Bing and Microsoft Advertising at Search Marketing Expo - West 2011: San Jose, March 8-10, 2011

Today marks the start of SMX West in San Jose.  The Bing and Microsoft Advertising teams are out in force this week covering a breadth of search related topics.  If you’re attending, check out the sessions (listed below) and pay us a visit at Booth #200.  If you can’t make it in person, you can join the conversations happening at #smx on Twitter.

Looking forward to the conversation.

Aya Zook, Bing

TUESDAY, MARCH 8TH

9:00am – 10:15a | Meeting Room A2
Social Signals & Search

It’s no longer theoretical.Both Google and Bing say that they factor social signals into their ranking algorithms for ―regular‖ search results. Who you are socially, your authority, the authority of those who talk about you (or your company) all play a role. This session looks at how social signals are currently being used with search.
Speaker: Paul Yiu, Principal Group Manager, Bing Social

10:45am – 12:00pm | Room: Grand Salon III
Best Practices With adCenter For Bing & Yahoo

Now that Yahoo and Bing have a combined estimated 30% market share, you know you can’t ignore this appealingly large source of traffic — but you’ve also heard that you can’t just clone your AdWords campaign and expect to get good results. What are the key differences between AdWords and adCenter? What adCenter features are unique and powerful? What kinds of features should you be taking advantage of to maximize your ad campaigns on Bing and Yahoo? How does your campaign on Bing differ from what appears on Yahoo? Come to this session to find out.
Speaker: Rathna Sharad, Group Product Manager, Microsoft

12:00pm – 12:20pm | Expo Hall Theater A
Bing and Yahoo! Search: Going Global

Speaker: Kelly Thomas Nojaim, Group Product Manager, Microsoft

12:00pm – 1:30pm | Food Court
Birds of Feather Discussion: Webmaster Tools

Moderators: Duane Forrester, Senior Product Manager, Bing Webmaster Tools
Sasi Parthasarathy, Program Manager, Bing

12:00pm – 1:30pm | Food Court
Birds of Feather Discussion: adCenter results post Bing/Yahoo migration

Moderator: Nancy Perry, Senior Customer & Partner Experience Manager, Microsoft Advertising

12:15pm – 1:30pm | Meeting Room E
Evolving the AdCenter user experience: matching the tools to the task

Join a discussion on how to evolve the design and user experience of AdCenter.
Moderator: Stephen Giff, Senior User Research Lead, Microsoft Advertising
*If you’re interested in participating in this discussion, please stop by Booth #200 to sign-up or email sgiff@microsoft.com

1:45pm – 3:00pm | Room: Grand Salon III
Mobile Search Ads

Haven’t done mobile search ads yet? You’re missing out on a growing market! eMarketer predicts that mobile ad spend will surpass $6.5 billion in 2012. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said that “mobile will be a larger business than the PC-Web,” likely a primary reason Google recently spent $750 million to acquire mobile advertising network AdMob. This session looks at mobile paid search opportunities and how search marketers can get ahead of this tsunami of opportunity.
Speaker: Dennis Glavin, Group Product Manager, Microsoft

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 9TH 

10:45am – 12:00pm | Room: Grand Salon IV
Mobile Apps & How They’re Revolutionizing Search 

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is famous for saying “…on the desktop search is where it’s at; that’s where the money is. But on a mobile device search hasn’t happened. Search is not where it’s at, people are not searching on a mobile device like they do on the desktop.” Oh really? There are currently more than 200,000 apps for the iPhone and 100,000 and growing for Google’s Android – and many are built around search. This session looks at popular search apps on different devices, how they gather data and the new, away from the desktop opportunities they offer to marketers.
Speaker: Andy Chu, Director of Bing Mobile, Microsoft

12:00pm – 1:45pm | Food Court
Birds of Feather Table Discussion: Local Search

Moderator: Andy Chu, Director of Bing Mobile, Microsoft

12:00pm – 1:30pm | Food Court
Birds of Feather Discussion: Give feedback directly to adCenter Engineers

