I will be speaking at the Search Engine Strategies San Francisco 2010 (SES).This is one of the leading search & social marketing event world wide and the agenda is looking great. The conference is in its 12th year and is organized by a advisory board and the leading online marketing publications ClickZ and Search Engine Watch. The topics I am taking on are bot dear to me, the one on Tuesday, August 17th is called “Digital Asset Optimization” and talks about using what the Internet gives you to market your services and products. The other is more in line with fast developing interest in online PR and is on 18th of August. This one is called Search, PR and the Social Butterfly and looks really promising.

I recently found this fantastic tool called Social Mention, a real time search platform.

Been playing around with it and found it to be really useful for several things but mostly to get a feel for the general buzz out there. The tools is limited when it comes to other languages out-side of English, but I am sure that it will be fixed as the tool develops.

I have tested their alert services and they work great take what Google does with their alerts little further adding sites and mentions that Google does not include. Their alert are however limited to only one delivery per day, while Google is quite dynamic and delivers material as it happens.

Verdict: Great tool, worth using and best of all it is free!

Found this really good article called “SEO as a Marketing Discipline” written by Rishi Lakhani. It illustrates in a very good way the problems the search marketing industry is going through and what it is that is holding back the upper management. It’s a reccomended read for those wanting to understand how we can make this industry more professional.

“I don’t mean ignorance in a negative way – I mean people genuinely don’t understand the work involved behind SEO – especially at the top level of any organisation. Most people use search engines – but most assume their existence and the results pages as part of life.”

iFront is a conference managed by Nenad Stanojlovic in behalf the Serbian consulting company owned by visionary Vladimir Milisavljevic. Nordic eMarketing was lucky enough to get an invitation to fly over and speak about the topic of search marketing with focus on the region the conference is held at.

With guests in the close to 100 guest including the Serbian Minster of Telecommunications who opened the conference there we good speakers from both local companies and International companies like Nokia and Nordic eMarketing. This is a conference that will be worth noting in the future and should help the Serbians enter the world of Internet marketing. With around 7.4 million inhabitants only 3.3 million are Internet users, Serbia still has a long way to reach the likes of the UK, Denmark, Norway or Iceland. But still is doing much better than many of their neighbouring countries.

Are marketers closing the database of human intention and reaching the holy grail of marketing, with 100% transparency of the users, the people they are targeting? This evolution can be traced back to 2001 when Google opened Google Zeitgest and with that we could see and understand better the searcher and use that data to help us get better results. Microsoft opened their MSN AdLab tool and with that the dimension of age and gender was added to the equation.

Then entered the world of social media and the applications and tools that came with it and now with opt in “Check-in” applications so now the gap has been closed from the purchase and onsite analytics, to the query, from there to the social graph like who I am and who I know. From there we have the status update though micro-blogging , what am I doing and now with the help mobile phones “where am I”.

The “Check-in” is a statement of “here I am what do you have to offer?”

Search Engine Strategies (SES) is one of the oldest conferences in the field and highly respected as such. Spoke on this conference couple of times before and it‘s great to be invited again. The topic is very dear to me as we do PPC for some of our clients at Nordic eMarketing. 

Some of the questions that this session should be addressing are, are there tools attendees could be using right now to help get better conversions, lower costs, or save hours of time in work? The short answer is yes, the longer one is that you will need to come to SES to see more.

I am speaking at the International Search Summit in Lonon next week. The summit is hosted by WebCertainand is a search marketing event with a difference – a focus on multilingual and international search. All of the sessions at the Summit have a global approach and look at the issues affecting online marketers when they are running campaigns in multiple languages and countries. The session I am talking at is “Using Online PR for Links”.

See you in London – http://www.internationalsearchsummit.com/overview-nov-09.html

Yahoo! just announced the launch of the Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network (YWACN) which will replace the good old IndexTools Partner Program. It’s great and exciting to that Yahoo! is moving and that Dennis and his team in the US and Hungary are still alive and kicking.  I am looking forward seeing the latest updates on the system and actually also reading the book Dennis Mortensen wrote onWeb Analytics. Met Dennis at the SES NY at the Yahoo! stand and he was very excited about the book and knowing him the quality of it will be great.

One of my favourite conference, the SMX London, will be held on the 18th and the 19th of May. I have been offered to speak on the Brand & Reputation Management Strategies session with Mel Carson, adCenter Community Manager – Europe, Microsoft and Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Creative Director, deMib.com. Both great guy’s. The conference is

Session description: “With the proliferation of blogs, social media and other “consumer generated content” sites it’s getting more challenging for organizations to manage perceptions about their products and services. How can you respond to negative opinions, much less find them? How can you correct misleading information on sites you don’t control-including search result pages? Learn how to “take back the web” in this session.”

You can find a great summary of last years conference at the DataDial Blog and a Video Round-up at You Tube. Not sure that the Video does the conference full justice but at least some climbs into what is going on.

The site IcelandGourmetGuide.com made it to the „Best New Websites“ section of Web Users, did not get a full house but three out of four stars, not all bad. Little Web 2.0 options such as interaction with each restaurant, external rating options but beside that, three stars. For me the site looks little one dimensional and as stated in the review „Sadly, the restaurant guide to Reykjavik is disappointingly thin and there‘s nowhere for interested visitors to interact“. I am how sure that the site owners will fix this.

couple of other sites on Iceland:

www.dining.is
www.travelnet.is
www.hotels.is
www.nat.is