SMX West - Search Marketing, But Hot

Now that we’ve had a chance to catch our collective breath at CLM, here’s a quick look back at SMX West, the hot new search marketing conference and expo co-chaired by Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman.

SMX West was held Feb. 26-28, and despite the early calendar date was heavily and enthusiastically attended. News had evidently spread about the success of the inaugural SMX conference, SMX Advanced, which was held in Seattle last summer (and is scheduled for June 3-4, 2008).

Day 1: Danny kicked off the event with a rousing and inspiring keynote address on the future of search titled “Web 3.0, 4.0 and Beyond”, followed by breakout sessions. The sessions are generally a combination of short presentations (5 - 15 minutes each presenter) followed by a question & answer / panel discussion period. In the afternoon, our very own Amy Konefal presented on the topic of Avoiding PPC Pitfalls on a panel with Addie Connor from Course Advisor, Inc. and David Szetela from Clix Marketing, moderated by Matt Van Wagner.

Day 2: I missed the morning keynote prepping for my turn to present. I presented “Getting More from Multivariate Testing” on a “Wonder Twins” panel about MVT and landing pages. The session was moderated by Gord Hotchkiss, with co-panelists Jonathan Mendez, formerly of Omniture Offermatica, newly from RAMP Digital; Seth Rosenblatt of Interwoven; Jon Diorio from Google Website Optimizer; and Gregg Makuch from Widemile. It took me a few minutes to realize I was the only panelist NOT from an MVT platform company. Cool.

More great sessions and hallway discussions, followed by the Google Groove party, which disappointingly closed down promptly at 10pm before any of us could get up the nerve to do Karaoke. Fun time, though, and we came away with some of the famous Google glow-in-the-dark cups.

Day 3: The keynote this day was a panel discussion moderated by Chris Sherman and Gord Hotchkiss. The panel included one of my own personal heros, Peter Norvig (and how is it that Google’s snapping up so many of the scientists I admire?) who I was honored to meet briefly after the keynote session. Also on the panel were Brad Goldberg from Microsoft and Dr. Larry Heck from Yahoo! In the afternoon Lance Loveday presented with co-panelist Shari Thurow, author of Search Engine Visibility, in two sessions - one on “Search and Usability - They Can (and Should) Coexist”, the other a “Usability Checkup” session examining live sites.

All in all, SMX West was a top-notch search conference. Well-run and organized, with an overall high session quality. If you get a chance to go next time, do it.