Get Listed – Local University – Spokane WA (REVIEW)
On Thursday, Shawn and I attended the GetListed.org Local University conference at Northern Quest Casino here in Spokane. This was a great event, brought to town by our good friend Ed Reese from Sixth Man Marketing. Being a web professional in Spokane is difficult. All of the exciting workshops and conferences take places in major U.S. cities. Seattle is relatively nearby, and it gets its share of exciting web design / SEO events but even a half day conference in Seattle generally requires a hotel stay and hours of traveling.
In some ways this puts Spokane Web Designers, Developers, and SEOs at a disadvantage. We either have to make costly trips, pay expensive conference fees, and sacrifice precious work time to learn about new industry innovations or we are relegated to watching post conference video presentations. Don’t get me wrong, I am very thankful these options exist but it is not the same as interacting with industry experts. Also, if people less motivated than I, they are unlikely to take the time to research these virtually attend these events on their own. I believe this creates a barrier to information and contributes to a lack of innovation in our local market. In time, this will cause our local designers and developers to fall behind the national competition in major cities. This trend is bad for our regional economy and the local customers that rely on us to be industry experts.
What was this Event About?
This event was primarily an introductory course to Google Local and SEO. This event was really useful for anyone involved with marketing a website but it was especially useful for those with little or no practical knowledge of SEO. I personally do quite a bit of reading on the topic and I follow several of the presenters’ blogs so I wasn’t expecting much new information. For me, this was primarily a refresher course but for the business owners in attendance there was a wealth of useful information.
While the presentations were good, I believe most of the new information I learned was in response to audience questions to the experts. The event allowed for two separate Q/A sessions and there were some great questions asked by the attendees.
What did I really think about the event?
As I said previously this was a great event. If GetListed.org’s Local University was return to Spokane, I would attended again, even if it were just to hear the same information. Prior to the event, we didn’t know how technical the information would be so we didn’t market the event to our clients. In retrospect it would have been a great event to bring clients to, especially those with local retail locations who could benefit from better leveraging of Google Local.
I only have 2 complaints about the event. The first, it would have been nice to have a 10-15 minute intermission after the first Q/A session to get up, stretch, and socialize. During the 3rd hour I begin to lose some focus and I think a break would’ve helped immensely. Second, I think it would be a good idea to put the entire presentation into one Powerpoint file to make it easier to jump from person to person. It appeared the presentations were very coordinated, however, the different styles of presentation and the constant changing between presentations was a bit distracting.
One other note, I really enjoyed having a hand-out for Ed’s presentation and it would be great to have some take-away documents from each presenter even if it just had their contact information, an overview of what they do, their blog address, and some general points regarding their presentation.
So who did the presenting?
David Mihm
Ed Reese
Mike Blumenthal
Mary Bowling
Matt McGee
What is the website for the event?
You can read more about the event at: http://getlisted.org/spokane/
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Comments
Hey Ryan,
Thanks for the kind words about our seminar. I think all of your feedback makes a lot of sense & we will do our best to incorporate it into our future events–especially the idea of a longer break and handouts from each presenter.
Out of curiosity, did you attend the morning or afternoon session?
Best,
David
@Ed – Thanks for bringing it to town. You’ll have to keep Shawn and I posted of what you guys have going on in the future.
@David – Our team came to the morning session. So I suppose we attended the first ever Local University session. 
@All, I just wanted to point out again the piece about having a hand-out for each presenter or at least one with all the important links, profiles, etc.
It would make it easier for people to follow you guys after the conference. I followed both you guys prior to the conference but I didn’t follow the other presenters so I had to track them down manually. It wasn’t hard to do but some people probably won’t go through the effort.
Hey Ryan
Love your feedback…all very useful and as David said, we will make every effort to integrate it.
Hopefully we can make it back to Spokane and we can meet your customers the next time.
@Ryan
Hey, sorry to post offtopic on this post, but I couldn’t find an email address for you here.
Could you delete/hide this article of yours?
http://www.stemkoski.com/how-to-properly-store-currencymoney-in-mysql/
It keeps turning up in search results, and it’s just plain wrong advice that will cause people all kinds of data errors.
Thanks for the write-up, Ryan. We had a great time putting on the event. It was really great to see the level of engagement with the business owners here in Spokane. The questions we got for the audience were really impressive. I’m glad you liked the event. We’ve received a lot of positive feedback so far and have already put in on our plan for next year.
We appreciate all comments about the event, so your critiques carry much weight as well. Yeah, we kinda missed that whole break thing. It’s something we talked about after the conference was over. I tend to like conferences that have a good, natural pace to them. Ours was a bit rushed (with no breaks). Very good point. Also a good point about having one collective PPT. That would’ve saved some time for sure.
Thanks again for attending the event and blogging about it. We really appreciate it! I’m glad you enjoyed it.