Keynote Conversation: John Borthwick – Founder & CEO, Betaworks

If you’ve spent any time in social media, there’s an excellent chance you’ve used a product that started with Betaworks. The company gave birth to Summize, which became Twitter Search. Twitter’s TweetDeck client is another Betaworks child. Millions shorten URLs with Bitly each month; SocialFlow helps managers send tweets and Facebook posts to their audiences; Chartbeat provides real-time analytics. Newest child? Digg, which was reborn in six weeks under Betawork’s parentage. In this conversation with conference co-chair Danny Sullivan, Betaworks CEO John Borthwick will cover how his company decides what to back in the rapidly evolving world of social media, as well as trend and his perspectives on the space.

Issues & Tactics Track

Solution Spotlight by Didit (10:45-10:50)
Solution Spotlights are brief introductions to relevant products and services offered by SMX exhibitors and sponsors.

Do Not Track, Do Not Cookie: How To Handle Government Pushback On Digital Marketing (#smx #21B)
Good news – the EU unexpectedly backed away from its cookie and tracking legislation policy that severely limited online marketing. Bad news – US lawmakers are contemplating sweeping changes to intellectual property law that will stifle access and the flow of information we’ve long been accustomed to. What’s a marketer to do? This session is a marketer’s guide to new and proposed regulations. It provides tips on how to comply with (or cleverly avoid) regulations that limit relationships with your online customers and users.

Semantic SEO Track

Solution Spotlight by gShift Labs (10:45-10:50)
Solution Spotlights are brief introductions to relevant products and services offered by SMX exhibitors and sponsors.

Schema 101: Why The New Meta Data Matters (#smx #21C)
Schema.org is a joint alliance between Google, Microsoft and others to provide a common foundation for microdata standards. In other words, provide trusted meta data that allow site owners to express important “facts” about their businesses that both inform searchers and build authority with search engines. This session looks at these microdata standards and how to use them to enhance the importance of your own online content.

Social Media Track

Solution Spotlight by MediaWhiz (10:45-10:50)
Solution Spotlights are brief introductions to relevant products and services offered by SMX exhibitors and sponsors.

Getting Ahead With Google+ (#smx #21A)
Google+ is a social aspect to Google, allowing people to share photos, places they’ve been, videos, links and status updates. Google CEO Larry Page has publicly stated that Google+ is the “new DNA” for all aspects of Google, so as a marketer, you ignore it at your peril. This session examines the core mechanics of Google+ and how marketers should best interact with all of its moving parts.

SMX Advanced Track

Solution Spotlight by Marin Software (10:45-10:50)
Solution Spotlights are brief introductions to relevant products and services offered by SMX exhibitors and sponsors.

The Mad Scientists Of Paid Search (#smx #21D)
It’s alive! Mwah ha ha ha! Our mad scientists emerge from their PPC labs, where they’ve been assembling keywords, bidding strategies and other assorted parts into monster PPC campaigns. Attend this session to see how they’ve successfully enhanced paid search performance with rigorous testing and trial and error. Their creations are abnormally effective!

Plus Session Track 

What’s this?

This session is sponsored and produced by Conductor. It is open to all SMX East attendees, including Expo+ Pass holders.

Issues & Tactics Track

What’s Your Personas-ality? (#smx #22B)
Personas are a way to model the basic types of visitors you expect to come to your site and tailor their experience to fit their needs. To be successful, you need to truly understand the needs of your customers, and “get into their heads” to model optimal online paths through your web site to satisfy them. This session looks at how personas can be a powerful tool for attracting customers, whether through organic or paid search campaigns.

Semantic SEO Track

Schema 201: Real World Markup For Success (#smx #22C)
You know semantic markup is important, but are you using it in the most effective way possible? This session features marketers that have explored and fine-tuned their approaches to microdata and other ways of expressing authority to search engines. Speakers will also offer case-study examples of how paying attention to detail has had a significantly positive impact on online visibility.

Social Media Track

Tuning Up Your Twitter Tactics (#smx #22A)
Twitter is a proven source of traffic, but it’s no longer just about simply pushing out a quick 140-character update to your followers. Other important considerations now include time of day, frequency of tweets and retweets, the authority of those who retweet you, Twitter’s expanding promoted tweet program and many other increasingly complex factors. Attend this session and get the insight you need to drive more traffic – and potential customers – from Twitter.

