Who’s Susan Bradley? – aka Small Business Marketing Unleashed – Day 1

It’s funny actually – I’m attending an conference focused on Small Business and IT here in the USA and NO ONE know’s who the heck Susan Bradley is. It’s certainly a first to me for sure. Susan is well known in the SBS IT Pro community as THE blog to read if you have any questions or need direction. However no one here has heard of her. What’s more interesting is that no one knows what an MVP is. My point is that we all live in our own little worlds and often we think that the ends of the earth are as far as we can see. That is so not true. I’m digging into all aspects of Small Business Marketing and the Small Business Marketing Unleashed Conference. Today I’ve seen presentations on many aspects of how small business can market themselves online. It is amazing to see this first run event and the people involved in it. Some of the people here are industry veterans of 10 years plus providing deep insight to the how’s, whys and wherefores of marketing your business via many different means over the Internet. Presentations today that I’ve seen include…

Website Architecture by Stoney deGeyter – here we learned about the follies of duplicate content, tables, screwy URLs and more that will affect peoples ability to find content on your site, and affect the search engines from finding the information which will in turn affect how NEW people find your site. It was a fast moving session that really helped me to understand where I need to go with my sites.

Building a Community by Wendy Piersall – Wendy deep dived into what it takes to build a community around your product or service. A lot of this to me covered things that I already felt that I knew, but it also looked at the community from a vendors perspective and gave me some great ideas about things that I can do to help the SBS community on a wider scale.

Blogging for Business by Mack Collier – Mack claimed to be an Introvert – he was far from it. He presented an engaging discussion on blogging for business, how to do it, how not to do it. Great session all in all and many things that I hope to adopt moving forwards to create better discussions in the community. One of the key things that Mack proposed was that “Blogging… It’s not about the tools, its about the conversations and connections that these tools facilitate” That to me is so true for the SMB community and I’ll strive to increase what I do here on my blog to help that.

Web Analytics by Matt Bailey – one of the first things we learned here is that there is no such thing as accurate statistics! Matt then went on to discuss about how with analytics, you should spend 10% on your software and 90% analysing the output by a HUMAN rather than a computer as the variables are so complex that you can not programmatically get the answers you want. Amazing stuff really. He also went on to statistically analyse the death rate of the Red Shirts in Star Trek and then discuss how we could prevent them from dying. Useful once more in the context of web analytics. Amazing presentation.

Finally – the really cool thing that I’ve seen in this event, is that most of the speaker are around all day AND they are attending other speakers sessions… that in itself has lead to some extremely interesting discussions as the other speakers ask questions that allow us as attendees to cross pollinate and easily combine the knowledge that we’ve learned across all sessions.

I won’t be blogging tomorrow at the request of the conference organisers – the plan is that they will be giving some even deeper darker secrets that they would prefer not be available outside the confines of the conference. Fair enough I say – I paid some good $$ to be here 🙂 I will however post a summary of my impressions tomorrow night so you can see my thoughts.

FOOTNOTE: Susan Bradley is also known as the SBSDiva – www.sbsdiva.com – one of the most well known bloggers in the Small Business Server space worldwide.