SES New York 2008 Conference Highlights

The Search Engine Strategies (SES) New York Conference & Expo got under way this week at the Hilton New York, officially kicking off on Mon. March 17th and ending today, Thurs, March 20th. According to Forrester's Five Year US Interactive Marketing Forecast, search marketing is extremely important today and is expected to triple in the next 5 years to over 25 billion.  So, I decided to head down to NYC for this once-a-year event and was fortunate to be able to attend for two days. They included me as press since Adotas is the official online publication that I'm covering the conference for as well

SES New York is the largest show in the SES global series and is a must attend event for marketers looking to gain insights and knowledge from experts in the Internet and search industry. A total of over 60 sessions were offered across a wide variety of topics and experience levels that started with search fundamentals and then also included specialized tracks such as social search, local, advertising, multimedia and contextual ads. Some of these topics were on the agenda last year and it was noted that there will most likely be new ones next year that aren’t on our radar yet. The Expo Hall officially opened on Tuesday morning which included over 135 sponsors and exhibitors that we could chat with as well.

I choose Tues. and Wed. as the days to attend and tried to absorb as much as I could from all the experts there. I'm sorry to say that I missed the SES/St. Patty's Day PUB CRAWL on Monday evening that took folks bar hoping to seven different pubs. I flew into JFK on Tues. morning and actually made it to the Hilton before the 9am conference welcome and opening keynote from Nick Carr, author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google. Kevin Ryan, our host from SES for the event, introduced Nick and informed us that his book had just made #5 of the New York Times Best Seller list. Nick is also the former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review and writes and speaks on technology, business, and culture.

Nick started off saying that he thought it was hard to be the first slot in the morning after the biggest alcoholic holiday of the year. Kevin had previously commented about consuming a bit of alcohol the previous night. Nonetheless, all seemed awake and very interested in Nick’s topic. Nick stated that we’re at a major turning point in the history of computing and how we use computers. Economics, not technology, actually determines the way companies behave and what we do. Nick gave us a history lesson going back to the late 1800’s when the first water wheel was created to generate power. He continued on with explaining how the utility companies came along shortly after that and during the course of a 20 year span ended up supplying 80% of our power. 

The change we are now experiencing today is in deploying computing centrally, similar to how the utility companies did with power. This “cloud utility computing” model is not a new topic, but suddenly something that is seen as very possible as well as inevitable. After hearing Nick’s comparison to power generation I had a much better understanding of this topic including the term "virtualization" which is basically turning physical computing into software. Today the computer grid that can distribute over a network is now finally at the point that it’s catching up with computers.

So, a computer revolution is at our doorsteps. The major benefit to companies will be economies of scale in which they will no longer have to run and manage their own IT systems. However, it also means these companies will need to employ less people. The other growing trend today is user-generated content that companies can also tap into instead of developing their own content. On top of the fact that we are getting accustomed to having more and more highly personalized content served up to us which is based on our past behaviors. So, Nick asks, will this lead to the polarization of society? And of course there is the entire privacy issue that we’ve now been dealing with based on all the information that we have at hand, and will just continue to have more and more of. Nick ended his discussion by asking the question, which side are you on – the controlling or the liberating?

After lunch on Tuesday there was the “Orion Panel” on Universal Search that discussed how search, marketing and information seeking is changing the industry which included new research data from comScore. The panel consisted of:

• John Battelle, Founder/ Chairman/CEO, Federated Media
• James Lamberti, Senior Vice President, Search and Media, comScore
• Lyndsay Menzies, Managing Director, Big Mouth Media
• Jack Menzel, PM for Universal Search, Google

Google Universal Search not only searches the Internet for text, but also videos, images, news, maps, weather and more. The data presented by comScore showed that of the 1.2 billion total search queries from a week in January within the U.S., 220 million contained a Universal Search result. This equated to 58% of the 87 million people searching seeing a Universal Search result. Of those searches, video and news had the highest share. The panel discussed the fact that Universal Search is turning Google search result pages more into media destinations. They concluded that organic search is becoming more and more important and paid search is going to become even more competitive.

