SES San Francisco 2011 Conference Recap

I’ve been really fortunate to attend a multitude of amazing online marketing conferences over the last year. I’m talking about SMX West 2011, ad:tech San Francisco 2011, and SMX Advanced Seattle 2011. Today, I’m thrilled to write about SES San Francisco 2011 – I spent all day at this search marketing conference today and had a great time. Also, as always, I’m thrilled to share a bunch of cool pictures from the event!

It’s All About Networking at SES San Francisco

eZanga 2nd Tier Search Engine Rocks

As always, my favorite part of online marketing conferences is the amazing networking. It’s all about the networking. Today was an action-packed day of networking for sure. It all started off in the Expo Hall. I met up with my friends from eZanga (check out the picture to the right). For those that don’t know, eZanga is an awesome 2nd tier search engine. I have experienced considerable success on 2nd tiers and highly recommend them. After all, the 1st tiers get so competitive that it’s often easier to drive higher percentage margins on 2nd tier search engines such as eZanga. I was really impressed with eZanga’s jungle-themed booth.

Next, I met up with my friend Marc Poirier from Acquisio. I was thrilled to meet up with Marc because I learned earlier in the day that Acquisio Secured $12.1 Million In Series B Funding. How cool, I’m super impressed. I didn’t get a chance to get a photo with Marc and the Acquisio team because they were so busy. Honestly, I walked by their booth about 10 times and they were always completely busy (clearly shows that Acquisio has a lot of fans like me).

PPC Ian and The Amazing Kenshoo Team

Next, I continued to make my rounds and headed over to the Kenshoo and Marin Software booths. For those that don’t know, Kenshoo and Marin Software are two of the most amazing online marketing platforms around. (You may wish to check out my SEM Automation Whitepaper and post about PPC Automation.) Online marketing campaigns are more complex than ever. I’ve personally experienced outstanding results with platforms like Acquisio, Kenshoo, and Marin. I highly recommend checking them out – your results and productivity will skyrocket.

In addition to the Expo Hall, I attended a really exciting SEMPO Board of Directors Lunch. This invite only lunch gave SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization) members the opportunity to network with SEMPO’s Board of Directors and leadership. I made some amazing connections and was truly impressed with the caliber of marketers at this lunch. If you’re not in SEMPO, I highly recommend signing up! Last, I met up with with some amazing old friends from Nextag and Stanford. It’s such a small world and always so much fun running into old friends.

My Favorite Parts of SES San Francisco

PPC Ian and The Amazing Marin Software Team

Aside from the amazing networking, what else did I enjoy about SES San Francisco? A whole lot! While the conference was less busy than SES San Francisco 2010, it was still an amazing time. First and foremost, I had an absolute blast in the social media sessions. Everyone’s always talking about social these days, but it’s for good reason. It’s limitless and there’s so much to learn. For those of you attending days 2 and 3 of SES, make sure to go to the social media sessions – they are among the best at the conference in my opinion.

Also, it was really great to see Google promoting their new doubleclick search version 3 platform. Not only did Google promote doubleclick search via their huge booth in the Expo Hall (picture below) but also they gave a live demo of the new platform. (It was great to hear my friend Kit speak, you can see a picture of PPC Ian and Kit in my post about Networking With Google.) As mentioned earlier, it’s all about SEM tools. Now, there’s one more amazing tool to improve your marketing operations and efficiency!

Last, I felt that the free goodies were great this time. Symantec is giving away really cool remote controlled H2 Hummers. I was particularly impressed to see Symantec integrating Verisign into the Yahoo! organic search results. If a site is Verisign certified, the Verisign logo shows up there right in the Yahoo! search results – pretty cool. I’m actually done with the conference for the rest of the week (my team is sharing the pass) but will be most likely attending some of the events at night over the next few days. Are you attending SES San Francisco this year?

