Search Summit 2007 Review
Now that I’m back home and have had a couple of good night’s sleep I thought that it would be worthwhile re-capping Search Summit which was held in Sydney last Thursday and Friday (March 1 and 2, 2007). I stumbled across the early planning of Search Summit late last year and they had already announced that they were chasing a couple of well-known industry names to speak at the event. It was still a fair way off so I whacked the site into my feed reader and went about my business.
As time went by and an agenda was released I figured that the quality of presenters and quality of topic ensured that we booked our ticket and made the trip from Ballina. Now that the event has been done and dusted I would have to say that Barry Smyth did a fantastic job of organising a world-class search marketing conference and an even better job at attracting some of most well-known names in the industry (both international and Australian).
Day One Highlights
Day one commenced pretty early and got off to a great start with Chris Sherman’s keynote speech on the Outlook of Search in 2007. Chris gave us plenty of food for thought and each of his presentations over the two days left me with the impression that we as marketers really need to start embracing all types of technology as a way of driving traffic, whether it be through traditional search, social media, widgets etc.
The next session that I sat in on was focused heavily on pay per click marketing with a strong focus on writing copy to meet the editorial reviews of both Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. All in all, this was a pretty informative session but I was hoping to get a few more stone cold facts and inside tips on what does and doesn’t work rather than concentrating just on meeting the editorial guidelines. The session was conducted by Peter Brown from Google, and Gareth Evans from Yahoo.
After lunch we took on the Benchmarking and Analysis session. This turned out to be a pretty interesting session due mostly to the fact that we were one presenter down and a few of the Google team were sitting in on the session. There were some pretty interesting questions that were answered by Adam Lasnik, not to mention the predicament that Fred Schebesta placed himself with some of the advice that he was dishing out particularly after reviewing a site that he was working on (really wasn’t too smart Fred).
The following session that we attended was a discussion on the pros and cons of joining SEMPO and there seems to be some considerable movement behind establishing a branch here in Australia. Barry Smyth moderated the session and there was a fair bit of talk about the merits of integrating an accredited training program, whether it be through traineeships or universities. I think that for the Australian search engine marketing industry to further evolve and join the ranks of the USA and Europe, we need to embrace a professional organisation such as SEMPO.
Day one was finished off with a fairly interesting debate about whether to conduct your search engine marketing in-house or to outsource (or to in-house or outhouse as many were talking up in the audience). I think it was a pretty close verdict where the outsourcing team got the final vote from the audience. (You can listen to a podcast of the debate here)
Last but not least were a couple of nice cold beers to top off what was a very interesting day.
Day Two Highlights
Unfortunately we are unable to attend the first couple sessions which was really disappointing as I was very keen to look in on the Bot Obedience session, as it’s not every day you get to hear directly from the Google team as to what they recommend when it comes to best practices on robots.txt and .htaccess.
By the time we arrived and had some morning tea were able to head in and grab seats for the Web 2.0 and Search session. I would have to say this was probably the most enjoyable session that I attended. Mike Motherwell and Chris Sherman provided some fantastic food for thought with the underlying theme that it is now more important than ever to build on your “defensible traffic” and weaning off any reliance totally on search engines.
Dan Crow gave some great insight on how Google currently handle media rich applications such as Flash and Ajax. To cut a long story short, at the moment they do not handle these technologies too well at all. The Web crawlers are able to interpret text within flash however have no concept of the page or timeline of a flash presentation. He did however hint that this is something that they are working very hard on but could not give an accurate timeline as to when they would be able to handle these technologies.
The pre-lunchtime session was focused on how to Grow an SEM Agency. Andy Beal basically took us through some of the steps that he has implemented over the years to help grow a number of the most successful search engine marketing agencies in the US. I was able to speak with Andy after the session and he was very enthusiastic about having a business grow and build their brand around one or a series of experts within the organisation. He also spoke at length about a company’s ability to land a big brand client and then leverage that to expand into better client bases.
The final two sessions of the day saw a bit of rearrangement with Adam Lasniks session on living the non-9 to 5 lifestyle being brought forward allowing the conference to finish with a discussion on the future of digital marketing.
Once all the officialdom was done and dusted we headed off to the Kirribilli Hotel (John Howard’s local as my brother put it). I must admit that this was probably the most informative session of the entire two days. Over a couple of beers we were able to have some great conversations with Detlev Johnson, Chris Sherman, Dan Crow from Google as well as a range of fellow Australian search engine marketers that we didn’t get the opportunity to speak with throughout the conference.
In summary, Barry Smyth has put on a great show and if he can back things up next year with a similar quality presenters I’m sure that we will be back.
