I would have to say SES San Jose 2007 turned out to be a pretty good conference. With a HUGE thanks to the TopRank Blogging Team (LtoR: Dana Larson, Melinda Cayetano, Thomas McMahon and Mike Yanke), we were able to cover 26 sessions, publish nearly 500 photos and 7 video interviews.
Besides coverage of the conference sessions, there were also the after conference “networking” events, ie parties including: SES Dinner at Hanoke Gardens, Google Dance, Women in Search Luncheon, Yahoo Book Party and of course, the infamous Search Bash.
Conferences are a great way to make new friends, continue existing friendships and further your knowledge in a fast paced, ever-changing industry. It’s those personal connections that can speed up knowledge transfer and the acquisition of truly productive insight.
The information presented in the sessions by themselves is great, but having discussions and debates about that information with smart, lateral thinking search marketing professionals afterwards is where the real value comes.
It was great meeting with 2 of our current clients at the show as well as meeting with a record number (for us) of potential clients. Busy was an understatement for all and we’re very appreciative of Incisive for having TopRank as a media sponsor and for putting on such a productive conference.
Whether it was learning more about local search engine Zvents or laughing til it hurt hearing about Michael Gray and Matt Cutts doing battle over paid links, the conference provided a steady clip of information and engagement.
Thank you to everyone who was so generous with their time to do video interviews and also thanks to those that interviewed TopRank including: Mike McDonald from WebProNews, NBC11, Rumblepup and Brett Tabke.
The next conference stop for TopRank is the DMA07 annual conference in Chicago. This is the largest such conference in the world with more than 30,000 attendees expected. There I am speaking on a link building session with Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts (a PR client) and I’ll be doing a half day post-conference seminar on marketing with social media with Joseph Jaffee of Crayon.