The afternoon included sponsored sessions from some of the big companies such as Google, Microsoft, Omniture, HitWise and Medio. I choose Google’s session which was on their Analytics and Web Optimizer products. Analytics appeared to be one of the most popular session topics this year which I found out by making the mistake of entering this session late and being left with standing room only. So, I didn’t get a very good overview since I could hardly see the screen. I’m hoping to get a copy of the presentation and then spending more time using both of these products to help raise my own organic search rankings. 

Day 3 on Wednesday morning got underway with the keynote: Search Has Changed Everything... And So Can You by Gordon McLeod, President of The Wall Street Journal Digital Network. Gordon discussed how the WSJ slowly, but surely, changed how they do business. They now have increased their organic search results by 33% which is more than double since Oct. ’06. Part of this has been by expanding their free online content which has consisted of mostly lifestyle and sports articles. As Gordon stated, the WSJ is basically a content company, not a technology company, but they are learning how to use technology better. Currently they have 1.1 million subscribers and 14.7 million monthly visitors which Gordon wants to see both areas grow. Part of their strategy to obtain this is to have ongoing SEO training throughout the company…"It’s not a project anymore”.

The session tracks on Day 3 include Fundamentals, Stats & Research, Social Search, Vertical & Retail and The Click Z Track. I followed the Social Search Track and the first session was a great one titled Social Media Marketing - What is it and What is it Good For? It featured five panelists including Jory Des Jardins, Cofounder & President of Strategic Alliances of BlogHer - which happens to be the next event in NYC that I'd like to attend in a couple of weeks. I could write an entire post just on this session alone, which I probably will do. There were some great case studies shared on brands that have integrated social media into their marketing mix and have received success. The overarching teaching that all the panelists tried to pass on to the audience is that social media is not about just throwing out a message to an audience but instead it’s all about relationships and the conversation. You need to invest the time to do it right.

Wednesday’s afternoon keynote was with Jason Calacanis, founder and CEO of Mahalo.com, which is a human-powered search engine focused on the top English-language vertical search terms such as travel, products, news, entertainment, sports, food, and health. Jason was also the CEO and cofounder of Weblogs, Inc., a network of blogs that he sold to AOL in Nov. ’05 and then was appointed SVP. Jason has an especially open communication style and speaks to people very much on Twitter, which at one time he became the most followed person in the world. He even shared with us his cell phone number, which I won’t divulge here since he said he’s had some “stalking” issues.

I had to head out during the middle of the next Social Search session which was all about social media research…a great application. Unfortunately Jet Blue had called and left a message on my cell phone that my flight was canceled. I was planning on taking a late, last one out flight that evening. So I called them and they got me on an earlier flight. The weather was a problem for everyone traveling and my “earlier” flight actually got me home just about 10 minutes before my “late” flight was originally scheduled to. I was trying to explain to the Jet Blue agent that the message they left me was to call 1-800-Jet-Blue, but I couldn't easily do that because letters on smart phones don't all match up to a number. So, the letter "J" isn't the number 5 on my phone as it is on her phone, instead I have a $ with the caps on. It took her awhile to get it. I don't know if she'll pass the word to the Jet Blue marketing folks as I asked her to do. They certainly aren't the only brand that hasn't figured this out yet. And I'm sure I'm not the only traveler that's had this problem either.

Overall I’d say the conference was very successful. I did not get actual attendance numbers, but it appears to be the same as last year, around 8,000 people. They tried some new formats this year and they did do a good job of staying on schedule and leaving some time for Q&A’s at the end of the sessions. However, there never seems to be enough time for these and when they end you always have the race up to the front of the room if you want to talk with any of the speakers. I do have to say though that the majority of speakers appeared to be very accessible. It’s definitely an event I would recommend and after all, it is New York. Check out more about the conference on the SES Blog as well.