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How Much Is That SEO Hunk in The Window?  

:: Tuesday, March 08, 2005 ::

Hard as it is to believe, sex sells search engine optimizaiton companies. All it takes is a trade show and beautifully perfect girls planted by an SEO company in a crowd to attract attention.

Exactly whose attention the SEO company wanted is anyone's guess, since this company totally freaked out a lot of the women SEO's in the biz who attended the Search Engine Strategies Conference in NYC.

The rollicking debate, which pits many men, who think there's nothing wrong with using the female gender to sell products, and women, who found the whole thing about girls in teeny tiny black thin-strap shirts with a slogan about "being on top" an insult, is a recent thread highlight of Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Watch Forums. Best complain to him, in his own forum, since it's the company he works for that puts on the SES conference.

And complain and congratulate they did in SES NYC expo center a joke?

Automobile manufacturers do this all the time. In one recent USA car TV commerical, there's a gorgeously sculpted woman wearing a flowing gown slinking all over a car, fantasizing about it. All I can think of is if marketing execs think women crave the attention of cold metal and dream of being with a car, something is just wrong with the world, and I missed the last plane off of it.

One smart advertising company made a commerical years ago that had this muscle bound, tanned, shirtless, sweaty construction guy working in the city street below while being watched by a bunch of women drooling and hanging out the window.

This time they were at least close to understanding what we like.

What women don't like is attending a conference, as business owners, SEO or web design company employees, or leaders in the SEO industry and being subjected to girls who dress like our daughters trying to get us to visit a booth.

Once again, there's this terrible example of not understanding what women like. I find it difficult to believe that we're so hard to figure out.

My husband came to the SES conference to hang out with me when I wasn't in any sessions and visit with my friends in the SES biz, some of whom he's met before and enjoys seeing. We had planned on his joining me to see the Exhibits, for which he would be charged a $25 fee.

But, several people recommended to me that it wasn't worth going to see at all. I'd heard about the "girls dressed in skimpy outfits" but that alone wouldn't have scared me off. (I used to be pretty and by all means, showed it off, but that was a long time ago...) My husband lost interest in paying $25 for what sounded less like intelligent information gathering and more like an entertainment show. He would have gone if I'd wanted to, but the image of a show with a pack of girls trying to get people to a booth sent one strong message to me - they didn't want ME, a woman, to stop by the booth.

This said, I really have no hard feelings. I've been extremely fortunate to work in the Internet industry with amazing men who treated me like an equal. As long as I kept my mouth shut about how their fingers suddenly hit the keyboard a million miles an hour, IM'ing each other every time a female walked by our cubes, I was welcome to be their friend and treated as a peer.

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 3/08/2005 11:40:00 AM

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