This week in London one of the major search conferences sets up their tents for two days of knowledge exchange. Chelsea Stadium will once again be the place where SMX London takes place. As usual State of Digital will be present.
The conference
SMX London is one of the last ‘old style’ and ‘real’ search conference. Where other conferences have chosen a more broader approach (SES going with ClickZ for example), SMX is sticking to what they started with: search. Yes there are other elements present at the conference, like social, but it is all focused on the search professional, who also has social as part of the job role these days.
This makes the conference an interesting place to be when it comes to finding out what the state of the current search market is. How is SEO doing, what is going on with PPC? And how does Social fit in?
The program and the speakers
The SMX program looks interesting for the marketers who want to learn from industry peers. If you look at the agenda you will see that the organisation, which like always is in the hands of Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman, has divided the two days of conference in different tracks: the SEO Track and the Paid Search Track on day 1 and the Search & Social Track and SMX Advanced Track on day 2. Keynote this year is Vice President and General Manager of Lenovo Ajit Sivadasan, who we know from RIMC in Iceland.
You can listen to Danny Sullivan talking about the way they set up the conference at the last part of this interview I did with him several weeks ago.
Speakers this year are very much the search and social people that do hands on work, with a lot of agencies presenting as well as tools (Marin Software, Searchmetrics) and big brands like Lenovo as well as big names from the engines, take the ‘Meet The Search Engines’ session on day 1 where Duane Forrester (Bing), Eugene Lomize (Yandex) and John Mueller (Google) take the stage.
There is something to be found for everyone.
What we will be doing
State of Digital will off course be present at SMX. There are several of us there, both speaking as well as covering. The State of Digital speakers are:
Matt Beswick, Director, Hidden Pixel (@mattbeswick) on Tuesday 3:45pm in the session “What’s In My SEO Toolbox?”
Bas van den Beld, Chief Editor, State of Digital (@basvandenbeld) on Wednesday 10:45am in the session “Supercharging Twitter & Facebook Engagement”
and
Barry Adams, SEO & Digital Strategy consultant, Pierce Communications (@badams) and Bastian Grimm, Managing Partner, Grimm Digital (@basgr) on Wednesday 10:45am in the session “From Microdata & Schema To Rich Snippets: Markup For The Advanced SEO”
The blogging team consists of Sam Noble, Jo Turnbull, Russell O’Sullivan and Polly Pospelova.
Be sure to say hi to them!
State of Digital (and formerly State of Search) has always been known for the extensive conference coverage we do as well as for trying out new things. This week we will be trying out something new again. In stead of getting a lot of blogposts around SMX covering the event we will send out our team at SMX to properly analyse what is being said and extract the lessons learned from all the talks, specificially for you. We will then publish this in a free e-book next week where you will able to find the exact information you are looking for.
The e-book will be a very valuable document which will help you take the next steps in search and social based on industry expert talks.
You can already sign up for a free copy of the e-book here, so you will get it before it is even published.
