So I am listening to eComXpo. Unlike the usual conferences I attend eComXpo only requires that you fire up your browser. Some of the hidden or secondary costs improve the quality of some conferences. Examples:

• Crowd: Sure there is the annoying guy with the cell phone, but the crowds help vote for what topics are interesting when we are unsure.

  Right now there are so many presentations that it is hard for me to decide which one I would want to go to.

• Noise / questions within the crowd: I always get a kick out of learning from or answering questions near by people ask. Sometimes that which is important is reinforced by the comments from those around us. Also sometimes speakers are not entirely correct, and the crowd can help correct any wrong info which has recently changed and whatnot.
• You Have to Pay for Food & Travel: This puts most people in a foreign environment, but also means that they will likely do things like eat in groups. Marketing conferences over the web are going to be a low trust medium. The biggest value in conferences for me have not come from listening to the speeches, but from listening to guys like Greg Boser or DaveN chat after hours.
• Expensive Ticket Prices: I usually go to search conferences. Some of these eComXpo affiliate speeches seem to be advertorials more than educational speeches. I think affiliate marketing tends to be more that way though from my limited exposure. I meant to go to CJU but had too much going on to be able to go.

  If people are paying a grand and a half for conference tickets then most speakers understand that it is not appropriate to give advertorials.

• Just Hanging Out: Many people who go to speak at conferences go entirely for self promo. Others who are passionate about their topics & really in the know sometimes go because they like to hang out with their buddies. Missing out on Greg Boser and DaveN speaking and making up for that with a few more advertorials does not IMHO make it better.

There are a bunch of other example I can think of, but in general the eComXpo still has a long way to go. Some of this stuff could be made up for with technology, but the human interaction stuff is going to be hard to make up for with technology. Lots of the random little errors in how we are programmed and random crossing paths make up the most interesting and most or least memorable bits of conferences.

There are some killer speakers on eComXpo, but it is hard to know who is who if you are new...the noise of the crowds can sometimes help make conferences better. Seeing a few opening advertorials may push people away from a Seth Godin, John Battelle, or Doc Searls speech, which IMHO would be an unfortunate trade off.

So Google agreed to promote Open Office & Sun's other open source software. When specifically asked how, Eric Schmidt said that they have not yet stated. Well then, what is the point of the press frenzy?

Google also said they are extending their server partnership with Sun, but again would not specify any details.

Sun is to bundle the Google toolbar with Java.

A reporter asked what is so special about this toolbar bundling partnership and Eric Schmidt said the vastness of it.

Did and Yahoo! & Adobe make a huge public speech in their toolbar partnership? Nope.

You got to wonder how long the media will keep having a frenzy response to non event stories from Google.

Sun's stock has already given back most of today's gains and looks to soon give back some of yesterday's gains.

Both companies were asked leading questions about MicroSoft and refused to give much of an answer, which I find a bit entertaining when you consider how blunt some opinions are expressed on their blogs:

Frankly, all of these services are trying to outrun Windows Vista and Office 12 - with which Microsoft will once again attempt to recover the distribution advantage, preloading Windows, Internet Explorer and Office with Microsoft content and services. They argue it's necessary to secure the platform, 3rd parties and government officials argue it's anti-competitive. You pick.

On any social network trust can be leveraged for profit. Sounds obvious, but when you think of playing many networks as a game of margins sometimes that means working on zero or small margins until you create a profile you can leverage.

eBay:
A friend of mine buys and sells stuff on eBay, keeping the stuff he really likes, and selling back the stuff that was not as good as he would have desired. The stuff he did not like frequently sells for more than he paid for it because he posts in a clear and honest manner and leverages his reputation.

Some people go one step further and also drive traffic to third party networks for monetization. Others start opening bidding price at way more than an item is worth just to use eBay for cheap exposure to targeted traffic streams.

Other Auction Sites:
As you go on the smaller networks you go into an area of greater risk, since a seller being blackballed from a small auction site would not hurt them as much as a blackball from eBay would.

Sometimes the variety of networks create arbitrage opportunities. In the past I bought some groups of a half dozen or so exceptionally old cheap baseball cards for a few dollars and then pieced them out and resold them on eBay for a decent profit. It was not uncommon for people to pay $10 to $15 for an individual card that was part of a $2 to $4 group.

Amazon:
Amazon has a ratings and review system, just like eBay. Sometimes people will not be interested in buying from you unless you have a profile built up.

As a writer you can make a number of book sales by making sure you review every competing book on the market. After you review enough other books people will trust you more when you review friends books in exchange for friends reviewing your books.

Some people also mention their books in so you want to... lists, even if their book is not on Amazon.com. Originally unknowingly to me, someone else did this for me, and I know it caused at least one ebook sale.

Wikipedia & Spam:
Recently I created a meta search engine and mentioned it on WikiPedia. Was my mention WikiSpam? Maybe, maybe not.

If I had a long established profile with tons of submissions I am sure it would not have been considered WikiSpam. As it sits now, in spite of coverage from SEW, someone at Wikipedia thinks Myriad Search does not have any notability.

Eventually I bet some SEO companies will heavily focus on creative ways of using the Wikipedia for SEO. There may eventually be a company that exclusively works on editing the WikiPedia.

If you can't fit direct links to your site into the guide some people will go so far as to build indirect linkage data, working in articles from well known media sources. For example, I probably could not add a link to SEO Book to the WikiPedia, but I could create a linkable thesis that made linkage more likely, or link from the Wikipedia into an article from the WSJ about an SEO company suing me on some Wikipedia page covering blogging & free speech.

