I’m in Dublin for the Search Marketing World 2008 event tomorrow. Organised by Interactive Return this promises to be a great event. Chris Sherman, Partner & Executive Editor, Search Engine Land is delivering the Keynote at the event, and I hope to be speaking to Chris at some point about how he sees Search marketing evolving over the next few years. Look out for details of that conversation after the event.

I also plan to speak to Vanessa Fox Features Editor, Search Engine Land, Entrepreneur in Residence, Ignition Partners about the meteoric rise of social media and its implications for digital marketers, and to Brian Clifton, Head of Web Analytics for Europe, Google about the crucial role of web analytics in the digital marketer’s arsenal. I’ll be posting here about the conference in general, and my conversations with these experts in particular after the event, so be sure to check back.

Looking forward to tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: Search Marketing World 2008,Interactive Return,Chris Sherman,Vanessa Fox,Brian Clifton,digital marketing,Ireland

NB: This piece will be published in the Career Moves section of the Evening Echo on Monday 24 March 2008

We all know how important training is to a successful career. Lifelong learning has become a bit of a “buzzword”, but we shouldn’t let its overuse dilute its significance. Whether it’s learning to use a new software package, how to implement the latest Health and Safety regulations or how to better mange our time, training helps us to realise our potential, and the right training can really give us a leg-up the career ladder.

The trouble, of course, is that these days we never seem to have enough time for learning… because were all so busy doing. People are chasing their tails from nine-to-five trying to cram 12 hours worth of of work into an eight hour day. And they’re the lucky ones – for many eight-to-six is a more likely scenario. We don’t even have time for a proper lunch break, let alone to contemplate a couple of days out to attend a training course.

How refreshing it is, then, when someone comes along and manages to shoehorn a couple of days worth of learning into an intensive half-day session. Talk about maximising the use of your valuable time.

I’m sitting sipping coffee in the Conference Centre foyer at the Clarion Hotel in Cork, waiting in eager anticipation for Getting Results in Online Marketing to start.

There’s a positive vibe, and the course material (6MB or so of PDF files) has been provided on a 1GB USB memory stick. It’s a refreshing change to see that sort of added value — a 1GB stick is a genuinely useful little extra, whereas the 64MB or 128MB sticks that often accompany seminars and events just end up cluttering up drawers when you get home.

Well, the seminar is about to start… more later.

For more details check out Getting Results in Online Marketing on the Praxis Now web site.

I’ve been invited to attend a half day seminar in Cork tomorrow morning called “Getting Results in Online Marketing“. Hosted by John Coburn of Praxis Now, this is a follow up Seminar to the one I attended last October — Internet Marketing for 21st Century Business, which was excellent.

This second seminar, which is new for 2008, picks up where Internet Marketing for 21st Century Business left off. This time the focus is on conversion: taking the traffic that arrives at your website, and converting visitors into prospects who can bring tangible value to your business.

After all, traffic without conversion just consumes bandwidth.

I must say I’m looking forward to the morning seminar. John is an energetic, intelligent and entertaining presenter, and if the session is as chock full of insight, helpful hints, tips and strategies as the last one it should prove to be a very productive morning.

I’ll post more about the seminar over the weekend.

Technorati Tags: Praxis Now, Internet Marketing Seminar, Getting Results, Online Marketing, Internet Marketing, Digital Marketing, Cork, John Coburn

A journalist makes a phone call from their mobile phone to their editor in London. They utter a single word that lights up a light on the screen of a security service’s operative. 24 hours later they’re dead.

It’s a scene from The Bourne Ultimatum, and it makes you wonder just how much your usage of mobile devices can reveal about you. It’s fiction… of course. But like all good fiction it’s grounded in reality. Your mobile could be revealing much more about you than you might think: things about your personality, your habits, your movements, your social network, who you meet and when….

