Reflecting on SMX Advanced
I attended SMX Advanced 2010 in Seattle last week, it was my first time at the conference and I wanted to put my cards on the table, highlighting what I liked about the conference and what I thought could be improved.
What I Liked
Birds of a Feather Topic Lunch Tables – The opportunities to network and meet fascinating people in the industry were vast and well organised. In particular, I liked the Birds of a Feather Topic Lunch Tables that were topic based lunch tables for which you had to sign up, that were held in a separate dining area. You had to be quick on the uptake to register for these tables but topics ranged from influencing the C-suite on PPC advertising to meeting a Bing engineer, to name just two. On a side note, C-suite is not a programming language it’s used in the business world to describe the top honchos at the executive level.
Diversified Sessions – There were a wide number of topics from which to choose within each subject matter, with the usual suspects such as ‘Quality Score Optimization for the Pros’ but also some more focused sessions such as Microsoft’s adCenter Desktop Lab and Efficient Frontier’s Demystifying Search Data. Certainly the list was extensive and beyond learnings from the sessions themselves, the questions posed by the audience were often interesting and challenging.
More Presenting, Less Selling – It was refreshing to see most presenters shying away from selling their own product or tool, with only a few sales pitches being thrown out to the audience. Perhaps selling has become more subliminal or presenters have realised, by being told countless times, that attendees are not interested in who you are or what you do unless that information in some way benefits their business in the 1.25 hours they have dedicated to listening to you. If not, there’s always two more concurrent sessions to attend…
The Food – It must be stated that the diversity, quality of and frequency at which refreshments were provided was impressive. With some type of refreshment pitstop after each session it is a marvel we did not roll over and sleep after the delicious lunches.
What I Disliked
Temperamental WiFi Access – It must be said that the Internet connection fell out more frequently than would be desired at a search engine marketing conference. One would expect that the Internet connection would be able to accommodate 1,500 tweeting, blogging, sharing, search engine marketing junkies. Power outlets were also sparse which made things difficult for people like myself with a battery deficient laptop, which bodes the question, either more power outlets should be added or I should investigate upgrading to the iPad? Tough decision…
Encyclopaedic Sessions – Most sessions were of high enough quality to warrant being featured at SMX Advanced but there were some that had an encyclopaedic nature to them in that they skimmed over the topic at surface level rather than diving deep, sharing lessons learnt, case studies or experiment results. Don’t give me the basics of attribution, I know what it is, tell me what your business is doing to tackle the problem, share ideas, brainstorm.
Would Have Liked
Certainly, we cannot all get what we want all the time, but I would have liked to see some REAL answers provided by Bing/Yahoo about the paid search transition planned for the end of Q3 this year. It would have been great to see either search engine equipped with both some answers and a willingness to share. It was the right platform to do it – with some of North America’s leading search marketers in the room, this would have assisted in streamlining the process somewhat, disseminating information effectively and perhaps alleviating the stress search marketers are feeling.
The issue of privacy, though recently a hot topic in the media, particularly with Facebook not playing nice with its privacy settings was not really touched upon. Granted, session topics are proposed months in advance but Europe appears to be more concerned with this issue. Given the number of lawsuits underway relating to privacy, perhaps this is being discussed at conferences held there?
This last point is a prickly one but it would have been fantastic to see an industry leader touch on the point of industry maturity and evolution. The search industry continues to change at an unprecedented rate but maybe it’s time to pick up on that topic of standards, accreditation and training. It would be interesting to see how the industry is divided on the issue today.
6 Comments to “Reflecting on SMX Advanced”
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WiFi is always tough, and conference organizers struggle with it — even Google and Apple
It’s largely out of our control and in the hands of the facility. They seemed to work out most of the bugs early on the first day, but we’ll always push for better.
If I could just put power strips out everywhere, I could. But you get charged a seriously large amount for these. Lots and lots. So we aim for a mix.
I’d have loved a session with Yahoo and Bing answering questions on the transition. We tried and tried. Kind of begged. They weren’t willing. They didn’t feel they had the right answers to give yet.
Privacy is interesting, but it remains more a consumer issue than one for search marketers. That’s why when we have limited session, as with Advanced, it was a pass on that topic.
The industry leadership keynote is interesting, but we’ve typically done these for the bigger topic shows of SMX East and West. I think from a programming perspective, they make more sense there. Advanced is more a “roll up your sleeves” type of thing.
Thanks for the feedback!
Thank you in turn Danny for the in depth responses to my points. It was a great experience, I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
I’m impressed at the speed at which you posted your comment – the post’s barely been live a full 15 minutes.
If that’s not quality brand monitoring, I don’t know what is!
Marta, one of the most honest and truthful (in my opinion) reflections and I read about, thanks.
Danny (we met at SMX Madrid’08 where I was presenting) Why the format is so different in this side of the world? “panel: 5 people x 10 minutes” versus ‘one person x 45 minutes presentation’ as we have more often in Europe? last ones give the opportunity to go deep in subjects, the first one
makes it not advanced at all.
I understand that it must be attractive to bring enough people and this is the reason to have ‘famous’ presenters but if they are not going to be able to explain any advanced topic what is the point to be there while I can find much more insightful articles daily? only for the networking?
by the way, I was registered, but I could not access the, registered area, sent an email and never got answer back so I missed all these opportunities to join the Topic Lunch Tables and prepare networking beforehand.
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Ani, SMX Madrid was produced locally by a different team. I don’t know exactly why they selected that format.
I can tell you that we don’t have a set format for any of our US shows. We create an agenda, then we have a coordinator available to program the sessions however they want. It’s really up to them.
It’s not 5 people at 10 minutes each. It is often 4 people at 12-15 minutes or 3 people. But it will very. For my first session on Bing/Google, I had four speakers, but two of them were given up to 25 minutes each to talk. The other two had no formal talk time (from the search engines). They were there for Q&A.
It’s not about bringing in famous presenters. It’s simply because the coordinator usually has several people they think will combine to provide an overall good picture of things. Panels are also good insurance in case someone gets sick (which happens far more than you might think). And I think it’s nice to have a variety of perspectives. But again, it’s not always the time format you’ve outlined.
I’m sorry you had problems with the SMX Connect system. I’m not sure which contact form you used for help. I know the team does a pretty good job of getting back to people, so my apologies that this apparently didn’t happen.
Thanks Danny for your answer, I’m glad we can discuss it if this somehow helps to make better SMXs.
You are right that not all the presentations were “5 people at 10 minutes each”, it was my imprecise short way to describe it but the majority of them were quite close to, I mean, there were no in deep presentations “one person x 45 minutes” what makes any similar event (in the opinion of coordinators) an “overall good picture of things” but not getting close to ‘advanced’ in my opinion.
A better balance between different types of formats in presentations could do it better. That was too the opinion of the people I could talk to, although it is not a representation of a wide opinion, of course.
Maybe my expectations were too high but ‘advanced’ was in the tile.
Don’t worry for the SMX Connect system problem, these things happen from time to time.