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Donna has over 25 years of experience in assisting brands, agencies and not-for profit organizations develop and implement a wide variety of their marketing communications needs. In 2005 she founded DDC Marketing Group which has specialized in bringing interactive promotional marketing solutions to life for many clients. Today the firm is also dedicated to helping clients integrate blogs and social media into their marketing mix. Her own blog,Donna’s Promo Talk, helps to keep marketing professionals current on today's hottest interactive promotions and trends.

Most recently Donna joined the online team at Butler Till Media Services as Emerging Online Media Supervisor. Donna is responsible for overseeing the agency’s search marketing efforts for a variety of clients as well as integrating emerging online media opportunities such as blogs, social media networks, viral marketing, mobile as well as interactive promotions.

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SES New York 2008 Conference: Change is the Constant

Written on
March 21st 2008
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by Donna DeClemente  |
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conference.jpgADOTAS EXCLUSIVE — The Search Engine Strategies (SES) New York Conference & Expo got under way this week at the Hilton New York, officially kicking off on Monday and going till Thursday. As I recently wrote in a post on my blog, a  Five Year US Interactive Marketing Forecast done by Forrester Research predicted that search marketing is extremely important today and is expected to triple in the next five years to over $25 billion. So, I decided to head down to NYC for this once-a-year event and was fortunate enough to be able to attend the conference for a few days.

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. More than 60 sessions were offered across a wide variety of topics and experience levels – it kicked off with search fundamentals and then also included specialized tracks such as social search, local, advertising, multimedia and contextual ads. Some of the 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 more than 135 sponsors and exhibitors that we could chat with as well.

Since I joined the SESers on Tuesday, I’m sorry to say that I missed the SES/St. Patty’s Day pub crawl Monday night that took folks bar-hoping to seven different pubs. I flew into JFK Tuesday morning and made it to the Hilton before the 9 a.m. 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 no. five on 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 and Kevin both acknowledged the previous evening’s festivities and the early start time but everyone managed to shake off their residual exhaustion, perk up and dive into Nick’s topic. Nick said the industry is at a major turning point right now as far as how we use computers goes. His thesis was that economics, not technology, actually determines the way companies behave and how we operate. Nick gave attendees a sweeping overview of our society’s use of power from the first water wheel in the late 1800s to the utility companies that soon sprang up to supply 80% of our power.

The change we are currently experiencing today in the universe of computers is in deploying computing centrally, which is very similar to how utility companies eventually garnered and distributed power. This “cloud utility computing” model is not a new topic, but suddenly something that is seen as an inevitability. Nick’s talk gave me a much better understanding of the topic including “virtualization,” which is basically turning physical computing into software. Today the computer grid itself is now finally at the point that it’s catching up with computers.

In other words, 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 not need to employ as many 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?

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 October of ’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”.

There were several session tracks on Day 3 include Fundamentals, Stats & Research, Social Search and Vertical & Retail. 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 have the next event in New York City that I’d like to attend in a few weeks. I could write an entire article just on this session alone, which I probably will eventually 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 communications style and he and Kevin Ryan had a very casual conversation on stage, though they kept complaining that the lights were too bright and they couldn’t see the audience. Kevin speaks to people very much through Twitter, which at one time he became the most followed person in the world. He even shared his cell phone number with us, which I won’t divulge here since he said he’s had some “stalking” issues in the past.

Anyhow, so I did miss Thursday’s keynote speaker, Andrew Tomkins, Chief Scientist at Yahoo! Research. Andrew’s research over the last eight years has focused on measurement, modeling, and analysis of content, communities, and users on the World Wide Web. I’m sure it was very informative and hopefully I’ll be able to download his presentation.

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. It’s definitely an event I would recommend and after all, it is New York. Maybe next time I’ll make it for the pub crawl!



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Reader Comments.

Actually, Jason Calacanis uses twitter (http://twitter.com/JasonCalacanis) and uses it very often, not Mr. Ryan.

Posted by Dave | 3:58 pm on March 21, 2008.

Yes Dave you are correct. I made a typo when writing the article. I meant to write Jason, not Kevin. Thanks for pointing that out.

Posted by Donna DeClemente | 8:02 pm on March 25, 2008.

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