I know a couple of the people who presented in this session of doing SEO/SEM Inhouse (that is, when does a company outsource SEO/SEM vs doing it In House).  Here was the description of that session:

2:00 pm - 3:15pm  In House Forum - Working As A Team
No PowerPoint presentations here! Instead, we’ve got a panel of in house search marketers ready to take questions and provide answers about how they do things to get SEM done internally. We’ll go to the audience for answers and discussion, as well.
Moderator:
Michael Sack, Executive Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, Inceptor
Speakers:
Jessica Bowman, Product Manager, Enterprise Rent-A-Car
Josh Greene, Director, E-marketing, Time Warner Cable
Bill Hunt, President/CEO, Global Strategies International
Mike Moran, Distinguished Engineer and Manager of Site Architecture, IBM
Marshall D. Simmonds, Chief Search Strategist, New York Times / About.com
Sean Smith, VP of Search Engine Marketing, Citigroup

Bill Hunt is a friend and co-worker at IBM who has also been a mentor to me.  Bill has his own company, Global Strategies International, or GSI that handles Enterprise SEO/SEM programs and his company has many, many Fortune 500 clients.  At IBM, Bill also manages Paid Search and is one of IBM’s main Search Strategists.   One of Global Strategies specialities is Multi Language SEO; Bill’s team can work with most of the major European, Japanase and Chinese sites- and they can handle translation issues as well.

Mike Moran is a distinguished engineer at IBM and for my first year at IBM, he was boss (I work for a different manager now). Mike Moran is been termed IBM’s Site Architect and has a major role in shaping IBM’s Ecommerce strategy and personalization.  Mike’s also a Search Guru and had helped set up IBM’s internal search engine and holds several patents related to Search.

Mike Moran and Bill Hunt also wrote a well known book on Search Engine Marketing which I reviewed while in manuscript form. A copy of the book was being given away every 30 minutes during the show.

Marshall D. Simmonds now works for the New York Times, I’ve met him a couple of times at Search Engine Strategies and Webmasterworld conferences and at one time worked with/for Bill Hunt; small world.  I find Simmonds new position, the one he took over at the New York Times (as opposed to what he did for Primedia) much more interesting but have not had a chance to talk with him about it.

The other speakers I don’t know and never met before (Josh Greene, Jessica Bowman, Michael Sack).

I don’t always go to this session while attending conferences because I’m living that at IBM and have worked with these issues; today I went to see what kind of questions people ask in the session.   Often, the question is where do I start?  The people who tend to come to sessions like this are business manager types, companies that are having issues with their own search marketing programs, how to set them up, what to run internally and what to hire conractors to do. 

I don’t see any action item from this session, it’s more about understanding business needs and how to make Search Marketing work for a company and I can understand why keyword research is needed for a person managing the a SEO/SEM project.

Fixing Web Templates is one of the major steps that has profound implications in your SEO/SEM Strategy - and if it’s done right, major, major increases in traffic and conversions can happen.

Most SEO projects are long term - and companies that want instant results often fail at it; companies that want to sell instant results are probably using techniques that will end up getting your site banned - because no one can guarantee results.

Bill Hunt suggested that a company focus on what exists today (in their standards process) and to make the process work to your advantage - this is mainly an issue for large corporations that usually can’t make changes quickly.  The standards are the thing that often seems to get the way, but if fix the standards, then the much of the site changes made in an SEO/SEM campaign will remain, almost on autopilot.

That’s all I have to say about this session; if you want to know more about doing SEO/SEM in a large corporation then buy Mike Moran and Bill Hunt’s book.