SMX Meet & Greet: Monday, June 7 – 6PM to 7:30PM

Sponsored by:

SEO & Social Media Track

SEO For Google Vs. Bing: How Different Are They? – Back in the old days, some SEOs walked through the snow for eight miles and made different versions of their sites for Infoseek, AltaVista, Excite, Lycos and others. Each search engine liked different things, and so the effort was deemed worth it, by some. Then came Google, which grew and grew to the degree that for many, it was the only search engine to care about. You built a site for Google and didn’t worry about the rest. Now the times may be changing. When the Microsoft-Yahoo deal is complete — only months away now — Yahoo’s results will be powered by Bing. Suddenly, a second player with an estimated 25-35% marketshare will emerge overnight. Does it make sense to build a Bing-specific site? Is there that much of a difference between ranking factors for Bing versus Google to justify the effort? This panel explores the issues.

Paid Search Track

How’s Your QSO? Quality Score Optimization For Pros – Improve your AdWords quality score and enjoy cheaper prices and better positioning when advertising on Google. It’s that easy. Except it’s not, since how Google calculates quality score remains a mysterious black box to many. Even the paid search experts can find understanding quality score to be a challenge. In this session, quality score optimization advice designed for the pros.

Business Issues Track

Opening The Contracts Kimono: Translating Your Pricing Model To Legal Agreement – Discussions of SEM "pricing models" are mostly theoretical chatter. Putting deals together based on those concepts requires developing contracts, which can be daunting and expensive to perfect. Agencies and independents are highly protective of their contracts, the valuable written instruments that embody actual execution of SEM business models.

Join our panel of successful SEM agency owners and  independents, each prepared to dissect business models of different flavors and distribute some of their shop’s SEO, PPC, ORM, Social Media, NDA, performance-based, other agreements and/or specific paragraphs.  You’ve never attended a session like this. The entire cost of attending SMX Advanced may be justified by one contract or paragraph.

Note: Because of the high value of materials:

• Materials will be distributed only to those who physically attend the session and agree not to redistribute
• Laws differ from state to state; recipients’ attorneys may need to adapt the language as appropriate for their jurisdiction
• Materials are in no way are intended to constitute legal advice, only reference materials regarding how other firms have accomplished various business model objectives.

SEO & Social Media Track

Twitter, Real Time Search & Real Time SEO – Still think Twitter’s a big waste of time? Think again. Tweets are now directly integrated into Google’s main search results. Along with tweets, other real time content is being incorporated into Google and other search engines. This session looks at the fast moving changes in real time search, with a particular look at how the SEO pro should be leveraging Twitter as part of their campaigns.

Paid Search Track

Targeting The Search Funnel – Most people don’t do a search and immediatley buy from a web site. They often research a product over days, weeks or even months, using different search terms from search session-to-session. The panel looks at the search funnel, as Google’s new tool recently renamed the sales funnel. How do you best target people at different points of the funnel using paid search and move them toward your ultimate goal of conversion.

Business Issues Track

Emotional Rescue: What You Need To Know About The B2B Buying Dynamic – SEM businesses – agencies, software vendors, consultants -  sell to other businesses…which evaluate rationally and make sound decisions. Then why did the deal go sour at the 11th hour? How about the  customer oozing buying signals – then suddenly stop returning calls and answering e-mail? Sound familiar? You’re not alone.
 
B2B sales are driven by emotion just as consumer purchases are, according to ground breaking research contained in The Buyersphere: How Business Buys from Business in a Digital Marketplace.
You’ll leave this session knowing:

•  the "marketing funnel" is broken analogy because of the role of emotion plays in B2B buying, and what you can do to mitigate the effects of emotion to become a more successful B2B sales organization;
•  how organizational and person risks affect B2B purchase decisions;
•  what the  overlap is  between "Doers" and "Buyers" in the buying process, and how that dynamic influences decisions ;
•  how online/offline sales best practices contribute to greater success.

SEO & Social Media Track

Show Me The Links: Real Life Link Building – Yes, yes. Do a top 10 list. Got it. Attract links with rewards. Heard that. What else you got when it comes to link building? In this session, link builders share real life stories of how they obtained hard-to-get links. Is it the relationships, stupid? Focusing on what matters? Tips and strategies, for the pros.

