See ya, Chicago
This’ll be my last blog post from Chicago. Tomorrow is an abbreviated day with only three session slots. And I’m speaking at two of them – the first and last. Then I catch a shuttle to O’Hare right after the last session. So it’ll be a crazy day to say the least.
It’s been a great week personally and professionally. I was blessed to be able to hang out quite a bit with David and Irma Wallace of Search Rank, who are both great people and I’m glad to call them friends. I also met a lot of new people I’d been hoping to meet — Barry Schwartz & Chris Boggs, Lisa Barone, Kim Krause-Berg, Greg Sterling, Andy Beal, Lee Odden, Matt Bailey, Li Evans, Rob Kerry, Loren Baker, Brian Smith, Chris Smith, David Temple, Eric Enge, and countless others. (Sorry if I forgot your name….)
I was able to try authentic Chicago pizza from Giordano’s, which was terrific. I was able to walk and shop on the Magnificent Mile. And I rode a cab with a driver who barely spoke English. 🙂 I didn’t get to see much of the city, but what I saw was very nice. One of my memories will be the wonderful view from my great room at the Hilton — you can see it in the attached photo.
[tags]seschicago06, ses, seo, chicago[/tags]
Matt – Thanks for the great show recap! I’ve enjoyed your blog – keep up the great work.
I was curious as to your impression of how much of the conference was B-to-C focused compared to B-to-B. At SES San Jose, it seemed like more of the focus was on B-to-C. Your thoughts?
Hey Patrick – thanks for the kind words about SBS, much appreciated. And thanks for commenting on this post.
To answer your question, I would agree with you that the focus was more B-to-C. That was certainly the theme of the sessions I did and the ones I attended, too. I’m kinda biased by my own experiences that way, and I didn’t attend any sessions that were real heavy on B-to-B.
At the same time, you can make the argument that much of what we’d all call “SEO Best Practices” is applicable to both types of businesses, right?
Good point, Matt. I agree with that. Many SEO techniques and practices are applicable for either B-to-C or B-to-B. The goals are much the same.
San Jose was my first SES conference and I tried focusing only on the SEM (paid search) sessions. In these sessions, many of the examples used were B-to-C examples. I kept thinking that a B-to-B marketer would need to optimize (landing pages, ads, keywords, etc.) differently based on the different mindset of their audience – Personal (consumer) vs. Professional (business).
The next conference I attend I’m going to take the SEO track – I’ll probably see it differently.