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.

On Saturday, the combined PodCamp Philly / SearchCamp Philly (pcphilly08) conference started.  I’d been asked to speak at 4 presentations (1 on Saturday and 3 on Sunday).  The conference kicked off with the news that it had raised over 5K for the  Science Leadership Academy.

The first session I attended was Beth Harte who spoke on “Managing your SEM on a Budget”.  For some, this session was their first experience with an ‘unconference’ where the audience is encouraged to participate.  Rather than just being lectured to, they can ask questions and offer advice – sometimes giving new information to the presenter.

The next session was Geoff Livingston talking about the “Difference between PR & Social Media.”  He started this presentation off by immediately involving the audience by asking marketers to raise their hands.  Then, by asking the PR people to raise theirs.  His next question was for the PR people that didn’t identify themselves as marketers, why didn’t they think that way?  PR is a subset of marketing.

He then moved into a discussion of Apple, with the initial statement that “Apple engages in PR not social media.”

To engage in social media:

• they would have to give up control
• they would have the issue of too many conversations to monitor and respond to
• they’d have to be more authentic
• they’d have to be transparent
• they would have to network and commit the resources to do so

He closed his session with the quote: “Social Media is going to bring PR to it’s fricking knees, it may take 10 years – but it’s going to happen.”

Next up was Wil Reynolds with a presentation on “How not to get ripped off by SEO firms,”… although a more apt title would have been “Should you do SEO in-house or outsource?”  This session had a lot of energy, but ran for the full hour in presentation mode.  Meaning, there wasn’t the level of interaction with the audience of the other sessions.

Run from an SEO firm if:

• they cold call you
• they don’t have good rankings
• they try to sell you on crappy tools
• they don’t proactively offer to analyze traffic and conversions from organic search
• they only offer rankings reports
• they are heavy on the scare tactics – Google penalties
• they claim that they use proprietary software for simple tasks – that free tools already exist for
• they ‘dabble’ in search – not a core competency
• they demand a retainer for you to keep your rankings

Personally, I’d also add in:

• they set up a new url for you and don’t clearly state that you own that url
• they have their own link farm that they claim ‘works for all their other clients’
• they won’t give you a clear answer on whether they outsource their work, and which parts

Will Reynolds and I did a Small Business site review next, where we walked through 2 audience submitted sites to give them advice on do’s and don’ts.

Finally, Howard Greenstein ran the “Twitter: Are we just drinking the Kool Aid?” session, where people talked about the benefits of twitter, and for those not on, their concerns.

Heading of the conference, we all ran into Hanna, or to give her her full name ‘Hurricane Hanna,’ who decided to drop the contents of the sky directly on the attendees.  We may have been wet through, but our spirits weren’t dampened.  We’re all looking forward to a great Day 2 (although I still have 3 sessions left to present…).