A College Grad @ SES Toronto 2009 June 7, 2009
I’m a recent college graduate from the Advertising program at St. Lawrence College in Kingston, Ontario. I’m hitting the ground running – this is my first time attending the Search Engine Strategies conference in Toronto, and I’m pumped!
Monday June 8th @ 11:00pm – I just returned from an awesome evening at the SES Toronto meetup. It was a great experience. I met up with @MrMunchWeb and @davidcorcoran, which was a nice opportunity to bring the Twitterverse down to earth and meet some new folks face-to-face. We discussed a number of different topics: traditional advertising, affiliate marketing and content quality, just to name a few. It quickly became one of my favourite moments of the day.
Day One of Search Engine Strategies Toronto 2009:
There were a lot of folks tweeting throughout the day (a trend that I expect to see continue tomorrow, as well). #sesto was buzzing with highlights from the various keynotes and sessions. My phone died by the evening, leaving me without Twitter (or email, or search… or a phone, for that matter) and I didn’t have my laptop with me (this 17″ Dell Inspiron is too much of a beast to carry around!), but I did take some notes.
Here’s some stuff that stood out (along with some observations/comments from yours truly):
- 9:00am – The Whuffie Factor (keynote) – Tara Hunt (@missrogue) gives the opening keynote. She touches on corporate transparency and giving back to your customers. The points of “respond to all feedback” and “understand your community” are heavily stressed. The term throwing sheep is also introduced to suggest the notion of promoting participation with your customers/community/followers. In the end, it’s all comes back to an age-old concept: put your customer first before everything else.
For the most part, this is nothing new. As with most people, I worked part-time retail when in high school, and I learned early on that customer satisfaction is of the utmost priority. You can use as many terms as you want – whuffie factor, social mojo, social capital, whatever – but it all comes down to understanding your customer, and doing whatever you can to build a relationship with them. The trade off, of course, is the time you spend maintaing this relationship, and whether or not the ROI (return on investment) is worth the cost. - 11:00am – Internationalization of SEO for Global Markets (corporateville) – This is the most educational session of the entire day, at least in my opinion. Various elements that influence SEO for country-specific targeting are touched on, and the issue of translation vs. interpretation is also acknowledged. It seems that most of the other Twitter users are next door, though.
Kerstin Baker-Ash (@bakerash) does a wonderful job of focusing on the importance of not only interpreting for foreign markets, but getting right down into the nitty-gritty of geographic localization. Kudos on the presentation. - 1:15pm – Change in Search Engine Usage (keynote) - As much as I love Twitter, the amount of coverage it receives becomes a bit excessive during ths keynote. An attendee sitting near me is becoming noticeably agitated with the subject matter of the panel discussion.
Nevertheless, some interesting points are raised: the increased dissatisfaction with search engine results, the growing trend of alternative media as search platforms (YouTube, etc.), and the concept of pushing out content to share (between people) rather than content to index (on SERP’s). - 2:30pm – Universal and Blended Search – Although the term is “universal search”, Bill Tighe (from Google Canada) stresses the notion of “universal marketing”. The concept is simple: get as much as you can out on the web, embrace social networks, push out multiple forms of media and be omni-present. As universal search becomes more of a standard feature in search engines, the ability for you to provide comprehensive results across a variety of sources becomes much more important.
- 4:30pm – Twitter – The session is exactly what I expect it to be – an overview of the basics, an introduction to various Twitter utilities and a broad Q&A.
What I wasn’t expecting was the lashing that Mark Jackson (@markjackson of Vizion Interactive) gives to Twitter Search. Jackson essentially says that there’s no way in hell Twitter is going to pose any threat to Google in the search market (at least not in the near future) and starts listing reasons why.
It was an odd coincidence. Only moments earlier I was telling @adrianeden that I didn’t see traditional search as a dead (or dying) tool. Adrian disagreed, however, suggesting that #socialmojo (whuffie) is the way of the future (something I will continue to disagree with for quite some time).
And thus ends day one. Many thanks to the panelists and speakers. I’m looking forward to day two!
UPDATE: Some great in-depth coverage of the SES Toronto 2009 sessions coming from Montreal’s NVI Solutions (@nvi).
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I was lucky enough to be invited to this year’s Search Engine Strategies conference in Toronto, Ontario. SES Toronto 2009 will be my first major industry conference, and as geeky as it may sound, I’m very excited. The conference takes place from June 8th (tomorrow) to June 10th (Wednesday), the latter of which also happens to be the day of my college graduation ceremony.
Everything has happened very quickly. Back in April I was simply focused on side projects and wrapping up class assignments. When I started at my new job in May, I was given the opportunity to combine my college education with my self-taught web experience – an exciting prospect for any graduate who is passionate about their career choice.
I love my job. I love what I’m doing and I’m looking forward to seeing where things go in the future. There’s hardly a moment where I’m not immersed in SEO/SEM/internet marketing research. I think I’m doing more research now than I was in school (ha!), but I’m enjoying every minute of it.
As a college graduate, as a web geek, and as someone who loves education, the ability to participate in three days of discussion and seminars is an absolute blessing. (Getting out to Toronto for three days isn’t too shabby, either!)
Posted in Neat Stuff, SEO, Slice of Life