What I’m Looking For in My Sessions at SMX East 2014

We’ve just published the SMX East 2014 agenda and I have two sessions that I’m coordinating this year — one on local search, and the second on Pinterest as a search engine and e-commerce marketing opportunity.

The Speaker Pitch Form is also open, so if you’d like the chance to be part of either of my sessions — or some other session(s) — get your pitch together and submit it as soon as you can. (Reminder: see my unofficial tips for submitting pitches.)

As I’ve done before, I want to give a quick heads up about what I’m looking for in each session to help you put together a better pitch, which should help make both sessions as great as they can be.

Let’s Talk Local Search: Super Therapy Session For Advanced Local Marketers

This is a discussion-only session — no Powerpoints, no formal presentations, just a great panel of local search experts discussing what’s working and what’s not. If you pitch this session, your focus in the Speaker Pitch Form should be on the BIO section. I’ll need to know who you are, what clients you’ve worked with, what specific kind of work you do for your clients — i.e., do you focus on something specific, or are you involved in all aspects of local search optimization? — and stuff like that.

In the PITCH section, there’s no need to pitch a specific topic because the conversation will be wide-ranging. But feel free to use that part to tell me what strategies and tactics are working well, what results/case studies you’re able to talk about and so forth.

Pinterest: Marketing On The Web’s Visual Shopping Mall

If you click on that title, you can read the session description and see that we’re discussing Pinterest as a search channel more so than a social channel. For this session, I would love to have speakers that can discuss

• “Pinterest SEO” — i.e., how to optimize images and boards for visibility within Pinterest search
• perhaps similar to that is how to succeed with the new Pinterest Guided Search
• Pinterest and regular web search — i.e., getting visibility in Google and Bing search results via pins and boards

This session is in the Retail track, so I’ll also look forward to getting great pitches that are specific to showing best practices and case studies for how e-commerce stores are succeeding with Pinterest — whether it be via search or other means.

Final Thoughts

If you’re planning to pitch either of my sessions, please do it sooner rather than later. Like many session coordinators, I’ll close a session as soon as I have the pitches/speakers that I want, even if it’s before the pitch form was due to close.

If you have any questions about either of these sessions, drop me a note in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.