Welcome back!
I had an opportunity today to attend the Austin Advertising Federation luncheon. This is one of the first industry functions that I’ve been able to attend, and I am now looking forward to more. The speakers were Bill Leake and Brian Combs of Apogee Search. The topic was why so many agencies struggle with search marketing, and as someone who practices SEO I thought they did a great job.
Bill was the primary speaker, and he was probably the more confident speaker between the two. He raised a few great points about Google’s shift to including news, videos and social media items in search results, indexing flash content and search within search. He also made a personal comment about flash content that I happen to agree with, that flash developers make sites that are annoying to everyone but the person that developed it. I completely agree that the medium (flash vs html vs ajax vs …) needs to be chosen based on the message and the content, not the other way around. I would have loved it if he had taken this line of thought further, but this probably wasn’t the proper forum for that conversation.
Brian was also great. He didn’t speak as much, which is unfortunate because I appreciated his thoughts as well. While discussing the use of social media he made the point that each site (Digg, Twitter, Facebook, etc) becomes its own community, and if someone is going to use that medium then all efforts really need to be tailored to that specific site. Digg users respond differently to a story than Facebook or Sphinn or Reddit users would. Very insiteful. To claim that you’re an expert in all social media is too broad to be meaningful.
I also met a few folks from other agencies around town. I particularly enjoyed visiting with the event host, Paul Bradshaw of Full Orange Films. All in all, I really enjoyed it, and am looking forward to attending future events.
One Comment
I completely agree that the medium needs to be chosen based on the message and the content, not the other way around. I would have loved it if he had taken this line of thought further, but this probably wasn’t the proper forum for that conversation.