SMX West – Part 1: The Experience
16 Mar
SMX West Expo Hall
Its about time I do a write-up on my attendance at SMX West. I have been completely submersed in search marketing and related learnings ever since the week of the expo, but I think its time I come up for air before the memory slips away.
It was a cold and rainy day.. no just kidding. I mean it really was, but I’ll try to stay on point here. Which basically means whatever I feel is worth talking about from the day :-) But I will break this write-up into two parts for your convenience: Part 1 will discuss the more peripheral learnings I took from the experience as a whole, and Part 2 will discuss some of the specific learnings I took away – though just a handful of those that I felt were most profound and applicable, as a lot was covered and I don’t want to just create a summary of each course I attended.
So on to the experience..
This was my first industry conference since I have become so interested and involved in social media – both personally and as a marketing tool. And let me tell you, between Twitter and custom social networks, my network of people to learn from in the online space has just exploded.
Custom Social Networks
Search Marketing Expo – in all their awesomeness – created a custom social network, called SMX Connect, which allowed everyone who logged into it to interact with each other, and also allowed you to view a map of all “Connecty” registered attendees to see where everyone was from and view their profiles. We even had to submit our questions to the panel through a custom Q&A web interface so the moderator could more efficiently pick and choose the most relevant questions to pose to the panel. Very cool.
Optimizing My Learnings Through Twitter
I also created an “smx” twitter feed, which has provided a constant stream of endlessly interesting, educational and valuable information, and which also exposed me to so many other great people to follow in the industry. Even though I am quite organized in Tweetdeck, my streams have become such valuable content-providers I am now unable to even keep up – but I do my best. The feed has only just started to slow, but now instead of an “SMX” feed, I have an “smx peeps” feed which includes every person I discovered through SMX in person, Connecty, and my Twitter feeds. Beyond just following Twitter feeds, I am now aware of a handful of awesome live bloggers who were covering sessions I was unable to attend, and who continue to cover all of the big industry conferences and seminars. as well as dozens of great new blogs, companies and potentially useful platforms to keep an eye on.
Search Marketing Strategies – New York is coming up, and soon I will add the “SMSNY” feed which will just start the cycle all over again – although I won’t attend that one, but I will learn a lot just through the use of Twitter and following the live bloggers.
So as much as I learned from the courses I took at the expo itself, I can safely say I was able to multiply those learnings exponentially thanks to the use of social media and all of the resources I gained by being so active in the social space throughout the event.
Resources to Add to Your Arsenal
For fun, heres my Twitter list of all the folks I am now following from all of this Search Marketing frenzy that is SMX:
And here are a few of the great blogs I bookmarked since the event:
