SMX Sydney|Keynote – The State Of The Search Union|Keynote Panel

Good Morning Everybody, there are a couple of bloodshot eyes and weary heads here at SMX Sydney, for once I am not one of them, yay.

And now a stupid joke to wake everyone up:

A vulture gets on a transatlantic flight with a dead animal in each claw.
The flight attendant stops him, and says “I’m sorry, sir, only one piece of carrion per passenger allowed”. Hehe, now on with the show.

This is a panel discussion with Chris Sherman, Andrew Goodman, Gillian Muesigg, Alex Parsons and Marty Weintrub.

The change in search is that it has grown massively, it has come into it’s own. We are only getting into developing strategy, Facebook is not strategy, PPC is not strategy, they are tactics to implement a digital strategy.

Ebay’s main promotion was online. It was a decision that was derided but ultimately proved effective. Companies have become spoiled by direct response. Companies are always measuring their performance. Companies are not just satisfied with a brand benefit from search. Cheapest time is now to buy ‘brand mindshare’. Companies are going to have to get creative as there is a limited amount of SEM inventory available. People are measuring different type of metrics, like number of fans to a page, measuring depth of engagement of a blog, how many people are commenting?

We are getting much more information about demographics. The trade-off is privacy concerns. Are we ready to move to a society where there is even less privacy? Australia may be more open to less privacy due to the inherent confidence in OZ. Younger people are more likely to be open to less privacy in the future.

Postulate seems to be the word of the morning, I postulate.

There is a massive amount of information that you can bring out of Facebook. You can market to a guy and his friends who will persuade him to purchase a product. The recession was a great time to be in search. Before that, there was no attribution, when ever dollar counts, you need to think about attribution. The early adopter, metric driven companies will be the winners.

Google is not the only way to go, Yandex, Baidu are all useful, when you utilise them correctly. Shouldn’t target different countries using different search engines, right now anyway, consolidate your efforts.

In 5 years what are we going to be talking about:

Alex Parsons– Something to do with mobile, video and broadband etc. You have that device with you everywhere, you can do anything with it, how do we reach our consumers through that kind of device.

Marty Weintrub-More government intervention. Shifts in regulation and insurrection of the masses.

Andrew Goodman-Somebody will make sense how best to give something away to get into people’s good books. Fibre optics is a good example.

Gillian Muesigg-Those databases with everyone’s information. How far can they go ? Our tools will be different, the web will become more mobile.

Good first session to get us going this morning, I will be relocating for the first time to ballroom b, enjoy the break.

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