I have the chance to participate to a web marketing conference called Be-Wizard in Rimini (Italy) on 16 – 17 March 2012.
This was for me the first international conference during my SEO career. The conference was divided in two days. The first day was a general web marketing conference. To be honest nothing special. General topics, and speakers who sometimes were extremely boring and not good communicators.
The second day was divided in three sections: tourism, business and advanced. I choose to go to the advanced section because there were speakers I follow on twitter and I was really curious to see them live. The advanced section was really good, even if I have to say I saw that some presentations hav not that magic feeling and spirit that I like a lot when I listen to someone. Anyway.
The free wifi allows me to get in touch in real time via twitter with a lot of people during the two days. The highlights of the two days conference were to meet people, and it was totally great to receive a mention on twitter saying “hey Alessio, coffee later?”. You know, strange feeling…from virtual to real talk. That’s it. And here are 4 people I had the pleasure to meet and talk.
Gianluca Fiorelli – I Love SEO
Allright…Gianluca is well-known to everyone. He is one of the first SEO I started follow almost one year ago, he is now an SEOmoz associate and we talked over twitter a few times. What I like the most about him was the knowledge he has about SEO and inbound marketing in general. We took a coffee together and he explained me a bit how it became an SEO, coming from the television world. He told me some of the work he’s doing for SEOmoz and other stuff.
In the advanced section he talked about ‘Content and SEO – how to have a good site thanks to links and social mentions‘ . It was really interesting, not only for the topic but even for the way he presented. There are a lot of tips and useful things in this presentation, and I really suggest you to have a look at it and then go back to work and do stuff.
David is a great guy. He was so nice and the thing I liked the most was his communication skills. David talked twice, in the first day and in the business section during the second day. The second talk he gave was about mobile e-commerce and SEO aspects related to it. It was an extremely fun and interesting speech, and he really made me think a lot how important and cool to have a mobile site for your e-commerce.
I talked briefly to him, and we promised to get in touch when I’ll be in London next time.
Hannah talked twice too. People from Distilled are so strong communicators. Have to say that when they took the stage they rocked! The thing I liked the most about Hannah? Her smile. Yeah, I know…not a geek thing. She was smiling all the time, and she caught the attention of the listeners so easy that I was so impressed about this. During the second day, there were some problems with microphones and audio, but she was so great to keep calm and nice, she made people laugh and bypassed the problem as nothing happened. Her speech was ‘Lessons in linkbait‘ during the second day. Simple, neat, a lot of good stuff. I mean, at this point (even after having visited Distilled New York few months ago) I had no doubt about the quality of her speech, but it was truly amazing.
After the speech I met her, but I did not have the courage to present myself because she was a little bit sad thinking she wasn’t great at her presentation for the technical problems. David – and I agree totally – brightened her up saying she rocked, but I did not want to say ‘hey, my name is Alessio!’ in that moment because I felt it was not the moment. But I had a chance to talk with her via twitter and let her know I really enjoy her presentation!
Giorgio Taverniti – Giorgiotave.it
Giorgio is an italian SEO, and I think he is the most famous one. He created a big community of people interested in SEO and web marketing in general. I did a guest post in his site about ‘What SEO can learn from biology‘ (remember, I was a molecular biologist) and finally I had the chance to meet him.
He talked about ‘Search Plus Your World: the new Google social features‘ and the presentation was really smart and funny. He gave a lot of advices on what we’re gonna see in the near future even for Google.it. I liked a lot that an italian was so smart of communicating SEO stuff, because after some presentations of the day before I was really worried.
I talked to him after his presentation , asking about Google Plus pages for brands. He gave me some insights, and I was really happy to finally associate a face to a twitter account. I know we’re gonna meet each other soon, so more to follow.
I have to say: I’m not a big fan of conferences, because I think that thanks to twitter, slideshares, blogs and whatever you can learn a lot anyway even without attending. The most important part was to meet and talk with people, so I recommend to everyone to go to conferences even only for this reason, and to learn ( and sometimes to avoid) how to make presentations.
This post was written listening to Boards of Canada’s ‘Music Has The Right To Children’
