Think Visibility September 2009 in a (Very Big) Nut Shell.

Well for once the weekend antics of me and several members of my team are worth a mention. No, we didn’t guess the lottery results, we didn’t get abducted; we went to Think Visibility at the Alea Casino in Leeds.

About Think Visibility

Think Visibility September 2009 (the second Think Visibility conference) hosted and organised by Dom ‘The Hodge’ Hodgson, brought together 200+ attendees and 13 speakers (not including the panel) to discuss and learn about a broad range of subjects from Universal Search to Corporate Blogging.

The Speakers and Talks

The first speaker of the day was Joost de Valk discussing Wordpress SEO. Now a few of us had heard Joost speak before on the subject of Wordpress SEO and we were all familiar with his blog over at Yoast.com, so we were slightly worried that he might cover old ground. The amazing thing was that Joost had anticipated this himself and addressed this issue at the start of his presentation. He then went on to cover some pretty exciting stuff including optimising images, distributing page elements to get the most out of progressive rendering, caching and a whole lot more.

The next speaker was Julian Sambles from the Telegraph talking about the challenges he faced in bringing online to the forefront of the Telegraph. This subject could have been very dry and corporate but Julian did a fantastic job of bringing the subject to life and gave a great commentary on what, when you think about it, must have been a really difficult job. One thing he highlighted was the need to consider how much time people actually have to do what you need of them with regard to SEO and give them options based on this or a priority list so they can do as much as they can in the time they have.

The final speaker before lunch was Judith Lewis talking about Universal Search. Judith did a fantastic job of stressing the importance of universal search and gave some great ideas for getting the most out of video content, news, images, Google Base and Google Local listings. Oh and Judith gave out chocolate which always goes down well at conferences!

The lunch break saw the unveiling of a mystery and very entertaining panel consisting of Chris Garrett, Al Carlton, Kieran Donoghue and Pa.. Dom with Tim Nash as the host. After witnessing someone nearly being decapitated by a flying t-shirt, the main room was split into 3 separate rooms and we dispersed.

The first of the 3 split sessions saw;

Elaine Forth and her husband give a very honest and informative talk on how they had gone from being the owners of a simple parenting website (http://www.allkids.co.uk) with a whole load of good content, through the affiliate channel and ended up running a business that is looking to turn over £1 million this year.

Fiona Thomson talk about how the F-Pattern is pretty out of date and backed this up with several examples of data from eye tracking studies from major brand sites such as House of Fraser.

And Paul Robinson discussed advanced user analysis techniques and how available data could be used to drive recommendations, cross selling opportunities and user adaptive websites.

The second of the split sessions saw;

Tim Nash talk about Links. Not link building, not analytics but methods of evaluating links and his experiences while researching this subject. Tim’s was one of the more technical talks with discussion around page segmentation techniques and how someone might create various tools. Tim showed and discussed an image from a segmentation tool he had created (the only slide of his with any colour on it) and explained how page segmentation could be used to create a link footprint for a site and could potentially be used by search engines to further granulate the value of links based on their position on a page.

Chris Clarkson’s talk on his trials and tribulations during his affiliate journey; this was a great session telling not only the highs of being an affiliate but also how bad things can get.

And Tom Smith gave an interesting and entertaining presentation (with amusing doodle slides) on where social media websites may be going wrong and how to overcome the mistakes to turn a website into a success.

Tom’s theory on succeeding in social media was to promote ‘selfish media’ first. Promote the benefits and rewards of the user and the social aspects of the website will naturally promote themselves, providing a thriving website. The core of his presentation revolved around explaining several methods of identifying where website interactions were “making you do things you didn’t know you wanted to do” and included methods of improving these interactions by mapping “process beads”(a flow chart of knock on effects of an initial action).

The last of the split sessions, prior to the 3 rooms becoming 1 again saw;

Karyn Fleeting talk about Corporate Blogging. Karyn gave some good advice on what corporate blogs are often missing, the need to breathe life into corporate blogs via a face and humour and the need to assemble processes for handling the issues that sometimes arise such as negative comments, legal issues etc.

Zoe Piper talking about how to win on the content network, in which she provided tips on how to get the most out of the content network aided by cats.
And Rob Manuel provided an insight into his experiences from running what he calls his personal hell, Sickopedia.

With the rooms opened back up the final talk of the day (if you don’t count drunken rants during Drink Visibility) was from Yahoo’s Artur Ortega on the impact of accessibility on the modern office. It was interesting to see how research into disability had lead to so many of the tools and systems we now take for granted and also just how much Bell Laboratories played a part in it all.

Think Visibility as a whole

Think Visibility September 2009 was a success. Dom ‘The Hodge’ Hodgson and his team pulled off a blinding conference, managing to keep it intimate and fun. The only real issue I heard about all day was the printer breaking which slowed down the lanyard production at the start of the day.

The food at the lunch interval was very nice although I would have liked to have known what was in the sandwiches mainly because some of them were amazing and I have it in my head I was eating tuna, mayo and sweet chilli. I would also like to know what was in the Firebox boxes that the lunchtime panel walked out with (looking very shifty). Oh and there is a rumour (probably started by one of my guys) that the cookie area had a sign saying 1 each. If this is true, I’m truly sorry for depriving 4 people of their cookies which incidentally, were cracking.

The next Think Visibility conference will be in March 2010. Hopefully we will see you there.