The AWS Blog

After spending all winter under a dead gray Michigan sky, I recently had the opportunity to fly to sunny Las Vegas to attend ePrize’s Interactive Promotion Summit at Caesar’s Palace.

I spend the majority of my time neck deep in the search world, so it’s always interesting for me when I get a chance to attend a conference that’s focused on another form of online marketing. It was especially important for me to broaden my horizons since we all just learned that SEO will be dead in mid-July.

The summit featured speakers and attendees who are highly involved in the interactive promotion world. Like most of us in the search marketing world, these people typically have achieved a good depth of knowledge in both the marketing and technology fields.

The event kicked off with a Sunday evening networking event sponsored by Conde-Nast and continued through Tuesday with speakers discussing topics ranging from their own interactive promotion strategies to one speaker who focused on the science of happyness!

The one message that seemed to come across clearly from each presenter was that it’s almost impossible to have a successful online promotion without backing it up with media that drives traffic to it. I knew that I’d find a way to tie SEO/SEM into this whole thing! The Yahoo! people obviously saw that as well. They were a main sponsor of the summit and Dick O’Hare, Yahoo’s VP of Global Strategic Partnerships and Emerging Markets was one of the main speakers.

Marcus Buckingham provided the keynote presentation on the subject of leveraging your strengths (he’s written a number of books on the topic). It’s his belief that people spend too much time trying to overcome their weaknesses, and not enough time enhancing and utilizing their strengths. As he spoke, you could definitely feel the audience getting more and more introspective as we all began to evaluate how much of our day is spent doing the things we do really well.

After leaving the presentation I turned to one of my employees who was with me and asked how much of his day he thought was spent leveraging his strengths.  His reply was a humorous, “none.” I guess we all have some work to do. I’d still rank Awecomm very high in terms of people leveraging their strengths, but I think there may be a correlation between the corporate hierarchy and the amount of time that people spend doing what they do best (e.g. my developers are incredibly talented developers, when I promote them to manager, the ratio changes).

The whole event was beautifully orchestrated by a small team of marketers from ePrize, who I think could not have done a better job. Unlike so many conferences, the schedule was well constructed, the food was good, and there was plenty of time to network with the great marketing minds that were there.

If you can manage to get an invitation next year, I would definitely recommend attending this event. All-in-all it’s a great demonstration of how all of the different forms of online marketing intertwine.

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We need another SEO Specialist. Check out the job description, pass it around to your SEO friends, and if it sounds like you, let us know!

And speaking of hiring, Mark Leidlein just joined Awecomm’s hosting division as the new Director of Sales. Congrats Mark, and welcome to the team! Here’s a link to the announcement on Web Host Industry Review: AWH Appoints Director of Sales.

Drop him an email if you want to congratulate him yourself, or if you want to sign up for some web hosting service.

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Remember the Nick Burns skit from Saturday Night Live, where Jimmy Fallon played the condescending corporate computer support guy? It was funny because it was true.

Before this whole web marketing revolution started off, I grew up in the tech world, and running into people like Nick wasn’t a rare occasion. I always thought of the condescension as a defense mechanism for people who weren’t as knowledgeable as they wanted to appear.

Organizational transparency and cooperation among practitioners are two things that exist in the search and web marketing world that makes it so attractive to me.

Attend a conference like Search Engine Strategies, and you’ll encounter hundreds of people in the same industry. The vast majority of them are especially willing to not only share their tricks and tips, but most of them are also willing to ask for help from each other (therefore admitting that they don’t really know everything).

This cooperation and transparency makes sense to me. Our web marketing business has grown because we do what we do best for our customers, and if they need anything else, we’ll find a partner to refer them to. Anyone who knows business will tell you that this is usually the only way to be successful. Attracting customers that you won’t be able to provide good service to will create all kinds of problems (poor retention, bad word-of-mouth, etc).

We embrace the transparency concept. When we recently launched the new Mobile Website Development service at our company, I posted on the AWS Blog about the challenges we were facing, and how we planned to get around them. I also started and participated on a number of public discussions on different forums around the net. When we finally formulated our development plan, I posted a sample of the site on the blog. Low-and-behold, a design company on the other side of the globe liked our approach and adopted it as as well!

It’s not going to lose me business. It’s going to strengthen my industry. Most likely they’ll even improve on our ideas, and share them as well.

I was snapped back to the tech world earlier this week when I had a run-in with someone from the old school. One of our customers approached us to do something that we don’t have a lot of experience doing. I sent my dev team off to find out how complicated it would be. At the same time that my team got back to me with some information, my customer told me that he knew someone else that specialized in the service, and asked that we work with them.

The news was not a bad thing in my opinion. I thought that we had an opportunity to work with this company to provide a solid solution to our customer, and hopefully form a mutually beneficial relationship with this new organization.

I was wrong.

When I called to find out more about the solution, I was met with unbelievable aggression. My questions along the lines of, “can you help me understand roughly how the solution works,” and “what method are we using to transport the data to and from the web front-end,” were met with responses like, “you obviously know more than I do, so why don’t you tell me.”

Needless to say, the project manager and the software engineer from my team that were on the call with me were shocked, and I chose to end the call quickly.

The point is, the part of me that grew up in the tech world has learned a lot from the search world. I think the technology industry has grown up quite a bit, largely because of the open-source movement, but this week was a reminder that we may still have a little way to go.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Every man I meet is in some way my superior; and in that I can learn of him.” Words that most web marketing people embrace and that some tech people can still learn a lot from.

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