{"id":103777,"date":"2012-04-26T09:27:00","date_gmt":"2012-04-26T14:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/smx-toronto-day-one-recap-the-courage-to-change\/"},"modified":"2025-01-03T04:49:01","modified_gmt":"2025-01-03T09:49:01","slug":"smx-toronto-day-one-recap-the-courage-to-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/en-gb\/insights\/blog\/strategy\/smx-toronto-day-one-recap-the-courage-to-change\/","title":{"rendered":"SMX Toronto Day One Recap: The Courage to Change"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is part one of a two part series on SMX (Search Marketing Expo) 2012 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.<\/em><\/p>\n

SMX Toronto started out with a somewhat morbid analogy. Keynote speaker Gord Hotchkiss of Mediative opened the conference with a talk titled “Changing Course and Avoiding the Seventh Iceberg.” The basic point that Hotchkiss was making was that the digital economy is a disruptive force of the type that normally scuttles large businesses. Just over 100 years ago, the captain of the Titanic effectively ignored warnings about six icebergs before colliding with the seventh. In other words, the signs are there. The digital revolution, Hotchkiss argued, is changing business as we know it, and companies (particularly big ones) need to have tremendous courage in order to make the kinds of tough decisions that will see them through this\u00a0unprecedented\u00a0period of change.<\/p>\n

It’s hard to argue with Hotchkiss on this. He gave a whole passel of examples of companies that have failed to adapt during periods of disruptive change (only about 10% of the companies that started the Fortune 500 are still in existence in any form today), and the big reason is that it’s really difficult to be brutally honest in assessing weakness. Companies have a lot invested (people, resources, infrastructure) in business as usual. Changing that in a radical and meaningful way is no small task.<\/p>\n

The keynote talk kicked off a day focused on change and how to consistently approach that change with courage and innovation. While Hotchkiss was talking about how the digital revolution is changing and will continue to change business in general, the rest of the day was focused on how the pace of change within the realm of search marketing is accelerating and how we all need to continually adapt and reevaluate our approach to space.<\/p>\n

Our own Ken Dobell led a panel on “The Big Google Kitchen Sink,” where he and others focused on the changing face of Search Engine Optimisation<\/a>. As I’ve said on this blog before<\/u>, SEO is no longer about trying to reverse engineer the algorithm or delivering ranking reports. More and more, it’s about getting your content to be ready, relevant and right. Ryan Jones of Sapientnitro had an interesting point during the panel that the concept of content itself is changing as well. It’s not just about copy or even relevance. More and more, it’s all about usefulness. Figuring out the usefulness of content and the signals that indicate that usefulness may just be the next big challenge for Google and search marketers.<\/p>\n

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