SMX West: The Secret Conference

As a marketing pro, I get a lot of emails promoting conferences. One of the great rules is that, if you go to a conference once, you're going to get email from the conference forever forward. I think that the last Macworld I went to was probably in 2010, but I still get emails from them every year.

That's what makes the SMX West conference even more baffling. Searching my inbox, the last time that I received an email from the SMX group was all the way back in 2011. Contrast that to the RSA conference where I probably get an email a week. There are two possible take-aways from this:

1. The SMX Conference marketing team has a strategy, and that strategy doesn't include emailing people to alert them to the conference. Perhaps they don't like email or don't want to spend on email. Perhaps they only know search. Or simply underscore the importance of search. Either way, at this point, if I hadn't looked for the conference I wouldn't have known anything about it.
2. I am not their target demographic. Sure I manage search marketing programs. Sure, I've been to their conference before. But maybe I don't spend enough. Maybe I'm not buying a particular set of tools that they believe in. Maybe I'm not somebody who's going to spend $2K on a conference. 

All of that being said, it's unlikely that I will be pointing out much of anything valuable in terms of marketing take-aways from this event -- except perhaps as a case study for the most invisible promotional efforts.