It was a long time coming, but, this week, Seattle played host to its first, full-fledged search marketing conference, Search Marketing Expo Advanced. As the name suggests, this search marketing confab, which got underway June 3-5 at the Bell Harbor International Conference Center, wasn’t for everybody.
When conference organizer, master of ceremonies, and bona fide search engine guru (and analyst), Danny Sullivan, brought a one-day version of his Search Engine Strategies show to Seattle a year ago, he was blown away by the level of expertise in the local audience. The questions were erudite, the inquiries insightful.
So after Danny parted company with the principals behind Search Engine Strategies, he founded his own enterprise, Third Door Media, and launched his own series of symposia, dubbed SMX for Search Marketing Expo. The Seattle edition is SMX Advanced because the subject matter assumes no small degree of search marketing knowledge.
Attendees will include the best and the brightest of the search industry’s cognoscenti who will be coming from far and wide, with a large contingent from Redmond, Sunnyvale, Kirkland and Mountainview, homes of Microsoft, Yahoo and Google respectively.
Befittingly, the SMX name sounds a bit like a high powered, turbo-charged sports car or fuel additive, which is exactly what the SMX brand of search expertise has the power to do for a company’s online marketing program.
SMX Advanced will offer two tracks, Organic, also known as or naturally indexed search, and PPC or sponsored, pay-per-click search. The emphasis in both cases will be on letting the audience take the lead by shaping the conversation and being a part of this historic “best of the best” undertaking.
On a computer screen, the cursor arrow always points to the Northwest. Now the eyes of the search world will be looking in the same direction. At last, in the world of search conferencing, Seattle has been found! [24×7]
