Wear Your Cross Training Shoes to Connected Marketing Week

Here’s a helpful tip: Wear your cross training shoes when you head to Connected Marketing Week, which is being held at The Moscone Center in San Francisco from August 16 to 20, 2010.

Yes, yes, as Mona Elesseily, the Director of Marketing Strategy at Page Zero Media, has told me again and again, any pair of comfortable shoes will help you survive five days of walking from session to session to the exhibit hall at an SES Conference and Expo.

But, cross trainers will make the right fashion statement at Connected Marketing Week, the biggest gathering of interactive marketing events aiming to educate marketers on every aspect of the digital industry.

Participating events include: ClickZ’s BlogworkZ; the Email Experience Council’s Email Marketer’s Toolkit For Success; Bruce Clay’s Search Engine Optimization Training; the Connected Marketing Meet & Greet, SES San Francisco, Online Marketing Summit’s OMS Social Media Day; WebmasterRadio.FM’s SearchBash; the Email Experience Council’s Optimize Your Email Campaigns Forum; IAB’s Future of Display: Ad Networks and Exchanges Forum; Search Engine Watch’s Black Hat, White Hat Un-Conferenced event; the IM Charity Party; Jeff Pulver’s 140 Characters Conference; Tim Ash’s Conversion Conference; ClickZ’s International Marketing Forum; and SES’s SEM Training San Francisco.

Yep, you can learn more at this one week festival than you can by attending a fistful of events scattered around the country or continent during the next year. With travel budgets still tight, that’s a good thing. Plus, if you register by July 30, you can save up to $300.

Okay, okay, but why get cross trained if you are an SEO specialist, PPC specialist, social medial specialist, or email specialist?

Good question.

Here’s the answer: The search engine marketing industry isn’t moving forward in a straight line. It’s zigging into social media marketing and zagging into internet marketing. And your success today and in the foreseeable future requires an advanced understanding of how consumers and audiences are connecting, sharing their passions and influencing others.

In short, you need to cross train if you are going to get ahead.

Over the next few days, I’m going to recommend some cross training workouts to help the 8,000 attendees get the most out of the more than 200 sessions at Connected Marketing Week. No one can attend every session. But no one can afford to get stuck in a narrow track in a changing industry in an uncertain economy.

Get it? Got it? Good.