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Best of WordCamp Jerusalem

Gil Reich — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 09:01:49 +0000

WordCamp Jerusalem had a very strong finish. Here’s the best of the best:

WordCamp Jerusalem

Best Lines:

Matt Mullenweg:
- People have better things 2 do. The tool should be invisible. Take 1 sec from 15 mil users. That’s a lot of time.
- (Discussing WordPress history): Some of the conversations were a bit combative. But you guys should be fine with that.
- 3.0 was just meant to be the version after 2.9. It wasn’t meant to signify a major release. [and in response to laughter:] Really!
- Joel Spolsky said it takes 10 years to make great software. WordPress is 8. So we’re almost there!
- I don’t mind being on the Titanic, but I want to be steering.
Liz Cohen: Don’t go to blog angry
Audience member after attempts to get reasonable lighting failed: “This is a tech college, everything is binary. It’s on or off.”

Best Lessons:

Barry Abrahamson: 80% of total load time is client side. Tools: Yslow; Pagespeed. To reduce client-side load time Reduce # of http requests; compress (gzip); optimize images (resize, pngcrush, jpegtrans) [hat tip: Charlie Kalech]
Barry Abrahamson: Don’t optimize if you don’t have to. Caching can cause complications and often doesn’t help much. Only use it if you need it. [hat tip: Charlie Kalech]
Liz Cohen: Step outside your zone. Show that you’re thinking about the whole industry. Example RapidFire Video.

Best Interactions:

Barak Danin: Got timid applause as he was introduced. Said “it’s OK” and helped start the clapping. “It’s just that I saw people were a bit embarrassed, so I figured I’d help them.”
Matt Mullenweg reacting to positive audience participation enthusiastically shouts ”Free blogs for all of you”
Audience Member: What would you tell somebody who started a site in WordPress? Matt: Well first, you made the right choice. Second, you’re in the right place. Should we take a survey in this room?

Best Tweets:

@frgdr: #BestOf #KvetchingAsSport RT @mdavep #wcjeru not enough tuna in my tuna sandwich
@mdavep: man, @photomatt is recklessly giving away free blogs left and right at #wcjeru

Best Stories:

Matt Mullenweg: The way people became core developers at WordPress was they kept sending me patches and asking me to commit them. Eventually I had to say “here, have commit rights.”

Best Speakers:

Matt Mullenweg
Barry Abrahamson
Liz Cohen (yes, I’m biased, but still …)
Oren Yomtov
Miriam Schwab
Eyal Sela
Jonathan Caras

Best Blog Coverage:

Jennifer: Good Morning From WordCamp Jerusalem (Almost)

Did you catch something great that I missed? Did I mention you and not link to you? Leave a comment here or Tweet to @GilR.

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Best of 140: Twitter in Tel Aviv

Gil Reich — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 08:06:15 +0000

The 140 conference in Tel Aviv was great.

Best Lines:

Bob Rosenschein: If you have a hot startup idea, let me know. But please don’t send me a business plan. Send me a 140 character pitch.
Bob Rosenschein: Israel has such an advantage over the Americans. We wake up 7 hours earlier! [Australians have an even bigger advantage. But they have to live life upside down.]
Benji Lovitt (Twitter comedy): Do Jewish mothers in the West Bank tell their daughters not to settle?
Shalev Hulio: Got Tweet of guy trapped in store during Haiti earthquake. He was in liquor dept. Didn’t want 2 come out
Nimrod Dweck: I learned my English from hip-hop so I can say things like “Yeah bitches” but big words are hard
Lior Zoref: Food gets the most ReTweets. It’s emotional. (hat tip: @elyondekoven).
Guy Zohar (TV newscaster): I’m going to talk about truth in the news. Don’t worry, it will be short.
Guy Zohar: In the news, “truth” is anything that hasn’t been disproven yet. [Ouch]
Adam Fisher: You can say so much more in 140 characters in Hebrew than in English.
Jeff Pulver on what would have been his father’s 75 bday: Our Tweets are the time capsule we leave behind
Jacob Ner David: Is that based on anything, or did you just make that stat up completely?
Tal Yaniv: Talk positive and save characters on Tweets (hat tip: @RenaR)
Charlie Kalech: For Twestival we’re in MidEast region. So we work with people from Dubai, Bethlehem, Amman … [Cool]
Ronen Raz: We used to say “history is written by the winners.” From now on it may be analyzed by the winners. But it’s being written by all of us in real time

Best Exchanges:

Tal Yaniv & Mel Rosenberg:
- Tal: How many of you are parents, have children?
- Mel: How many of your parents have children?
- Tal: I’m sorry if I said it wrong. But Mel, you’re the only one who misunderstood.
Comedians Benji Lovitt and Charley Warady:
- Charlie: Try to explain Tweetups 2 non-Tweeters. I’m going to see ppl I’ve never seen b4 but are my good friends
- Benji: Try 2 explain Tweetups 2 Tweeters. No, we’re meeting for real drinks. In person.

