Think Visibility : An Overview

Leading Up To Think Visibility

Over the weekend I travelled down to Leeds to attend the Think Visibility one-day conference hosted by Dominic ‘The Hodge’ Hodgson and the Think Visibility team. It has to be stated, days prior to my departure, I was not in the best of health, in fact my wife and family were in heavy persuasion mode to get me to just stay at home and recuperate. Despite, their attention (2 yr olds can be so persuasive when telling Daddy to stay at home) I climbed into the car and decided that Leeds should at least share in the ‘Tropical Disease‘ that was coursing through my brittle bones. And off to Think Visibility I went!

Think Visibility Eve

After picking up James (Partner with North South Media) in Doncaster, we swung the car around and headed back North for Leeds and Bewelys Hotel. After arriving in Leeds and driving past Leeds Football Ground (Elland Road) 3 times we eventually took the right turn-off and arrived just in time to head-off to the Hogs Head for a Friday night get-together with the pre-Think-Visibility crowd. I’m glad I brought James along, he is a genuine people person and not being of the shy-type was soon mingling with the guest speakers while I sweated out the dreaded lurgy at the bar, clinging onto a cool pint of Heinekin like an alcholics blankie, James drifted in and out of converstions between Dave Naylor, Tim Nash, Chris Garret etc … like anyone outside of Search Marketing would. I did bump into Shaun from Hobo Web, Andy and Mrs Burnett from AndrewBurnett, Alistair McDermott of Website Doctor and Chris Clarkson from Pfft.co.uk …

4 beers later (wimp, yes I know, but James was pished) and I’m sleeping in the hotel room when James (remember, I just mentioned he’s pished) starts phoning and accepting calls at 4 am in the morning from his Facebook friends and starts explaining to them what Twitter and SEO is all about, I crashed when he tried to explain Page Rank to his Facebook phone friend using buckets as an anology, I mean how can you explain something like that using buckets…

Think Visibility Day

After waking at 7am, shower, shave and on my way for 8am, we get lost en-route to Think Visibility and turn a straight-forward 30 minutes walk into a 70 minute hike. Eventually, we arrive! And we’re off, first Guest Speaker is …

Tim Nash
Tim, adds a large injection of humour into a bleary eyed crowd. He explains how search engines came to being and demonstates with the help of some red dye, 4 buckets and some corks how Google came up with PageRank and also how NoFollow works. It has to be one of the best demonstrations and anologies I have ever seen / heard. Tim, was a bit dissapointed that his buckets didn’t explode as expected, Tim on behalf of my wife – thank-you for not ruining my new shirt with red dye

Chris Garret
One of the most influential bloggers on the UK scene today. Chris highlighted 25 ways to promote a blog. A number of ways I was aware of, but there were things within Chris’ presentation that made me do a slap-to-the-head motion and think ‘Why haven’t I tried that …’ Guess, that’s why Chris is so inspirational at what he does and I’m left writing about how inspirational Chris is.

Guy Redwood
Guy is some guy, when it comes to Eye Tracking and Simple Usability needs. His talk was really insightful about using Eye Tracking services to help work out why a user makes the clicks and descisions they do on your website. I liked the way Guy broke from the mould and stated that their was no data on the much flouted F-Figure of how a user reads a web page.

I mentioned this to Guy the night before during some drinks and he quickly doused the flames on this theory – I had said to Guy that I used the F-figure to help explain user movements to a client to which he quickly reassured me there was no data to back-up this claim. To hear him, once again proclaim it to the audience was inspiring to myself. Here’s a man, who trusts his data and if you don’t believe me then view the video below …

Tom Smith
Tom’s speech was bubbly and enthralling … it was just sheer brilliance and his energy and excitiment levels about speaking about Social Media was out there for all to get hooked on … I entered late into Tom’s speech, not that he noticed, and ended up being dumped uncerimoniously on the concrete floor to listen. No matter how much I fidgeted, shuffled and twisted my body into a more comfortable mode, I was hanging all the time on Tom’s words … his slides were awesome, they looked like contemporary social media art pieces.

After Tom, it was time for lunch, and injected by Tom’s enthusiastic performance I grabbed James and Andy Murd to head for a lunchtime pint and a dissection of what had went before. Upon return, we met up with the usual behind-the-bike-shed bunch consisting of Shaun, Andrew Burnett and in some form-or-another Big Chris as we talked both shop and the night-before hilarities. I then jumped across to speak with the Polr team : Ryan, Lynn and Calum and get a quick catch-up of events with those guys. Then it was onto the afternoon shot …

Dave Naylor
Wow, is about the best thing I can say to summarise Dave’s talk. He quickly rounded up his slide presentation in about 2 minutes flat then opened the room upto a Q&A session. From Google Base to SilverBullets to Unique Content Generation to Authority Blogs to Personalised Results and quite a bit in-between, Dave answered it all. A huge plus point in my day.

However, after Dave’s speech my ill-health kicked in big time. I felt extremely weak, tired and dizzy and decided that enough was enough and headed back to my Hotel room for a 3 hours sleep. Unfortunately, I never got to hear the other speakers but after asking around I realised that I had missed some real gems.

I have listed further reading for Think Visibility below and hope you all take the time to read each post. Here’s to a future Think Visibility (I hear from good sources that September the 12th 2009 is scheduled, so to avoid future dissapointment I guess you should follow @thinkvisibility on Twitter to see when those tickets will be released, because, believe me, if the next line-up is anything as good as that one then they’ll be gone quickly).

Further Reading :
www.ratssawgod.com
www.searchenginechocolate.com
www.polr.co.uk/
www.pfft.co.uk
www.seomoz.org/

Images courtesy of Sk8geek Think Visibility images on flickr