A little disappointed with the Search Engine Room workshop…
I thought I’d do some professional development and go along to ‘The Search Engine Room‘ workshop last week in Auckland.
To say the least, I have to say I was a little disappointed. I thought it was going to be developer focussed, giving insights to SEO tomorrow, and what to expect from a developer point of view. Instead, it was full of account managers, advertising directors, floncy poncy la la types looking for prey in an industry where it’s easy to be a predator with no remorse. I think some of those people attending are going to walk away with even more ammo to bamboozle already confused clients, and have them part with even more of their hard earned coin.
I went undercover and had a namebadge stating I was with a tourism organisation, not my web development agency. It was great to have pitches coming left right and centre and seeing the spin that bullshitters salespeople will try get away with. That was fun, but to be honest, I don’t like the smell of rich people talking crap.
It wasn’t all pitchfest though, I did take home some interesting info… eventually.
Mr Yahoo! was there and put on a good show, Mr Google looked like a bored shitless accountant going through a messy divorce - he gave an average presentation, and Mrs Microsoft, crikey, she looked and sounded like a robot set on world domination.
Mr e-commerce SEO gave an ok talk, but didn’t give anything away that had me scribbling in my note pad. I did ask him if he could recommend an e-commerce platform or CMS and he told me to speak to my developer about mod_rewrite for APACHE… em… burp.
Probably my favourite speakers were Rod Jacka from Panalysis, and Francisco Cordero from Bebo. Both gave excellent presentaions and had a captive audience. Without their presentations I would have had burns. Thom James made some interesting points about online reputation and PR, his sidekick making an example of Meridian Energy and the amount of negative results there are when searching for them. Interesting.
I had some issues with Mrs FirstRate, outlining a point that alt tags on images should be optimised for search engines. Em, no. They are not for that and shame on you for advocating they should be used for that.
Mark Sceats treated everyone like a bozo and for the second half of his talk, read out a powerpoint presentation word for word. I struggled to stay awake through that one.
So all in all, if you’re thinking about going to the next one, go from a client perspective - not as a developer. Get an insight into how the larger players are hunting for new business and the spin they are putting on SEO. Put on your suit and practice saying ‘ladeda’.
