October 2005
Best Practices: Keeping content fresh
Search Engine Strategies achieves high rankings with audience-approved presenters
By Cathy Chatfield-Taylor

Launched in 1999 as a one-day event, Search Engine Strategies (SES, www.searchenginestrategies.com) has grown to a four-day, five-track conference and trade show held in 10 cities throughout North America, Europe and Asia. A typical U.S. edition draws more than 100 exhibitors paying $50 per square foot, a dozen sponsors paying up to $32,000 for premier positioning, and about 1,300 attendees paying up to $1,795 for a platinum passport.

“There’s a lot of exuberance around search,” says Founder Danny Sullivan, the Internet consultant and journalist who started SearchEngineWatch.com in June 1997. “This is a marketing medium that grew and thrived when all the other online advertising media had failed.”

Search Engine Watch provides e-newsletters and Web feeds to more than 150,000 readers who want to know how to be found by search engines. This hot property has changed hands twice — first when Jupitermedia (then Mecklermedia) bought out Sullivan within five months of startup, then sold the Web site and trade shows to Incisive Media plc for $43 million cash in August 2005 along with the ClickZ Network of Web sites.

Sullivan has stayed on board throughout as Editor of Search Engine Watch and Chair of the U.S. trade shows in New York, San Jose and Chicago. Associate Editor Chris Sherman chairs editions in Toronto, London and Stockholm. Both take an approach to speaker selection that ensures even returning attendees get fresh, deep content.

“What I bring is the same editorial quality that I bring to Search Engine Watch — understanding what the trends are and finding speakers who will enlighten people rather than do sales pitches.” Sullivan says. “Our sessions aren’t tied to sponsorships.”

Personally responsible for choosing about 150 speakers for 60 or more sessions at each conference, Sullivan delineates the ground rules for speaker selection in the SES Weblog (http://blog. searchenginestrategies.com),  launched in June 2005. The sometimes prickly posts cover deadlines, speaker openings and confirmations, and how to pitch ideas and improve your odds. Typical tips: Don’t pitch before openings are posted, don’t use a PR firm to pitch for you, and don’t pitch products. The best way to get picked? “Pitch me a new session idea when I ask for new session ideas,” he writes. That’s a four-day window of opportunity 10 weeks out.

Sullivan recruits speakers from among his network of editorial contacts but has also tapped conference attendees who impressed him with their questions. To ensure the three- to four-person panels deliver quality content without overlaps or gaps, he carefully choreographs each session, talking with panelists about their expertise then outlining key points to be covered by each speaker.

Four-star rated sessions get noted in the conference program, as do new sessions. The ratings introduce a bit of healthy competition among speakers, since only the best get invited back. At the record-breaking New York event, which had 1,800 paid attendees, Feb. 28–March 3, 2005, at the Hilton Times Square, speakers averaged a score of 4.2 out of 5 in evaluations.

Programming has evolved to include beginner and advanced tracks, and special-interest tracks such as vertical search and advertising. Location influences the audience slant — advertisers in New York, Webmasters in San Jose, and retailers in Chicago. Popular sessions like “Site Clinic,” at which attendees present Web sites for feedback, recur at every edition. New sessions occasionally bomb, such as a roundtable with too many people.

Under Sullivan’s supervision, every U.S. edition but one (post 9/11 in Dallas) has posted year-on-year attendance growth. Sullivan is optimistic about the show’s prospects under new ownership. Incisive Media has already added a Paris edition in French and a Miami edition targeting Hispanic and Latin American markets. If their chairs, recruited from the ranks of experts in those markets, are half as successful in selecting speakers, they’ll produce successful events, too.

“My job, and what my compensation is based on, is putting people in chairs in those rooms,” Sullivan says. “The show is successful because they’ve gotten good speakers.”