skip to main content
Audio First Social

Iain’s Top 9 Turing Fest Tweets

Turing Fest is one of Scotland's biggest meet ups of tech minds, and includes some big (geek insider) names like Rand Fishkin and Oli Gardner.

Two days of inspiring talks, running two concurrent tracks over four separate subjects: Engineering (coding), Marketing, Product and Strategy. Anyone in software or web tech needs to go – it’s where the smartest minds in tech meet.

Here’s a top 9 of the best bits according to me and my Twitter:

The Conversational Form

Oli Gardner reminded us of the importance of conversion optimising, and demonstrated his excellent user-testing framework with the ‘conversation form’. A conversation form displays the next question when the previous question has been answered, and can appear to work as if you’re speaking with a chatbot (although not necessary).

Google – mobile only index

Aleyda Solis provided some solid evidence on how influencial mobiles are on our lives, and that Google will eventually use the mobile-friendliness of your website as one of the most important ranking factors in search.

Introducing the Chatbot inside search results

A refreshing talk by Purna Virji (from Microsoft) demonstrating the use of their chatbot AI (Cortana) inside a search results page, and the future of chat in accessing services. I’m a big advocate of voice AI and while the tech is a little complicated to both understand and embrace, it’s ultimately how people will want to access your content and services in future.

Joanna Lord – quote of the day

A fast-paced talk by Classpass’s Joanna Lord gave what I thought was the quote of the day. Referencing the value vs. price model, Lord said

Trust that you’re bringing value to the world. See that value by proxy through money, and raise your prices. So long as it’s not detrimental to growth.

YouGov Profiles

A quick way to get lots of rich data about users and user groups – YouGov Profiles.

Organic is dead

The content rich speaker, Wil Reynolds, said – almost under his breath – that “organic will be dead in 10 years”. He later rebutted my tweet, and added a little more depth to this statement, in that featured snippets and paid search are (and will be more so) taking over the search results pages – which is correct.

Time Horizons

A great concept brought to the audience’s attention in the Product track, Janna Bastow uncovered the idea of ‘Time Horizons’. Replacing ‘time lines’ or gantt chart style project plans, time horizons provide more flexibility and focus on the task’s importance and size over timescales and deadlines.

Happiness as a KPI

My most popular tweet of the event was a reference to Jane Austin’s reference to using happiness as a key performance indicator (KPI) when designing a user interface. Measuring happiness (or frustration) was another topic entirely, however.

It’s a wrap

I couldn’t leave without bumping into one of the stars of the event, Rand Fishkin.

You can find tickets coming up for next year’s here at turingfest.com.

Search engine visibility
Websites & analytics

I’ve got plenty to say

View my other articles and opinion pieces below

Socialise: Your ultimate social media handbook, now available on Amazon

By Iain Scott

We are thrilled to announce that our new book Socialise: Unlock your content, maximise social media engagement and win more work than ever before is now available to order and download on Amazon. Purchase your copy of Socialise here. What is Socialise? Your content isn’t boring. You’re just communicating your content in a boring way. […]