Working Together - SES San Jose 2005

Working Together is a first time out session for SES San Jose 2005 and one that almost deserves the secondary title of "Ego Management" or "Jedi Mind Tricks To Win Search Marketing Buy-In."

If only it were so easy to have Jedi powers to convince your marketing or IT department to do what you know is best, when it comes to search marketing. In lieu of that, we have some speakers with advice to help.

Bill Hunt and Mike Moran from IBM, who I mentioned talking on our Big Site/Big Brand SEM session, get to drill down deeper into how they've won approval for changes. Marshall D. Simmonds from the Big Site panel also returns to this one. Marshall won sign-off ages ago for his SEO work with About.com. Now that he's picked up the new challenge of overseeing changes for the New York Times, he'll share fresh insights on making friends and smoothing the way for search marketing. Kathleen Stockham from Best Buy will also be on the panel will share her experiences building support for search marketing at all levels.

We'll then go into Q&A for about 40 minutes, with Bill Hartzer from Intec Telecom Systems taking part in that. It's not uncommon that I'll have panels where some speakers are only taking part in Q&A. My goal with presentations is to help set up a number of issues and especially provide common answers. But Q&A is also crucial, just as important as presentations, because you never know what an audience is most interested in. I like to have diversity of opinions for that, hence having Q&A-only panelists.