So far this morning, I’ve sat in on You & A with Matt Cutts, Duplicate Content Summit, and a Social Media Marketing panel that included Rand. Rebecca and I will provide some comprehensive coverage of all the sessions later, with the requisite embarrassing photographs, so I’ll just give you a feel for what SMX is all about and how it’s different to SES and Pubcon.
Firstly, there are way less people here. Way less. It’s like leaving a city’s biggest public high school and enrolling in a tiny private college. However, aside from the smaller size, a main point of SMX was to provide more advanced tracks and sessions for people who’d heard the SES spiels before. There is no Link Building 101 here. Above and beyond this, though, I’m noticing that the speakers’ demeanor is a lot less formal than at the bigger shows (Lisa, Tamar and I have been publicly called upon and made fun of twice three times in this session. It’s like being back in college and being caught drawing flowers on your notes. Serves us right for sitting in the front and giggling).
So, is the information more advanced? So far (and it’s not even the end of the first day), it depends on the speaker. One or two speakers I’ve heard today delivered speeches that were no more in-depth than those that I listening to in Las Vegas or New York. However, I’d say the majority of the presentations and virtually all of the questions in the Q&A section highlight the type of people in the crowd who’ve gathered here in Seattle this week.
If you’re on-the-fence as to what you should spend your travel or conference budget on and you’re hearing some of the same things over and over again at the other shows, I don’t think you’ll find that SMX Advanced is the graduate program to SES’s grade school. The difference is not extreme, but it is noticeable. Therefore, I would recommend checking out the SMX shows. I like that they’re shorter than SES and Pubcon (back to the college analogies, have you ever partied for five nights in a row and tried to go to class all day at the same time? Yeah, it’s great.) and I feel that the general knowledge of the audience has as much to do with the quality of the conference as does the formal presentations of the speakers.
On a more SEOmoz-centric note, it’s great to see so many of our members out here in Seattle. There’s a big difference between exchanging comments with people on the blog and chatting with them in the Expo hall! I’ll let you know if I change my mind about anything I’ve written here; it’s early going in the world of SMX. All of you in Seattle – I’ll see you this evening. To those of you who’ve stayed home, keep SMX in mind.
