On Friday June 21, 2013 I attended Interactive Day San Diego. Overall it was a great event. I saw some old friends, met a lot of new people, shared some ideas and even learned a thing or two. In this blog post I want to cover a couple things that should be noted. But before you read all this insight, here is a quick picture of the main speaker area.
Rand Fishkin Session
I attended most of Rand Fishkin’s session. If you don’t know who Rand is, he is the CEO of MOZ, formerly SEO MOZ.
While I expected his session to be about SEO strategies, it was actually more focused on selling online in a general sense. Developing customer persona models, touching on mobile and sales processes. This was refreshing and intriguing, our company Ignite Visibility, has been focusing more and more on conversion rate optimization and really the overall online buying process. Rank Fishkin doesn’t want SEO MOZ to be pigeon holed in SEO any more (he didn’t say that, but I get that vibe) and they shouldn’t. SEO is only one part of online business and if the other elements are ignored the business will surely fail.
As you would expect, Rand’s presentation was excellent.
Mobile Session Offered Insight
This session admittedly was a little pitchy and didn’t give me exactly what I was looking for. I really wanted to hear about the best mobile shopping carts, mobile first design mindset and integration between apps and mobile websites. Instead it was really just a demonstration of what the presenters company had built. That being said, I did snag a few great statistics. The biggest one is the first.
Mobile search to surpass web by end of 2013. (wow! I‘ll have to write a whole post just on this… Can this be true??? Or did the presenter have his facts wrong?)
More people read mobile emails than on a desktop.
Mobile is predicted to be the focal point of everything we are doing for marketing.
More mobile phones than people in the US.
98% of mobile phones are text enabled.
81% of users text on a regular basis.
98% of text messages are opened.
55% of people in the US own Smartphones.
Star Star technologies – You pick up your phone and hit Star Star and then a keyword. When you do that you get a text message sent to you.
Recommended to not put too much emphasis on QR codes.
Make sure you are leading QR code people to a mobile website.
The new iPhone will have a QR code reader installed on it. Will potentially make it more popular.
QR codes are now available based on time of day. Example is a QR code that can only be used when it is sunny outside.
NFC technology (Near Field Communication) allows your phones to communicate with objects when they are near each other (this is going to be awesome).
Danny Grey from Google and Wade Forst, Director of Emerging Experiences at RazorFish
I caught both Danny and Wade’s presentations. Danny unleashed a world of statistics and Wade unveiled a success story between Razorfish and AT&T. Both guys are ingrained in some very interesting projects operating on the highest level in the tech industry.
I had a chance to chat with both of them during happy hour. I wont say exactly who said what, but between the three of us there were some feelings that Twitter would be making a big splash with the IPO, LinkedIn would continue to grow strong, Yahoo buying Tumblr was a surprise and wearables would be a huge future market. There was also this amazing underlining assumption that everything was achievable, everything would be integrated and nothing would stop tech progress. Those two guys were a blast for an Internet marketer like myself to speak with. Good people.
Shark Tank
One of my good friends for the last 5 years is Ben Koonse. If you haven’t heard of Ben I believe you may some day, outside of this blog post that is :). He has played a part in a handful of start ups, he is an excellent developer and is hungry to get a solid project off the ground. Ben presented his latest project at Shark Tank and gave an excellent pitch. As one of twelve contestants, Ben was fighting for a shot at 5k. But it was really more about the publicity. His idea is https://www.tryspree.com, a website that allows you to go on a trying spree for free. It’s a great idea. They should have picked him.
The winner was a new social media app named https://blurtopia.com. Congratulations to those guys.
Here is a picture of Ben pitching Tryspree.
Analytics Insight
I am an analytics guy. I am very good with analytics and when I don’t know something it drives me a little bonkers. There is an issue with Google analytics right now (it has been an issue for a while). Basically, if you are logged in to Google and do a search, then Google will not show you the organic keyword that was searched in Google Analytics, it falls under the infamous not provided bucket. This is tough for us, because we always try to demonstrate the ROI our search engine optimization services provide. We can still do this to an extent, but we don’t know which keywords are branded and which are non-branded when a user is logged in. This can account for 1% of organic traffic or up to 30%, or more.
For a long time I thought if we switched from Google Analytics to another platform we could get this data. Alas, my logic was completely off. This data is hidden because when you are logged in to Google you are in a secure environment. So it is not the analytics program, but the secure platform. I learned this during a conversation at the convention and then mentally kicked myself for the rest of the day for not knowing it first. My internal monologue whispered, “Come on John, you are better than that.”
Final Thoughts on Interactive Day San Diego
Right now in the Internet marketing world anything is possible. This conference confirmed that Ignite Visibility Internet Marketing is on the cutting edge, as much as any other company out there. But outside of that, it showed me that there are some really great people helping to push things forward and solve problems. I love the online marketing space. I feel blessed to live in a time when so much is being accomplished, so many smart people see so much potential and every business in the world wants a piece of the pie. To everyone who attended. Great to see you and good luck with your projects.
