Thousands Expected to Attend Leading Search and Social Marketing Conference and Expo
SES New York 2011
NEW YORK – Incisive Media announced that Duncan Watts, principal research scientist at Yahoo! Labs, will be the keynote speaker at SES New York. The industry’s leading search and social marketing conference and expo, which is expected to attract over 5,000 industry professionals, is scheduled to take place March 21-25, 2011 at the Hilton New York.
During his keynote, Watts will be sharing insights from his forthcoming book “Everything Is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer,” which will be published March 29, 2011. The Watts keynote address will be held at 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, March 22, the opening day of the conference. To attend SES New York, fill out the registration form here.
“I’ve studied Duncan’s work for a long time and couldn’t be more thrilled that he will be sharing his latest research and ideas with the SES community,” stated Mike Grehan, VP and global content director at SES parent company Incisive Media. “When attendees hear his theories on the social aspects of human behavior as applied to marketing, they will inevitably stop and consider their current strategies.”
“I’m looking forward to being part of the premier search and marketing conference at SES New York,” said Watts. “The Web is opening the door to an entirely new way of conducting social science, enabling us to conduct experiments at fantastic scale and to measure forms of human interaction and expression at a speed and precision never before thought possible. It’s an amazing time to be studying social science.”
Through March 4, marketers can register to receive the SES New York early-bird discount of up to $400. For the first time at SES New York, Incisive Media has designed an attractively-priced All Access Passport, which includes access to all conference sessions, keynotes, the expo hall, training sessions and partnered events.
About Duncan Watts
Watts is a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Labs (www.labs.yahoo.com), where he directs the Human Social Dynamics group. Prior to joining Yahoo!, he was a full professor of Sociology at Columbia University, where he taught from 2000-2007. He has also served on the external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute and Nuffield College, Oxford. His research on social networks and collective dynamics has appeared in a wide range of journals, from Nature, Science, and Physical Review Letters to the American Journal of Sociology. He is also the author of “Six Degrees: The Science of A Connected Age” (Norton, 2003), and the forthcoming “Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer” (Crown Business, March 2011). He holds a B.Sc. in Physics from the University of New South Wales, and Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Cornell University.
About SES
Incisive Media’s SES is a leading global conference and training series focused on search and social media marketing. Other Incisive resources for interactive marketers include ClickZ for digital marketing news, information, commentary, advice, opinion and research and Search Engine Watch, which provides news and information about search, analysis of the search engine industry and tools for improving search marketing effectiveness.
Incisive Media is a leading global provider of specialized business news and information, in print, in person and online. The company’s principal markets include financial services, legal services, commercial real estate, marketing services and risk management. Incisive Media’s market-leading brands include Accountancy Age, Computing, Investment Week, Legal Week, Post, Risk, and SES Conference & Expo. For more information, visit www.incisivemedia.com
For more news and event updates visit the SES press room.
About “Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer”
By Duncan J. Watts
Crown Business; March 29, 2011
Why is the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world? Why did Facebook succeed when other social networking sites failed? Did the surge in Iraq really lead to less violence? How much can CEOs impact the performance of their companies? And does higher pay incentivize people to work hard?
If you think the answers to these questions are a matter of common sense, think again. As sociologist and network science pioneer Duncan Watts explains in this provocative book, the explanations that we give for the outcomes that we observe in life—explanations that seem obvious once we know the answer—are less useful than they seem.
Drawing on the latest scientific research, along with a wealth of historical and contemporary examples, Watts shows how common sense reasoning and history conspire to mislead us into believing that we understand more about the world of human behavior than we do; and in turn, why attempts to predict, manage, or manipulate social and economic systems so often go awry.
It seems obvious, for example, that people respond to incentives; yet policy makers and managers alike frequently fail to anticipate how people will respond to the incentives they create. Social trends often seem to have been driven by certain influential people; yet marketers have been unable to identify these “influencers” in advance. And although successful products or companies always seem in retrospect to have succeeded because of their unique qualities, predicting the qualities of the next hit product or hot company is notoriously difficult even for experienced professionals.
Only by understanding how and when common sense fails, Watts argues, can we improve how we plan for the future, as well as understand the present—an argument that has important implications in politics, business, and marketing, as well as in science and everyday life.
“Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer” is available for pre-order on Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.
