SEOkomm 2011, Salzburg – a quick re-cap
Search Engine Optimisation

SEOkomm 2011, Salzburg – a quick re-cap

29th November 2011

Even though my travel schedule is still ridiculously packed (and yeah, that continues until Christmas) it’s about time for a new post. What better thing to write about than a conference? Right, almost nothing – especially if that conference, in this case the 2011 edition of SEOkomm, just closed its doors and left a very, very good impression. But let’s start at the beginning…

Just taking place for the second time, SEOkomm already became THE online marketing lead conference in Austria. Put together by no one else then linkbuilding-guru and my very good friend Christoph C. Cemper in cooperation with Oliver Hauser last year’s conference received an enormous amount of positive feedback. And since there is no other SEO conference (at least that size) in Austria anyways, both decided to do SEOkomm again in 2011. And let me assure you, those guys did an amazing job!

I’ve been two 20+ conferences during this year; in Germany, in Europe and also in the States – but this one really kicked it. Besides of having a jam-packed agenda starting at 9 am and ending at 7 pm (yes, that’s 10 hours!) with ~40 top speakers there we’re some more things really worth mentioning:

Smooth & pain free registration desks: Most of the events do have long queues at check-in – this really sucks big time. I didn’t notice ANY queue at all – and they even had a speaker’s check-in which worked amazingly fast. Good job!

Catering: The thing I really liked about the catering in general was the quality of drinks and food. You could have juices, coke and coffee (yes, the good stuff – espresso, cappuccino, etc.) at all times. Compared to other events that run out of water during half of the day this was – again – just great. The food was nice as well; however talking to Oliver during the day revealed that they had a little bit of trouble (aka some queues) when serving lunch. Didn’t notice that, however I guess they’ll have that fixed in 2012. Only thing to improve would have been to serve diet coke and RedBull sugar-free. Hah, I know I’m a pain… sorry guys!

To get an impression:

Free wifi for 500+ people: Ever been to a search marketing conference? If not, you’d probably guess that’s pretty much “normal” to have a free and working wifi at the conference. Trust me, it’s not! Even though most of the events do have it – it’s either not working at all (or if it works, painfully slow) or you can’t connect because it’s limited to 50 or 100 connections. This is almost nothing if you count in phones and stuff. SEOkomm managed to have a great wifi working all the time, no connection losses, nothing – it just worked! Awesome!

Tech setup: As a speaker you want things to go as smoothly as possible. Carrying a microphone all the time is not so great, having to push the next button for each slide sucks as well – but what should I say? Right… wire-less presenters, headsets – all available. Besides of some smaller issues with the mic’s during the last panel I didn’t notice any trouble at all.

Last but not least – Content: Yes, usually – especially as an attendee – you’d mainly care about content. Bad things first: The whole event was German-speaking only, sorry guys. However – if you do speak German – from the presentations quality (at least the ones I saw) it was THE best German-speaking event in 2011. Great, great job! If you have not been there, mark your calendar for November 2012 – cause there’s gonna be another one. And you surely don’t want to miss it.

If you’re interested in some further impressions, be sure not to miss all the pictures taken during the event and there is also a huge amount of (German) re-caps available over here.

Thanks guys for having me, see you again at SEOkomm 2012!

Images by Tony Gigov for SEOkomm.

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Written By
Bastian Grimm is founder and CEO of Grimm Digital. He mainly works as online marketing consultant with a strong focus on organic search engine optimization (SEO). Grimm specializes in SEO strategy consulting, website assessments as well as large scale link building campaigns.
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