For the first time in a long time, I've joined a professional association. A couple days ago I paid (with my company card of course) the membership fee for SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Association. In the past I've generally eschewed professional associations because you only get out of them what you put into them, and frankly I was never that interested in putting that much into them. But I noticed that they had a job board (that only members can post to) and I've been thinking lately that I need to belong to some professional groups. So I joined and posted my job on their site.
Now that I'm a member, I get to display this logo on my site (wheee):
Given that I'm an in-house SEO with little interest in freelancing on the side, the logo (which isn't even an accreditation since SEMPO isn't a standards-based organization) doesn't mean anything to me.
But if SEMPO membership helps me directly or indirectly in building and improving my team, it'll be well worth the money. I really do need to spend more energy on networking and meeting people in the industry. But even though I haven't spent too much time perusing SEMPO's membership list, I don't get the sense that the big A-listers are members; it's actually a very new and small organization. Oh well.
Even though membership seems sort of pricey as far as professional groups go, maybe I'll get some good employee leads out of it. And that's really all I'm looking for at this point.
Updated 1/24/2007:
Actually, SEMPO just announced that it is offering a Fundamentals of Search Marketing course that sounds like a promising resource. I might have both my writers, and any future staff, sign up for this. Would be a lot more useful to start here than to send noobs straight to SES or PubCon where it can be too overwhelming.
Labels: search marketing
Posted by Melanie Phung
Get RSS feed
I've Joined SEMPO
For the first time in a long time, I've joined a professional association. A couple days ago I paid (with my company card of course) the membership fee for SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Association. In the past I've generally eschewed professional associations because you only get out of them what you put into them, and frankly I was never that interested in putting that much into them. But I noticed that they had a job board (that only members can post to) and I've been thinking lately that I need to belong to some professional groups. So I joined and posted my job on their site.
Now that I'm a member, I get to display this logo on my site (wheee):
Given that I'm an in-house SEO with little interest in freelancing on the side, the logo (which isn't even an accreditation since SEMPO isn't a standards-based organization) doesn't mean anything to me.
But if SEMPO membership helps me directly or indirectly in building and improving my team, it'll be well worth the money. I really do need to spend more energy on networking and meeting people in the industry. But even though I haven't spent too much time perusing SEMPO's membership list, I don't get the sense that the big A-listers are members; it's actually a very new and small organization. Oh well.
Even though membership seems sort of pricey as far as professional groups go, maybe I'll get some good employee leads out of it. And that's really all I'm looking for at this point.
Updated 1/24/2007:
Actually, SEMPO just announced that it is offering a Fundamentals of Search Marketing course that sounds like a promising resource. I might have both my writers, and any future staff, sign up for this. Would be a lot more useful to start here than to send noobs straight to SES or PubCon where it can be too overwhelming.
Labels: search marketing
Posted by Melanie Phung