SES New York Day 2 - Widgets and gadgets

This is me, James Welch, head of research for Just Search/Getupdated, reporting from the 2nd day of my trip to Search Engine Strategies New York 2008. If you missed it, read the SES New York day 1 post.

Day 2 started for me at 6am with me making some small changes to my powerpoint presentation for my speech/session later on for “Widgets and Gadgets are taking over, but what are they?”. I had seen a session the previous day from JenStar which made me realise that maybe I hadn’t written enough text from my head on to the slides. I had 23 slides, but lots of them were simple images. I added some more text and another 3 slides eventually by 9am.

I went down to the session area at 9.45 and it was already busy with about 20 people sitting down. I loaded my ppt to the computer and went for a walk. When I came back 10 minutes later the room was nearly full - more full than I had seen other sessions - it seemed it was more of an interesting subject than I gave it credit for. By the time it started it was packed with information hungry people - mmm, my favourite.

Joining me on the session were guys from Hitwise, Google and Gravitas. Luckily, we all spoke about different subjects, which was good for the audience. I concentrated on the Gadget Ad side of things, as I though that it would engage the audience more - and it seemed to have worked quite well. The Hitwise guy was very intelligent, but had been rushed in to doing the speech by his company I think, but he did a great job. The speech from Jeff of Gravitas was entertaining, he has a great persona, but I don’t think caught the audience’s imagination. Maybe they were expecting something else I’m not sure? Christian from Google was your typical, expert, class-above, Google person with a great product knowledge, but with typical Google guidelines, probably had to water down what he said.

My own presentation was double in size to the rest, although I finished it in record time, due to the number of images. I showed many examples of how it worked and how it could work, with ideas like the reevoo content recording gadget. I could see that the audience was engaged when I explained about using gadgets as reputation management tools.

I had a great round of applause after it and the SEO press has been very kind since with 90% of quotes and reporting from the session being from my part of the session, rather than from the others. It was definitely the most informative in terms of the screens shown.

After the session, I went back to the Getupdated stand to finish off the rest of the day and met some potential new clients after yet more whiteboard drawings that now littered the expo hall of the Hilton! The day finished off with me talking yet again about SEO strategies to a few business owners whilst the rest of our guys were having a drink to take away the stress of running a show at an expo like SES NY.

All-in-all it was a great few days from a personal perspective and I hope that my brand of SEO strategy has been impressed upon all the people that I spoke to and that my session on widgets and gadgets will help companies to create further great examples in the future. From a company perspective, the brand will now have more awareness on a wider stage and we will continue to do this over the next few months and years.

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