SMX Advanced Track

Solution Spotlight by DAC Group (1:30-1:35)
Solution Spotlights are brief introductions to relevant products and services offered by SMX exhibitors and sponsors.

iConvert: Landing Pages & Conversion In A Smartphone & Tablet World (#smx #22D)
Well-designed mobile landing pages and sites can mean the difference between consumer engagement or abandonment, with corresponding consequences to your brand. But can mobile sites and landing pages actually drive conversions? Should marketers plan that mobile users will convert on their smartphones, or should they expect conversions to come from other channels, like landline phone, computer or even (gasp!) offline? And how can those smartphone-influenced sales or conversions be tracked? What about “T-commerce?” Should tablets be treated like PCs or smartphones or neither? Join us as we debate these burning questions and take away best practices you should be implementing.

Plus Session Track 

What’s this?

Performance Targeting Through Real Time Bidding And Display: The Complement To Search

While search captures 4% of users’ total time spent, according to Nielsen, the other 96% is spent actively consuming content across the web. This presents a huge opportunity for savvy performance marketers to leverage advanced targeting options through display. Search campaigns excel at delivering conversions and have a set of attributes that deliver exceptional advertising returns. Why not for display too? The emergence of real time bidding (RTB) is a catalyst for massive growth and performance in display as it brings impression level, data driven targeting and clear success metrics for advertising experiences. Phenomenal opportunities await search marketers and agencies to grow their footprint and returns leveraging advanced technologies that complement their existing search programs.

Scott Linzer, Head of Search Agency Development, will illuminate the opportunity available to savvy, results-centric search marketers in a bright new world of display.

This session is sponsored and produced by Quantcast. It is open to all SMX East attendees, including Expo+ Pass holders.

Issues & Tactics Track

Solution Spotlight by aimClear (3:30-3:35)
Solution Spotlights are brief introductions to relevant products and services offered by SMX exhibitors and sponsors.

Finding & Succeeding With A Search Marketing Agency (#smx #23B)
Serious question: would you do brain surgery on yourself? No? Then if you’re not an experienced search marketer who’s willing to devote 24/7 to the task, you’ll want to work with an agency. But how do you find the one that will best satisfy your needs? This session features both agencies and clients who offer a frank view of how to establish and maintain an ideal working relationship.

Semantic SEO Track

Solution Spotlight by Sedo.com (3:30-3:35)
Solution Spotlights are brief introductions to relevant products and services offered by SMX exhibitors and sponsors.

From Authorship To Authority: Why Claiming Your Identity Matters (#smx #23C)
With all of the recent focus on “content is king,” many marketers overlook that there’s a much broader process involved in establishing and maintaining the all-important factor of “authority.” This comprehensive session considers the entire process of “claiming your identity,” starting with brainstorming sessions with SEO, social and content development teams, to content promotion tactics for gaining authority links. Both enterprise SEO teams as well as outside consultants will benefit from this session.

Social Media Track

Getting Liked & Shared On Facebook (#smx #23A)
With nearly one billion users, the Timeline feature and integration of everything people do from link sharing to exercising, Facebook offers a huge opportunity for marketers. This session looks at how to drive traffic and conversions through fan pages, viral campaigns and more.

SMX Advanced Track

Pagination & Canonicalization For The Pros (#smx #23D)
SEO geek alert: Google now recommends using the pagination tag with optional parameters, sort orders, and filters. For the rest of us, that raises questions like: are there still reasons to use robots.txt or noindex? Can a canonical tag really replace a 301? How do you keep your IIS=based site from infinite redirect loops when you canonicalize default page names? And what about rel=alternate href=lang? We’ll go through the issues step by step so you can clear up the clutter on your site, maximize crawling and indexing, and eliminate duplicate content risks.