Best Stories:

Jeff Pulver: During Haiti earthquake I retweeted USAirForce pls let Doctors w/o Borders land their plane. They replied to me saying “we’re on it.” Next thing I knew the Air Force was following me. What do you do when the Air Force is following you? Pretty soon I was DM’ing with the Pentagon. (hat tip: @eliesheva)
Yoni Bloch (a top Israeli musician): I had a video get 200,000 hits on YouTube. My label, the biggest music label in Israel, told them to take it down. They said “We’ll show YouTube.” You know what YouTube said? “OK.” I had to explain to my manager that we wanted this on YouTube.
Yosi Taguri: We have a friend who went to a restaurant taking pictures with his iPad. The owner was sure he was a food critic. He got his whole meal for free.
Yosi Taguri: When we started we hoped people would send us free food. We found out there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But there are free dinners.
Guy Zohar: There was a video of an accident in New York. Our competitors aired it. I first posted to Twitter. Was told it was a movie stunt. So I reported the full story.
Guy Zohar: There was an ad in the paper recruiting women for the Women’s Flotilla. Others newscasters treated it as real. I called the number, was answering machine that didn’t return. Called the Secret Service, they said it wasn’t real. Posted to Facebook. A colleague said they placed it for a joke segment. Again, I got the story, just because I used Social Media network.
Gali Ross: Recent vacation. We got in the car. Opened iPhone. Started driving. About 2 hours before wanting to stop we started looking up B2Bs or restaurants or whatever. 12 day trip, no planning whatsoever.

Best Lessons / Analyses:

Benji Lovitt: Make ppl laugh, esp when they really need the relief, they’ll help promote u when u need
Boaz Cohen: 20 years ago many people had illegal cable connections. Now most people have paid subscriptions. Same will happen with music. [Jeff Pulver disagreed: I think once things are free, people get used to it and there's no turning back.]
Efrat Kotler: Diplomacy’s 1st phase: Govt 2 govt. 2nd: Ppl 2 ppl. 3rd: Gov & ppl working 2gether. [It's the same w/ companies.]
Dror Ceder: [Implied lesson from blooper reel] when you’re doing a live broadcast, wear a belt (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrJptTZgRv4)
Dror Ceder: We’re moving from the anonymous web to the identity web (hey, I said that: The Age of Anonymity has Ended)
Jeff Pulver: If Facebook realized that they’re Facebook & stopped trying to be something else they’d be so much better

Best Sessions & Speakers:

IDF New Media Desk head Lt. Aliza Landes and MediAnd co-founder Shalev Hulio were fantastic describing how people contacted the Israel Defense Forces through their Twitter account to help save people trapped during the earthquake in Haiti
Yosi Taguri & Lior Zoref were very entertaining on both of their panels
Nice magic show by Lior Manor
Twitter comedy by Benji Lovitt and Charley Warady
Dror Ceder from Wibiya was entertaining
Social Media for Social Good: Excellent and touching session with Charlie Kalech, Liane Thompson, Paula Stern, Ronen Raz, and Yotam Troim

Best Interaction:

Jacob Ner David: Everybody who agrees raise your hand [A few hands]. Everybody who disagrees raise your hand [A few hands]. Everybody who isn’t paying attention raise your hand.
Dror Ceder (trying to wake people up): Everybody who is here, raise your hand. Most of you aren’t here. Let’s try again …
Oded Sharon and audience member:
- Oded: What game mechanics do you want see in life?
- Answer from the audience: Offer a badge to anyone who will clean my apartment
- Oded: There’s an app for that! [A chores app]

Best Logistics:

Yeah, the boring stuff that makes all the difference. Nicely done here:

Lots of power outlets: Such a sweet sight when I’m trying to blog an all day conference
Good wi-fi: A hundred of us Tweeting (and some people watching a live feed of the conference we were attending. I don’t know why). The WiFi held up pretty nicely
Twitter names on the list of speakers. That’s usually my first challenge for live conference Tweeting & blogging, finding the speakers’ Twitter names. So nice to have it right there. The conference schedule was just a one pager, double-sided. And yet it had everything I needed.

Best Tweets:

@elyondekoven: nice thing about a twitter conf is you are almost *expected* to be playing online during the lectures ;-)
@mayaub: Girl Power session at #140conf was scheduled at the exact time mothers who have to pick up their kids need to leave: ironic!
@eliesheva: hearing a lot about ‘tweeter’ today – twitter, you better watch out. [I spend my life embarrassing my kids with my foreign accent for Hebrew. Jokes about their accents make me feel better. Sorry.]

What have I missed? Tweet with #BestOf #140Conf or comment here.

If you’re mentioned in this post, and want it to be linked to your site, let me know the URL by comment or Tweet to @GilR.

