Mark Your Calendars: The Search Marketing Workshop, 2012

Planning is full swing underway for the 2012 edition of The Search Marketing Workshop to take place Friday, November 16, 2012.  We have lined up two dynamite keynote speakers to start and end the day:

• Chad Wiebesick, Director of Social Media and Interactive Marketing at MEDC, on the digital side of The Pure Michigan Campaign.
• Michal Lorenc, Google, Head of Industry—Ticketing and Live Events, on the convergence of social, mobile, and search.

I'm also excited about the range of industry and academic experts we have pulled together to cover two tracks:

• Effective Search Marketing
• Mobile Marketing Basics

You can see preliminary details of both these tracks in the draft agenda I have attached below.

And last but not least, we will also showcase our students in a mid conference poster session where they will be talking about the significant search marketing campaigns they have managed. 

Our goal in the conference is to update the Southeast Michigan business community on the state of the art in search marketing. We want to make Eastern Michigan University's search marketing connections, resources, and talents available to the broader community.

Here's our draft agenda:

The 2012 Search Marketing Workshop from BudGibson

Tracking how visitors turn into customers

Last week, I had the honor of presenting at Meaghan McCann's Pay Per Click Club. Meaghan asked me to speak on Google Analytics. Her group consists of a set of people, some of whom are driving business through search marketing. All of  them view the web in general as a primary sales driver.

I always pitch Google Analytics as a way to see what is happening on your site. Out of the box, it does a good job of giving a general view. The more work you put into setting up tracking goals and campaigns, the more useful your information will be. Without Google Analytics, you find yourself in the situation depicted below. You have plenty of information about how visitors are being acquired but little to no information about what they are doing once they get to your site.

The main benefit of Google Analytics in this situation is to fill in the question marks. Here's the presentation itself:

Google analytics

View more presentations from BudGibson

The Channelized Mobile Landscape — What It Means for Business Owners

As the graphic above indicates, there are now essentially three players in the post-pc mobile landscape:

• Google
• Apple
• Amazon

These companies control:

• The datacenter back end,
• parts of the Internet delivery system,
• and the devices consumers use

In effect, they have all three set up direct to consumer channels with a fair number of restrictions. All three present their own offerings first, front and center on their devices. These devices are highly integrated into each company's server infrastructure. This infrastructure includes web search, transaction processing, media delivery, geography-based services and other significant data processing. 

For business owners, there is one critical message. Whereas for a long time, it sufficed to have a quality presence on the web and be properly registered with the services of one significant search provider, google, you now have to be thinking about how you can be found on each device. They are all different.