More Pictures From SES San Francisco

Google Went Really Big At SES San Francisco 2011

I Definitely +1'd Google's Booth

doubleclick search Made a Huge Debut at SES San Francisco

All Images In This Post © PPCIan.com

Search marketing conferences this year have been great! I’ve thoroughly enjoyed TRAFFIC Las Vegas, SMX West Santa Clara, SMX Advanced Seattle, and now SES (Search Engine Strategies) San Francisco. Today, I’d like to recap my experience at SES San Francisco this week and some of my exciting takeaways. SES was absolutely packed and it was a tremendous conference!

SEM Automation Is Hot

My Friends Craig and Alex From Click Equations at SES San Francisco

If you’ve been reading PPC Ian for a while, you know that I’m a huge fan of pay per click automation. I even wrote a FREE 12 page SEM Automation Buyer’s Guide. SEM automation is constantly on my mind, it’s the only way to gain the leverage to succeed when you’re managing multi-million dollar PPC campaigns.

Excitingly, SEM automation was everywhere I turned in the expo hall! It was truly remarkable. SEM automation is hot! It was really great to see both old and new friends in the automation game. I got the opportunity to sync up with the Marin Software team. I met the amazing ClickEquations team for the first time in person. I even had the opportunity to learn about American Express getting in the game with their new OPEN SEM platform. I was totally floored when I learned about that!

Being a Celebrity Executive Is Cool

PPC Ian and My Friend Dan From Marin Software

The keynote yesterday by Jeffrey Hayzlett, former CMO of Kodak, was awesome! There were several takeaways around people management, especially motivation and turning organizations around. However, that’s not what impressed me the most.

What really impressed me was Jeffrey’s delivery. This guy is truly talented. He’s basically an expert presenter and actor. As my personal career progresses, I’m setting my sights high. I’d love to become a celebrity executive one day and pick up some acting skills myself. It’s really captivating stuff! It’s also a completely different skill than my Stanford Computer Science roots. I’m definitely a leader and expert people manager. I’d also call myself a stellar presenter (just check out my Stanford Graduate School of Business speech all about online Marketing). However, Jeffrey takes it to a whole other level!

I Picked Up A Few PPC, SEO, and Blogging Tips

To close out, I’d like to highlight some of my lower level notes. I was writing very quickly yesterday and jotted down some awesome stuff, a lot of it very actionable.

It Was Great Catching Up With Mike From Yahoo

Perhaps most excitingly, I learned about the concept of citations in Google’s new organic caffeine algorithm (launched in June). Apparently, Google is now looking quite a bit at social networking sites and how many times your website or blog has been cited (mentioned or linked to). This is really great to learn from an SEO standpoint. It’s not all about links anymore, you also need to focus on citations! As a side note, I’m a big fan of blog commenting. While most comments have a nofollow tag on the link (unless you get on the top commentators), I’ve long been a believer that Google gives these nofollow comments some kind of weight. Now, I’m seriously thinking these comments could be counted as citations!

I was also really excited to learn about Google’s definition of a blog: Any website with a feed. When I typically think of a blog, I think about your typical WordPress blog like this one! It really opens doors when you start thinking about a blog as any site with a feed. Basically, you now have the option to add a feed (or feeds) to your "static" website and turn it into a blog. The speakers were making the point that this could have an SEO benefit because Google’s new caffeine algorithm is giving weight to blogs because they offer up to date information (caffeine is all about the real time). At the same time, I think this only makes sense if you update your site (and feeds) regularly. Otherwise, Google will now view your "blog" as one that doesn’t get updated frequently (which is worse than a static website that doesn’t get updated, in my opinion).

Yahoo is doing some seriously great stuff. Shashi Seth dazzled the audience with his discussion of Yahoo’s focus on the front end of search. The last 12 years, in his opinion, have been all about the back end of search. Now, Yahoo is partnering with Microsoft so Microsoft can take over the back end of things. This will allow Yahoo to focus on what they do the best: Optimizing their front end user experience. Shashi pointed out that there’s far more to the search results page than the actual results themselves. Yahoo will still be really focused on search, more from a front end perspective in terms of adding valuable experiences to search that aren’t there right now. Something else that blew me away: The "trending" topics on Yahoo’s homepage now account for 5 percent of searches on Yahoo.