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Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Link to ShoeMoney Internet Marketing Blog

Do search conferences need a wakeup call from paying attendees?

Posted: 30 Jul 2013 06:44 AM PDT

I talked to a friend of mine a few months back to ask if he would be going to SMX Advanced again this year.  He's a frequent person on the search industry conference tour, so I kind of expected that he would naturally be heading to Seattle for this year's conference.

So I was kind of surprised when he said he was skipping it that year.  When I asked him why, he said that SMX advanced just wasn't the same and other conferences, the layout of the conference center – though obviously no fault of SMX – really sucked for attendees. It was spread out so you can easily attend the PPC track and not see a single soul on the other side of the conference center who might've been attending SEO track.  Oh, and it's a conference center with huge pillars right in the middle of the room.

He also said that the content just wasn't new. He noticed the past couple year's conferences had been a slightly freshened up version of the previous years and he felt he just wasn't getting the dollar value out of it anymore to pay to attend.  He was still considering attending, but only because Matt Cutts is doing a session. If it wasn't for that he told me he wouldn't even consider going again. And that is someone who had been to most, if not all, previous SMX Advance conferences.

Now this isn't just to pick on SMX, this applies to many conferences in this industry.  It just so happens that SMX Advanced was the most recent search conference, and the conference I happened to be discussing with this shall-remain-nameless person.

Now, part of what he said is correct. The Matt Cutts' room with the shape and the pillars sucks ass.  But again, you can't really fault Danny Sullivan and SMX for that, other than perhaps changing to a better venue. But the content freshness, I definitely see what he's getting at.  You can easily play a name that conference trivia game by giving the session title and you have to guess if it's SMX, SES or PubCon.  And it unfortunately isn't that unusual to see someone at SMX with slides referencing SES, or worse, the guy who presented at SMX to re-used the same deck from SES, complete with the SES branded PowerPoint template. Likewise, there have been people at SES who have obviously reused decks because the examples will be Search Engine Land instead of Search Engine Watch.  And rinse and repeat at Pubcon.

So why are conferences getting stale? Is a tried-and-true thing? Is it laziness? Do they just assume they will sell tickets because that's what they do?  Are they listening too much to what speakers want to talk about and not enough to what paying attendees want to hear? Or are they just plain and simply not evolving with the times?

Looking at the SMX Advanced agendas for the last couple years show the lot of the same old thing. A Danny Sullivan has added a few new sessions, this year was the first time I can recall him finally adding a content session, unusual for him because it's not straight search, and they added a retargeting session which is very hot at the moment. So good on him, because content is worth its weight in gold at the moment, and everyone and their Grandma is talking about retargeting.

And thank God he finally took out that tired "Pagination & Canonicalization for the Pros" session this year. I mean, how many times can we beat the dead horse at SMX?  All the information is available straight from Google, and Google is a lot better at sorting these issues out on their own than they were years ago when Danny brought out this session.  However, in its place is the "Crazy, Complicated Technical Issues That Completely Sabotage the Best SEO Efforts," but at least this time they try to disguise that dead horse with sheep's clothing.  But there were many sessions that were either identical from the previous year, with the same speakers or dealt with the same content but with an updated session title.  And the speakers as a whole?  Same old thing of all Danny's favorite people, but that is what we expect at SMX.

Onto SES, looking at SES San Francisco (although it is not until later this year, so it could change). It was interesting to notice that SES featured a retargeting session a year ago, so they were definitely on top of what was going to be hot.  They definitely have more variety in their sessions, but then again, it is a 5 track conference versus SMX 3 panels (plus sponsor track), and SES's 3 days versus SMX's 2 days.  As for speakers, the only have a handful speakers listed on their agenda so far, but I imagine it will be a mix of the usual industry speakers with some new faces.

So maybe part of the problem with SMX not changing that much from year to year is the fact that it is so small and can only offer 21 sessions total to choose from.  How much different would be if it could expand to three days and five tracks, or we just see the dreaded canonicalization horse once again.  And with three  tracks, I know there were times when I'd look at the options and choose something that was hopefully worth tweeting about, if I wasn't personally interested in it.

As for Pubcon, they haven't released their agenda got for this year's conference, but considering the crazy number of sessions they had last year (I think it is more than SES & SMX have combined in a year!) I expect there will definitely be some overlap on the sessions they have this year as well.  But unlike SMX, at Pubcon's usual 7 tracks, odds are good that at least one of the 7 at any given time would be worthy for each person to attend.

Maybe it's time that conferences began looking at different ways to come up with session ideas. It's all wonderful to accept session pitches from speakers for session ideas, but remember those people have an agenda about why they want to do that particular session, most likely because they want to bring in clients for that particular area. Bring it back to the attendees instead. Why not ask for suggestions from the actual attendees on sessions they would like to see, complete with what the session description would be, rather than asking potential speakers to do it.  Speaker audience and paying audience are two different animals J  Who knows, maybe canonicalization is the session attendees want back (although personally, I probably would have chosen the session on watching paint dry over canonicalization), or then again, they might just want to see it die in a fire like me.

