Lots of great sessions on Wednesday here at WebmasterWorld Boston Pubcon. Unfortunatley, I was only able to attend two of them (one as a speaker) due to a teleconference I did with Bulldog Reporter.
I thought the Public Relations panel in the morning went well. Robin, Lawrence and David all made strong presentations. What I liked best about the session and this is corroborated by feedback I received from attendees, was the diversity of perspectives offered.
Lawrence Coburn offered a small company’s inside perspective of what he called “dumb luck PR” and how to take advantage of that and snowball it. Very cool story actually. Television personality and CNN maven 🙂 Robin Liss shared her perspective on getting TV coverage. David McInnis gave a rundown on press release optimization and some of the new features available at PRWeb. My presentation covered the notion of applying search engine optimization principles to blog and press release optimization.
This was a great panel and I hope to speak with this group again at the Las Vegas Pubcon. I will either make a summary blog post on the main topics and tools from my PPT later this week.
Shortly after the PR session, I hustled back to my hotel room at the very impressive Hotel Commonwealth, (rooms are bigger than most suites I’ve had) to do a teleconference on Public Relations and Search Engine Optimization with Jamie O’Donnell of SEO-PR and Sally Falkow of Expansion Plus for the Bulldog Reporter’s PR University Audio Conference Series.
There were some big names in Public Relations that paid to listen/participate in this teleconference and I was not sure how it would go since I’d not done one with Jamie and Sally before. However, I think it went really well and I am very appreciative to Jamie O’Donnel for inviting me to participate.
This teleconference offered an impressive amount of detailed information on applying search engine optimization to press releases including keyword research, document optimization, SEO and some unique insights on internet public relations, particularly from Jamie and Sally, that were priceless. I can tell you that public relations firms of all sorts are sizing up how they can take advantage of search engine optimization in their practices. The desire for building up in-house expertise in this area is very strong.
After the teleconference it was time to get back to Pubcon where I caught the tail end of the Super Session, “Search Engines and Webmasters” with Tim Mayer of Yahoo, Ramez Naam from MSN, Matt Cutts of Google and Rahul Lahiri from Ask.com. Lots of great info in this session, unfortunatley I did not blog it. Ramez showed some interesting features of Live.com especially the Windows Live Local Virtual Earth preview that lets you drive through city streets and see it first person.
After the super session, it was a short happy hour on the conference floor and then off to dinner at an Irish pub with Christine Churchill, Jill Whalen and Craig. There is simply no substitute for being able to share stories and info with industry veterans and I am forever grateful for the priceless insight from others in the search industry. Especially after a few pints of Guiness!
Thursday is the actual “Pub” con and that’s where all the networking happens at this conference. Should be fun AND productive.
