Alan Kohler was the second keynote speaker – a very ‘old school’ presentation in which he simply referred to his notebook on occasion, but extremely engaging. Quite refreshing in fact and Alan definitely has charisma.
Alan spoke to us about the future of journalism and the upheaval major news publishers are facing at this very moment. The speed of change has really caught them off guard and people like Rupert Murdoch are desperately trying to figure out what to do to maintain revenues when so much information can be gathered online for free.
Alan pointed out that quality journalism was the key – noting that his 14,500 subscribers were happy to pay their $330 annual subscriptions to his Eureka Report newsletter. I did the maths, that’s a good business to be in.
Next we saw Jye Smith, social media strategist, Switched On Media and Nicholas O’Flaherty, Bullet PR who spoke about social media and search engine visibility.
Because so many social media results are showing up in the search engines, they spoke about ways to leverage social media to get traffic to your social media channels and then back to your website. Nicholas also spoke a little on reputation management.
Karen Grinter from Global Reviews did a fascinating speech on user testing, a topic very close to my heart. They use a system similar to user testing but in a much more hands-on interpretive way. Some of the case studies were extremely insightful in terms of user behaviour online, how people search, what annoys them and makes people more inclined to do business online with you.
Key take-away? “Even when a user had a brand in mind when they went online, 51% searched on general terms.”
In the session I spoke in, we saw Jon Ostler, FirstRate talk about how everything that was old is now new again, the click economy and how it’s evolved over time. I loved his take on Forbes most powerful list – Google Founders Larry and Sergey now out-ranking Rupert Murdoch!
1. US President Obama
2. China President HuJintao
3. Russian President Vladimir Putin
4. U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke
5. Google founders Sergey Brin & Larry Page
6. Telmexchief executive Carlos Slim Helú
7. News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch
8. Wal-Mart chief executive Michael T. Duke
9. Saudi King Abdullah bin AdbulAziz al Saud
10. Microsoft founder Bill Gates
Matt Bateman of Commission Monster spoke about affiliate marketing, a topic which isn’t usually discussed at the sorts of events, so it was an interesting and new insight into the world of performance-based online advertising.
Finally! I spoke about the rise and rise of shopping comparison sites like GetPrice, Myshopping, etc. These big sites are starting to dominate the head terms and the long tail search terms online with three of the top five sites ranking for “LCD TV” being comparison websites for example:
They also completely dominate the long tail as you can see from the next screenshot:
So from top to bottom, these sites are squeezing the life out of product related search results. So in essence, if you can’t beat them, join ‘em.
You can download a copy of my comparison sites presentation here.
For more Online Sales expert advice, click here.
Chris Thomas heads Reseo, a search engine optimisation company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.
James was the editor and publisher of SmartCompany and LeadingCompany for five years. He is now the Australian Financial Review‘s companies & markets editor, and a former BRW editor.