And yes, I know someone can argue that people go to conferences for the sessions they go there for the networking and the bar conversations. But when people are shelling out two grand or so for a ticket, you definitely want to get value out of that, even if you are sitting in the session room nursing a hangover with Red Bull while refreshing #whicheverconference onTwitter.

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ProBlogger: Gmail Trying to ‘Fix’ Our Inbox and What it Means for You.

ProBlogger: Gmail Trying to ‘Fix’ Our Inbox and What it Means for You.

Link to @ProBlogger

Gmail Trying to ‘Fix’ Our Inbox and What it Means for You.

Posted: 29 Jul 2013 08:34 AM PDT

If capturing and sending email is a part of your blog, it might be your newsletter, affiliate programs, sales email or even just reader comment notifications there are some changes (that have been looming for some time) now ramping up to a level that will impact the way you create and send emails …

Email services providers are taking matters into their own hands to fix our inbox’s.  

… and when Google start leading the charge with this, we all better pay attention.

The reality is that when it comes to our own inbox it’s a never ending stream of important stuff mixed with the boring but essential stuff, mixed in with the junk mail and spam. Sorting and organising takes time and if your not on top of it,  the important emails get lost in the noise.

It’s a problem we’ve been trying to solve since the dawn of email:

  • We were given functionality to use such as folders, and auto-filter rules
  • We were given blocking tools such as spam filters and junk folders
  • We were given techniques to try such as inbox zero

All of these things were created for users to help themselves — of course if they wanted.

I realised this was all about to change when providers started to play with the idea of proactively helping us manage the legitimate emails in our inbox by trying to figure out for us the important emails over the normal. Google's priority inbox is a great example of this.

However now Google have taken another step and are organising into groups our email for us.  Based on their own rules by default.

If you’re a Gmail user (not everyone seems to have this yet) at some point you’ll see a primary inbox, a social inbox, and a promotions inbox magically appear.

Google will, using it’s own wisdom by default, sort all your email into these groups.

You will be able to ‘train’ google by dragging emails from one inbox to another and hidden nicely away in the settings you can turn it off. But if history is anything to go by only a small percentage will actually do either of those.

So what will this mean for sending emails right now?

Time will only tell what the open and click through rate implications of not being in the primary inbox will be as more users are provided the service and actually realise there is now three inboxes instead of one.  But I’d be pretty confident in saying though we’ll all be aiming for the priority inbox.

Mailchimp have already release some peliminary findings, with a noticeable impact.

So not only will you have to be thinking about spam filters and trash folders and how your email looks on mobile, you’ll also need to be mindful of which default Google category your email if going to hits.

Oh and that’s of course after you come up with some great copy!

You can go on the front foot with your users and ask them to tell Google to shift you to the priority inbox, but that’s difficult right now as not all Gmail users have the service.

I would say your best action right now is to both track closely your open rates and click thoughts and start testing different approaches. Just like SEO and spam, Google won’t share with us it’s rules for classification, so we’re going to need to figure it out on our own.  You might want to play with text emails, you might want to play with different from addresses and service providers. It’s time to re-test some of the assumptions we’ve made when it comes to email.

What have we seen with our own emails.

We've noticed on dPS that both our launch emails from new product (this week) as well as our weekly newsletter were put in the 'promotional' tab. What was probably more concerning what that the confirmation (opt-in) email from our newsletter also ended up in promotions tab.

Open rates were slightly down for both.  So we're keeping an eye on things – but I feel it's still too early to tell.  I have received direct emails from a few people I subscribe requesting to be moved across to the priority, to but without knowing exactly who has the change and doesn't it's bit early in my opinion.

But that’s just the beginning

When spam filters first arrived there was period where they needed to earn our trust.  We needed to believe that they would do a good job of keeping out only spam and not the stuff we wanted to receive.  Over time they succeeded and the performance of spam filters are hardly given a second thought.  Once that same trust is given to the automatic organisation of our legitimate emails the complexities of this will skyrocket.   More venders will get involved, more rules will be put into play.

What I Like about this

For those creating quality content for the inbox that people want to read these sorts of systems are designed to work for you.  If your emails are a priority for your recipients you should benefit from this by default. There will be some slight adjustments to make I’m sure. It’s more those that are trying to push their way into peoples inbox’s that will feel the impact more than those who’ve earned it.

What worries me about this change

Even as a bit of a nerd I struggled to 'train' my inbox. It was even harder do the same via my phone.  So that has really drawn me to the conclusion that our challenge is not going to be in educating our subscribers it's going to be squarely at working within the rules that Google won't share with us.   We can't forget that Google have a commercial interest in this, and the idea of paying for the priory inbox isn't without question.  Nor is the idea of 3rd party messages appearing in the promotions tab either.

Fun times ahead.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
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Gmail Trying to ‘Fix’ Our Inbox and What it Means for You.
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