Opening day has arrived for the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. This multi-track conference that includes workshops, expo show floor, an unconference, networking and more. It takes place Tuesday, March 31 to April 3, 2009 at the Moscone Center in SOMA. It all started back in 2005 when Tim O’Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 and the games began starting with the 1st. Web 2.0 Expo. At its peak, the Web 2.0 Expo was full of optimism and enthusiasm for the numerous opportunities based on new practices and principles that produced innovative services and business models. Before one used directories, now one tags; before Double Click was the main advertising product, now the new sheriff was Google Ad Sense. It was the beginning of a new era.
Is the party almost over? America is in the midst of an economic downturn like it has never experienced before. The launching of companies founded by two engineers without a business model is no longer sustainable. In fact, according to TechCrunch‘s Layoff Tracker, there have been 317,796 layoffs since August of 2007. In fact, just today hi5, the 3rd. largest social network site, laid off over 50% of their employees! Not to ruin the party with all this doom and gloom, just pointing out that it’s not debuting in the best of times. Not surprisingly, its theme is “The power of less.”
Entering Moscone West, the Web 2.0 Expo shouts “we will survive“ with its bright yellow logos plastering the walls and hanging from its ceilings. Despite all this, there are still impressive numbers flocking to the Web 2.0 Expo and a large group of both start ups and enterprise organizations. IBM was a main sponsor with a huge presence branded everywhere one looked. Although their gloomy black nylon welcome bag, was not exactly welcoming.
There were a number of fantastic workshops to choose from for the 1st. day of the expo. For the morning session I chose SEO: from Soup to Nuts. Stephan Spencer of NetConcepts guided us on how anyone can gain high rankings in 7 easy steps. He focused on the search engine Google, as its the most market share in the market. If you want to learn more, his slides are available here.
My afternoon session was with Building a Social Media Strategy Using Social Map led by Mark Silva. He is the founder of Real Branding and he has worked with a number of impressive clients such as AOL, ABC, Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, Disney, HBO and others. He introduced a great tool that is used to assess populations called Social Technographics, introduced by Forrester’s Charline Li. It provides a way to categorize behaviors based on levels of participation and to then determine a social media strategy based on it. Build your very own audience profile with the easy to use social technology profile tool.
I met incredibly enthusiastic attendees and knowledgeable speakers. I am looking forward to checking out the the Expo, meeting new companies, new people and going to FREE events!
- Expo Hall
- All Keynotes
- All Government 2.0 Sessions
- All Sponsored Sessions
- Web2Open and Web2Open Hybrid Sessions
- Opening Reception (Sponsored by Palm)
- Booth Crawl
- All other networking events
- Launch Pad
- Tekzilla Live!
- Solutions Showcase Theater presentations
- Sunlight Hackathon
- Birds of a Feather Sessions
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