I came across and article about Reality Mining, the natural extension of Data Mining, over on the Technology Review website. It cites MIT professor Sandy Pentland, who believes that the increasing sophistication, penetration and connectivity of mobile devices is about to herald a new era of analysing and predicting human behaviour based on the data mobile operators collect about us.

According to Professor Pentland, Reality mining… “is all about paying attention to patterns in life and using that information to help [with] things like setting privacy patterns, sharing things with people, notifying people–basically, to help you live your life.”

Add in the fact that mobile devices are increasingly location aware, and are becoming powerful computers in their own right, and, in theory, the data gleaned from these devices could be used to personalize the information, services, and of course advertising, that we receive in a way that’s simply unprecedented.

But it raises the age old question — just because we can, does that necessarily mean that we should?

Last May, according to the Technology Review article, Pentland and his team demonstrated how cell-phone data enabled them to accurately model the social networks of about 100 MIT students and professors. They even managed to predict where subjects would meet with members of their networks on any given day of the week. Powerful… useful… and potentially very intrusive stuff!

But it goes much further than that — data from cell phones could, for example, be used to augment models that predict the spread of contagious diseases, adding data about social relationships into the modelling algorithms. Or perhaps to flag the onset of depression — because a phone could, apparently, pick up the cues more readily than friends or family. Exciting, but at the same time I find it more than a little disturbing.

For marketers, of course, being able to track and predict the behaviour and social interaction of prospects opens up all kinds of doors. It could also open up an enormous can of worms.

“All of the devices that we have are completely ignorant of the things that matter most,” says Pentland. “They may know all sorts of stuff about Web pages and phone numbers. But at the end of the day, we live to interact with other people. Now, with reality mining, you can see how that happens … it’s an interesting God’s-eye view.”

The problem is, I’m not so sure I want people to have a “God’s eye view” of how I interact with other people… however enticing it might be from a marketing perspective. How about you?

Ireland’s only dedicated search engine marketing event, Search Marketing World, will be held at the Crowne Plaza, Northwood, Dublin, on 03 April 2008. Keynote speaker at Ireland’s only dedicated search event this year is Chris Sherman, Executive Editor of Search Engine Land, one of the world’s leading search engine experts. Joining Chris in Dublin is an impressive list of speakers that reads like a “who’s, who” of international and Irish digital marketing.

Increasingly businesses around the world are harnessing the power of the internet to reach out to consumers in new and exciting ways. Studies show that more advertising spend is being diverted online – and that search is the biggest online channel by far. Keeping abreast of the latest trends in search engine marketing is vital for marketing professionals, web masters, website designers and developers, business owners, media buyers and just about anyone else involved in marketing today.

Search Marketing World is hosted by leading Irish interactive marketing agency, Interactive Return, and offers a uniquely Irish perspective on the global phenomenon of search engine marketing. More details are available on the website at www.searchmarketingworld2008.com, or by telephone on 01 672 9022 (9am – 4pm Mon-Fri).

Technorati Tags: Search Engine Marketing,Search Marketing events,search marketing Ireland,Interactive Return,Chris Sherman

Review of "Internet Marketing for 21st Century Business" — a half-day training seminar by PraxisNow.

Did you know that, according to research, around 80% of all Internet users find the web sites they’re looking for using a search engine? And that in the month of August 2007, in North America alone, the three main search engines fielded a mind-boggling 6.7 billion search queries between them?

That’s more than one search for every living person on the planet.

When it comes to Internet search, the figures are simply staggering – and if you’re a marketer the case for tapping into this burgeoning pool of online prospects is an incredibly compelling one. Having your company web site “pop up” at the top of the search engine listings at precisely the time your potential customers are looking for your products or services is the nearest to marketing nirvana you’re ever likely to get.

There’s no doubt that making effective use of internet marketing techniques like search engine optimisation (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and e-mail marketing can revolutionise your business, but where do you start? For many website owners, traditional marketers and corporate managers the world of digital marketing is a mystery. It’s a world full of technical jargon and seemingly arcane techniques that have always been the preserve of a select few professionals… until now.