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Best of SMX Advanced 2010

Gil Reich — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 13:44:44 +0000

SMX Advanced was fantastic! Here’s the best of the best:

Best Lessons:

Matt Cutts:
- To the best of my knowledge Bounce Rate is not used in WebRankings
- Google tries to break up words in a domain name, even when there are no hyphens.
Regarding MayDay update:
- Matt Cutts: MayDay is largely Google knocking out pages that don’t pass a quality threshold. In addition to banning spam, they’re also kicking out low quality pages.
- Vanessa Fox, Rae Hoffman, Greg Boser, and Stephan Spencer all later argued that the key to MayDay is that link value isn’t trickling as far within a site. So sites that have pages that are too many links from an external link are dropping out. Greg and Todd Friesen say you can be 2 clicks away from an external link. No further.
Microsoft: 65% of commercial mobile searches result in a purchase within an hour [Really? I'm skeptical]

Best Anecdotes:

Yusuf Mehdi‘s 8-year-old daughter wrote a list of all her friends using Bing, and all her friends using that other search engine. Yusuf showed the list, has a copy framed at work. His daughter says to him “Daddy. We have a lot of work to do.”
Danny Sullivan bought the @mattcutts Twitter account as part of a joke. Danny Tweeted from it as a FakeMattCutts. Then he gave it to Matt.
Arnie Kuenn discussing personal pleas for links. Wanted a link from a pirate site. Asked in pirate. Was turned down. Wrote a thanks anyway note in pirate, promising rum if they changed their mind. They changed their mind. No rum was exchanged. Or so Arnie says (Matt, there may be a rum for links black market, check it out).

Best Lines:

Danny Sullivan:
- So an important SEO tip? Be Wikipedia.
- I know you can’t speak for Yahoo!, Sasi (bing rep), but Matt (Cutts), you can.
- Matt Cutts is a senior engineer at Google. Which is all you need to know about him.
John LeBaron [Using an example of how to kill a vampire]: So whenever we have something this important, we turn to Craigslist. “Insecure High School loner seeking vampire who sparkles.” (hat tip: @RyanJones)
Branko Rihtman: Announces that Ethanol (commonly found in beer) is the secret ingredient of SEO, and if you buy him a beer he’ll help you with SEO.

Best Exchange:

Rand Fishkin‘s data shows that Bing is getting more Googly. Matt points out that Rand’s data set only considers the search head. Implied and unsaid: Google’s key strength has always been the long tail, which is why Google’s significance to many content sites is way beyond their (impressive) total market
Danny: Do you still get that boost if you buy AdSense? Matt: Aargh!!

Scariest Suggestion:

Dennis Yu: You can get so specific with Facebook ad targeting that you can essentially target individuals. Really freak them out.

Best Shameless Plug:

John Shehata: Calls on people to follow him on Twitter while discussing Twitter ranking factors

Best Releases

Google launches Caffeine during Matt’s keynote
Bing launches Social during Yusuf Mehdi’s keynote

Best Session

The You&A with Matt Cutts is always amazing. They’re hysterical together, and informative.
Honorable mention to Bing’s Yusuf Mehdi. Such a change from Microsoft’s keynote last year. I hope this guy sticks around and does the conference circuit, joining Matt.
The SEO Vets session was great, as always. The most interesting thing this time was that they basically agreed on everything. Usually it seems like a bunch of black hats teasing Vanessa, but here even @oilman (Todd Friessen) was talking about focusing on the user. Perhaps the Wild West days of SEO are behind us and the world the white hats always claimed we lived in is finally here?

Best Speakers:

Marty Weintraub, Jordan LeBaron, Rand Fishkin, Christine Churchill, Danny Sullivan, Bill Parkes, Dennis Yu, Addie Conner, Branko Rihtman, Stew Langille, John Shehata, Chris Silver Smith, Chris Bennett, Arnie Kuenn, Debra Mastaler, Roger Montti, Tony Adam, Brent Csutoras, Rachel Pasqua, Michael Behrens

Best Tweets:

@AlanBleiweiss: bathroom check water on hand check cigarette smoked half way check doc open check – I have this liveblogging down to a science!
@spryd: Link building isn’t emailing a bunch of web masters asking for links. Look for key partnerships. It takes time & a lot of work @oilman #smx [Followed by ...]
@elliottng: @oilman Dear @oilman, I really like your Site…my Link would look good on it. Please. That is all. #smx

Also in this series:

What did I miss?

Contact me via Twitter @GilR or by commenting on this post if:

You have a great moment that I missed.
You’re mentioned here, and would like me to turn your mention into a link. Just let me know the URL.
If you’re recognized here and would like an Award Widget.

Thanks for your help.

