Archive: December, 2008

I was party to an interesting conversation outside the Hilton Hotel in Chicago last week. I was standing beside a friend who is another Search Engine Strategies speaker, talking to a half dozen or so conference delegates, two of whom had specific instructions to seek out the other speaker as a potential vendor. He was turning himself inside-out trying to explain what I had meant when I made the seemingly dismissive comment, “Rankings are so dead dude,” to a potential client of his a few moments earlier.

These sorts of conversations are usually pretty interesting and though each of them is unique, they tend to follow a similar pattern. People attending search marketing conferences are there on their company’s budgets or pay thousands out of their own pockets. They are expected to return with a lot of fresh info that will build their online businesses. When talking to speakers, smarter conference delegates tend to pry as much information as they can.