Search Engine Strategies Chicago is currently underway, and attendees are tweeting their takeaways from the sessions. This year there was rapping: Here’s the keynote from Mikel Chertudi: Here are some of the interesting points made that people found worth sharing: …

Fionn Downhill, CEO of reputation management firm Elixer Interactive and Attorney Geoffrey Wozman spoke in a session at SES Chicago called "Brand, Trademark & Reputation Management." Downhill says online reputation management combines marketing and public relations. 

Another Search Engine Strategies conference, another conversation about the future of search. It’s a regular topic, but one that never loses relevance, as the search landscape continues to change dramatically, even between conferences. Look at all Google has done this year, for example. Not only did we get the left panel navigation, but Instant search. Those are probably the biggest changes to the interface, but there are plenty of other things going on.

As online marketing and search engine marketing in particular have evolved over the years, more and more metrics and data sources have become available to marketers. This is a great thing for analyzing campaigns and strategies, learning from them and improving upon them. However, all of this data can get extremely overwhelming, which is why it’s important to have strategies for the analytical process itself.

Getting press coverage can mean a great deal for gaining traffic and overall exposure for your business. That said, there are also ways to take some initiative yourself in getting some exposure from news search.

What’s the next big thing in social media? Is it Google Buzz? Is it Chat Roulette? Is it Foursquare? Is it Gowalla? Is it something you won’t hear about until tomorrow, next week, or next year? While it is certainly a good idea to be aware of trends, it’s also important for businesses not to get to fixated on them, and go rushing into things that may or may not make sense for them.

Shiny Object Syndrome

Social media marketing is largely about engaging with your audience, and a big part of that is knowing where your audience is. A lot of brands may find that their audience is easiest to reach through forums, which are kind of the old school social networks.

Do you use forums to engage with your audience? Tell us about it.

Every year in March I make my annual trek to Austin to be part of the South By Southwest Interactive show, one of the biggest gatherings of people working in all aspects of the web in the world. For those who have been, they might describe the event as a simultaneous assault of information, networking and back to back parties. It has become the Everest of social media events, and in my fourth year of attending I realized that there are techniques for surviving a large event that I have been using and adding to each year.

In a recent article, we talked about the importance of usability of both the search engines and your site, with regards to the path to conversions. If you create content, you would do well to consider similar lessons in how you craft that.

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) has shared the results of its annual State of Search Marketing Report. WebProNews talked about the findings with SEMPO’s outgoing president Sara Holoubek at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York (more exclusive interviews from the conference can be viewed here).

Microsoft announced some new updates to Bing today at SES NY, where WebProNews covered the event live (during which a representative for Bing also let me know that live.webpronews.com would be a good place to check it out).

Will Bing’s updates affect your search strategy? Discuss here.

For all sorts of reasons (more on that in a minute), Avinash Kaushik is an authority on search analytics.  He’s also a likable and entertaining speaker.  SES New York attendees were in for a treat, then, as Kaushik delivered a keynote address titled "Be Awesome: Ideas for Approaching Search Analytics Differently."

It’s no secret that marketing tactics must change over time – just imagine how far a modern newspaper would get paying boys to shout "extra" on city streets – and the search marketing industry may be changing right now.  Experts discussed how, along with how marketers should react, in an SES New York session titled Search Marketing: Analyze This.

Arguably the biggest news in the tech industry so far this year, has been Google’s launch of the Nexus One smartphone. The company rocked the mobile space when it announced that it would be selling the device on its own without the need of a carrier contract (although such contracts are available).

At SES Chicago, there was an interesting session in which a group of search marketing professionals debated the issue of which is better between PPC and SEO. Participants included Dave Naylor, Chirstine Churchill, Michael Gray, and Karen Weber, and Rand Fishkin.

As Google’s search engine competitors often bring up, searchers want more than just "ten blue links" these days. Of course it has been quite a while now since search results from any of the big three were only ten blue links for most searches. We are well into the era of blended search.

At the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, WebProNews attended the session on how SEO can help save the publishing industry, a quite interesting topic, considering the controversy the industry has been experiencing of late. Do you think SEO can help publishers save their businesses? Share your thoughts here.

You may recall Feras Alhlou, who chatted with WebProNews earlier this year after contributing a guest post to Google’s Analytics Blog about using advanced segments in Google Analytics. Alhlou is the president of E-Nor, and he presented at an analytics session at SES this week.

One aspect of search that doesn’t get discussed often enough is image search. It’s such a huge part of search and the daily habits of web surfers all over the world, it’s amazing how little attention is actually paid to it when it comes to marketing and optimization. Have tips for optimizing for image search? Share them here.