I was recently invited to speak to a class of MBA students at Johns Hopkins University on the topic of Search Engine Marketing. The course was entitled “Marketing Strategy”, so my goal was to speak on a high level, discussing the importance of search engine marketing and its position as owning the lion’s share of the internet marketing world.
So anyhow, I prepared my lecture and structured it around 20 PowerPoint slides (Overview of Search Engine Marketing). As is the norm, I put on one of my favorite suits, packed up my laptop and digital camcorder and headed downtown for the lecture.
I arrived on time and set up my camcorder at the back of the class. I got my slideshow ready and tried to get a feel for the students’ level of experience regarding internet marketing. I started off with some general background information, discussing what search engines are, what their role is, how they are a crucial component of the structure of the internet, how they work, etc. I think for all of this I was a bit more dry than I would have liked. Then I got into discussing PPC search engine marketing versus organic search engine optimization, the pluses, minuses, etc. We used a few real world examples, discussed rankings factors, etc. The students had tons of questions and were really quite interested in what I had to say – which was a relief as I wasn’t certain of what to expect.
(Its neat to me b/c I’m a geek – but I can expect everyone to feel the same way!)
So anyhow, I somehow took up the full 2 hours of the class period (which I felt bad about as I didn’t leave the professor much time) but by all accounts the students seemed like they really liked the lecture, the professor was quite pleased, it was really a great experience! I gathered up my camcorder and laptop and walked out to the car and drove home.
Then I turned on the camcorder to have a look.
Oops. My genius self forgot to hit RECORD!
How low this feeling was that suddenly came over me. How can I speak about search engine algorithms at one of the finer institutions of higher education in the country and not even remember that you have to press record after turning on the camcorder?!?!?!
Such is life. It was another great experience and I hope to start to get do more speaking engagements. I was hoping to use the video from this one as a sample of sorts, and also a record and means of self evaluation. I think it would have been neat for all of my fellow SEOs out there. Most of the time we sit in front of the PC and its nice to hear of our craft in other media – be it the article about SEO in Entrepenuer Magazine (another article here), or listening to the archives of search engine radio – anything that offers a nice change of pace from the forums and, well, boring seo blogs!