SEMPO – First Official Membership Meeting

If you do not know about SEMPO, The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization is all about education and awareness to influence increased budgets towards the SEM industry. �SEMPO is a non-profit professional association working to increase awareness and promote the value of Search Engine Marketing worldwide.� If you were wondering, these guys are for real. I recommend that anyone who is in the SEM/SEO field either in your own firm or in a division in a large organization to join as some level member.

For the details with the meeting read on.Noel Michael, the VP of SEMPO and the CEO of Marketleap gave a brief introduction to SEMPO and to the President of SEMPO and also the CEO of WebMama, Barbara Coll. She first thanked NetApplications who supplied the drinks which made everyone happy. After looking at NetApplications sign just to link to it, it is clear that they need some basic SEO work to help them out. She then thanksed WebEx for broadcasting the event for free, which turned out not to work since they never got a live Internet line. And then finally thanks Danny Sullivan and Jupitermedia for supporting them.

Yes they are a serious organization with currently 105 members since August 20th 2003. 24 percent of those members are international and some are from major fortune 500 companies. They have three people on the payroll including and executive administrator, an accountant and a Webmaster.

The benefits of joinging include: (1) help the industry grow, not just for selfish reasons (2) obtain research on spending trends and percentages and receive help with understanding budgets, (3) the ability to communicate with vendors which also happen to be supporters of SEMPO including Overture (Yahoo! etc.), Ask Jeeves, and a recent addition in Google, (4) and educate the market worldwide about SEM.

Then the projector guy pulled the plug because of Chicago labor laws, so the rest of the meeting went on without a projector. The bottom line is that the price will be going up at the end of January, if you going now you get grandfathered in at the current price. You can and should sign up with credit card at the SEMPO Web site athttp://www.sempo.org.

Got to runt o the keynote address by Steve Berkowitz from Ask Jeeves, will report on that really late tonight.