FEVA’s “Pro­mot­ing the Word through Image and Text” con­fer­ence (they will break my link fairly quickly, methinks, but it’s good whilst it lasts) was today, and it rocked.

Ses­sions about archi­tec­ture to cre­ative strate­gies to the the­ol­ogy of “pro­mo­tion” (which we don’t call mar­ket­ing for fear of stir­ring the con­tro­versy pot) to a rather help­ful copy­right ses­sion (albeit one rais­ing more ques­tions than it answered), as well as great food, a com­fort­able venue, and gen­er­ally excel­lent organ­i­sa­tion, etc.

Go along next year.

And, now that pos­i­tive rec­om­men­da­tion is cemented firmly with­out men­tion of the web…

I did, how­ever, take great excep­tion to the web strat­egy speaker, who I am tempted to pour out all man­ner of vit­ri­olic utter­ances against but will attempt to refrain. He essen­tially said that footer keyword-stuffing was fine, as was spam­ming meta tags (though, thank­fully, he acknowl­edged search engines pay “less atten­tion” to them these days — I would put that closer to “insignif­i­cant atten­tion and not worth the markup bloat they so often are”). Every­thing he had to say about con­tent for the web could be sur­mised in the key­word, “key­words”, pay­ing no atten­tion to the dif­fer­ent copy-writing demands of web media and the flow-on effects of organic key­word enhance­ment. Fur­ther, he man­aged to sug­gest online games for youth and prize com­pe­ti­tions as legit­i­mate mar­ket­ing tac­tics, which, to me, seems brain-dead — per­haps I should just say “an unpro­duc­tive use of time”. The entire pre­sen­ta­tion appeared to have been repur­posed from a very basic web 1001 pre­sen­ta­tion to small busi­nesses, with­out much (or any) regard for audi­ence feedback.

For exam­ple, he asked ques­tions at the begin­ning to get an indi­ca­tion of where the audi­ence was at in terms of web pres­ence (I would say well over 90% had a web­site, with prob­a­bly half of that being main­tained in some capac­ity — yes, our web­site is get­ting touched up soon… heh, in all my free time) and then pro­ceeded to com­pletely ignore that (although he did act very sur­prised at the num­ber of hands that went up) and tell every­one about how to get online in the first place. Com­plete with the worst in Pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tion technique.

Def­i­nitely not a high­light of the day!

Any­way, that aside, I went home feel­ing pretty moti­vated to Get­Stuff­Done™ and started on the three gazil­lion changes pend­ing for the Matthias site… then gave up when Budd called say­ing Borat was on. I’ve gen­er­ally had a great evening, though — a few hours with a glass of red wine and a sense of accom­plish­ment as con­tent takes shape, then a con­ver­sa­tion about using Google Maps to plot some 2,100 retail out­lets effec­tively (no con­sen­sus as to how to achieve this yet, because that’s 2,100 points to be ren­dered client-side as an over­lay, which would prob­a­bly crash some browsers, if not make them run hideously slowly — but the brain is churn­ing over), then watch­ing that crazy movie. Yeah, you’ve got to laugh at it, but… gosh. Really hope they went back and explained it was satire to some of those peo­ple, if not apol­o­gis­ing out­right. Hav­ing said that, I think he’s reached the lim­its of the per­sona; it really got a bit repet­i­tive and pre­dictable (but still evok­ing laugh­ter for shock value) in parts. I still laughed loudly.

Any­way. More to come soon.

Tags: basic web, Budd, etc, food, Google, online games, retail outlets, search engines, web media, web presence, web strategy speaker