10 Yetis Attends Day One of SAScon SEO, PR and Social Conference in Manchester

Andy here, back from attending Day One of SAScon, (#SAScon on twitter) an SEO conference up in Manchester. I went along because I was really interested in the subject matters of several of the sessions, and it also had speakers who I was keen to hear talk.

It was also great to meet up with some of the main guys of the SEO/Digital/PR world such as Dom TheHodge (who, by the way, did the most romantic proposal to his now fiancée that I have ever heard) from EmberAds and ThinkVis, Kelvin Newman from BrightonSEO and Site Visibility, James Crawford from PR Agency One, a great Manchester PR Agency, Peter Bowles from Dynamo PR, Famous PR freelance Stuart Bruce and Lexi Mills from Distilled and last but in no way least, the Rockstar of the Digital Engagement world, Ned Poulter.

I started off by attending the "Are PRs from Venus and SEOs from Mars? When will the planets ever collide?". The panel was made up of James Crawford, Simon Wharton from Pushon (think may have been one of the organisers of the conf), Peter Bowles and facilitated by Lexi Mills.

Lexi started the session brilliantly (in my eyes only maybe) by saying the recent Panda and Penguin updates are making SEO's talk more about doing more "PR'y" style activities... Woot! Good news for PR's.

Simon however, kicked his thoughts off in controversial style by labelling Public Relations people as being "f*cking useless" when it comes to SEO. I was, no surprise, pretty shocked at this. Rather than launch into a massive defence of our sector, far better to realise (as I quickly did) that Simon works quite closely with some PR's so he clearly was saying it purely for the shock factor and I am guessing (not really knowing him) that it is just part of him trying to be a walking Linkbait machine.

To be fair to Simon, he went on to speak loads of sense about the differing approaches and how, similar to my own thoughts, it is about SEO's and PR's working together to deliver quality campaign results.

The panel kinda drifted more into Linkbuilding tactics (obvious, given the topics) and there was a healthy debate about who should really drive this and where ownership should sit.

Lexi made the great suggestion that PR's should force agencies to have campaign and planning meetings alongside their SEO colleagues. A brilliant idea that we are all guilty of forgetting from time to time.

Kudos to Peter and James for standing up for the PR industry in the face of varying levels of hostility from Simon on this panel.

I kinda missed the next few sessions due to catching up with a few people I had not spoken to for (in some cases) years.

The next session I went to was Social Media Meets PR.

The panel was chaired by Kristal Ireland from Propaganda and on the panel was: Paul Fabretti from Brazen, Judith Lewis from Beyond and Stuart Bruce (mentioned about).

The session seemed a bit more spikey than the PR venus one earlier, but I got the impression that Paul and Stuart were making the same very valid points, but in totally different ways :-)

My notes are a bit disjointed from this session as I took a call, apologies!

Judith, who I have heard talk many times and is a hugely engaging conference speaker talked about the need for brands to better interact with customers in order to build more deep and meaningful relationships. She also referenced the need for agencies and companies to look beyond interaction as campaigns and instead see them as a continual conversation.

Paul made the spot on point that agencies always have to be careful when they come up with outrageous social and PR ideas because doing so may make the client think that the agency does not understand their brand.

HSBC and its press office Twitter account and social strategy received a great deal of praise from all of the panel for its social strategy and also the way in which is dealt with a potential negative system outage issue. They turned the situation around and had great levels of journo engagement because of their rapid and intelligent use of its Twitter channel to keep media and consumers up to date.

Proving how awesome HSBC's twitter strategy is, one of the press office team saw that I was tweeting about the praise they were receiving and joined in the online conversation. Kudos to HSBC, they are on it like a car bonnet.

Finally on this session, could not end without giving a massive shout to Dave Edmundson-Bird from Manchester Metropolitan Uni who recieved praise from every corner of the room for the awesome media, pr, digital etc courses that he lectures on. Sounds like his is the degree that the next generation of digi-leaders need to be on.

The last session I attended for the day was called "Is There a Place for Blackhat SEO in Modern day SEO campaigns". The panel was made up of basically some of the elite SEO folk from across the globe.

Bas van den Beld from State of Search, Ralph Tegtmeier aka Fantomaster, Dave Naylor from Bronco, Paul Madden from Automica and Kelvin Newman (mentioned above) from SiteVisibility.

Given the content I don't think I can really say too much about this session :-) The highlight was probably one of the search engines being compared to the Gestapo :-)

All in all, I will definitely be back for the next SAScon. It was a brilliantly organised event, well marshalled by the ever impressive Don't Panic team and packed to the rafters, no doubt down to the brilliant PR job done by James Crawford offa PRAgencyOne.

Andy