Also follow #isslon on Twitter for live updates.

Andy Atkins-Kruger kicked things off by thanking Sante J Achille for attending.  Sante is not the only speaker who has flown in for the event, but he has special circumstances as he lives in l’Aquila, the Italian city destroyed by earthquakes.

The first presentation was from Anne Kennedy about the global reach of Facebook.  Anne had lots of insights on the growth of Facebook, their success in part due to their successful localisation project.

Then it was my turn to speak (too quickly).  My subject was the opportunities and threats of marketing through Twitter.  I was surprised to see that at least 2/3 of attendees used Twitter.  My basic viewpoint is that there are lot of opportunities, but don’t be misled by the simplicity of Twitter – put in as much effort into planning as you would with any other campaigns…

I also believe that Twitter as a search engine has great possibilities for growth.

After a break, Nicole Vanderbilt of Bebo and Regina Bustamante of Plaxo spoke about the services offered by their social media sites.  Regina also shared information on their complex translation and localisation process.

Peter Crosby of Viadeo explained how they turned a French start-up into a global professional network.  He kept us on our toes with some live text voting and emphasised that their success in going global was based on taking very local approaches in each country.  Weirdly, it turns out I am following his brother on Twitter, small world and all that…

After lunch Andy, Dixon Jones of Receptional and Kristjan Mar Hauksson of Nordic eMarketing had their traditional battle, this time they each championed a “future of web marketing”.  Kristjan said nothing would ever be more successful than Google and was amusingly dismissive of Twitter’s ineffective search results.  Dixon argued that Facebook was the future model, because of its stickiness and the engagement it offers users.

Andy was pretty convincing sating that Twitter will be the future, but he lost the vote to Kristjan.  (Dixon later tweeted that he had been robbed!)

Moving onto blogs.  Vasco Sommer-Nunes of Mokono spoke on how to monetise blogging and Sante went through international blogging strategies, a subject that he is an expert in.  He also mentioned the importance of Flickr  - look out for the pictures from the conference on there soon! (Update – pictures from ISS London are already up, more coming from WebCertain

Then trends – Alex Burmeister of Nielsen online provided lots of in depth information on tracking and analytics – basically proving once again that social media is growing at an unstoppable rate.

More coming soon…

…continued

Tom Smith from Trendstream continued the analytic / statistics theme.  There was an awful lot to take in from both of them, one things that will definitely interest Stats-Fans – Nielsen are committed to making more of their data generally avaiable.

After a break, we had a passionate presentation from Massimo Burgio @massimoburgio (Massimo had an adventure getting to the conference from Barcelona with all sorts of travel problems – he arrived about 15 minutes before he was set to speak…)

Massimo’s presentation was a call to arms and all about the need for SEMs to change their attitudes, in line with the changes in search behaviour.

Following Massimo was my colleague Oscar Carreras with the brief to discuss SEO techniques in Social Media.  Oscar firmly believes that blogging is the way to go (I agree with him) because blogs allow synchronisation between channels – and the content is ideal for using in campaigns, in comparison to point-of-sale pages).

And wrapping things up, Martin Belam (@currybet), information architect from the Guardian spoke about How Major Publishers are Using Social Media to Drive Traffic.  Being an old news hound, this is my kind of subject and I touched on it briefly in my presentation – Twitter is an excellent news channel.

Even people weren’t as into that subject as I am were really enjoying the presentation, with an incidental Star Trek theme to the slides.  Martin (who was speaking for himself and not representing The Guardian – he has a disclaimer and everything), nevertheless spoke about a new project at The Guardian, the release of content – for free!

This caused a bit of a ruffle in a room full of marketers – could and should this be a model for other organisations and sectors?

Here is Volker Ballueder’s reivew of the ISS London.

Find tweets from the day on Twitter under #isslon

Please share your comments or useful links for information about the conference.

They promise “a mix of new and old, funny and serious” and there are over 400 blogs included on the list.

You won’t find us there, but WebCertain’s Managing Director has been on the list for some time with his news site about international search marketing, Multilingual Search.

Other favourites of mine include -

Mikkel deMib Svendsen:  Mikkel is one of the most recognisable people on the conference circuit (he’s the guy in the orange suit!) and more than that is one of the most knowledgeable people around on Reputation Management issues.

Forrester Blog for Interactive Marketing:  Forrester are the market leaders on digital research.

Hubspot:  Home to some of the best tools in the industry

WebCertain hosted two very successful International Search Summits in London last year and March will see the first event being held in Norway.

More details of the event can be found on our international news site NewsCertain, or go directly to http://www.internationalsearchsummit.no/ (site is in English).

It should be a really good conference, especially with the presence of one of the most entertaining speakers on the circuit; Kristjan Mar Hauksson of Nordic eMarketing.

The SEO-PR-Tips team regret that they won’t be attending this one (although we will have our spies there) – we’re saving ourselves for the next London International Search Summt in May – that event will focus on Social Media.

The final line-ups are yet to be announced, but (strictly on the hush hush you understand) we have heard some interesting names.  One thing that is very likely to be discussed is a follow up on the international Facebook research that WebCertain has been carrying out with Ann Kennedy.  We’ll let you know more when we know more…