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Myself and some of the HigherSites team headed up to the Online Marketing Show at Olympia on Tuesday this week (30 June). It’s always interesting to see what other companies and industry professionals are doing, particularly when online marketing is such a rapidly developing field, and on the whole I thought the show was very enjoyable, with some good speakers and seminar sessions. So here are a few of the highlights and lowlights of the show, from my perspective. For those that don’t know me, one of my fields of expertise is online marketing (search engine optimisation, pay-per-click advertising, social media etc.) and I am a Google qualified professional.

Show Overview
The show is put on by Marketing Week and is split into four distinct areas, with online marketing being just one of these. However, it was clear that online marketing is what most delegates were interested in, and I feel that Marketing Week completely underestimated its popularity, given that the Online section was the smallest. The result of this was that the show was very crowded and that the seminar sessions were universally over-subscribed. There simply wasn’t enough space for everyone to sit and listen, so delegates were forced to stand around the edges of the theatre areas in large crowds, straining to listen to the presentations. Others sat on the floor for long periods.

Clearly, online marketing is what marketing agencies are most interested in, and I hope Marketing Week adapt their show next year to reflect that fact.

The Venue
Olympia is a reasonable venue - much the same as any other conference centre really. It’s the usual story with the catering: exorbitant prices; low quality, and; not enough seating. If you can, try and plan your day so that you don’t need to eat there (unless you particularly want to part with £2 for a small bottle of water and over £4 for a pre-packaged sandwich).

Olympia is easily reached by Tube. If you’re travelling from the West Country, as we were, I recommend taking the M3 straight in to Richmond, parking at Old Deer Park Car Park (about £8 all day) and jumping on the Tube at Richmond station, which is no more than 5 minutes walk from the car park. This puts you straight on the District line and you change at Earl’s Court for an Olympia train.

Multi Variate Testing
The first session we attended (and by “attended” I mean: “jostled for space and craned our necks to see and listen from outside the theatre area”) was all to do with multi variate testing. If you’re not familiar with this area of online marketing / usability, it’s all to do with displaying multiple versions of a page and gauging which version delivers the best results. This sort of testing fits neatly between website development and online marketing, because it takes a lot of the guesswork out of the design and development process and provides increased levels of success to online marketing efforts. A page layout ceases to be the preference of the designer or the website owner, and becomes a proven formula for success, as dictated by the website users.

It really is amazing how the tiniest changes to a page layout can have a dramatic impact on the conversion rates of any calls to action on that page. This sort of testing is an absolute must for any website owner that needs better conversion levels. Remember: online marketing only delivers traffic to your website, it is the job of the website to convert that traffic into actual business.

Augmented Reality
This area of marketing is not really something I see myself ever getting involved in heavily, but it is something that is going to be huge. I can’t really explain it as well as a simple video demonstration can, so if you want to know more, do a search for “augmented reality” on YouTube.

I have already seen this technology in action, so it is here and now and available, but it is very expensive at the moment.

How 140 Brands Use Twitter
No matter how proficient you are in a particular discipline, it’s always worthwhile to have a look at things through another expert’s perspective. This particular session was lively and fast-paced with an excellent speaker. I picked up a few points that I will apply to my own use of Twitter and the company use of Twitter for clients as part of a social marketing package. It was particularly interesting to look at how major brands are using Twitter to good effect, and how many different ways there are to use it.

I thought the speaker did a particularly good job of getting across one of the key points of using Twitter for marketing. I have previously tended to caution customers not to use Twitter as a “PR megaphone”, but I like hers better. The analogy was of engaging with guests at a party. No-one will engage with you if all you do is talk about yourself! Online marketing with Twitter is all about engaging with people, and to do that, you need to be interested in what they have to say, even if sometimes you might not like what they say!

SEO is dead! Long live the new SEO!
I was drawn to this session by the exciting title, but the reality is it failed to deliver. Some of the content was largely similar to the content that I present in my own seminars and workshops, but this is no surprise as much of the content comes from the collective mouth of Google anyway. The theme of the session wasn’t really developed well enough, and I felt it could have been better. The speaker seemed more interested in plugging his own business and stand.

Unfortunately he made a bit of a gaff by introducing Microsoft bing as some sort of next big thing, and seemed to indicate that websites should be optimised specifically for bing, and if your current SEO company hadn’t told you about it, you ought to sack them (said as a bit of joke). Unfortunately, during the Q&A, one bright spark put his hand up and asked for some more specifics on how a website should be optimised for bing, which the speaker was unable to give, because of course nobody knows yet. Microsoft don’t publish their search engine algorithms for us to exploit, and as it is a brand new engine, it will take time for this information to filter through. But, given Google’s massive market share, I don’t think I will be spending too much of my time worrying about bing just yet.

Conclusion
So, I only managed to catch 4 sessions during the day, but with the exception of the last, the sessions were very useful for me. The stands were pretty much all SEO companies or email marketeers, so these didn’t hold much interest to me, but for a traditional marketing agency looking to branch into digital, I imagine there would have been plenty of potential partners there.

I am scheduled to deliver a 1 hour session on SEO and Social Media at Business South West 2009, and whilst I haven’t finalised my material yet, I took a lot of pointers on how to make my presentations even more lively and interactive. Good stuff.

Overall a good day, and definitely worth going, just a shame it wasn’t organised a bit better and given the attention it deserved.

It has been a long couple of days. Preparing and presenting a three hour workshop on search engine optimisation for Connecting Somerset - a council funded initiative to help local business owners make the most of ICT. The problem with my workshop is the way the web changes so fast, and search engine algorithms, even faster. What is best practice one minute, becomes a no-no the next. Inevitably, this means I have to modify my presentation and the associated handout every time I deliver it.

It was a real shame that some of the confirmed delegates didn’t turn up. This information is extremely valuable for business owners, and I know of no other forum where you can get it for free (well, almost free - there’s a nominal fee to cover lunch and venue hire). Once again, I had plenty of positive feedback and thanks from the delegates, who appeared for the most part to be very happy with the new things they had learned.

As we move forward, search engine optimisation will become much more closely linked with social media, and this a theme we started to develop today, and one that we will be developing further with a selection of new products from HigherSites.

If any of the delegates do find my blog, I’d welcome some feedback here - just use the comments facility below. If you haven’t attended a workshop yet, get your name to me to be put on the list. You don’t necessarily have to be a Somerset-based business to benefit.

Now, I am hugely tired, and I am going to bed!