08.08.06

Reporting from the Frontlines

Posted in Uncategorized at 5:53 pm by altersage

Things have been a little crazy on this side since I returned from attending the Online Marketing Conference in Jozi last week. I’ve had to catch up on my Inbox, client work, new proposals, and various other proposals that have now come through as well. Needless to say I am very content in my state of “busi-ness” – which is a clever little play on words “busy” and “business” ; )

It was a two day conference starting on the Wednesday. I managed to get the earliest flight out on the Wednesday morning, rushed from Joburg International Airport to the Rosebank hotel where the conference was held and made it just in time to only have missed the first speaker.

I was pleasantly surprised with the delegates that attended the conference. Mostly all from top notch companies pertaining to either health care, banking, wireless network providers, tourism and even a couple of SME’s that could afford the conference rates ;)

I was however utterly shocked at what it costs for transfers between hotels and even to the airport! To put it mildly, it would have been cheaper to rent a car for the two days than it totalled for all of 4 transfers!!

All in all attending the conference was definitely worth every penny, as it was mostly a great networking opportunity for me. My other objective was to gauge the Joburg market in terms of receptiveness to SEO and online promotion in general. I am quite satisfied with my findings and may even be spending some more time in Jozi over the next few months. I am also looking forward to presenting a similar conference for Cape Town delegates perhaps in a couple of month’s time. After all I have the hands-on, proven experience and (just as a cherry on the cake), headed the SEO teams for two of the key-speakers at this conference.

The sessions were quite broad:

  1. The next big thing in online and what that means to your business – Acceleration
  2. Affiliate Marketing – ForgeBusiness
  3. Email Marketing Programs – Acceleration
  4. Organic Searching – ClickThinking
  5. Made to Measure – ThirtyFour
  6. Reaching the Teen Market – Sweet16
  7. The Rise of the Blogosphere – Mail & Guardian
  8. Online Marketing in SA – incuBeta
  9. SA’s Online Users – Media24 Digital
  10. Broadband and Advertising – MyBroadBand
  11. Maximising Online Revenue – BidOrBuy
  12. webPR – Quirk
  13. Media in Context – Thirty Four
  14. Spreading your Online Business - MediaSpace

The two sessions that were of most interest to me were:

  1. Email Marketing - Acceleration
  2. Affiliate Marketing - ForgeBusiness

It was a rather bizarre feeling walking in on the Wednesday morning, and giving a few people quite a surprise with my presence.

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