Best of SMX Toronto 2010

Gil Reich — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 17:54:22 +0000

Great conference. Here’s the best of the best:

Best Lines:

Avinash Kaushik: I know my books were successful because the top search results for the book’s topics are the pirated versions of the book.
Avinash Kaushik: The important question is the Why. The internet is full of weird people and they’re all on your Website, simply trying to screw with you.
Bryan Segal: (asking for a show of hands on different questions) BTW, this isn’t how we get our data at comScore.
Shari Thurow: The 5-second usability test. Let people look at your site for 5 seconds, then ask them what the site is about. If they can’t tell you, you’re site isn’t focused enough.
Shari Thurow: You have to pass the “What kind of X are you?” Test. What kind of law firm are you? “State of the Art?” “World class?” No. You’re a corporate law firm, that’s what you have to say most clearly. [I love that marketing hype is now one of the worst ways to market. People aren't searching for superlatives or marketing hype, they're looking for concrete information].
Dawn Wentzell: “Worst of” lists rank better than “Best of” lists.
Shalom Issenberg: Since we had to stop buying links, link-building got really expensive.
Larry Bailin: People don’t search for the solution, they search for the problem.
Sionne Roberts: We’re going to be discussing a tsunami of information. That’s from the session description. I don’t know what it is, but it sounds like a good thing.
Warren Raisch: There’s a lot of confusion in the market. Which is good for us, because we’re consultants.
Warren Raisch: If you could have a car or a cellphone? 80% of kids said phone. The digital need to be connected is more important than physical mobility to kids today.
Sionne Roberts: So far we’ve had 2 answers to every question:
1. It depends
2. Focus on outcomes, begin with the end in mind

Larry Bailin: Successful internet marketing is more about sales and marketing strategies than technical skills & faulty tactics. This will never change.
Larry Bailin: Article in Feb 2010 Entrepreneur says “The SEO business is 80% spam” That number is probably a little low.
Larry Bailin: A few years ago I was here and we all said the future was Second Life. 3 months later is was dead. We don’t know the future.
Guillaume Bouchard: There’s a lot less content internationally. Think if you were doing SEO in US a few years ago, but with today’s algos.

Best Takeaways:

Avinash Kaushik: Paid searchers are often only converting days later. Optimize for those later conversions.
Bryan Segal: Organic search has become a richer experience. Paid search will catch up, and will then be used more for branding, not just direct response. (Backs up Avinash’s key takeaway)
Dawn Wentzell: Content that gets linked to naturally:
- Original research, with good visuals
- The Definitive Guide to your industry
- Industry coverage, including live blogging conferences. Lisa Barone’s PubCon coverage got 293 links [but that's an outlier].

Best Examples / Case Studies:

Avinash Kaushik: When they saw conversion on a Travel site was only coming days later, even with paid click, they made 3 changes:
- Changed from immediate sales pushes (“Buy Now”) to softer (“Learn More”)
- Added “Save My Itinerary” feature
- Added checkbox to “Notify me if prices go up or down more than 10%” with box for e-mail address.
Shari Thurow: Design for your users, not for yourself or your spouse. A site about cement was in purple and teal, because those were the designer’s favorite colors.

Best Warming up the crowd:

Manny Rivas did a good job waking us up before a Friday afternoon session.

Best Speakers:

Particularly great presentations by: Avinash, Bryan Segal, Dawn Wentzell, Christina Keffer, Barbara Coll, Rob Garner, Joshua Dreller, Ken Jurina, Warren Raisch, Manny Rivas

Best of Tim Ash:

I didn’t include anything from the eMetrics conference, which was co-located, but apparently Tim Ash rocked (and Manny Rivas captured it, thanx Manny!).

The 7 Deadly Landing Page Sins …

Unclear Call to Action.
Too many choices.
Asking for too much, too soon – “Would you like me to hold your credit card while you shop?” [Heh]
Too much text – unclutter content by striking out adjectives.
Not keeping your promise – if you set the bar high, you damn well better stand up to it.
Visual distractions – Don’t kid yourself, boring works. Make sure your prioritize goals.
Lack of trust – don’t undermine your potential to gain your customers trust.

Tim’s best lines:

You decipher images 4-500X quicker than reading words
The purpose of the homepage is to get people off the homepage. (hat tip to Manny Rivas)
If the desired action isn’t obvious you’re losing money!

Best Live Blogging:

CT Moore at NVI.

Did I miss anything? Any corrections? Let me know!

More SMX Toronto coverage:

Also in this series:

Best of SphinnCon 2010

Gil Reich — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 10:39:58 +0000

SphinnCon Israel was great, thanx Barry! Thanks everyone for all your help in generating this post:

SphinnCon

Best Speakers:

Sam Michelson: Funny, engaging, informative presentation on brand management.
Eli Feldblum: Apparently a great session on SEO for Video.
Miriam Schwab: Great tour of tools for Word Press.
Debra Askanase: Great tour of Social Media tools.
Uri Breitman: On Hebrew SEO
Charlie Kalech: Word on the street is that Charlie’s session was awesome.

