Posts Tagged ‘SMX’

Testing, 1.. 2.. 3.., is this thing on? It’s been awhile since I used one of these blog things; let’s see if it’s like riding a bike.

I flew back from SMX Advanced 2008 on Thursday and I wanted to give some closing thoughts now that I’ve had time to rest and catch up. I met some great people in Seattle; some I’ve talked with online or read their work and others not. I’m not going to do the roll call because they know who they are. OK, I have to acknowledge Chris Winfield. He knows why.

I have to take my hat off for Matt Cutts after meeting him. I have more respect than ever for him and the job he does. Every time I saw him he was friendly and outgoing to everyone. He is very helpful where he can be but has a tightrope to walk balancing the needs of Google with webmasters and marketers. Personally, I don’t see how Matt can stand the pressure of everyone wanting a piece of him at every turn. Since when did software engineers become such skilled communicators?

The SMX sessions where great overall, but started a little slow with link building. Bot herding just had too much info to cover in a short presentation. The 2nd day rocked across-the-board on the organic track. Some have complained about too much talk of black hat techniques while others such as myself disagree. If you don’t want to know how all forms of Internet marketing work then your probably not passionate about the industry and can’t consider yourself an expert in the field. My only real recommendation to Danny Sullivan is to limit the number of speakers on each panel to 3 so they have time to go into their presentation in-depth. It’s needed for advanced sessions to live up to the name.

I think the biggest benefits gained while at SMX had nothing to do with the sessions. While there I had time to take a breather from the day-to-day grind and all the sudden brilliant ideas started to pop into my head. Some sparked from conversations while others just came to me through some form of osmosis from smart people in the room.

To wrap up, yes the show had high and low points, but so does every event in every industry. To me it was worth every penny and I plan being there next year. The way that SMX as a whole is splitting up conferences into niches is the only way to go. If I only attend 2 events a year it would probably be SMX Advanced and SMX Social Media. Maybe there should be an SMX analytics also?