Brighton SEO - Three things we love

Attend an event
Run
Talk

The event - brightonSEO

In case you missed it, the event I attended was the #brightonSEO conference and for my second outing at this awesome event, it still punches highly as one of my favorite events.

It's not just the great content and speakers, but the format, the people, and the energy from the crowd. The team has also worked hard to make the event as inclusive as possible in all natures, which you can see from the social shares and commentary from many of the thousands of participants. It's also the small touches like the ice-cream and very brightonesque networking that make it so special.

If it's not already on your radar, it definitely should be.

The run

After a chat with Kelvin after last year's event, I suggested that I could lead a morning run on each day and fast forward 7 months; that's what we did.

Meeting in plenty of time ahead of the conference, the sun shone down on us as we explored both the east and west of Brighton on our morning 5k runs each day of the conference. I drafted in a few of my RunPals to help "tail walk" so that every pace was catered for on these morning walk/runs (noone is left behind on our runs) and the conversations flowed.

I still remember the first of these I ever did at an UFI event in Basel - they offer a great chance to chat with other delegates ahead of the main event, especially if you'd traveled solo and didn't know anyone else.

Morning activity like this offers a great way to break the ice for many, including those who dipped in the sea afterwards, almost literally breaking the ice to get in! I'll write more about this soon, but it wasn't just running - there was a beach clean organized by the local rep of Surfer's Against Sewage, Stuart, as well as morning Yoga, offering lots of options for people to get involved in something good and healthy to start the day.

We benefitted from return runners on day two of the conference - not everyone was out partying you see ;)

The talking - event roundtables

This was less about me talking and more about facilitating some great people from SEO world for the events brightonSEO Roundtables over the two days. They included folks from heads of agencies, in-house financial teams, retail, and e-commerce, and SEO / copywriting freelancers (I may be biased, but these were my favourite folk ;).

Roundtables are such a great way to generate open discussions and to encourage challenging questions and it was my roll to ensure the conversation kept flowing. The discussion was lively and it was a pleasure to hear the views of everyone in the room - these should be a standard at every event!

Little tip - I post-it notes and pens in the middle of the table and at the start of the session I said to the groups that if anyone was struggling to get their words out or couldn't find exactly what it was they wanted to say, that they could jot a note on the post-it, hand to me and I'd try to raise it in the discussion. This happened three times over the two days and whilst not perfect and pretty rudimental, it's my attempt at trying to ensure various neurocharactersistcs can take part within our sessions.

The feedback from these roundtables has been incredible, and it was an amazing opportunity to learn from everyone in the room!

My Waves Connects content is currently focusing a lot on case studies, so I'll be building out a couple from this event and the work we did there to share more of what went down, how it worked, and what people thought soon as well as how some areas of what we provided could be improved next time.

But all in all, for me, brightonSEO was a great success and I'm already looking forward to the next one with the same energy and enthusiasm that I had when attending my first event. You should most definitely be registering for the next content yourself.

Until then - it's back to work! Thanks again to Kelvin, Jo, Tom and the team for such an awesome event!