You probably associate the WebmasterWorld PubCon conference with Vegas. After building up a following with roots in the UK and then several smaller conferences in Boston and Irvine, Vegas became the mainstay of PubCon. The latest expansion of PubCon was down in Austin, TX the city where WebmasterWorld is headquartered. The folks at WebmasterWorld did an outstanding job at this new venue. There was an outstanding speaker list, multiple tracks covering all aspects of search, social media, a little bit of technology and of course top-notch speakers in the keynote slots including Matt Cutts of Google and Guy Kawasaki.

While there was a lot of buzz around social media, it seemed to be mostly buzz. It’s still new and the platforms, methodologies and measurements are still evolving. There were lots of different perspectives. It appeared that at this point in time, those able to derive the most benefit from social media are those that offer professional services and make a strong effort to become part of the community on LinkedIn, Twitter and even Facebook. Social media isn’t much different than getting involved in local community events in many ways. It is talk, it is conversation, and it is getting to know other people and exchanging ideas. It just happens online, the conversation is world-wide and it’s not quite as personable as a face to face conversation.

It seems strange that one of what is arguably the most “social” of the social networking sites whose sole focus is to help people get together and socialize almost never gets mentioned in any of the presentations and is absent among the buzz of social media – Meetup.com. Meetup.com works, there are thousands of people with similar interests connecting and organizing interest groups and businesses around the globe, yet nobody seems to talk about it. It can be a great tool for small businesses to gain customers and the potential for larger businesses seems to be untapped thus far. One thing Meetup.com does have going for it is revenue unlike some other social networking sites like Twitter.

When talking to people at the conference, the groups of people who reported business was steady, growing, or booming were those responsible for growing sales (surprise!). This included people focused on search and site conversion. If you can make more money with fewer resources, it’s only natural that you’d be doing well in this economy. The math is very simple and always has been. If you spend $100,000 to get 100,000 clicks and can either increase your average order size and maintain margins or double the conversion rate from 1% to 2% while maintaining a similar margin and average order value you will make more money.

In order to begin to take steps to increase sales through conversion optimization, it’s important to have a solid analytics package. There were some great presentations in the “Tracking & Results Analytics” session that talked about everything from new features in Google Analytics to targeting press releases to specific segments of the buying cycle and tracking the results (do you know who reads your press releases and how much value you get from them?). The consensus among the panel was that despite the flood of data and increasingly robust analytics packages available (sometimes for free), most organizations simply don’t make the investment to actually learn how to use them to anywhere near the full potential.

Universal search was another hot topic. As more photos, video, podcasts and other media become available on the Internet the engines are starting to include a lot more of this type of information in the search results. There are more and more opportunities to gain visibility with all these different types of media and it is becoming more and more important to organize and optimize all of these different types of content for maximum visibility. Not only is it a technical challenge but a massive organizational challenge. Who in a company owns all this media and is responsible for its organization and integration into the overall online presence of a company? Is it PR, tech, marketing, design, internal, outsourced to an agency? Amanda Watlington has the most insightful presentation on the challenges of dealing with all the potential media assets at ones disposal.

One member of the audience froze the room and the speaker when he asked the Google rep, Jackie Bodine “Does Size Matter?” This was of course in reference to the size of images in image search but it seemed to be interpreted as a much more personal question. It wasn’t really clear if size matters so it appears that the debate will continue to drag on.