Yesterday I attended the San Diego Ad Club’s Interactive Day. This was my fourth year attending and I think this year may have been the best yet.  These conferences are always a crap shoot for me. It seems most breakout sessions are either geared toward beginners, or cover topics at the guru level. I was pleased to find that this conference seemed to fall right in the middle, offering something for everybody. There was an impressive roster of speakers including Paul Ollinger, from Facebook, who very candidly answered questions about the current privacy controversies facing social media, and Joshua Knox from Google, who walked us analytics geeks through some of the new tools currently being rolled out from Google Analytics.  Rand Fishkin from SEOMOZ.org, was my favorite. Not only was his material immediately actionable, but he managed to make the topic of analyzing SEO solutions amusing, which isn’t easy to do. He offered some interesting statistics too, (Paid search gets 14% of clicks. Organic gets 86%, but 80% of ad budgets go toward PPC!). Perhaps we need to rethink this ration? If you aren’t already familiar with SEOMOZ, I highly recommend checking them out http://www.seomoz.org/ . The site offers a variety of free tools, as well as other resources via a membership.  Another hot topic was mobile marketing. Did you know that there are more mobile subscribers than PC users and TV viewers combined? That’s pretty amazing. If you haven’t begun marketing through this technology, now would be a good time to jump on the train. While much has been done in this realm, mobile marketing is still really in its infancy and big changes are still to come.

It’s always great to be able to attend a conference in your own backyard and it looks like with the continued success of Interactive Day San Diego, there will be more opportunity to learn from the best minds in interactive marketing in the future, right here in San Diego.