SES New York 2009 – Feedback
March 29, 2009
Overall, I felt a bit disappointed at this year’s event. The sessions on Day 1 and 2 appeared to have little for the SEO attendees and much was a bit too basic. In addition, the charity party was on Monday night which meant that people like me, who had to come in on Tues (or late Mon) the party was out of reach and there was no Webmaster Radio Bash or anything to replace it.
Happily, there were invite events that I was fortunate enough to attend and the Castle as well as the Hilton Bars for getting together to talk about life and all things SEO, SEM and Social Media. Now does that mean it was a bad conference or that I felt is had no value? Definitely not. I just feel that the lack of focus on SEO and open networking events definitely detracted from SES and so was not as exciting an event as last year, where social events abound along with new nuggets at most every session.
Recommended Improvements
As for the conference itself, I do feel on of the most important things SES could do, would be to add a track for advanced attendees. In one session I attended, they asked the audience “How many of you were here in 2004?”. No one raised their hands. I believe this is because the conference has not listened to attendees about the need for these tracks and maybe they should. SES has some of the most talented people in the business there, the speakers do not have to give away the secret sauce, but they can surely do more than talk about SEO 101. I do hope SES will hear this and offer a new track next year. Maybe one on “The Cutting Edge” or “Advanced, Not 101 Anymore.” Something that will offer those of us with greater understanding more value.
All this being said, I still feel I learned a lot and made some great new friends. The people that come to these events are always so helpful and fun. I rarely run across someone who is unwilling to return a smile and a hello and find many are very willing to share helpful nuggets of information.Plus, just being in Times Square with all your favorite SEO/M’s is a blast in itself.
So overall, it was a good conference with great people and a lot of fun times. Would just like to see some more advanced content and more focus on open network events next year. These two things would have made the conference a great one, instead of just a good one.
Thank you for listening!
Smiles!
Entry Filed under: 2009,SES New York,networking,news,search,search engines,seo,social media,technology. Tags: blogging, business, internet, search, search engine, search engine optimization, Search Engine Strategies, secret sauce, seo, SES New York, SES NY.
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Joel Sussman | March 31, 2009 at 6:57 am
I attended a session on Tuesday, called “Advanced SEO Strategies: Integrating Analytics, Usability, Persuasion, and Journalism”. I found the session to be very useful, and the presenter, Matthew Bailey, kept people’s attention and definitely knew his stuff; but I don’t recall anything in the session that I would consider to be “Advanced SEO”.
It all depends on your perspective, though. The word “advanced” means different things to different people, so it’s based, in part, on how long you’ve been in SEO.
The intrinsic problem with the SES conference is that attendees can’t split themselves into three people to be able to attend every session that interest them! I know that I had to make some difficult decisions, and in one case, I ended up in a workshop that I didn’t like (not the one I mentioned.)