Best Lines:

Sam Michelson: You need to meet with your clients to understand what they really want. I like spending the weekend. With the ones who aren’t in jail.

Best Take-Aways:

Gab Goldenberg: Build long term relationships, friendships, reciprocity (not trading). One of the best strategies is guest posting.

Best Gags:

Sam Michelson: Fake slide about building reputation for the Mossad.

Best Running Jokes:

Dixon Jones after being tweaked by Ari Ozick that Majestic has a bad UI: We have a bad UI because everybody uses Excel anyway … Then I download it into Excel, because we have a lousy UI.

Best Tweets:

Shira Abel (@shiraabel): ohhhhhh… dangerous keywords. Oh. Not as exciting as I had hoped…
Dan-ya Schwartz (@danjas): I wonder if @neyne knows that his computer is projected. I enjoy following the way his mind work. [I wish I were there].

Best Examples:

Vanessa Fox: TSA’s Reputation Management success.
Shira Abel: Lower Merion School District’s Reputation Management failure.

Best Interaction:

Tomer Honen: Phone went off while he was speaking. Asked if it was for him, said to tell them he’s not here.
And then Tomer again, setting up Vanessa. The exchange went something like this:
- Conference Participant: I got a message that I have too many URLs.
- Tomer: How many do you have
- Participant: About 180 million.
- [After the laughter died down the second punchline came...]
- Vanessa Fox (from the audience): I programmed that feature!

Best Live Blogging:

Debra Askanase: SphinnCon Coverage

[I almost wrote Lisa Barone & Barry Schwartz out of habit :-). Great job by Debra.]

Also in this series:

Best of BirdBrain

Gil Reich — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:31:02 +0000

Mel Rosenberg at BirdBrain

Jeff Pulver, Yossi Vardi, Mel Rosenberg, Noam Fine, and Sharon Ariel ran a networking breakfast and Bird Brain Unconference yesterday.

A bunch of creative people doing different things. The highlights:

Best innovation idea:

Roi Chobadi: A chat client that looks like you’re programming in Visual Studio. You know, so when your boss walks into your office you don’t have to quickly Alt-Tab.

Best lines:

Jeff Pulver: “I worked in the World Trade Center. I got fired. Saved my life. So you never know”
Jeff Pulver: “Hire people who don’t have experience. They don’t know what can’t be done.”
Oded Sharon: “The best motivator? Give credit“
Tal Yaniv: “Instead of telling my child ‘don’t spill’ I say ‘keep it in the glass.’ Focus on the positive.
Yossi Vardi: “The main thing that stops people from making their ideas succeed is fear of looking stupid.”
Mel Rosenberg: “This is an unconference, if you want to speak put your name on board. We won’t read it, but at least it will be there.”

Best Tweeting:

@tallynetzer. Thanx Tally!

I also liked the back story to the conference, which Mel described as:

When I saw that Jeff Pulver was going to be in Israel, I wanted to do an Unconference after his Networking Breakfast. I figured it should probably be about Mobile since we were at Afeka college. Jeff said ‘Mel, what are you passionate about?’ I said ‘About helping people be creative.’ So that’s our topic.

Well done, Mel.

Best of PubCon 2009

Gil Reich — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:53:27 +0000

Best Lines:

Carolyn Shelby: I don’t usually no-follow. I only do it if it’s somebody I really hate and I use it as sort of a digital middle finger ‘Hi’
Lawrence Coburn: Sharing is Caring but Google is King. Search: 97%. Social 0.55%
Joe Laratro: [After giving URLs for Google & Bing Webmaster tools] You should also use Y! Site Explorer. It’s a long URL, you can just Google it.
Michael Gray: The first LinkBait was when Moses came down with that Top 10 List. LinkBait is not going away.
Tony Hsieh: We ask people on interviews “On a scale of 1 to 10, how lucky are you?” We don’t hire the ones with low numbers because we don’t want them bringing their unluckiness. [Great idea. People who think they're unlucky are generally not the people who succeed.]
Catfish Comstock: MegaSite SEO is not for faint of heart or weak. If you’re one of those, PPC is down the hall
Bob Brisco: I’m astounded by how many people don’t think we look at the bottom line when valuating a company.

