Quick Review: SemCon 2011

SEMCon or Search Engine Marketing Conference is an event held yearly (since 2007) by Fiera de Manila together with organizers like YugaTech, iMV Solutions and SEO Philippines. It’s basically a gathering of search engine marketers, strategists and consultants so they can teach other digital marketers, SEO practitioners, and different types of noobs like me!

This event is actually proof that direct mail still works. I almost forgot about this conference until I received an over-sized postcard that was sent to our office. While SEMCon is obviously not as big as the IMMAP Summit – perhaps part of the reason why I didn’t hear (or read) much buzz around it, according to Fiera de Manila, both days still had about 90-100 participants.

This was my first time attending SEMCon so I’m not sure what the previous attendance numbers were as it’s now their fifth year doing this.

I’m going to do a quick run through of some of the main “conference factors.” Here goes!

1. Cost

I know conference fees aren’t something most attendees worry about as they’re usually from big local or even multinational companies that have huge training budgets. But I can’t help but think about small business owners or freelance digital marketers. It’s not exactly cheap at P14,000 for 2 days.

For reference, I looked at the previous SEMCons and they started at P8,500 in 2007, P9,500 in 2008 and 2009, and then last year went up to P12,000. I’m part of that group hoping it won’t cost P16,000 next year.

2. Seminar Kit

This is how my seminar kit looked like:

That’s the 2-day seminar schedule printed on a folder, a tote bag, SEVEN sheets of ebay.ph fliers, 3 eBay buttons, my seminar badge, a flier ad for another event and a SEMCon branded notebook.

Let’s go back to those ebay.ph fliers I received.

I understand receiving one flier but SEVEN? Do they want conference attendees to go out and distribute fliers for them? I asked one of the attendees I met at the conference and she told me she didn’t even bother looking at the fliers. I, on the other hand, looked at them, took a picture (for this post) and off to the recycling bin it went. I have nothing against ebay.ph of course. I just feel it’s a waste of money and paper. Poor trees.

Same goes for the buttons. I’ve never been on ebay.ph so when I get a button like this…

I start to think whether they realized that some of the attendees might not have even bought, much less sell, anything on ebay.ph and just had them done without really thinking it through. Or if they believed this would entice me to sell on ebay.ph.

Either way, it didn’t help leave a good brand impression, at least not to me. Plus the buttons felt cheaply made. Like it was intended for people to look at for two seconds and then throw away without feeling the slightest tinge of guilt.

I’d rather just get the event schedule and my badge.

3. Venue | Food

They had it at the AIM Conference Center in Makati. I was pretty happy with the venue. It was easy to find and the place looked solid.

…That is until I looked up all the previous SemCon venues and they were all at the Hotel Intercon! I wonder what happened this year. Maybe they didn’t serve food last time?

Speaking of food, it was okay. Typical buffet catering service. I’d rate it as 2.5 out of 5 (as in it’s not bad but it’s also not good) but it was good enough in that I didn’t have to go to McDonald’s to eat lunch or leave the place to buy food elsewhere.

I would like to mention though that the catering staff was really friendly. I give importance to service so I suppose that makes up for the food quality.

4. Speakers

I loved most of the speakers! I’m planning on writing a separate post on some of them but for now, here’s a quick list:

• Marc Macalua with his stoic but hilarious presentation on Google Panda
• Hans Koch and his detailed report on the two group buying sites he worked with
• Myles Vives with actual Facebook tips people can follow
• Carlo Ople on social media tools and even some off-the-record bits
• Allan Caeg advocating UX in the Philippines

 

The Verdict

So the food wasn’t exactly mouthwatering, the conference fee was a bit on the high side, and the seminar kit was slightly disappointing. But why do people go to conferences anyway? Not to try amazing cuisine for one. (Although that would be a bonus.)

At the end of the day, the important question when attending conferences is always, “Did you learn about things you wouldn’t have learned elsewhere?”

And I did. Plus I met cool new people.

I told Abe of YugaTech (who is really nice and down-to-earth by the way) that I will definitely go next year and even bring some of my co-workers with me. I think it’s worth it.

Plus I’m sure it will be even better next year. I know it takes a lot of time and hard work putting all that together so I’d like to thank and congratulate the event organizers. I had fun! :)

Top 3 Must-Follow Tech Sites for the Social Media Dork

A social media dork?
 
Yes, that’s me!
 
If you want to get the latest news in the tech industry, you’ll need to be dependent on Google Reader. In my case I use FeedDemon, Reeder for my phone, and Flipboard (best app ever!) for my iPad.
 
I initially started off using my trusty bookmark folders and making sure I check my ‘News’ folder every day but that didn’t work out as I ended up forgetting to check some sites and then eventually all of them. Then I tried subscribing to them via email and that just drove me nuts. It was stressful seeing you have 100 unread ‘emails’ per day!
 
I wish I made full use of Google Reader 3 years ago!
 
I have a bunch of sites I subscribe to (including those I feel are thought leaders) but I’ll only list out three of the major tech news sites for now and hope you’ll help me add some more to it.  

1. TechCrunch

Quick background on TC for my fellow dorks. TechCrunch was founded by Michael Arrington in 2005. While some of you may know Mike (we’re tight like that, first name basis nah mean?) as one of the biggest jerks in the tech media industry what with pictures like this:



…he’s actually a good example of how it’s never too late to build something great and even out of your ‘career path.’ Mike founded TC when he was 35. Before that, he was just an average corporate lawyer! Now, TC makes about $10 million a year with 9.2 million visitors a month.
 