Issues & Tactics Track

Is Your Search Marketing Career Optimized? (#smx #24B)
Many search marketers focus on the results of their efforts (rightly so!) – things like reports demonstrating metrics achieved, ROI targets exceeded and so on. And then they wonder why they haven’t received a promotion or salary increase lately. An equally important part of optimizing your career is to demonstrate how you’re creating value for clients and employers, quantify that value and communicating a persuasive message about your success up the various management and stakeholder chains. This session looks at specific techniques that are overlooked by many when negotiating their compensation packages, and how to make the most from your hard work.

Semantic SEO Track

Direct Answers & The Knowledge Graph: Friend Or Foe? (#smx #24C)
We all want the best “results” from search engines, and increasingly we’re seeing “direct answers” based on “facts” search engines discover rather than the traditional ten blue links of results. For some, this is a boon, eliminating competition. For others, it’s a nightmare, sharply increasing SEO competition, often in unexpected (and to some, “unfair”) ways. How should marketers deal with the so called “knowledge graph” and the unprecedented changes it’s creating? Come to this session to hear some great forward-looking insights.

Social Media Track

The New Facebook Ads (#smx #24A)
Despite recent controversy with some major advertisers pulling their Facebook advertising accounts, other marketers have found that Facebook ads generate unprecedented results. And Facebook continues to roll out new formats, targeting options and other features that provide compelling options for many advertisers. This session focuses on the many reasons to “like” the new Facebook ads, and how to create successful campaigns.

SMX Advanced Track

Breaking The Speed Limit: Faster Sites Win! (#smx #24D)
Faster sites win in more ways than just rankings. Search engines can crawl (and index) more pages as server-side speed increases. And user engagement (including conversion!) increases as client-side speed (and perceived loading time) increases. Learn about hidden tricks you might be missing on how to speed things up.

Clinic Track

Google Analytics Clinic (#smx #24E)
Analytics are great, because they give you tons of insight and actionable information about the performance of your search marketing campaigns. But that can create problems if you’re not using the right reports, or drawing the wrong conclusions from the data. This clinic lets you ask questions about Google analytics options, settings and reports, and get advice from our experts.

Sponsored by

SMX After Dark Charity Party – It’s All for the Kids

Wednesday, October 3 – 9pm to 11pm

Join us for SMX After Dark, the annual networking charity event at SMX East! You’ll enjoy an open bar, snacks and an evening of networking with internet marketers from around the world!

Last year the SMX community donated $11,000 to Susan G. Komen for the Cure. We’re aiming to crush that this year. You’ll choose from three outstanding charities that benefit children in their own way.

Leading the fight to end exploitation
Learn more

Technology education for low-income communities
Learn more

Pediatric research hospital
Learn more

All. 100%. Every penny of your $50 donation goes to the charity of your choice. The good people at Covario provide all of the entertainment, food and bevies. Thanks Covario! Even the registration services have been donated by our friends at eTouches.

We’ll be posting the location of the party soon, so check back for details.

You’ll have the opportunity to register for After Dark when you register for your SMX conference ticket. Just want to come to After Dark? Already registered for the conference? Then register for just After Dark here!

Note: The charge for SMX After Dark is $50 and is not included with any SMX ticket. After Dark tickets can be purchased separately here or when you register for the conference.

Visit the NCMEC website.

Eighty-eight million U.S. residents lack the education, skills and credentials to participate in our growing information economy. At the same time, employer demand for skilled information workers is creating 3.7 million new IT jobs before 2016. Per Scholas, a non-profit based in the South Bronx, helps more than 400 low-income individuals annually learn new skills and get jobs in the technology sector. Nearly 80-percent of our graduates land jobs with average starting wages of $26,000 — more than 4 times what they earned before. We are excited about our future and the opportunities we are creating for thousands of economically dispossessed and dislocated workers, their families and communities.

Visit the PerScholas website.

Recognized as a leader in pediatric care, Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital at Westchester (NY) Medical Center operates under a “family-centered care” approach to treating children. This philosophy involves parents, siblings and family members in every step of a child’s treatment, and is provided in a state-of-the-art building designed specifically from the point of view of children and their families. Our hospital philosophy is that family-centered care and active family involvement create an environment especially suited to enable medical specialists to provide the most advanced care to their patients and to facilitate the healing process, regardless of the illness.

Visit the Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital website.