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As you know, Microsoft is a huge company and they have tons of web properties that need SEO. Microsoft runs their own internal SEO conferences to save costs on sending these marketers to conferences. Danny Sullivan and others spoke at a recent Microsoft internal conference this week. In fact, he snapped a picture of the attendees and posted it on Twitter showing that there are over 500 attendees at an internal SEO conference at Microsoft.
This is pretty amazing being that only internal Microsoft employees are allowed in. It is the size of many SEO conferences or larger but only within one company - pretty amazing.
This post is part of our daily Search Photo of the Day column, where we find fun and interesting photos related to the search industry and share them with our readers.
Comments:
James Norquay
04/04/2012 12:19 pm
Crazy! But very cool too see over 500 people all getting into the SEO spirit.
Cristian Gonzalez Guasch
04/04/2012 01:39 pm
Yes, this is the annual xMS SEO Summit in Redmond. With the two highly respected, search engine experts, Danny Sullivan and Vanessa Fox :)
Dennis Goedegebuure
04/04/2012 03:14 pm
I can tell you, having put together similar SEO internal sessions at eBay, getting people to sign up, and commit the time is a hard job! My largest session was around 200 people all at once, where especially the directors and up are always claiming to be "too busy" to spend the time, while the ROI on these learning's is almost always larger than what they were going to spend their time on! Hat tip for the Microsoft team which has pulled this off. This is awesome!
Thos003
04/04/2012 11:09 pm
Wait, you had internal eBay conferences and I didn't get an invite? .... So Sad..... I would have brought shirts. =)
Derrick Wheeler
11/28/2012 10:29 pm
Jumping in a little late here but I wanted to make a couple points. Attendees and speakers from every major web publishing discipline including digital marketers, design, developers, operations, site managers, copywriters, etc. This was our third year of holding the event. It was a full two-days with three consecutive tracks. We had over 30 internal Microsoft presenters representing XBOX, Skype, Office, Windows, MSN, Support, MSDN, TechNet, and many more. It was free to attend. All if this for a cost less than $100 per person, that included all day coffee, snacks and lunches for all. All sessions were recorded and made available on demand. We made the summit accessible for the hearing impaired. It is one of the most exciting aspects of what I do as part of my job at Microsoft. This year it will be held in March and we have asked Rand Fishkin to keynote day two. We are looking for someone from Facebook to keynote day three, any ideas?. The summit is being expanded to cover additional digital marketing topics with an extra day being added up front. The CMO of Microsoft is keynoting day one. Overall we have excellent executive support at Microsoft for SEO and a huge SEO community that feels just like the external global SEO community that you all are a part of. Anyway, I just came across this post and wanted to provide some details that I am proud of. It took the work of many individuals with a passion for SEO to pull this off three years in a row.