SMX East & The Return Of The Evening Forum

One of my favorite sessions at the search conferences I’ve programmed for a decade now has been the Evening Forum. It’s been over two years since I last held one, and I’ve brought it back for our SMX East search engine marketing conference this Oct. 5-7.

There’s no agenda to the Evening Forum, which will be held at 6:15pm on Oct. 6, the second day of the show. No PowerPoint presentations. It’s just me with some microphones, letting the audience guide where things go.

Got a question for me? Fire away. At the Evening Forum, I do my best to answer all that I can. But I’m far from the only expert in the room. We usually have plenty of our expert speakers turning up, and I’ll call them out on their areas of knowledge, when appropriate questions come up.

We also have a room full of experts among our attendees. The forum is a great place to do impromptu polls and get a sense of what people think about various search marketing issues. In addition, it’s a great low-impact launching zone for people who have knowledge to share but may have been hesitant to formally pitch to be on a panel. Put your hand up and help others in the room. I’ll be calling on you!

In addition to the Evening Forum, we have another panel of experts being assembled more formally, for our “What’s Next In Search: The Bigwig Crystal Ball Panel.” Julie Sun from MTV will bring an in-house perspective to the panel. Andrew Goodman adds his PPC expertise. Greg Boser brings his no-holds barred SEO viewpoint. Additional panelists will be named shortly.

There’s plenty more on the agenda for SMX East, including a keynote presentation from Ben Huh of Cheezeburger Network that you won’t want to miss.

To learn more about the show, check out my previous post, Danny Sullivan’s Preview Of Search Engine Land’s SMX East 2009 Search Marketing Conference In New York. and the conference web site. I look forward to seeing many of our readers there!