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…).

Filed under: Education and Training, Social Marketing on Sunday, September 7th, 2008 by Simon Heseltine |
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