After the soaking everyone received on day 1 of Search Camp, thanks to Hurricane Hanna crashing the party, day 2 was a lovely, warm day. Now as to whether the weather, religious observances, partying from the night before, or the opening Eagles game of the season was to blame, attendance was lighter in the morning sessions, although by the afternoon it did seem to build up a little.

The first session I attended was… well… the one I was presenting on Local Search. This session was actually helped by the light attendance, as some slight A/V glitches meant that we all had to gather around my laptop to see the slides (yes, I know, slides at an unconference, but when you’re talking about specific websites, I think that you need to show screenshots to illustrate the points). My session ended a little early, so I was able to catch the tail end of Kim Krause Berg’s presentation on Usability.

After that I hit Beth Harte’s “Is Email Marketing dead?” presentation. The biggest takeaway from her session was that email isn’t dead, but you have to be careful how you manage your campaigns, she listed her 7 deadly email marketing sins

1. failing to test in multiple email clients
2. failing to spam check the copy
3. putting hurdles in the way of unsubscribing
4. Neglecting to maintain the list’s invalid addresses
5. Becoming complacent
6. sending non-relevant content
7. most importantly, emailing a user without their permission
8. failing to track the effectiveness of your email through an analytics program

ok, so I threw in a bonus sin

After lunch at the Temple University student cafeteria, it was back to the presentations, where I attended sessions by Geoff “I don’t need a powerpoint” Livingston on “Blogging for Business”, and Kevin Ryan on “The Past, Present and Future of Search”.

For the penultimate session, I presented to a fairly large crowd on “Social Networking and Social Search”, which raised some good questions from the audience on how to engage in these networks, and how to identify which ones to spend time on. (if you want the answers you should have been there Ok, the answers are honestly and transparently in a non-spammy way, and it really depends on your niche and where your stakeholders currently are).

My final session was an Entrepeneur site clinic with Frank Watson. We walked through a site, with the owner, talking about the various issues he was currently having, the issues he didn’t know he was currently having, and the issues he’s going to hit.

All in all, I’d have to say from the feedback that I’ve heard that SearchCamp Philly was a hit, and plans are already startig to fall into place for the follow up next year.

Related posts:

1. Search Camp Philly Day 1
2. SES London 2008 – Local Search
3. SEM, SMO and PPC for the PRSA
4. Blog Potomac Wrapup
5. Search Engine Strategies – San Jose 2007 – Wrap up

Tags: conference, pcphilly08, philadelphia, SearchCamp Philly 08, SearchCampPhilly
Posted in Education and Training, Social Marketing | 1 Comment »