I was fortunate enough to attend the excellent SMX West Conference. The Search Engine Marketing conference was excellent. I met a ton of really excellent people and learned a ton from the conference. I was especially interested in James Lamberti’s talks on Brand Experience and search. My experience with search at this point in my career is less about transactional user activity as it is about users associating broad search terms with familiar brands. Lamberti had a lot of great material on the subject hopefully I will be able to put it to use.
The terms blended or universal search were omnipresent, and it became clear that it local, video, image, and other search categories are still under utilized by most search firms. Our use of it in my current position for our Consumer Package goods clients is not abundant and hopefully I will have a chance to see some changes in this as time goes on.
I came back energized from the experience and feel more humbled than informed. Hopefully as time goes on I will have insights instead of a banal event report to offer.
My big takeaway from the experience is that it’s best to pace yourself when socializing. Two words: google groove.