How to Select the Right Online Marketing Conference for Your Business

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April 29, 2010 at 12:44 pm

How to Select the Right Online Marketing Conference for Your Business

By Bob Speyer, Web Success Team

One of my all time favorite movies is Rodney Dangerfield’s, Back to School, about a father who returns to attend college along side his son. While the parallels are not even, the dawning of the Internet Age has left us wide-eyed and scrambling to attend an online marketing event and monetize our knowledge.

Going “back to school” is a given for online marketers. Learning never stops, and in the online environment, it’s all about change, innovation, emerging technologies, strategies and tactics. You need to keep up-to-date.

Don’t Accept the Hype

With so many established or new conferences, seminars and trade shows to choose from, where do we separate the snake oil from the Holy Grail? Who do you believe and how much is value blended with true educational content?

Like with any product or service you are considering to purchase, research comes first. Let me share my views and insights in helping you decide which events you should attend.

Guidelines to Help You Decide the Right Event for Your Business:

Is More Better? The most expensive conferences are not necessarily the best. Sometimes, multiple day conferences are too overwhelming, fatigue sets in and learning declines. I am a firm believer in attending intensive one-day seminars with multiple speakers or an online series of events spread over days or weeks where you can listen to archived sessions.

Match Needs with Topics. Stay focused and determine if the topics will directly benefit your company’s marketing vision and deficiencies. One main criterion I use in selecting an event is if there will be in-depth case studies that implement theory and tactics into actionable results. Too often have I attended sessions where speakers cite studies, but do not back up their statements with concrete examples.

Research the Event. Find out about organizers, sponsors, speakers, and yes, fellow attendees – past and present. Read blog posts about past and upcoming events. Use social media to ask what others valued most from the event. Pay attention to the negative comments as well.

Set Clear Objectives. After choosing which event to attend, have an advanced game plan. Detail ten things you want to achieve or take away. It’s not enough to listen to lectures and interact with attendees. Ask relevant questions to benefit your business and network to make contacts you can actually use post-event.

Implement What You Learn. Knowledge for knowledge sake is an admirable pursuit, but we also live in the real world. Don’t forget to implement the strategies and tactics you learned to improve your business or to enhance your marketing efforts.

Two Recommended Online Marketing Events

The Web Success Team will be attending two online marketing events in May 2010: The Online Marketing Virtual Summit and the Social Media Success Summit. Both events are online. One is free, while the other charges. We recommend both as excellent learning centers that provide educational content for the novice to the marketing veteran and are excellent value for the money and time.

The Online Marketing Virtual Summit is a free one-day event on Thursday, May 27. The event showcases eight online marketing areas including Social Media, Search Marketing, Web Analytics, Integrated Marketing, Online Advertising/Mobile, Website Content, Email Marketing and Demand Generation. Featured speakers represent a good cross-section of the online marketing community from Google, Wharton Interactive Media Initiative,Intuit and Kodak, to name a few. If you can’t attend the live event, register anyway, and you can listen to the archived sessions at a later date. I’ve previously attended the Online Marketing Summit one-day, in-person event, and was impressed with the educational content, speaker interaction and absence of vendors trying to sell you something.

The Social Media Success Summit is more ambitious, stretching over three weeks from May 4-25 and includes social media gurus Guy Kawasaki, Mari Smith and Michael Stelzner along with marketers from Home Depot, Dominos, Whole Foods and Best Buy. These recognized authorities will reveal the latest techniques and proven business-building tactics you can use to immediately benefit from social media. It should be a virtual brain-fest of great information all for $597.

We Want to Hear from YOU!

For those of you who will attend these events, I welcome your feedback. Send reactions to bob@websuccessteam.com or comment on this post. I will incorporate your feedback in a follow-up review of the Online Marketing Virtual Summit and the Social Media Success Summit. To your web success!

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3 comments so far

Mari Smith

May 2nd, 2010 at 7:04 pm

Huge thanks for your kind support!! The SMSS is my *favorite* event of the year. I’m super excited about the lineup and have every session marked off on my own calendar too!!
WebSuccessTeam

May 4th, 2010 at 6:05 pm

THXS, Mari.
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