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I meant to post this Wednesday but got distracted with some last minute bits…

What a let down. With some really big names on the roster I was pretty excited when I got there this morning.

However, my excitement held about as long as the Arsenal defence did against Stoke this last weekend.

In our first talk about Building a brand and online reputation management, Mel Carson from Microsoft evangelised about how Microsoft took the time to speak to the little people, the ones who dont even spend all that much with them and still treated them with respect and proactively answered any complaints raised in forums. The content left a big “so what?” hanging in the air and it felt more like one huge plug for the sweet, sensitive folk over at Adcentre rather than a meat and potato’s approach to reputation management.

Next up was Jan Cise. Now I dont know if Jan was high or was taking part in a bet to see how many disconnected slides and concepts he could throw out in presentation, but without doubt the worst piece of presenting and I have ever seen. He started off by mentioning that having loads of “buy now” buttons on ones site was important in building ones brand, that sex no longer sells as it distracts consumers (distracts from what?), heat mapping photos of how guys look at other guys packages when seeing a picture… (I know I do) and that through registering chemical activity in the brain, G-d is now considered the biggest brand. Good news, now I dont have to take any more knocks on my door from the men in suits.

Seriously Chris et al, we paid over a £1000 for these tickets. I know this was in the bootcamp stream, but this wasnt even 101. This was weird-01 and an absolute waste of time. You only need to look at his website here www.jancisek.com to see what I am talking about. It shouldnt come as a surprise to the organisers that his talk was a load of twaddle.

As for the rest, the secret techniques talk descended into a plug for SEOMOZ’s Link Exchange and some tool that seemingly made a mountain of data out of analysing links. (only for the hardest of the hard quant jocks out there – I would love to see you explain that to a client) Massimo from GSI was pick of the speakers for me. He gave a really good demo of Tubemogul (www.tubemogul.com) which is a submission tool for video sharing platforms. Definitely worth a try.

I sat through a session on buying websites which was moderated by evilgreenmonkey and featuring Dave Nailer. You guys scare me. I say no more.

The last session I sat through was what to measure outside of CPA and the usual KPI’s. Need less to say, all the first speakers spoke about was goals and increasing conversions. Worthy topics to talk about, but this was not what was advertised on the program. I thought I was walking into a session on possible brand metrcis and the role of search in measuring engagement or something sexy like that. Not to be. First 2 speakers spoke beautifully about how to increase conversions through multivereate testing *Yawn*, then plugging their own ways of testing and analyses (seriously the guy from Unica’s deck had about 7 slides out of 20 on how important Unica are)  *yaaaaawwwwnnnn* and then continued on how tozzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz………………

And so few people… I dont know what the attendance was like compared to last year but this looked really small. (maybe 80 people max)

Overpriced and small.

Come on Search Engine Land. I love your site. Danny, you have inspired me for years through your rants and points of view. This sucked serious balls. The content was wrong, the speakers spent too long plugging their own bits and it was way too expensive for what we walked out with at the end of the day. Sort it out. We speak all day about how to market other peoples sites and businesses, how can we do this if the people who are at the top of the game cant market and provide value for themselves?

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