At any rate, this particular session hit home for me for a previous project from a couple years ago. There were some areas of a site I didn’t have direct access to at the time, so I just did as requested and submitted a checklist. I then naively assumed it would be done and went on to other things. Some better project management and following up (even if annoying) would have made all the difference. In short, “under communicating”.

At the time I was disappointed at others for not doing what they said they were going to do a month earlier, which wasn’t fair to them (out of sight, out of mind). On some level I knew that I assumed too much and didn’t stay on top of things but thinking about that didn’t excite me yet. They had a lot of other things to take care of just as I did, so since I wasn’t asking for an occasional update, SEO aspects were eclipsed by other priorities. While not exactly the same, it reminds me of a sign on the office door of one of my favorite professors: “Your Emergency Is Not My Priority”. He would point to this when students needed help the last day of the semester.

This “Industrial SEO” session underscored that for me again. At the time of that project, I was hiding behind only two familiar rocks of my previous role: Technical and Content. I forgot that I was now the leader and driver of the project and didn’t step up quite enough. I was slow but got there eventually.

It’s true that there is no other role that’s even similar to what I’m doing at my employer, so it was refreshing to realize that others went through these things too (getting into everyone else’s business is rarely appreciated by default). Most every challenge/disadvantage mentioned in this role is also an advantage though, with much opportunity to do a lot of good things for a deserving brand as a whole. At this point it gets away from monitors and servers and touches people, which is the main point of all of this.

I’m hungry.

I think I’ll roll with this and use the name “Hitman” and link to a creepy little Flash site I made a few years back. http://www.instanthitman.com (enjoy!)

Seriously though, I could tell Lisa would rather be cold than embarrassed, and for her sake I would have hit CTRL+Z .

Regardless, Lisa is a good writer and did an excellent job on all these notes here – much better notes than I took. Thanks for sharing these outside of the ‘inner circle’ ;-)

Cheers,
Andrew Brewster

I’m returning to your coverage of this session to compliment my notes.

I really liked David Lloyd’s rock preso and his Peter Druker quotes. His slide deck is a MUST DOWNLOAD for those at the conference to reference. I liked how he broke down the action steps for Rock 5 when dealing with people and the system:

PLAN
DO
ACT
LAUNCH

Adam Audette rapping? Priceless!

Lisa’s live blogging? Invaluable!!

For info, the link for seotoaster which you mentioned in your report is http://www.seotoaster.com

it boasts a number of unique SEO related features out of the box, including automated 301, deep-link, link sculpting using Java Script, and even point & click link siloing. It’s also very easy-to-use, free, open source. An unlimited number of toasted sites can be remote controlled for SEO and Internet marketing (email integration, Google news/Yahoo news compliant news facility,RSS feeds & press release distribution) with an SEO Samba subscription. The whole solution is also available on a private label basis to Agencies.

Thanks for the taking the time to report from SMX, are you going to be at SWSX?
Best,