Check In To Foursquare’s Keynote At SMX West!

Search Engine Land’s SMX West search marketing conference in San Jose March 8-10 has Foursquare kicking off the first of a series of keynotes at our event.

Chris Sherman and I will be talking with Foursquare’s director of business development Tristan Walker (pictured to the right), about how the service has been growing and reshaping the way both companies and consumers are interacting with each other, all tied to location.

Tristan’s a great speaker, full of stories about how Foursquare is being used, such as a shoe treasure hunt organized by Jimmy Choo last year, to linking your grocery store purchases to rewards, to Foursquare “mayors” being offered special promotions or offers.

Foursquare continues to grow, recording 200,000 check-ins during the Super Bowl, a new event record. Our keynote conversation will look over all that’s happened in 2010 and what marketers can expect in 2011.

Location & Local Search Track

Just before Tristan’s keynote conversation on March 8, our Location Services: The New Local Search? panel looks at the rise of location services in general, so SMX West attendees will want to check into that, too! It’s part of an entire track that day focused on the increasingly hot local search space.

Steven Levy Keynote

We also have two other keynotes at SMX West. Author and journalist Steven Levy will be speaking on March 10, discussing his upcoming book, In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives.

Steven has spent the past two years “embedded” with day-to-day life at Google, giving him an extraordinary view of the company’s inner workings.

Our previous post, Keynoting SMX West: Steven Levy, The Man Who Found Einstein’s Brain (& Is Looking At Google’s), has more about his talk.

Danny Sullivan’s “Searchquakes” Keynote

I’ll be doing a keynote talk myself on March 9, looking at the state of search and search marketing over the past year and in the coming ones. We’ve had a number of searchquakes that have hit recently:

• Google and Bing started opening up about using social signals
• Google started looking at merchant reputations
• Google Places listings started taking over the search engine results page for local searches
• One of Bing’s ranking signals turns out to be how people search on Google and other search engines
• Google has come under fire that its search results are becoming filled with spam and content farms
• Google has fought back announcing better spam filtering now & promising better filters to catch low-quality content farm material

It’s been an extraordinarily busy time in the search world, and I’m looking forward to providing some perspective on what’s happened and what may come.

I hope to see many of our readers out in San Jose. We’ve got a great SMX event planned. Check out the full agenda here.