If you feel the need for a refresher course on the latest trends in search marketing - especially detailed strategies for paid search - consider attending my seminar, Search Engine Marketing: From High-Level Strategy to Bottom-Line Results, at the Nielsen Norman Group User Experience conferences this fall. (Boston, Sunday, October 23, 2005; London, November 13, 2005.)
It's intended to be a kind of meta-class that takes into account perspectives from a range of top SEM experts. If you're needing to stay current but don't have time for a lengthy SEM-intensive conference, this one-day seminar should fill the bill.
Other fall events of note:
I'll be on a panel talking about search marketing at Toronto Interacts, the local chapter of the Usability Professionals Association, October 6, 2005. And I promise not to get on them about having dynamic URL's with three parameters in them. :)
Looks like another great Digital Marketing Conference put on by the Canadian Marketing Association, October 20, 2005. This time it's at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre with a followup reception at the Steam Whistle Brewery (near SkyDome). One of the keynote speakers is Dan Pink (I'm reading his book right now). Other speakers include Bryan Eisenberg (ditto; rereading actually). Word has it I'll be moderating the search marketing panel.
I'll also be speaking at ad:tech in New York on November 8, 2005. Honestly, as a non-lawyer and a non-exec-for-a-lawyered-up-Fortune-500, I'm a bit of a fish out of water on a trademark panel. I do recall clearly that I was one of the first to discover that you could effectively use "branded" terms as trigger words within a paid search account. Since that day, a curious thing has happened. Many established companies and their lawyers have been hopping mad at this form of advertising that allows a competitor to advertise on what appear to be "their" keywords. Lawsuits have been brought against Google by American Blind and Geico, but Google didn't lose those cases. They did lose judgments in France. The second thing that has happened at the same time as many established experts have cast a dim view on such practices. These guerrilla practices have been widely adopted (much like so-called black-hat SEO, used by many large corporations with the help of leading "safe, sane black hat SEO" firms), including by the agencies headed by said experts. I don't expect a lot of pats on the back for saying so. In the end, the courts will rule on specific cases.
The irony is, Metacrawler was selling ad space near SERP's on a CPM basis, and was willing to sell keywords like "yahoo" and "coca-cola," way back in 1997. (I know because I asked, and got specific price quotes on those words.) There was more tolerance for radical targeting methods back in the heyday of Business 2.0 1.0. Now that we've grown that bubble back just a bit, am I sensing a corresponding, if slight, uptick in tolerance for such creative online ad tactics? It'll be interesting to see what attendees at ad:tech think.
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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