Websites:
Search engines trust sites more as they age. They also trust sites with more quality link popularity as it ages. That sounds like it makes sense without saying, but if you fail to give people things to talk about then slowly you will lose market share to people who do.

Off the start even if you are doing a good job few people are going to see it. As your site exists longer there are going to be more and more ways for people to randomly stumble upon your website.

Personal Branding:
A few years ago would there have been anyone interested or any reason for Andrew Johnson to interview me? Would there have been any reason for others to mention that interview? No way. In the same way algorithms learn to trust you so do people.

After people become exceptionally notable some people will even link in to their reviews of other products (or others reviewing your product).

I Was Here First, etc:
In the Navy one of the guys who was a couple years ahead of me hated me because I did not give him the respect he felt he deserved (just for coming a couple years before me). Sure enough, in spite of him trying to hold me back, I still qualified faster than anyone in my division.

Some people who are more successful are there only because they came first. If you can think of different & better ways to build trust you can quickly pass them up. Look how quickly Threadwatch has taken off. I think many of the other blogs are better because Nick's raises the bar.

Niche:
It is not to say that anyone could walk in and just become synonymous with search the way Danny Sullivan is or Google is, but within every market there are niches that are going to be much easier to do well in.

Did I ever mention how much I hate cold calls?

So I picked up the phone on the first ring, and this girl was still talking on the other end to one of her friends.

I said "hello."

She said "is Robert there" (Robert is my roommates name)

I said "who is this"

She said "is Robert there"

I said "who is this"

She said "Mary Jane. Is Robert there?"

I said "who paid you to call me"

She said "oh, you are Robert"

I said "who paid you to call me"

She said "I might be able to tell you if you weren't so rude and would stop interupting me." And then she hung up. Perhaps she reads the archives and knows better.

A telemarketer inturupting me, and not even being ready to talk when she does, and she is talking about someone being rude and interupting. What a perspective. What irony. I laughed.

It is the exact reason why search and blogging are so great. Those who want to tune in do, and you waste minimal resources hunting down disinterested prospects.

I think Chris is a swell chap, but IProspect's recent study is no good. Chris Sherman wrote about the recent IProspect search marketing study.

While many overall search marketing campaigns are evaluated using more sophisticated business-related metrics, the individuals responsible for the campaigns aren't held to similar standards.

Can You Honestly Judge SEO Employees On ROI? NO:
There are so many outside factors that I think it ends up hurting the employees concentration if they are held liable for fluctuations in business from third party sites they don't entirely control.

As Sites Age & SEO Builds Upon Itself Good SEO Becomes More Profitable:
I have been a business partner when random $4,000 orders came in a number of times in a few day stretch, and have also been around earlier when the same business was only making about $3,000 a month. While that partnership is profit share, I don't think it is fair to evaluate SEOs on that end number if they are just an employee for a large SEO company.

Some Customers Suck:
What happens if you work for:

• a site in a small market or

• a site with a stupid owner or
• a site with a bad host or
• a site owner who does not share all offline sales information?

Bad deal for the worker bee?

Small SEO Firms Are Not Less Sophisticated Just Because They Fail to Measure Useless Numbers:
Most small SEO firms are NOT going to be focused on results per employee (simply firing useless employees and keeping good ones). Most larger SEO firms are going to be geared toward selling contracts more than evaluating the exact numbers. To me, from what little bit of the market I know, the larger companies opperate more based around selling perception of great service as being reality.

Different Brands & Markets Have Different Margins & Sizes:
Judging SEO employees within an SEO company based on end financial performance of merchants heavily skews data.

For about 8 months I was an inventory manager for one of the largest inventory companies in the world. In drug stores I often counted the low value hard to count stuff (cany isle) to allow other people to count the more expensive stuff to balloon their production numbers so they could get raises. My boss would sometimes give me flack for having one of the lowest production numbers. Some days I would end up being forced to count the pharmacy stuff. On my first day doing that I was about twice as efficient as the experts, yet on a performace basis I would have looked like crap for most of my employment cycle.

Most People Who Care Enough to do a Good Job Can Only Devote Attention Toward a Few Cliets at a Time:
So much of the employee productivity is going to be luck of the draw.
Sure it smooths out over time, but if your employees are doing services that are useful and worth selling most of them are going to be vertically oriented and / or working on a small number of sites at any given time.

If employees know exactly how profitable everything they do is then why should they even want to work for a company that is so backwards that they feel they have to measure everything the employees do in some arbitrary box?

The study continues with more numbers that are IMHO useless, like...
Separating SEO From Brand Value:

Fully 45% said they cannot determine whether SEO or PPC provides a higher ROI.

If it is a good business worth marketing how can you fully separate your SEO efforts from their intrinsic brand value unless you use sattellite sites? If you do good SEO shouldn't it be intertwined with their brand and improve their brand value?

The Real Results of the Study:
Many big SEO companies are going to try to spend tons of money trying to brand their way of doing things as the only way that is correct, but in all honesty most of the best SEO services come from smaller providers.

If you go through the studies you may come up with the same conclusions Mikkel did:

I hope I am not the only one that recognise this for what it is: A piece of BS promotional crap with onle goal: To promote and sell iProspects way of doing things. I am sorry, but this is SO American that I can't say how much I dislike it without breaking the forum TOS