Despite a cancelled flight, re-route through Detroit and 2 hours on the tarmac before taking off, I was very happy to make it home by midnight yesterday from New York. I know some folks ended up staying overnight at JFK and flying out in the morning.
For the majority of the Search Engine Strategies conference, I covered sessions for Search Engine Roundtable with Barry, Ben and Chris and it was a good time. Since I picked what to cover last, I sat in on sessions that I might not normally cover. And you know what? I am very glad I did.
An example is one of the best sessions I have ever covered called “Search Ad Buyers Forum” aka “Search Marketing Style Council” moderated by the ever brilliant and entertaining Dana Todd of SiteLab. The panelists (Misty Locke, Brian Mark, Michael Sack, Joshua Stylman) were all super-smart search marketers that gave insightful, non-salesy, and intelligent advice on paid search marketing. The “Style Council” theme made it more fun too.
Such panels are often prone to sucking up to search engines, but not this one, not by a long shot. It was not a bash session either thanks to Dana’s moderating skills and a focus by the panelists on what could be better. I hope search engine reps were in the audience because there was excellent feedback.
Barry has a great rundown of all the sessions covered at SES NYC 2006 on Search Engine Roundtable and over at Search Engine Watch Blog: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 and Day 4. Here are wrap ups/notes from Jeremy Zawodny, Matt Cutts Day 1 – Day 2 – Day 3 – Day 4 and even Scoble chimes in.
There are several other SEO blogs that covered parts of SES including: SearchViews, Inside Google and others but I wish all of them would take a hint from Barry’s archive page and provide some kind of unique tagging or more specific categories to make it easier to bring up all the posts on a certain topic or event. Not doing this is a missed opportunity for users and for search engines.
Chris Pirillo had me do a quick podcast interview with him at SES, talking about norse mythology with a little blogging and some SEO mixed in there. I rambled a lot and really wish I could do it over. Chris? Another podcast interview I did during the show with PRWeb happened earlier in the week and I hope to have links to both when they come out.
One of the great things about conferences is touching base with friends in person and making new connections. On my last night in NYC, my good friend Andy Atkins-Kruger and I went to a fantastic steakhouse with 3 story windows looking over Broadway. I even got him to drink wine from California. Afterwards we made it to the Hilton bar where I had the opportunity to finally meet Christine Churchill (we’re both ex-military) and also Misty Locke. Danny was there along with Chris Sherman, Tony Wright, Amanda Watlington, Todd Freisen, Daron Babin stopped by along with several others I can’t remember all the names – hey, it was late. 🙂
Congratulations to Danny and his team for a very successful show. I do believe SES has outgrown the meeting space of the Hilton though. There were a few sessions where attendees could not get into the room and inside many sessions it was packed wall to wall. Hopefully the new owner of the conference, Incisive Media will be able to make improvements on that.
The next SES event is in China and you can see the SES World Tour schedule here.
