PubCon Austin - Started Today

Conference sold out - off to a great start!

[Hawkgirl]

Today is Day One of the Austin PubCon. This is a three-day executive level educational event - a bit different from the other conferences (like Vegas) that we have done in the past. There are three session tracks today and tomorrow: SEO Organic Search and Optimization, SEM Search Marketing, and Social Media.

The event itself is sold out (wow) and the session rooms are pretty packed.

There is so much going on around here it has taken a while to get this posted. Sorry about that! I am so glad to see so many people here. I thought it would be 90% locals, but there are a lot of people who flew to Austin for the event, and it is great to see all of the non-local members and mods, too!

I missed the keynote (toddler & traffic issues), but heard that Guy Kawasaki and Chris Brogan had an excellent chat. The #pubcon discussion was rocking all through the keynote - you can go see what some of the attendees were buzzing about during their talk.

I did see the session titled, "SEO Landscape." Bill Hunt, (Global Strategies International), Gillian Muessig (SEOmoz), and Brett Tabke (!) all drove home the point that SEO is not dead. The three touched on content (content, content, content). Brett discussed an idea called Halo media - tie everything that drives traffic to a website together. Seems like a simple concept, I saw lots of lightbulbs going off as it clicked for people.

The Brand and Reputation Management session included some brand management gems from Tony Wright about how to manage a brand during a crisis. Other take-aways from the session: take care of your personal brand issues before you leave your job - plan your exit! Respond to both positive and negative reviews/comments. Be consistent ... everywhere.

Current sessions going on:
Universal and Personal Search
Conversion Optimization and Testing
Intersection of Search and Social Media

And later this afternoon, a session on Keyword Research and Selection. Do you have all of your keywords nailed? Even the long (long) tail? Someone I know just whipped up a list with over 75,000 keywords and still had a way to go.

How about the Twitter landscape? I've only been using twitter for about a month (does that make me a late adopter?). Even just this past month has seen explosive growth on Twitter (Guy Kawasaki does 150 Twitters a day!). It is becoming an integral part of everyone's workspace - there are hundreds of messages in the #pubcon Twitter discussion today (and just our discussion alone has been trending at #1 or #2 for most of the day).

Time for another session ...

[coopster]

Thanks for the update, wish I was there!

[Hawkgirl]

We wish you guys were here, too. See you in ... London in July? Vegas in November?

[whoisgregg]

Definitely a great PubCon! :)

Speaking of Twitter, a good way to follow the action at pubcon is by doing a twitter search for #pubcon [search.twitter.com].