Best Lessons:

Matt Tuens: You need to become THE AUTHORITY in your space. All else follows. [This dovetails what Bob Brisco was saying and is my main takeway of the conference.]
Joe Laratro, (crediting Jim Boykin from WeBuildPages.com) Putting links next to links to Authority Sites makes those links more authoritative in the eyes of both users and search engines.
Michael Gray, (crediting Rand Fishkin from SEO Moz). Know the Linkerati. Understand what the most powerful linkers link to.
Wil Reynolds: Get in early on changes in terminology, e.g. environmentally friendly -> eco friendly. Use Google Insights, competitors’ press releases.
Jill Sampsey: Use seasonal URLs like HolidaySpecials, not HolidaySpecials2009. Much better when 2010 comes around.
Bob Brisco: Passion is the 6th, transcendental factor for great sites. But that’s not instead of the first 5: Focus, Unique, Monetizable, Community, Content
Matt Cutts: Site speed going be an important factor in 2010

Most Surprising Analyses:

Bruce Clay: We scanned a newspaper article into a JPG, and put it in a PDF. Google indexed the words. They have the technology to index words from non-text sources. They’re redefining content. You need to create great stuff in engaging formats.
Bruce Clay: Multiple links from one page to another? Unfollowing one unfollows them all. First link with a non stop-word determines the link text. [Other experts challenged this. Matt Cutts said that he didn't think this was true, and would check on it.]
Rand Fishkin: We’ve found that the Topicality of a Link isn’t that important for Ranking. The old Ask / Teoma model was very focused on this, but Google isn’t. [My experience: Rand is dead on. An Ask guy once told us (Answers.com) that if we wanted to rank we needed more topical links. My (admittedly biased) view is that Google's acceptance of broad horizontal sites is one of the things that makes it so much better than it's competitors].

Best Scheduling

Having Matt Cutts at one session while the only “Rogue SEO” session, as well as a Link Buying session, were elsewhere.

Worst Scheduling

Having the two main Content sessions — Winning tactics for Content Creation & Optimizing Forums for Search & User Generated Content — at the same time.

Best Keynotes:

Bob Brisco: Hsieh (below) was inspirational. But Brisco put things in context. The vast majority of brilliant & inspired entrepreneurs fail. Gave lots of good numbers & info (for details see Bob Brisco PubCon Keynote)
Tony Hsieh: The Zappos CEO was fantastic. Most inspirational keynote I’ve ever heard (more at Tony Hsieh PubCon Keynote). But I thought it was misleading. There’s a survivors bias here. Tens of thousands of people with just as much passion and commitment fail.Sorry, I loved the story but found it simplistic. Or maybe I read too much Nassim Taleb.

Best Speakers

Best: Marty Weintraub, Lawrence Coburn, Rand Fishkin, Joanna Lord, Scott Stratten
Fantastic: Jon Henshaw, Jim Boykin, Matt Tuens, Aaron Wall, Bruce Clay, Lee Odden, Christine Churchill, Dustin Woodward, Heather Lloyd Martin, Michael Gray, Ian Lurie, Roger Dooley, Todd Mallicoat, Ted Ulle, Ricci Neer, Bob Brisco, Barry Schwartz, Anna Talerico, Todd Friesen, Michael Streko, Matt Cutts
Very, very good: Jessica Bowman, Wil Reynolds, Craig Paddock, Mark Jackson, Jill Sampsey, Scott Polk, Tony Adam, Matt Craine, Aaron Kronis, Elisabeth Osmeloski

[Note: From personal experience, from listening to others, and from monitoring Twitter. Help me out if I missed great speakers]

Best Yogiism:

Roger Dooley: When you’re promoting your site … don’t promote. [Self-contradictory, but true. Build relationships, help others.]

Best Interaction:

Carolyn Shelby: How many of you are getting less than 80% of their traffic from Google? [One hand went up]
Matt Cutts: [After seeing more hands than expected about people who had recently checked their WebMaster tools] Wow! Most people aren’t as smart, savvy, and might I add good looking as you guys.

Worst Interaction:

Joe Laratro: How many of you completely trust Google with all your data, Analytics, WebMaster tools, gmail. [Lots of hands] So how many of you want 3rd party tools? [Hey dude, way to manipulate. Next time leave out words like "completely." If you had asked how many "completely mistrust" you'd have gotten the opposite result. Keep it fair, dude].

Best Keyword Research Advice:

Carolyn Shelby: I have my 13 year old daughter have her friends come over with their laptops. I bring the pizza. I show them pictures and say “how would you describe this?” [Do all 13 year olds have laptops?]

Best Moderator

Vanessa Fox: 5 minutes before opening 1st session of the morning asks “Who has a headache” and offers aspirin. [Might have been Andy Beal's initiative. Also his aspirin].
Rand Fishkin: Even filled in admirably for a missing speaker.

Best Presentation Title:

Michael Bonfils: How to screw up your international search campaigns. Started with quote “It is a mistake to suppose that people succeed through success; they often succeed through failures.” Not sure what that means, but I suspect there’s a lot of truth in it.
Ted Ulle: Don’t build a Frankensite

Things You Don’t Think About

Michael Gray: We worked with a law firm. One partner died, they added a new partner, had to change the domain name. [made me wonder ... are law firms going to be slower to change their names because they're afraid of losing SEO value when changing their domain name?]

