For day two of the InfoCommerce conference, the focus shifted largely to working with search engines.
Today’s keynote was delivered by Craig Pisaris-Henderson, CEO of MIVA. MIVA is the current name for what most of us knew as FindWhat.com (as a marketer who likes names that convey what a product does, I have to admit that FindWhat seems much more compelling to me than MIVA, but that’s a discussion for another day).
Craig was making the argument that Yahoo and Google are publisher’s adversaries and that MIVA’s focus on the publisher, rather than the user, was a better solution. The audience did not seem convinced, voicing the opinion that “if the users want to use search, then you should be there to receive their traffic.” While MIVA has done some interesting things, I think that you need to go where the traffic is. While there are pros and cons to ad networks, I’m not sure there’s anywhere else to generate that level of traffic.
Two panels were the most compelling presentations of the day. “Search Engines: Rep Firms of the Future” focused on the question of “is Google friend or foe?”. Led by Sean Brooks of TechTarget, Joe Douress of LexisNexis Martindale Hubbell and Jeff Leibowitz of the Laredo Group, the theme of this panel was that Google and Yahoo are there, so embrace them. At the same time, publishers own an amazing amount of valuable content, so while search engines have their place, premium content providers can establish strong positions and Google will not take over the world.
On a more tactical basis, the last panel of the day was “The SEO/SEM Bake Off”. Aaron Kahlow, CEO of BusinessOnline, Diane Burley, President of PureContemporary.com and Todd Watts, Director of Marketing for Liquidity Services, Inc. debated the merits of organic vs. search marketing. Aaron Kahlow led off with a strong and compelling argument that SEO was where publishers should focus, yet today we spend 80% of our dollars on SEM. Diane Burley used a case study of the first year of her online magazine to show how to balance various approaches. Todd Watts was able to demonstrate that SEM could play a great role in balancing SEO. While no one can guarantee that they can give you the top position for each term in SEO, SEM allows you to buy the ones where you’re not getting the SEO results you want. Reinforcing the concepts mentioned by Anne Holland of MarketingSherpa yesterday, the panel agreed that publishers bought SEM because it was easier to understand and execute. Better results could be achieved by investing more in SEO, then using SEM to fill in the gaps.
Overall, this year's InfoCommerce Conference was compelling, with a strong mix of traditional and new publishers.
For more coverage of the InfoCommerce Conference, check the detailed session notes taken by John Blossom at Shore Communications as well as the comments on Dave Jung's b2blog. Dave spoke at one of the breakout sessions.
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