Online Marketing Summit

Organized and promoted by Aaron Kahlow, the annual Online Marketing Summit in San Diego is the main event for the Online Marketing Summit team and they pull some industry heavy-hitters to boot.

Basically a front-end seminar, OMS2010 seeks to be about education and does it’s best not to market to attendees… but can’t help itself really.

The content was excellent and with industry stalwarts like Dana Todd, president of SEMPO and Lee Odden from the TopRankBlog, and Rand Fiskin from SEOMoz there was plenty of marketing gold during the summit.

OMS has a unique structure with many rooms running at once with different streams in each.  Loosely based around particular topics such as Social Media or Mobile each room had a decidedly different feel.

Personally I liked the keynote presentations best, and although I forget his name now, I’ll fill it in when I find his card.  The guy who managed the Obama campaign’s online marketing presentation was just GOLD.

Likewise the venue was stunning, in beautiful San Diego, although I did hear some rumblings about the accommodation being a fair walk from the conference rooms, since I stayed elsewhere it didn’t bother me any.

The catering was good, although the first two days had the same menu, and I noticed a few people found that annoying.

In terms of providing information for newbie marketers this conference was definitely aimed more toward experienced marketers and to a certain extent corporate marketing managers.

One of the most useful aspects I found was the insight from the large corporates online like the NY Times whose failed SEO meant that rewrites of their articles were ranking higher than their original report.

Insights in to the direction Google will be taking with Local Search and maps was fascinating also.

Definitely recommend getting along to OMS2011 if you can.