Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Jose was a great conference. First of all, I was able to walk to the show at the San Jose Convention Center from my office, which is always nice. Not only was it cool to take a stroll from my office through downtown San Jose to the Convention Center, but I actually found it easier to follow-up on customer questions than if I was going back to a hotel.

Second, attendees seemed to have a broader range of experience than I’ve noticed in the past. SES is primarily focused on search engines (duh, it’s not called Search Engine Strategies for nothing) and analytics. At the show this year I talked with several people who are also really interested in email marketing and deliverability. Not just interested, but informed. I had a few good discussions with folks about integrating Web analytics data with their email marketing - even got a couple of use cases that I’d like to fold into our product. Overall, it confirmed that the strategy of Lyris HQ is on the right track.

I didn’t get a chance to attend any of the talks or panel discussions this time around - maybe that’s the down side of being able to walk back to the office. I did however get a chance to talk with a few of the speakers - either on the expo floor or at a ‘networking event’ (party). Marshall Sponder stopped by the Lyris booth because he remembered that we had given out conference lanyards with a 1GB flash memory clip. He needed a quick storage device to move the PowerPoint presentation for one of his talks. I was happy to give him mine and we ended up having an interesting little chat about tracking social media. I even got a copy of the talk - thanks Marshall.

Finally, I gave away a car. Well, that’s one way to put it. Another way is that I pulled a name out of a drum and announced the winner of the car that Lyris and a couple other companies sponsored. Lyris has had some cool give-aways in the past, but I’ve never seen anyone as surprised as the woman who won the new maroon Mazda 3. I’ll probably never win anything that cool in a give-away, but it was a great feeling being on the giving end.

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