Today marked the last and final day of SES San Jose 2009. Again, the conference seemed to have less people than the day before (which itself also seemed to have less people than the day before that) but putting all that aside… today was a good day. From the amazing opening keynote speaker, Charlene Li, to the finals sessions, today was a day of learning, networking, and introspection. Mostly discussed topic this week…”where exactly is this search industry headed”?
Below are some observations about the last day of the conference:
- Even less people but the keynote was packed with marketers waiting to hear Charlene Li speak.
- Charlene Li gave an impressive speech on the future of search including the declaration that you will soon be taking social with yo (i.e. social in the air).
- She also mentioned that the future of search will be by “people” not by “keywords”
- After Charlene, the day was packed with great and (mostly) full sessions.
- Blogs, news feeds are all powering and serving SEO campaigns well.
- Display, content, and search all used at the same time give your campaigns a huge life.
- Don’t necessarily give your search (last click) all of the credit! Display ads, emails, etc. can often give an “assist”. p.s. Yahoo! is now tracking search assists.
- Hours spent online is going up~ but search only takes up a small amount of the time what people do online.
- Search is becoming the new display operation system – and improving the ways that display can get into the mix.
- This year was less about the war between Bing, Yahoo!, and Google and instead was more focused on ROI for our clients.
- Lunch? C’mon guys.. Three straight days of the same food? Really?
In summary, there were a lot of great speakers and a lot of great people here at this year’s SES San Jose. Next year, SES will move to San Francisco which should be a great change of venue for this conference. Maybe, just then, we will see an attendance number that more closely matches the quality of the event.