Moderator: Nancy Perry, Senior Customer & Partner Experience Manager, Microsoft Advertising
Come join us in the following sessions and also check us out at Booth #200

12:15pm – 1:30pm | Meeting Room E
Tuning-up your campaigns in AdCenter to maximize performance

Join a discussion and give feedback to the AdCenter team on some design concepts that will help you maximize opportunities and improve your campaign performance.
Moderator: Stephen Giff, Senior User Research Lead, Microsoft Advertising
*If you’re interested in participating in this discussion, please stop by Booth #200 to sign-up or email sgiff@microsoft.com

12:45pm – 1:30pm | Meeting Room C2
Bing: A Focus on Your Business

As Bing continues to invest in building a deep experience for website owners, more tools become available for business owners. From long term traffic generation, to guidance on what’s working right now and where your traffic is coming from. Bing’s Webmaster program offers deep information which can help you build a better online footprint. If your goal is immediate traffic, we’ve got you covered. If you want to understand your current place in Bing’s index, again, we’ve got you covered. Need advice, no problem. We even have a way for you to put your business online without a website. If you have a business and want to get more from the internet, this session is for you. Come explore Bing’s Webmaster program with us.
Speaker: Duane Forrester, Senior Product Manager, Bing Webmaster Tools

5:00pm – 6:15pm | Room: Grand Salon IV
Searcher Behavior In A Multiplatform World

Understanding searcher behavior is one of the central pillars of effective search marketing. And more than ever, it’s important to not just understand what people are searching for, but how they are searching — using a computer, television, mobile device — because this provides important clues as to why they are searching and may change the experience you offer to them. Recent results-enhancing searcher behavior research methods and their uses will be discussed in this session.
Speaker: Jacquelyn Krones, Senior Product Manager, Bing

THURSDAY, MARCH 10TH

10:00am – 11:00am | Room: Grand Salon III
Cousins To Paid Search: Display, Contextual, All In The Family

While the search engines are best known for the text ads they display on search result pages, they also offer a wide variety of other ad formats (display, video etc.) that are displayed on thousands of partner sites all over the web. These ad formats can be targeted, and can significantly extend the reach of a search marketing campaign, all using the familiar tools.
Speaker: James Colborn, Director, Microsoft Advertising

11:15am – 12:15pm | Meeting Room A2
The Spam Police

In addition to constantly trying to improve the user experience, search engines are engaged in an ongoing war with spammers who seek to subvert the rules and get top rankings, regardless of user experience. In this panel some of the top “spam cops” discuss how they uncover new spam tactics, how they separate the wheat from the chaff, what to do if your site is inadvertently penalized and more.
Speaker: Sasi Parthasarathy, Program Manager, Bing

1:15pm – 2:15pm | Meeting Room A2
Ask The Search Engines

You’ve heard the lingo: PageRank sculpting, duplicate content penalties, canonical tags, sitemap structure, nofollow… and most recently a lot about the potential impact of Google Instant. In this session, you can ask questions and get direct answers from engineers from Google, Microsoft and the other search engines about crawling, indexing, ranking and other organic search issues.
Speaker: Duane Forrester, Senior Product Manager, Bing Webmaster Tools

1:15pm – 2:15pm | Room: Grand Salon III
Ask The Paid Search Reps

Google has famously written that to be a paid search advertiser, “all that’s needed is five minutes and a credit card.” While technically true, anyone who’s embarked on even a basic paid search campaign knows that you need to spend a lot of time, and in many cases a lot of money to be truly successful. And with Google, Microsoft and other ad networks continually rolling out new features and ad quality requirements, it’s difficult to keep up. In this session, you’ll have the opportunity to put questions directly to representatives from the major search ad networks about their paid search programs.
Speaker: Paul Corkery, Operations Program Manager Search Platforms & Tools, Microsoft