(PRWEB) September 30, 2013 -- “Congrats Richard at Pure SEO. You have officially been awarded the Google Certificate of Awesomeness for kindly sharing your expertise as a guest speaker at the Engage Masterclass series in Auckland. The Google Engage team thank you.” For Richard Conway, Founder and CEO of Pure SEO, this was the start of a ‘roller-coaster’ ride, as the only New Zealand winner of the Google Engage All Stars Competition.
Google has been running an event-based programme for agencies called Google Engage, which has been great at informing New Zealand agencies about all the latest features and advancements of Google products, as well as industry news and statistics. Richard was invited onto the expert panel at the last Google Engage event in Auckland and was asked to speak about how to grow and market a digital agency, resulting in his Certificate of Awesomeness and the subsequent visit to San Francisco as Director of the only NZ digital marketing agency to win the Google All-Stars competition.
As Richard tells it, getting to San Francisco for the All Stars competition did not start well. His flight was cancelled and he had to spend his first night in a hotel at Auckland airport and start over again the next day, meaning that he arrived in San Francisco slightly ‘behind the eight ball’. That all changed, however, with his introduction to the ‘awesome’ (in Richard’s words) Googleplex. “It has a kind of university campus feel to it, dominated by computer geeks. The sheer scale of the place was incredible, with everything ‘on brand’ and lots of high tech toys to play with (such as a search tool, which looks like a pinball machine, you do a search and it spits out about 10 visual results; you pick the one you want and just fling it along the bottom, until it reaches the end, at which point it appears on a huge screen”). Awesome stuff!
Impressively, Richard and Pure SEO were the only selected winners from New Zealand and were joined from agencies from around the world including South America, America, Australia and the UK. Richard’s favourite speaker on the first day at Googleplex was Jonah Berger, Professor of Marketing at Wharton School of Business. Professor Berger’s talk focused on ‘word of mouth’ marketing. He reaffirmed the fact that we are more likely to listen to a friend’s suggestion, as we generally value their opinion based on similar likes and dislikes. Everyone there received a signed copy of his book Contagious – about why things catch on. Well done Richard and Pure SEO on being singled out as a Google Engage All-Stars winner.
Please visit the Pure SEO website at http://www.pureseo.co.nz.
Richard Conway, Pure SEO, http://www.pureseo.co.nz, +64 9 950 3888, [email protected]
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