By guest writer Paul J. Bruemmer, Director Search Marketing Red Door Interactive

Billed for the “advanced� search marketing community, SMX proved to be quite valuable for those starting out with in-house SEM operations, or with 3-5 years experience. It likely was quite overwhelming for any entry level SEM’s. For those with 10+ plus years, it was a plum opportunity to network with the best and to be in step with the latest industry trends.

SMX: An introduction

As compared with other SEM shows, all the same faces and subject matter were present with a spin toward audience response and involvement.

Overall, I will score Search Marketing Expo with an 8 out of 10 power points and a full 10 for effort. Clearly, the team responsible for planning and delivering the event can be proud, and congratulations to those in the background who helped keep it all together.

The location was a welcome change, certainly one could break away to get the feeling of rest and relaxation in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. The audience seemed to be made up predominantly of in-house SEM’s and practitioners.

There were two tracks, Paid and Organic, which from a knowledge-transfer point-of-view, often made it difficult to get the whole picture; I wanted to be in two places at the same time. It is mandatory for in-house SEM’s and practitioners to have a well-rounded understanding of both paid and organic search in order to deliver best practice search engine marketing strategy and tactics.

Day one: It fell short

Day one, in many people’s opinion, fell short, to a large extent because these events require major search engine sponsors, and many of the sponsors were booked in sessions as panelists, but the attendees could care less about that.

Search engine sponsors would have been better served by letting their brand and advertising do the talking. The obvious occurred — Google dominated — and not too many attendees seemed to care much about the other engines or what they had to say.

SMX re-hashed the old organic topic of Duplicate Content with the engines on panel, and I simply tried not to snore too loudly. It was painfully slow, redundant and valueless as an advanced topic. Had there been a couple of expert practitioners on the panel, it may have provided a balance and satisfied the crowd.

The Paid side, on the other hand, provided value and appeared to gain momentum throughout the conference. ‘At the end of the day,’ (an inside joke…you had to be there); we were all desperately hoping that Day two would be much better.

The networking

And then nightfall arrived. Google hosted a party, and the networking proceeded to make up for the looser organic sessions of the day. If networking is important to you, then the conference ticket paid for itself hands-down at the Google party.

A lot goes on after hours, and only Danny and Google together can pull together the likes of the crowd attending such after-hour events. So therein was the most significant value-add at SMX, the networking.

Day two: If you missed it, you really blew it

Day two opened with a huge success during the Paid session, “Is bid management dead?� This was an excellent panel of experts facing off in debate; the scenario was very well crafted and executed. Everyone learned something, and I was a very happy camper.

The following two Organic tracks were off-the-hook — these were must attend, must have, and worthwhile to everyone in the audience. With the networking under our belts and the knowledge-transfer passed on during the last two organic sessions, we were as happy as pigs in the mud. If you missed it, you really blew it (big time).

There is no way to convey what was actually going on during these two sessions, and we were sworn to a 30-day lock-out and secrecy regarding the last session, called “Give it up.� I’ve been doing this for 12 years now, and I can tell you, everyone learned something valuable during this session.

The ‘Give it up’ session and networking made SMX the first SEM conference I can honestly recommend to others in the future as a worthwhile event; and I’ve been speaking at these events since 1999 (disclosure: I did not speak at SMX).

A bright future for search

Clearly, search continues to explode, leaving huge gaps and opportunities for many people, companies, tools, advertisers, ideas etc. If SMX is any indication of the direction in which we are headed, I would advise you to have your sun glasses handy; it is going to be a very bright future.

If you are on an in-house SEM team, or lead a team, and did not make it to SMX, I suggest you call me for the details immediately, none of the blogging you will read will do SMX justice, and the critical path of information, as I said, has been sworn to secrecy (no blogging allowed).

Anyone breaking this pact will certainly be discredited for the remainder of his or her career, and publicly humiliated for being a complete weasel and disingenuous dork.

Don’t miss the next SMX, and to show you how much confidence I have in this group’s talent and abilities, I will personally guarantee your ticket price if you leave the next SMX without feeling it was worth twice the price you paid.

Of course, you will have to call me first to discuss a strategy and plan for harvesting SMX value, you cannot just show up and expect to be hand-fed. It requires expert advice and preparation to capture the value in attending these events.

More reviews at the SMX site.

About the author

Paul J. Bruemmer has provided search engine marketing expertise and In-house consulting services to prominent American businesses since 1995. As Director of Search Marketing at Red Door Interactive, he is responsible for the strategic implementation of search engine marketing activities within Red Door’s Internet Presence Management (IPM) services. Paul has provided search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) services to thousands of websites, including clients like Lexis-Nexis and NASDAQ. Paul is a well-known industry columnist, having written articles for ClickZ, iMediaConnection, Search Engine Guide, Pandia and MarketingProfs. He is a featured speaker at local and national conference events: Search Engine Strategies (SES), MIVA, WebSideStory, eComXpo and San Diego Software Industry Council (SDSIC). Paul is on the SEMPO.ORG education committee task force for search marketing curriculum. Paul can be reached at (USA) 619-398-2670 ext. 127.