Think Visibility

I spent Saturday 7th March back at the office, so to speak, when nti Leeds sponsored Think Visibility here at Old Broadcasting House. This conference was organised by one of our coworkers, Dominic Hodgson, aka ‘The Hodge’. Dom is very much into SEO and had managed to gather some top names in the key specialist area of increasing visibility for this innovative conference.

It was an early start for a Saturday “ but much earlier for some who had travelled from as far afield as Glasgow and Gatwick that morning to get to Leeds. This had become one of the hottest tickets in town, selling out very soon after being announced by Dom, and people arrived early. When I arrived there was a real buzz at Old Broadcasting and there were many new faces as well as OBH regulars. The OBH coworkers were well represented  - another one of the advantages of working here is getting early notice of planned events.

We™ve hosted Barcamps, Photocamps, Northern Bloggers, WYLUG, Open Coffee, Ignite UK  to name a few and I™m pleased to say that this event was right up there with the very best of them all.  Many congratulations to Dom for all his efforts and for delivering a top class event. My only criticism is that there are now so many things I want (need)  to do after attending the talks that my head is still buzzing and I cant wait to get into work tomorrow to get on with all the plans.

Had a great chat with Paul Robinson from Manchester about coworking, and how things work at OBH, plans for the future, and how other spaces have developed such as The Hub at Kings Cross. It was also good to meet Andy Goodwin from Liverpool, who was interested in the coworking space, and how it had developed.

All the conference presentations were excellent but I have to give a special mention to my two favourites, who just happen to be local to Leeds, and represent the top talent in and around the region. I like Tom Smith™s take on visibility because he has a way of making practical sense, using diagrams, of what can seem overwhelming. Tom presented five steps to getting started with web 2.0 for a business : Invade; Provide and hope; Integrate; Augment; and Create. And fun things come in to it too “ like a Last.fm playlist for your business? Also up there with the best was Patrick Altoft from Branded 3 whose talk was entitled ˜Supersonic Link Building™.  Patrick recommends strategically seeking links by firstly identfiyng the links you need, and then proactively getting them.  The links you need should be based on trust (eg Guardian, BBC, Techcrunch, mainstream media web sites), keywords, and also page links.

There are several photos on flickr of the event.

Apologies to those I haven™t mentioned.  I haven™t really done justice to Tom and Patrick™s talks here either.  I strongly recommend that you check out www.thinkvisibility.com over the coming days to find our more about these, and other talks that I haven™t mentioned, and also to make sure you get a ticket for the next one. Judging by the feedback on Twitter, everyone wants more, and I cant see Dom leaving it here. I™ll definitely be at the next one and I would highly recommend it to you.

Leave a Reply