Paid Search Track

Pump Up Those Conversions! – You’ve got them to your site — that’s half the battle. Win the war. Convert, convert, convert! Convert them on the landing pages! Guide them past landing page as necessary, converting them deeper in the site. But convert! This session looks at tools, testing and techniques for the advanced search marketer to increase those conversion odds.

Business Issues Track

Raising Capital During & After The Great Recession – The stock market is up and the banking crisis appears over, but that doesn’t mean that funding from sources like VC, private equity and IPOs is flowing. Intrigued about or considering raising capital? This session is for you. Topics include: 

• Reality Check: The Financing Environment for Growth Stage Companies
• Startup Funding: What You Need To Know About Angels and VCs
• Against the Odds – Raising Capital in a Recession

Microsoft adCenter Desktop Lab – This lab session will walk through our newly upgraded Desktop tool that helps advertisers import their campaigns from Google and Yahoo to adCenter in just a few steps. Bring your laptop to this lab and follow along as we demo how to import your Google and Yahoo campaigns into adCenter using the Desktop tool. This lab will also cover how to build out effective keyword expansions using the Desktop tool’s built-in keyword research tab.

Speaker: Peter Chang, Product Manager, adCenter, Microsoft Advertising

This session is sponsored and produced by Microsoft Advertising. It is open to all SMX Advanced attendees.

SEO & Social Media Track

The Ultimate Social Media Tools Session – Buckle up for a tour of social media tools that you can use day to day. This session covers free and paid tools, how they work and how best to use them. Specifically, you’ll learn

• How using social media tools will help streamline your work
• How to save time and money using social media tools
• What tools you can use to help find conversations and customers
• How to have tools built on a very small budget, and how to get tools built

Paid Search Track

Test That Ad! – Let’s face it. The creative, when it comes to paid search ad copy, doesn’t give you a lot of room to be creative. You’ve got so little space, so little time your ad will be viewed, that it’s essential that every word counts. You’re testing religiously, right? But can you be testing better? And are there things you should be trying that you might not be aware of? This session aims to educate and surprise even the advanced paid search marketer.

Business Issues Track

Demystifying Online Attribution – Measuring ROI is key to effective online acquisition efforts. When you know what’s working (and what isn’t), you can react quickly. Just as important are the insights online data can give you about your customers: what were they searching for that caused them to buy? Did that display ad make all the difference? Unfortunately, attributing all conversions to the last click is easy to do with current analytics products, yet doing so obscures real customer data and effectiveness measurements. This panel will provide real answers on how to track a customer’s searches through all phases of the buying cycle, how to measure cross channel “assists”, and how to avoid the dangers of last click attribution.

Sponsors & Partners Track

Search & Social: Measuring & Driving Brand Effectiveness – Search and social media are the key platforms that provide advertisers with unfiltered feedback on how consumers identify and look for their brands. However, the major challenge in the past has been that the sheer amount of data made it hard to operationalize, and organization communication barriers made it hard to feed this back up the channel to impact brand building programs. Mostly, search and social media are used to augment keyword lists – but not strategically. Technology is making this a little more approachable – through dynamic generation of SEO content, to more effective reporting on keyword effectiveness, to increased integration of search into overall campaign programs.

This panel of experts from some of the biggest brands in their respective industries will share how they are using technology to power advertising performance using search and social media insights. Attendees will learn how to strategically harness the voice of the customer to leverage search and social media and create marketing programs that drive better results.

Speakers:

Arnel Leyva, Director of Product Management, Covario
Mark Grote, Senior Search Advertising Manager, Microsoft
Beth Lubov Butrymowicz, Global Media Manager, Intel Corporation

This session is sponsored and produced by Covario. It is open to all SMX Advanced attendees.

You&A With Matt Cutts
What’s a You&A? That’s where you, the audience, put your questions directly to the head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts. As an engineer in search quality, Matt’s been dealing with webmaster issues for Google since 2000 and is well known to many advanced search marketers from his blog and public speaking. Don’t miss this popular SMX Advanced tradition!

Bing Presents In The Park 2010

Bing is proudly hosting the SMX conference bash where attendees, speakers and invited guests will have a chance to mingle against the beautiful backdrop of the Olympic Sculpture Park and the Puget Sound.