Reviews and Commentary
SES New York: The Flock is Turning. Who will be the Shepherd?
By: Matt Naeger, Executive VP, Operations
For those of you in the Search industry who did not attend SES New York a few weeks ago, let me tell you some things that you probably already know: engines (particularly Google) don’t like duplicate content; linking is hard; enterprise SEO is really just SEO explained to a lot of people at your company; and analytics are important to marketing.
Having not attended the last few SES conferences, I expected the conversation in New York to be on a different level. I found myself, after returning to the office, astonished and disappointed at the lack of innovation in the panel discussions. I recognize that SES is not just for Search experts and that industry conferences need to be a place where novices can go to get up to speed. However, what I am finding way too often these days is that we, as an industry, are not talking about where the next evolution of Search should and could come from.
Where is the innovation in this space? Who is going to step to the plate and tell people what Search will look like in 2011 and beyond? Do we still need to be talking about topics that anyone who has worked in Search for more than six months would have a firm grasp on by this point? I talked with many colleagues at the show, all of whom agreed that you could have taken your hot tub time machine back five years and would not have noticed a single thing different about SES. It is time for us to start talking about Search the way that we always hope our clients think about it when they are allocating their budgets.
Search is as evolving a medium as marketers have ever experienced. It started out in the 90’s as a novel way to increase the “page views” of your Web site, morphed into a technical field focused on Web site design and keyword-heavy content, then exploded when Paid Search was born and Search became the best direct marketing program anyone had ever seen. Now it is time for Search to make its next evolution: it is time for Search Engine MARKETING to be seen as just that – marketing.
It is time for Search conferences and, frankly, Search marketers to talk about how to reach specific customer segments with targeted messages that may or may not be about driving directly to the almighty sale. It is time to talk about Search as a way to get the consumer to think differently about your brand. It is time to talk about how consumers use Search in their daily lives and not just about how they use it to purchase products or sign up for newsletters. It is time for us to recognize Search as a true marketing vehicle and not just a direct marketing vehicle.
We, as Search marketers, need to look at our conferences as a way to push our industry forward and not just a way to market our own services. I am issuing a challenge to every Search marketer reading this article who has something new and innovative to offer to the Search space: Stand up and be noticed for innovating among your colleagues and for driving the dialog in the industry. If we all start to do this, we can change how people think of Search and, in the long run, we can give Search the seat at the marketing table that we all know it should have.