Good kick off to the Search Insider Summit in Park City, Utah..my killer head cold aside.

We started with a great conversation around the Obama campaign and it’s use of online. We had Ben Seslija from Clickable and Corina Constantin from Didit as informed observers, with Emily Williams, who worked on the campaign as director of online marketing. One of the recurring themes was that the campaign was really a ground swell movement, that was effectively captured because the Obama campaign had the foresight to provide the right tools. The brand that was Obama was not a top down strategy, but rather a cooperative effort that largely played itself out online.

From there, conversations at the summit progressed through analytics and engagement mapping, advanced SEO tactics and best practices at PPC. When I retreated to my room to down a few decongestants and catch up on email, several were already planning on meeting at the bar (Todd Friesen and Rand Fishkin planted a seed that needed little in the way of nurturing) to pick up several discussion threads. Richard Zwicky from Enquisite wrapped up the day with a somewhat radical suggestion that the SEO monetization model was badly broken and promised an answer was coming.

So..the official part of Day One is over. But I’m sure the conversations are still going on.