What I learned at SES New York
Most of the Market Motive Faculty attended and/or spoke at the recent Search Engine Strategies New York. I believe this is the first full SES conference without Danny Sullivan. Though he is missed, the Incisive management team put on an excellent conference attended by over 8,000 folks looking to learn about online marketing.
Market Motive did a co-promotion with Incisive, so while I try to avoid shipping booths & staff cross country, we took a space on the show floor. Honestly, I’m glad we did.
I jot down notes on each day’s experiences at these events, so here are a few things I learned while at SES NYC:
Web Analytics is in a cycle of high popularity.
I witnessed standing room only in each session that covered web analytics. Perhaps the distribution of Google Analytics has caused this. True or not, site owners are starting to grasp the power of seeing visitor behavior on site and are looking for ways to interpret the data into action.
Regardless of the analytics tool, I know most new analytics tool users hit “The Wall” after about 20 minutes of use. I talk about this more in my “Stop Wasting Time with Web Analytics” series.
Testing a message in real-time is fun:
OK, we’re analytics folks. So multivariate testing is our genetic destiny. And this extends
beyond the web to the trade show floor. At SES, one of my goals was to reduce the TUTLGO (time until the light goes on) to less than 15 seconds booth visitors who ask, “So, what is Market Motive?”
To test, we systematically responded with short phrase combinations until we found the grouping that elicited the fastest enthusiastic response. We wanted to convey 1) the on demand video sessions, 2) the call access to faculty, and 3) the Q&A forums. (We learned to leave out #3) What was the winning phrase grouping? Skip the next part if you are pitch averse! It went something like this:
“We provide online classes, just like the sessions here, through a membership web site. After viewing any video, you can call in and discuss it with the presenter.”
[here, we'd pause and wait for the "oh!", then…]
“So short of hiring the top 6 consultants, or flying out to a dozen conferences, you can catch any session on-demand, and then talk to the industry authority to check your strategy or get advice.”
[Pause… Light goes on, and the next question would
fall roughly into one of the following four groups:]80% “Seriously? What does that cost?”
10% “OK, How often do I get to talk to [faculty name]?”
8% Other
2% “Do you take American Express?”
Good fish and Greek food is around the corner from the hotel. 
The company made it even better, which included Richard, Jeff, Jim, Emily, Karen Lea and Matt. My favorite topics of our private-room dinner:
- How many domains do you (not your business) own? (my answer: 18)
- How many saltine crackers can you consume at once? I’m up to four… Jeff.
- What was the outcome of Jim’s 2006 expose “click fraud allegations” from late 2007?
- What the heck is a lavraki?
How Many SEOs can you fit into a Irish Pub on Saint Patrick’s Day?
About 20. The rest of us conversational types worked the pub crawl backwards from #6 and met the other crew in the middle.
One bonus find: You can buy a decent 10×10 trade show booth for $499 on ebay
It was also my pleasure to meet Stoney, and Scott and Duane and hope to see you all at eMetrics SES San Jose or Pubcon.
Lastly, while at SES I learned from Jennifer Laycock about the upcoming Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference in Houston on April 21-22 backed by my friends Search Engine Guide. $975 for two full days of well known speakers sounds like a great deal to me.
