It has been a pleasure not having any speaking gigs during the month of January, while I’ve been finishing off Optimize, but it’s only a delay of the inevitable. Feb  - March are quite busy. Here’s the rundown of Online Marketing conferences I’ll be speaking at in the coming months:

2/7 OMS – San Diego - 1:30pm
Optimize This: Integrating Social, SEO & Content
Where: Hilton San Diego Bayfront

Learn the principles and best practices of optimizing content and social media participation for better marketing performance

2/9 SES Accelerator – San Diego - 10:15am
The Convergence of Search, Social and Content Marketing
Where: Hilton San Diego Bayfront

The Google Panda update just made great content critical. Social media is grabbing all the headlines. Search gets more powerful every year. But how do they all play together? How do you increase your odds of being found both in search and social media? How will you consistently create content your a will enjoy? Join this panel as they provide case studies and walk you through a step-by-step approach that any organization can follow to grow their business online.

2/14 Small Business Success Summit – 1:15pm Pacific
Small Business Blogging Panel: Mike Stelzner, Brian Clark, Joe Pulizzi
Where: Online

Want to know how to create a blog that provides ongoing streams of traffic and fuels the growth of your business? During this session, the founders of four top blogs will share how they’ve built multimillion-dollar empires by producing regular and valuable content for their blogs. You’ll discover how they started, what to avoid, and how they use their blogs to drive sales. You’ll also have an opportunity to ask your questions live to our panel.

2/21 SES London - 3:30pm
Site Redesign? Don’t Forget SEO Migration!
Where: The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, Broad Sanctuary, London

Companies often implement new content management systems and website redesigns without consideration of the effect on their search engine visibility. Numerous websites have suffered dramatic drops in search engine traffic due to an insufficient SEO migration plan or no plan at all. This session will provide website owners with best practices on mitigating negative SEO effects of a website redesign, new content management system implementation or aggregation of multiple websites. If your business is planning on making website changes that will affect content, URLs or templates, this is a must attend session.

3/22 SES New York - 2:25pm
Content Marketing Optimization
Where: Hilton New York

The core of any search or social media marketing program centers on content. Digital assets, rich media, web pages, MS Office and PDF docs as well as content created and shared by consumers all offer opportunities for optimization. If it can be searched, it can be optimized! Online marketing is increasingly competitive and brand marketers world-wide are seeking real advantages that will improve the efficiency and impact of their Social Media and SEO efforts. This session provides unique insight into content based optimization strategies and processes as well as tactics for sourcing, creation and promotion of optimized content on the social web.

Lee Odden at Content Marketing World in 2011

Skydiving with the Army Golden Knights

Yesterday I had the chance of a lifetime: To go skydiving for the first time in my life. Not only would I have the opportunity to do jump out of a perfectly good airplane, but I’d get to do it with the best of the best when it comes to skydiving: The Army Golden Knights.

2 1/2 Miles Up & Skydiving with Army Golden Knights

The backstory to this skydiving experience is that I was asked by Greg Swan from Weber Shandwick (who does PR for the Army) if I’d like to go skydiving as part of a pre-conference event outside of Dallas Texas.  After looking deciding there was an interesting social media SEO story to tell and feeling somewhat of a connection to the military because of my previous active duty service in the Army many years ago, I decided to do it.

Here’s a quick video interview in the hangar before getting on the plane:

Here are my last words before the jump. I love you mom!

Video of my actual jump 2 1/2 miles above Dallas with the U.S. Army Golden Knights

Here’s a video with my Army story:

I have 3 meetings during this time, but they are lunch so it should not be too much.

Dom will be shooting photos and some video for posting to his blog and Flickr account. It should be a great experience.