Posted on March 19, 2008 - by Justin Hartman

New Media Marketing Conference

Next week I’ll be presenting at the 2nd Annual New Media Marketing conference at Gallagher Estate in Midrand, Johannesburg. This four-day conference features an impressive lineup of speakers and I have to say it’s an honour to be presenting at such a great event.

I’m going to be talking about incorporating SEO and Social Media into a company’s marketing spend and it’s a perfect topic for me as I feel very passionate about both areas. These days I find myself working with Social Media more and more but my initial passion was always search.

I’ve long felt that while Google is an awesome company and I highly respect their ethos, one company should not control so much of the world’s data. Personally I’d rather have Google own my data than say Microsoft but I still maintain vertical search is a necessity in this ever dominant market.

When I developed Grabble in 2006 I thought I was onto a winner. Sadly it never took off (it’s almost dead in fact) but what I did gain out of this project was an appreciation for search and the technologies that power it. Grabble evolved from open source Java applications, Perl and then I settled on PHP.

There’s a reason why Google have a couple hundred thousand servers collecting, storing and processing information but none of this I could understand, contemplate or appreciate until I tried doing it myself.

What’s even better than talking about some passionate topics is the fact that I’m the second presenter which takes a lot of the pressure off me to really enjoy the remainder of the conference.

If anyone is still interested in going to the conference I have a whole bunch of vouchers which give you 25% discount off the conference price. Get in touch with me and I’ll happily hand them out.