Last week I spent a bunch of time in the San Francisco Bay Area. I spoke at Online Market World about blogging, I attended the Tech Target ROI summit, I was at the Pro Marketers marketing meetup (you can meet me tomorrow, Oct 7 in Boston), and I met individually with a bunch of folks through Twitter, Facebook and email. [mvolpe70.gooruze.com]
During this trip, I met and spoke with over 50 marketers of all different types, some were short chats, some were longer conversations. here are my observations on wha was on these marketers minds:
- Learning about inbound marketing. Many marketing experts were interested in learning about SEO, blogging, social media, landing page optimization and marketing analytics. (If you want to learn about these topics, watch these free marketing webinars.)
- Concerns about the economy. None of the marketers I talked to had actually seen a slowdown in business. The "recession" seems to just be on Wall Street, at leat for now. but it was on everyone's mind and people were worried about the future.
- Not much social media. Given that I am a heavy user of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other forms of social media (StumbleUpon, YouTube, Flickr, Hi5, and more...) I really expected the tech-heavy, lead-user bay area to be teaching me a ton about social media and introducing me to new tools. That was not the case. I actually had more Twitter followers than everyone I met, except for one person. The people I met with did not seem that interested in using social media as a lead generation tool.
- Fascination with SEO. While I did not get many questions about SEO, I got tons of questions about SEO. I talked to lots of people about Website Grader, and gave out lots of SEO advice. it was great to see so many people thinking about a core part of inbound marketing.
What do you think? What is the vibe of marketing in the San Francisco Bay Area today?
