Ok, I think after 2 days of “official” conference it’s time for a brief recap of the SES New York I’m currently attending…

In short, no big surprises - the agenda was published ahead of time, and only very few SEO & Linkbuilding sessions were planned for at all. This means all the “usual” high profile SEOs like Greg Boser, Todd Malicoat, Aaron Wall, Jim Boykin, etc. are missing here. I mean literally ALL are missing. Not even not speaking, but also not even here for the networking.

Instead we hear a lot about the usual “buzzy” topics like

• FACEBOOK - ok, FB is big, and has a lot of potential for targetting ads, but their cheesy booth and the even chessier presentation called “optimizing FB ads for the social graph” was a joke. Literally they had this two college girls out there in front of 3000 people and showed us how to use the self service ad booking form. COME ON! I’m sure NOBODY - nobody - paid 2 grands (over $2000 conference attendee fee here!) to hear this basic crap. Then facebook has a booth with some logos put up and again some cute college chicks. This appears to be the only reason why the booth was so packed with people…

• TWITTER - ok, Twitter is big too, growing exponentially, all sorts of rumours of Google or M$ or some other biggie buying Twitter, and most of all, a great “how to spam Twitter”-Keynote by Guy Kawasaki, who was brilliant yesterday - quote: “If they do it to me, it’s spam, but if I do it, it’s brilliant marketing”… controversial attitude and the right answer “UFM” (you f*ckin moron, or in nice-speak on the panel: Lisa “Un Follow Me” if you don’t like my spam…) Guy gave away some nice tips to and tools that he uses to automate building his twitter account and most impressive, some random crap link about peanut butter stuff he tweeted was clicked on by 200+ people in the next minute or so…

What really rocked the boat was again the topic conversion optimization and the always brillian Tim Ash. This session was held in a “site clinic” style panel and they really took some time to hint on how different sites could improve their conversion rate. I always love watching these conversion experts rip sites apart, because they often look at things in a different angle - i.e. pleasing the web designers, or pleasing your client experience?

I might be totally wrong, but the overall audience here has become even more corporate, even more agency crowd, even more distanced from the “technical internet marketing” that SEO and affiliate marketing is so much about…

So as expected and once again, the networking and meeting of new or old friends is the REAL value for me here. It once again shows that some talk inbetween the sessions is worth a lot more than a whole presentation made for the masses. We had great dinner at the Spice Market on Monday, have been to awesome russian restaurant and that’s what I believe is the value of the conference for me - and a lot others.

There’s yet another conference day tomorrow, but the expo has already shut down today. I heard from some exhibiting companies that the interest in their product was pretty good (200+ leads) and I’ve seen the expo hall packed all the time. Looking forward to get some insights on how those leads convert.

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