By Adam Schultz - MarketSmart Interactive

The first session I attended was "Leading Brand - Leading Sites - Marketing Magic" which says nothing about what was discussed. Basically, the session covered how to optimize for ridiculously large clients.

On the panel were some heavy hitters: Bill Hunt (Global Strategies International), Andrew Gerhart(?), Vinny Lingham (Clicks2Customers) and Fredric Marckini (iProspect)

Bill covered the work he did for IBM and how to manage a behemoth from without. Andrew discussed his work at Primedia and how to manage a behemoth from within. Vinny discussed the PPC side of things and Fredric talked about how his company managed large clients.

Bill Hunt (behemoth from the outside):
For Bill's part, it was very interesting to hear how much they were able to do for IBM. For the most part it was SEM basics on a grand scale. It was visibility, content, link optimization, just across 85 properties in multiple countries around the world.

It was interesting to see how the little intricate technical details that seem to have no affect on smaller sites are orders of magnitude more effective when they are applied to millions of pages.

The piece of his presentation that resonated so well with me was the need for training all people in the company who have anything to do with the website up to speed on SEO basics.

The other great issue he covered was the need to integrate SEM into their everyday jobs through internal protocol creation, workflow adjustments and style guide modifications.

This goes a long way to show that SEM is not some thing you do sometimes or for a little while, it's a way of life.

Andrew Gerhart (behemoth from within):
For Andrew's part, he went more into the approach that needs to be taken. That the normal rules for getting SEO done no longer apply.

His focus was on how to be effective in such a large company that making site changes is comparable to "moving mountains". The key issues were not only applicable to large sites but any web engagement.

Clear communication, training and involvement of all who will touch the project needs to happen as early as possible and professional project management is a huge plus.

His final notes were also great in that the ability to enforce the new policies and procedures along with the creating internal tools to automate reporting and other aspects like internal cross linking are tantamount to continued success.

Vinny Lingham (PPC):
Vinny discussed the PPC side of things for huge campaigns.

His thoughts on the importance of analytical integration for all channels, breaking the PPC channel into goal based campaigns and the importance of the "Tail" was great info but I didn't hear anything that struck me as out of the box. In his defense he was standing in for Chris Zacharias and had pretty short notice.

Fredric Marckini (general best practices):
The final speaker was Fredric Marckini. His focus was more a global approach on how to approach prospective clients. He hit on a few basic issues.

Be ready to talk about ugly babies, the time to discuss SEM is before a site is built or redesigned, involve IT early to increase buy-in, the importance of on site training and to approach linking from a link relationship management perspective.

Overall the session was very enlightening and gave me a lot to think about when preparing a campaign for a large client and the steps in order to insure success.

Where's the marketing integration?:

The one thing I would have liked to hear more about is how to get involved in the overall marketing mix. I personally feel that the real challenge is in getting these large companies to integrate SEO into everything they are doing online to maximize impact and would have loved to hear more on this topic.

Discuss this article in the Small Business Ideas forum.

Adam Schultz is MarketSmart Interactive's Manager of Product Development