The SMX Content Difference

The SMX West 2008 Programming Team

As our "The SMX Content Difference" page explains, we put our all into the programming of any Search Marketing Expo conference. SMX West 2008 is no exception. Below, some background about the people and the process behind the SMX West 2008 show.

Conference Chairs

Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman are co-chairs of SMX West 2008. Working with the session coordinators, they oversaw the agenda creation, programming format and speaker selection process.

Session Coordinators

Each individual session has a "session coordinator" who is in charge of selecting speakers and establishing the session format (who will talk for how long, on what topics and so on). The coordinators ensure that attendees get a session that is well orchestrated. Rather than speakers overlapping each other on topics (or being off-topic for the session), SMX session coordinators ensure that everyone is set to deliver a complementary performance. For SMX West 2008, our panel coordinators are:

Session Moderators

In most cases, panel coordinators will also serve as moderator of the session that they put together. However, we have a few cases where a different person may serve as the session moderator, such as when a panel coordinator might assemble two sessions running at the same time. Moderation is an important part of programming. Moderators are there to crack the whip if the speakers don't stick to their times, plus they help elicit further responses to questions posed by the audience. Moderators themselves are also often great sources of knowledge and can help provide a further perspective on panels. Below are the SMX session moderators:

Q&A Moderators

SMX also has a second type of moderator that we're debuting at SMX West. This is the Q&A Moderator. SMX devotes a huge amount of time for Q&A and discussion, as we feel it's an essential part of a successful and valuable session. However, just picking hands from the audience is a fairly random and unrepresentative way to decide on what to put to the panel.

Our solution is the Q&A Moderator. During most SMX sessions, attendees will be able to send questions to the Q&A Moderator. We'll describe the exact process in the future - but it will be easy and accessible to everyone in the audience. The Q&A Moderator - who is an expert themselves on the session topic - will group similar questions together. Then they will assemble a top list that gets put to the audience to vote on. This way, the entire audience can influence which questions get asked. As the Q&A period progresses, new questions will be posted and voted on. Below are our hard working Q&A Moderators:

By the way, looking for some type of "SMX Advisory Board," like some other conferences have? Yes, we've got one - and it's a pretty inclusive group of people. It's you. It's anyone that ever attends one of our shows. Whether you provide feedback to using our formal evaluation forms, send us email or just talk to us at the show, we take all that advice back to constantly reshape and improve our events going forward. So congrats! If you've been to one of our shows and provided some feedback, feel free to link to this post and name yourself as an advisory boardmember!