Coming to you from San Francisco
Your Web AddiCT is currently in San Francisco for the Search Engine Strategies Conference. The amount of time spent flying was nearly 24 hours and the second flight went over the North Pole to get me here.
The conference will draw thousands of marketers and agency professionals who will attend sessions and labs focused first and foremost on education (no sales pitches!) covering Search Marketing (including SEO, PPC management & Social Media), keyword research, local advertising, mobile engagement, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, online video, site optimization and usability, in addition to high-level strategy, keynotes, an expo floor with 100+ companies, networking events, parties and more
If you’d like to follow the conference from where you are the twitter hashtags are #ses and or #sessf. Thanks to Bruce Clay Inc there will be lotsa non-stop SES San Francisco live blogging.
Apart from the really long flights getting into the US with an Arabic first name like @rafiq is another mission on it’s own. Racial profiling, you could call it. I was in the US just under a year ago and had to go through a double security check with the official saying ‘It’s probably just your name.’ This time I got to the first security checkpoint and everything appeared fine but when he handed back my immigration forms and passport the official asked me to go to the secondary security checkpoint where I had to wait a few minutes then was asked 20 questions before having my passport stamped. After I collected my luggage I got stopped again and had all my bags searched. Welcome to the United States of America 🙂
So now that I’m here I’ll be tweeting from the conference using the @mihswat account and posting pics to my posterous page here. You can also expect a blog post or two on the MIH SWAT blog comparing my SES experience to SMX along with the usual memes covered on this blog.
This movie might be worth watching after all.
Photo by Dawn Endico