Never Mind:

Joe Laratro: You can follow me on Twitter. I won’t follow you back. I don’t write very much that’s interesting so there’s really no reason to follow me.

Best Pre-Conference Advice:

Heather Lloyd Martin: If a speaker gave you a tip that rocked your SEM world, let him or her know. Speakers love to know when they’ve helped someone (otherwise, we wouldn’t be speaking!). A short “Thanks for the tip on X” is fantastic feedback. And besides, you’ll make their day (from PubCon Tips). [Dovetails with a point Ted Ulle made about community management: Give praise generously. Quoted Tom Peters "Catch someone doing something right." On a personal note, I'm the world's most awkward networker. But I've been following the rule "if you think somebody did something awesome, tell them." So since I've been following many of these people's blogs and listening to their presentations, I've been able to compliment people on their great work. Even people that you don't think need any more validation always appreciate it.]

Dr Pete: Bring a sweater. From 7 Tips for Surviving PubCon. It’s cold inside. Note that this contradicts advice from the Most Frightening Man on the Internet (he’s not really dangerous) who says in a great conference tip video that your blood alcohol level should be high enough that you can skinny dip in the Arctic. So the sweater may only be relevant if you’re sober. [Update: It was cold part of Training Day. After that it was fine. Or maybe I had more to drink than I thought (unlikely). Still a good idea.]

Most Misleading Session Description:

In House SEO: The session was described as “If you have a do-it-yourself attitude … our panelists … will reveal the best tips, tools, and techniques for doing SEO in house …” I was expecting SEO tips. Nope. Should have been described as “Internal politics on how to work through organizational obstacles to accomplish your SEO goals.” Good session, but not one I would have attended. I’d have gotten more out of the Twitter session which seemed to have been rocking.
Get Your Site On The Road: Was supposed to discuss ” .. iPhone app, Facebook app ..” Nope. Not a bad session. Maybe if the description and the session were in synch the right people would have been there, instead of people who would have benefited more somewhere else.
International & European Site Optimization: Hey, if the session is going to be mostly about Baidu and China, how about letting me know that so I can go to a different session?
Top 50 Site Ideas We’ve Ever Seen: Good session. Glad I attended. But had absolutely nothing to do with the title.

Best ‘Haven’t Heard That In Decades’ Music:

Zanzibar: Lots of Billy Joel songs I hadn’t heard in years. “Rose he knows he’s such a credit to the game.” The irony always cracks me up. Lisa Barone complained that she never heard of these songs. Kids today.
Take Me to the Pilot: And now I can’t get the song out of my head.

Best Coverage:

SEO Roundtable: Fantastic live coverage of PubCon. Great feed of what the smartest people in the room were recording at the time, multiple people covering most of the sessions.
Outspoken Media: Great PubCon session recaps from Lisa Barone.

Did I miss anything? Let me know through Comments or Twitter @GilR. Thanx!

Also in this series: Best of SMX Advanced 2009

Best of SMX Advanced 2009

Gil Reich — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 10:28:25 +0000

SMX Advanced was fantastic. Here’s the best of the best …

Best lines:

Christine Churchill: “Anybody in this room not on Twitter? One person? Wow, let’s all applaud the last holdout.”
Matt Cutts when asked “how do I know if I’m getting penalized?” : “If you disappear from Google. That’s what we call a leading indicator.”
Danny Sullivan: “How many of you enjoyed Microsoft’s party last night? OK, today you each need to do 100 searches to pay for it.”
Danny: (to Qi Lu, MSFT’s pres of search) “You can tell us if you’re really going to buy Y!’s search assets. We won’t tell anybody.”
Danny: “How many of you have used Bing?” (a lot of hands) “Oh, how many of you haven’t used Bing?” (about 5 hands) (To Qi: ) “OK, so you’re spending $80 billion to convince him.”
Adam Audette: “Doing site audits are great, because you always find something that makes you think ‘that’s a new way fail’” (man, how come a guy named Audette does audits, and a guy name Grey does grey hat stuff? Did their names influence their futures?)
Greg Boser: “I can’t wait until my daughter is in college so I can get my hands on her edu account. We chose her college based on domain value.”
Danny: (Riffing while reading a Question): “Here’s a question from Steve. I’m trying to rebrand our Website. It was called Live.com …”
Todd Friessen: “The most exciting new thing about search? Real Time search, Twitter search. It’s so exciting, so spammable.”
George Markel: “I’m going to go way back. Pre-Twitter.”

Liveliest session:

Danny moderating Rand, Laura, and Marty. That was fun. Marty forgot to do the Obi Won hand movement when telling Matt Cutts “this is not buying links.” Also great stuff at the session, especially Rand’s lessons on which factors correlate best with SEO success. (See Lisa Barone’s great recap).

