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Feeling fresh, alert and green coming off of EST and attending my first SES conference, I was met with a sluggish start to SES. This means low energy attendees, no freebies as was advertised from previous years’ attendees and worse of all, no brekkie! Even the coffee was weak. Those who needed more of a jolt had to make a trek to the Starbucks in the hotel next door or feed themselves with the $10 dollar fruit plate from the adjacent hotel.First keynote of the day and of the conference features Clay Shirky, author of the book, Here Comes Everybook, (Boo, no free book), attracted attendees to file in whilst dragging their feet into the empty main exhibit hall. Snarky sidebar: Not sure what was the motivation factor behind the can’t-see-what’s-in-front-of-you dark room and neon colour lights circling the ceiling.

Think rave from the 90s but playing adult comtemp. Was this supposed to wake us up or motivate SES learning? If so, what’s with the smooth voiced Brit who can’t stop the chatter opening for the conference? He’s somewhat interesting but he’s sure got the quality of a national geographic documentary voice over.

Good news, Clay proved to be an engaging speaker with some great examples of what’s going on in the online world; featuring social media as the shiny new toy and discussing what really motivates people to stay engaged. Now, if only I wasn’t hungry and lulled to sleep by my circadian clock that’s telling me dark room equals sleep.

After a tour around the vendors hall and a collection swag later, I started in the session that I thought was the most logical, Introduction to Search Engine Marketing. As Fraulein Maria says; “When you read you begin with your ABCs…” obviously her message didn’t reach Brad Geddes who sailed us through the fundamentals with the average number of breaths taken for the hour of 2.

Sign me up for Hooked on Phonics SES style…I’m pretty sure I’m not alone because the number of people asking questions was a brave lone soul and the average number of attendees with glazed eyes were umm… all. We were a collection of misfits at our respective online jobs where acronyms like CPC and CTR sounds familiar but we will never be brave enough to ask what it is. Thank you Brad for enlightening us. I think this session would be great as a webinar and prereq before attending this conference. Great content but speed needs to be dialled down a smidgen. Onwards and upwards.

The next few sessions proved to be well endowed with lots of information for the SES virgin. The Next Wave for Online Video had a few gem speakers. Mark Robertson from ReelSEO gave the most yummy tidbits about the future. He cited some interesting technology that allows video search to be more than a text search like face recog, thumbnail use and open source for video.  All he needed was a beer to get over his shakiness. Erin Bouchier from Google, good speaker and great for a newbie, but not enough insider insight. S he’s from Google for goodness sake!

Gregory Markel and David Burch forgot why they were on the panel, albeit useful information was given, we want to know about the FUTURE of online video, not how to trick Youtube’s ranking algorithm.

The real treat came next; Avinash and Bryan are the most engaging speakers so far. No need to blab too much about them as I’m sure all the techies, bloggers and Twits have done them nuf lip service. BTW, did they plant the guy in the audience who worked for the sex toy site?

One exception to an otherwise brilliant afternoon… Stop the Presses: How SEO Can Help Save the Publishing Industy should be renamed to Stop: Turn Around and Go To Another Session. Now I know why the publishing industry is struggling…

With a bit of a buzz kill, I made my way into Extreme Makeover: Conversion Edition. Useful session if you are a Mom and Pops shop, ecomm site that uses their cousin as their web designer and developer. Really, it was useful but their examples were a bit outdated, why not take on the big guys and critique the crap out of their sites?

Finally, the SES day ended with a grateful sip of my Chardonnay. Looking forward to what the next day will bring… with all the peeps hung over from SES Bash. Can we have eggs and bacon for brekkie tomorrow…please?