Yesterday I visited Internet world 2009. After going to the SES expo earlier this year in the business design centre in Angel, London, I was expecting the show to be a much smaller affair.

Internet world 2009 was held in Earl’s Court two, and packed out the whole of the hall! The show certainly lived up to the hype and expectation from its pre-event marketing.

I was very impressed by the turnout, but unfortunately for me I was only able to visit the show on the very last day due to work commitments, however, I was able to see everything I needed to cover and managed to scale the whole show hall top to bottom, watch some seminars, get some questions answered, and get chatted up by a rather nice promotion girl ha! – It pays to be the Coolest Geek on the net!

I learned a few new hints and tips from the show, and expanded my friends list on linkedIn (note to self – I MUST bring more business cards!). One of the most impressive things in the show overall was the volume of SEO professionals and new SEO start-ups. During this recession, hitting the number one spot in Google has become an absolute priority for most online businesses and it’s evident that SEO is certainly the industry buzzword and marketing product at the moment, that said it’s what the market is hungry for right now, and it’s all about supply and demand!

It was evident at the show there were many new businesses that where a bit of a “bolt-on” SEO start up. That said every single booth offering SEO was rushed off their feet with clients wanting to know much more about what they had to offer. Now, here in the UK, it would be a great time to start up a new company based on SEO! (roll on my business)

There were many CMS (content management system) companies, and to me it’s fascinating the way these are developing. From the back-end it’s as if you’re using a windows application to simply build your website. Personally I prefer to tinker with the code and know what code is actually implemented, but still it’s showing the direction of the CMS platforms.

Internet World 2009 Seminar

I sat in on a seminar about direct marketing, this is a very interesting market to me as it included many hints and tips on direct marketing via e-mail, behavioral marketing and some other sneaky tips to increase conversion rates, that I’ll cover later on in this blog. I was very impressed with the developments in these technologies, however, one thing that seemed to elude the presentation was the capture of the e-mail addresses. I asked the question during the presentation:

“how is it you collect the emails in the first place to be able to direct such specific, targeted emails?”

I was told that you could buy the data from large data houses, that said, I think if you can capture the data directly yourself then you have a much better chance on converting your customers. Very interesting all the same and it’s thrown me many new ideas for my current projects.

One of the most popular seminars at the show seemed to be the social networking talks with the likes of Twitter and co. It’s certainly a hot property at the moment, with that in mind, I’m not sure anyone can claim themselves to be an authority in such a new field. The guys that are the real authority in the likes of social media marketing are the ones that make serious cash at this moment in time, utilizing these tools and techniques currently within their own marketing strategies, not the ones talking about them at shows and giving all the “good” information away, even so, there were a few interesting hints and tips I picked up on the social networking landscape.

There are a few other things I saw at Internet World 2009 that I just had to point out in this post. One of these things was originally an Adobe product which I saw presented on the TED talks on YouTube a few years ago. Fortunately for me the product was only there on the last day and I got to have a little play with this super cool new device “Microsoft Surface” – Brilliant! (filmed this with my LG KU990).

A cool £10,000 will snag you one of these beauties! New coffee table anyone?

Other highlights of the show to me included:
a magician (I’m always wowed by magic), not SEO related however very good all the same.
A group of three dancing girls one of which was dressed in a huge character costume, finally when I was asked if I am a male model, but of course! Ha

All in all Internet World 2009 was a great show! Roll on Internet World 2010!