SES Toronto 2008 : Opening Keynote

Live-blogging the opening keynote at SES Toronto 2008 Day 1

The future of Marketing

by Fredrick Mackini, Founder of IProspect Chief Global Search Officer, Isobar

There were many topics that Fredrick talked about. I will talk about the ones that really stood out as alot of his content was very valuable.

Here are 5 topics that Fredrick discussed in the Opening keynote of SES Toronto 2008:

1) Statistics on search, Google Video, Youtube and reach over MTV.

Many statistics were given on the amount of content being consumed that come from searches off Google Video and Youtube over the conventional media types such as MTV. People are interacting with the content by uploading their replies and comments and more views are being obtained. This type of interaction is hard to measure offline.

2) Different audiences uses different keywords to find you in search

He used a candle in a jar product as an example to drive home his point.  The customers of this product saw the product first hand and entered in keywords in a search engine to find the product online. The keywords that they used to find the product online were not what the company had expected. The company then used the search terms that people typed in to get to their site and adjusted their content on the site to reflect this.. This is a good example of how marketing content on your site is an iterative process to adjust to what your users are searching for.

3) Competitors stealing your off-line advertising

This is an interesting topic that I haven't put too much time to think about. There is a significant gap between off-line ad campaigns and how firms market themselves online through a variety of campaigns. There is the potential for your competitors to use your off-line ad campaign to their advantage online, stealing your potential customers. Making a holistic campaign that converts people from off-line to your online site is essential and must be thought out very well if you want your campaign to be successful. Integrating your campaign with the competitive landscape will be fundamental to your campaign.

4) Take PPC campaigns Global

You may be limiting your PPC campaigns by only keeping your PPC campaigns to a local market. He went through pricing of campaigns and cost of acquisition around the world. For one of the campaigns that his firm ran, the COA prices were a lot less around the world than in the US and Canada. Places such as South America, Europe, Australia were significant cheaper for them in acquiring customers for their clients.

5) Search-Leveraged Press releases

He went into a discussion about Search-leveraged press releases to get the word out in a marketing campaign. It detailed how releases are ranked, how people pick them up and the spill over effect of a successful press release. This led into a segway of how content is raised to the top of the search page.

Overall, Fredricks opening keynote was very entertaining and his ending comments that covered the future of search just confirmed my view of where it's going: search centric and community driven.