SES Toronto 2011: This is NOT Your Father's Oldsmobile

SES Toronto was held for the first time in May 2004. I was a speaker at the session on “Balancing Paid & Organic Listings.” Flash forward 8 years and SES Toronto 2011 will feature dramatically different content. As Melanie Shatner once said, “I guess some things were just meant for the next generation.”

In fact, if you go to the conference overview, you’ll see that 9 out of the 21 sessions are “new to the Toronto agenda.” And this is a conservative estimate, because there’s one more session being “Reserved for Late-Breaking Topic.”

Here are the new conference sessions will be held this June that weren’t held at last year’s SES event at the Hyatt Regency Toronto:

• Content Marketing Optimization
• Enterprise Level SEO
• Managing Your Online Reputation
• Key Points in Launching a Global Website
• Smart Mobile Marketing
• What Every Paid Search Advertiser Needs to Know About the Bing/Yahoo Alliance
• Social Media Solutions on a Budget
• Local 2.0: the Evolution of Search
• Next Gen YouTube Marketing

Oh, and at least one of the keynote speakers will be new, too. This year, Tracy Smith, VP, Performance Marketing & Go-To-Market, Yellow Pages Group, will be the keynote speaker on Day 2.

So, if you think you learned everything that you need to know at SES Toronto 2010, then consider this: Almost half of what you learned last year is now out-of-date. Maybe SES should have included a “best if used by June 2011” on 50 percent of last year’s content.

But, there’s no telling what will change in the coming year — although we can safely predict that there will continue to be lots of changes.

That’s why industry veterans come back to SES Toronto year after year. Hey, don’t take my word on that. Just listen to what some of the attendees at last year’s conference said.

One last tip: The SES Toronto 2011 agenda has been posted. But, the pre-agenda discount is still available until April 15. This means you can look over the agenda before deciding to attend and still save up to $400 if your register by April 15.

Check out the Rates & Registration Details. Although the prices do not include the 13% HST, they are in Canadian Dollars. So, you can save some serious Loonies and Toonies.

By the way, I should disclose that my father was the director of marketing at Oldsmobile when William Shatner’s daughter made the commercial above in 1988. That’s right, it was my father’s Oldsmobile.