Trade Show Season Has Begun!

Jamie Lane | February 16th, 2009

Wpromote made their first appearance at SMX West last week in Santa Clara, CA. This conference is one of the fastest growing and most respected in the search marketing industry. We were both an exhibitor and a presenter at the show and found it to be highly beneficial as a learning experience, way to promote the Wpromote brand as well as network with potential clients and partners. SMX West was a great start to our goal: “see and be seen (and heard)” as Amanda mentioned in her previous 5 Things Wpromote Will Do In 2009 blog.

SMX Presentation At this show we noticed a couple of things…First, there are a lot of 2nd and 3rd tier search engines that that would like nothing more than to convince a leading SEM company like Wpromote to partner with them. Second, the SMX theater presentations are great! They are packed with cutting-edge topics, dynamic speakers and inquisitive minds. There is a lot of info in each short session and if you didn’t get a chance to attend the theater presentations or haven’t made it to an SMX conference yet we highly recommend you do so. Lastly, SMX serves their “All-Access Pass” attendees a TON of food. Not always great food, but a lot of it! The cheese and crackers breaks are always the best!

There were a few companies exhibiting and attending SMX West that really caught our attention. Kenshoo is one of them! Kenshoo is an end-to-end SEM platform for campaign management. They make PPC campaigns with thousands, even millions, of keywords easy to scale, manage and adjust. Pixelsilk also stood out as a company for us to keep our eyes on. They have developed a new content management system (CMS) that will make SEO updates easier, allow for complete HTML control and give users the ability to develop with popular plugins. We also spent a lot of time getting to know Doyal Bryant from Universal Business Listings and Laura Wagner from PayRover. They are very interesting people, involved with countless companies that Wpromote looks forward to working with in the near future!

The trip to Silicon Valley was not all work though. We made sure to find time to mingle in the hotel lobby, play craps and even take a trip to Dave & Busters! The night at Dave & Busters was a blast. We were a cutthroat group ready for some good, clean, head-to-head competition. The girls won a lot more games than the guys would like to admit, including the motorcycle race and horse racing. The guys pulled ahead in trivia and, of course, all weapons related games. We took our winnings into the prize room and after some deliberation we unanimously decided on some ridiculously oversized pens that are sure to be a hit in our next office meetings. Before leaving we made one last stop at the candy machines and each attempted to bite into gigantic gumballs. The taste of the gum didn’t last very long but the pictures certainly will!

Next up for the Wpromote trade show team is Search Engine Strategies in NY. This is a premier conference and expo that focuses on SEM and Optimization. Anyone who is interested in learning more about these topics should try to make it to the show and meet us March 23-26. On Wednesday March 25, at 4 pm we will be hosting a session that you will not want to miss. We are using PPC advertising to test out titles for the session, so far 8 Things You Aren’t Doing  That Will Boost your SEM Results is pulling ahead. Let us know what you think would make a great session!

Save this Post!