Best takeaways:

Matt Cutts: PR sculpting used to work. It doesn’t any more. If you NoFollow a link, you no longer shift the power to the page’s other links, the power just evaporates. Update: At the SEO Vets session, the consensus was Don’t Panic, and Don’t Change Anything.
Matt Cutts: If you’re doing clever things that might look spammy, try to use a recognized implementation. For example, if you’re displaying some text only on mouse-over, use a standard implementation so we don’t mistake it for trickery.
Laura Lippay: You need 2 parallel SEO teams: technical and strategic. For strategy: “The best ranking factor you can have is a hot product.” (Of course, I’m always thrown by the way Yahoo! attends this conference with their Content people that are trying to rank, not with their Search people. I don’t even think their ad people were here. Contrast this to Google, and to Microsoft).

Best visual points made:

Michael Gray preceded his grey hat techniques with a disclaimer slide that this was for entertainment and educational purposes only.
Danny showing the value of old links by Googling “search engine.” Dogpile comes up #1. Google is #7. On Bing, Dogpile is also #1, Danny’s site is #5, and neither Google nor Bing are in the top 10. (On Yahoo!, BTW, Y! is #1, Google #2). Danny followed this up with a search for toothpaste … “Wikipedia is number 1, because that’s the law … but look down here, number 10 on this very competitive term is an ugly 10 year old page from a Nebraska family dentist…”

Best running gag:

Danny repeatedly gloating that we could now easily decide questions like “should I attend this session” with Bing, the new decision engine. Danny also liked showing Bing’s superiority when it ranked his pages higher than Google did.

Best bogus stat & syllogism:

It went something like this …78% of internet users have watched an online video. The average amount of time spent watching video is over 3 hours. So it’s obviously a big marketing tool. …. Umm … but “average” probably meant “arithmetic mean.” And “watching video” probably probably includes pirated movies, porn, etc. So a small percentage of users watching lots of non-marketing videos completely skew those numbers. You’ve given me no information about how well a video listing will serve as a marketing tool.

Best “Telling it like it is:”

Matt effectively said “We don’t tell you what to do, you can do whatever you want to, it’s your site. But we can do whatever we want to on our site to best serve our users.”

Best blog coverage of these sessions:

Lisa Barone doing a fantastic job covering the SEO track at Outspoken Media
Richard Baxter nice & detailed coverage, also of the SEO track, at SEOGadget
Angie doing a great job, mostly on the Social Media track at ExpertSEM

Best Tweet:

@toddmintz Playing Talking Heads “Road To Nowhere” before Microsoft keynote…incredible symbolism at play :) [hat tip to Lisa Barone] — Which I guess would make playing Road to Nowhere before the Bing keynote the Best Foreshadowing.

Biggest Missed Opportunity

Microsoft does their big launch, sends a big delegation, makes a big party, lighting up the Space Needle. And then they send their president of search to do the big keynote interview. Which sounds like a good idea, but it wasn’t. He may be the world’s greatest manager. But dude, send somebody else to be your face to the search professionals community.

Best Turning a Bug into a Feature:

Facebook’s pitch: “Get them before they search.” Right. Because scattershot targeting of people who might want my service sounds so much more effective than getting the right people while they’re actually searching for my service.

Best Surprise Applause:

Derrick Wheeler: “The hard part about SEO is getting it implemented.” Apparently a lot of frustration in the room judging by the spontaneous applause. Derrick followed up with “And that’s why you should vote for me,” before also mentioning that people often budget for the audit but not for the implementation, so you pay the SEO geniuses and you get nothing. On a related note, Derrick would have been a much better choice to give the MSFT keynote. Some executives are world class presenters. Some aren’t. You wouldn’t let somebody write code unless they have the talent for it. Same has to be true about giving presentations.

Best No Show

Yahoo! search isn’t here. Y! search advertising isn’t here. Y! doesn’t have a booth downstairs. Laura Lippay from Y!’s Content team is here, but I think that’s it. And I don’t think anybody’s noticed — wait, Danny Sullivan did (I guess he should notice these things). Danny just pointed out that Y! seems to be positioning themselves out of the search space. Uh … OK. Good post by Danny. Microsoft & Y! refuse to be #2 in the world’s most lucrative space, so they’re positioning themselves out of the space. Good luck, guys.

Best Ways to Improve Next SMX

More electricity outlets. I know Danny said it’s expensive, but this was ridiculous, people like vultures trying to snag an outlet. (I had to keep shutting down, and scavenging for abandoned outlets). More electricity outlets will get you more live blogging, more tweeting, etc., and generally happier and less frustrated customers. Spring for the extra outlets, guys.
Why don’t you make the Matt Cutts interview more than 45 minutes? It’s the highlight of the show, and everybody (including Matt and Danny) seems ready for more.

Quick Wrap-Up:

It was a great conference. They have enough funny, brilliant, charismatic and exciting people to make this work. Most of the sessions soared. Well done, guys.