What are some best practices for online-only retailers?


SIS Session: Leveraging Local Search on a National Basis
Lee Odden

SIS Session: Managing Search in an Uncertain Economy

Lee Odden     Interactive Marketing, Online Marketing, Search Insider Summit

Managing Search in an Uncertain Economy

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.

Joe from EDMC gives a client perspective. EDMC is a parent company, direct response. 70& of students from marketing, lead gen. Sees search spend rates to continue. In the past took a leap of faith and spent more without the data tracking and now that they have that, they’ll continue.


SIS Session: Managing Search in an Uncertain Economy
Lee Odden

SIS Session: Will Big Agencies Ever “Get” Search?

Lee Odden     Interactive Marketing, Online Marketing, Search Insider Summit

Gord Hotchkiss Mike Margolin

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.

Using broad topics and search phrases, what sorts of sites would you expect to find? Official Tourism board. Unfortunately, that site isn’t going to get found. What the OTB bid via paid search was all long tail phrases and only from April – July. Doing so misses out on all the investigative search and off season search from people planning vacations.


SIS Session: Will Big Agencies Ever “Get” Search?
Lee Odden

SIS Opening Remarks Gord Hotchkiss

Lee Odden     Interactive Marketing, Online Marketing, Search Insider Summit

Gord Hotchkiss

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.

Personalization holds promise, but in 2008 it’s not going to impact user experience that much. Engines like Google will continue to play with personalization in the coming year, but don’t expect much.


SIS Opening Remarks Gord Hotchkiss
Lee Odden

Search Insider Summit Day 1

Lee Odden     Interactive Marketing, Online Marketing, Search Insider Summit

View from Stein Eriksen Lodge

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

9:45am:
Managing Search in an Uncertain Economy with:
LeeAnn Prescott, Director, Research & Communications, Efficient Frontier
Roger Barnette, President, SearchIgnite
Brian Boland, Director, Microsoft adCenter
Joe Charlson, CMO, EDMC


Search Insider Summit Day 1
Lee Odden

Search Insider Summit Day .05 Photos

Lee Odden     Online Marketing, Search Insider Summit

Welcome to Search Insider Summit

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.

Aaron Goldman

Familiar faces included Aaron Goldman from Resolution Media, Gord Hotchkiss from Enquiro, David Berkowitz from 360i, Natala Menezes from Microsoft and Paul Bruemmer from Red Door Interactive. What’s nice about SIS events is that I DON’T know that many people yet and get to meet really interesting people from interesting companies like Carel Hearon from eLuxury, Carrie Coffee from Medio, Kendall Fargo from Intuit and John Hart from a particularly interesting technology company out of New Zealand called vortexDNA.


Search Insider Summit Day .05 Photos
Lee Odden

David Berkowitz & Gord Hotchkiss – Search Insider Summit Utah

Lee Odden     Interviews, Marketing PR Conferences, Online Marketing, Search Insider Summit, Spotlight on Search

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:

david-berkowitz.jpg gord-hotchkiss.jpg

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

David: I’m Director of Emerging Media and Client Strategy with 360i, the search-focused digital agency. I’ve been writing a weekly Search Insider column for MediaPost since it launched in mid-2004. For fun, I have my own blog at MarketersStudio.com, and I do a fair amount of speaking at industry events. It’s a great gig, especially with the clients I get to work with.


David Berkowitz & Gord Hotchkiss – Search Insider Summit Utah