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Report from Internet Summit 2008
Thursday, November 20, 2008 — posted by Sarah O'Keefe
On Wednesday, November 19, I attended a new event in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the Internet Summit 2008. The organizers got over 600 attendees and sold the event out.The good
Having an event like this 10 minutes from my house was disconcerting. Usually, conferences require travel, and the realization that after a day of conference stuff, I'd be sleeping in my own bed was odd. But excellent.
Bob Young of lulu.com (and the founder of Red Hat). He gave a brief presentation with some salient points about the Internet. He pointed out that Google (and Google AdWords) represents a serious branding problem. Are your customers just typing in "xyz widget" and then clicking the first or second search result or do they go directly to xyzwidgetcompany.com? If the former, then Google effectively owns your customer, and if your search position drops, you are toast.
Gian Fulgoni of ComScore with some terrifying insights about customer behavior. In particular, click rates are down to under 0.1% and 6% of customers account for 50% of clicks. Those "clickers" have relatively low incomes, which makes them not-so-appealing from a marketing point of view.
Fulgoni also discussed the fact that advertisers are paying mainly by the click, even though his data shows that simply viewing an ad leads to increased brand awareness ("lift"). In other words, ads are producing results even without clicks, and the ad host should get paid for that. (Speaking as an advertiser who takes full advantage of the "we only pay for clicks and there aren't very many of them" phenomenon, I tend to disagree.)
The award for Most Unassuming Title goes to "Best Practices for the Modern Infrastructure." The panel was fantastic, and the moderator (David Jones of Southern Capitol Ventures) did a great job of seeding the discussion with good questions. This was an example of how to do a panel right. The panel included some data center guys (Greg Rollet of Peak 10 and Paul Penny of Consonus Technology); Thomas Jacobik, Google Operations Manager in Lenoir, NC; and Michael Cristinziano of Citrix. Highlights included Rollet's characterization of a new data center as a "cash-incinerating machine," the point that data center operators' biggest cost is labor with power/energy not too far behind, and a reminder that "cloud computing" means that somebody else owns the "competency of infrastructure." Regarding the economic situation, the data center guys actually expect the result to be scarcity of data center resources because building out new data centers requires a lot of cash (see first point.)
The overarching theme that emerged from the conference was control, or rather the lack thereof. Blogging and other social media take away control from corporations. Cloud computing takes away control of infrastructure.
The last panel I attended was moderated by Scot Wingo of ChannelAdvisor. He pulled together a really excellent group to discuss search issues. Jordan Glogau of 1-800-Flowers.com discussed search from a corporate point of view, including issues like the conflicts that can arise when corporation and franchisees are interested in the same keywords. Kevin McFall talked about rushmoredrive.com and how they optimize their search engine, which "serves the online needs of this country's Black community." Mitesh Patel has a couple of golf-related sites; he made an interesting point about differentiating between "browsers" and "buyers" based on their keywords and serving up different ads. (For example, a person searching on "used golf clubs" is probably browsing, a person searching on a specific model name is likely ready to buy.) Michael Marshall of PointMetrix offered some fascinating insights into how Google really works. For example, Google has identified the center of each town, and when you search locally, a company's results on their proximity to the center that Google has identified.
I ran into a bunch of people I knew and connected with lots of new ones. It was great fun!
There's more on the conference in the #is08 tweme from me and others.
The bad
Panels, panels, and more panels. The presentations would have been stronger if they had just picked one person to do the presentation instead of trying to cram 5 people's thoughts into 45 minutes.
Audience issues. Many of the sessions were too basic for the audience. You can see some of this feedback in the backchannel twitter stream.
Wi-Fi. There was free wi-fi (yay!), but accessing it required agreeing to UNC's terms of service (ok) repeatedly (BOOO!).
No content takeaways. The (rather attractive) conference booklet had speaker biographies, a schedule, and a list of sponsors, but no details about the various panels other than the time, location, and title.
Breaks were too short. There was some major networking in the hallways, and it seemed as though the organizers were constantly having to round people up to send them back into the presentations. Longer breaks would be a plus.
The ugly
The phenomenon of five male panelists sneering at mommy bloggers immediately after mentioning the power of specific communities in the blogosphere.
The demographics of the panelists did not reflect the attendees. Specifically, there were 64 speakers, of which three were women. How could this happen, I asked? Nathan Gilliatt replied:
They looked in the yellow pages under Suspects, Usual. #is08Depressing venture capitalists talking about "nuclear winter." They looked as though they were about to fall asleep in their comfy armchairs (note to presenters: give them stools or something to keep them awake), and they had zero energy. Credit is a mess. We get it. Talk about something useful. Like, "What type of business could get funded in the current economy?" "What's been your biggest mistake as a VC?" etc.
Labels: conferences, is08
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