It’s no wonder all tech-inclined people seem to think everyone and their grandmas are reading (or used to read – some may think they’re too ‘mainstream’ now) TechCrunch.
 
Sometimes though they end up being like a less gossipy Valleywag spilling details on CEOs fighting and whatnot. Add to that all the drama they’ve been happily publishing after the AOL acquisition. But hey, at least you’re in the know, right?

2. Mashable

All girls know this. Pete Cashmore is HOT. (Btw, Pete Cashmore is taken. Sorry.)

His hotness and love life aside, Mashable was founded when Pete was NINETEEN, sick, and in Scotland. Interestingly, it was founded the same year as TechCrunch. It gets more pageviews (50M pageviews per month) than TC but makes less money – although they did say they’ve doubled their revenues.

You might run into some duplicate stories if you also follow TechCrunch but what I like about Mashable is it has a lot of social media news and tips you can follow. It’s definitely not as product-oriented as TC but with Mashable, you know they really try to engage their readers and give a more ‘community-oriented’ aura.

If you’re an “interwebz marketer”, you know you should be reading Mashable. They might be posting 100 articles a day (double that for TC) but you have to check it at least once every two days and scroll through the articles to stay up to date.

(P.S. Here’s something special for the dudes out there: Emily Chang interviewing Pete Cashmore. Yes, Emily Chang is hot. There, I said it.)

 

3. GigaOM

The last but definitely not the least on my list.

GigaOM was founded in 2006 by Indian writer, Om Malik. He was already 40 when he founded GigaOM. And he isn’t a jerk. Ha.

If you don’t want the AOL drama nor news on Ashton Kutcher or Justin Beiber, this is a good option for you. Some readers say they’re about to take TechCrunch’s place after TC got bought by AOL but we’ll see.

I personally don’t read too much of GigaOM but I’ve asked some loyal readers and from what they’ve said, GigaOM produces higher quality content as they do more research on new products and technologies. They may not be breaking stories but they’re more analytical than TC.  Shoo, if you have extra cash and want super in-depth data/research, why not subscribe to GigaOM Pro? What’s $199 a year for quality research and analysis right? No? Well, they let you in on some snippets of it anyway… sometimes.

GigaOM does have significantly less pageviews than both Mashable and TechCrunch at 4 million uniques, but they do have a better business model than both of them. This year, they’ve already raised a total of $14 million dollars in funding – more than both VentureBeat and BusinessInsider. That tells us a lot in terms of their future as a company.

There you have it! Three sites for the social media dork.

If you don’t like constantly checking these sites or getting a crapload of articles to read on your reader, then you can just go to Techmeme – a tech news aggregator that uses both algorithm and human editing to find the most popular stories.

Track Link Activity via Google Analytics and HootSuite (Free!)

We weren’t using HootSuite yet when they first came out with Google Analytics integration so when I tried it out a couple months back, it didn’t make sense to me to use it.
 
1. It’s not free. You’ll have to use your HootSuite report points for this. And one report starts at $50. If I’m not mistaken, you get 50 points for $50. Google analytics reports from HootSuite start at $10. And if you have more than one account, that quickly racks up. It’s a rip-off especially for small companies like us.
 
2. If you have a lot of traffic, the tweets to web conversion does not make sense. Especially if Twitter doesn’t bring you at least 10% of your total traffic. It’s just going to look like a flat line with dots against your web traffic graph.
 
3. You can just use HootSuite’s Custom URL Parameters!
 
If you aren’t already using this, HootSuite actually has a blog post on this one. I’m just going to show you how it will look like on your GA dashboard.
  

Step 1

Change your Custom URL Parameters:



When I first tried this out, I couldn’t find the drop down and that’s because I didn’t click on the link bar. Click on the link bar and you’ll see that gear. Click on it and the custom URL parameter settings will pop up.

The source and medium labels are pretty straightforward, it’s the Campaign name that you need to be specific with. Here I used ‘Peanut’s Twitter Account’ because well, this is my Twitter Account.

Step 2

Go to Google Analytics and under Traffic Sources, you’ll see it neatly labeled! (There’s a waiting period before Step 1 and Step 2, give it a day before they show up on your GA account.)

Now I know just how many visits Twitter gave me based on my ow.ly links!
 
I can also check under Campaigns and see my Twitter account in there:

Wow I brought in more than 5M visits! That’s amazing… editing skills.
 
Using HootSuite’s Custom URL Parameters, I don’t need to pay $50. Because that’s ridiculous.
 
It’s free, I just need to set it up once and you can use it on multiple Twitter users! By that I mean, those Twitter accounts that need to be managed by different people.

You’ll be able to measure how much visit each HS account has brought in and optimize based on the data that you have. And all it takes is just 5 minutes (or even less) for each of your HootSuite members.

5 minutes or $50?

What is this new Facebook Page metric called “People Talking About”?

Facebook just released three new metrics to add to your Facebook Page Insights just last week. The other 2 metrics are just different versions of what the old Facebook analytics had – Likes and Reach (in the old version it was Weekly/Monthly Likes and Interactions)
 
The newest one that’s being talked about is called “People Talking About.”
 
Here’s how the old Facebook Insights page used to look like:



 
When I read an article about this on Mashable, I was sure they weren’t going to use “People Talking About” as the final product feature name. I mean, what is that?! Why not use something like “Brand Activity” or something?! At least use a noun. But I digress.

So what does this People Talking About have?
 
It measures ‘stories’ generated by your Facebook page’s post. It includes:

1. Post Likes
2. Number of Post Shares
3. Post Comments
4. Number of Answers to Your Question
5. Event RSVPs

Here’s how it looks like on our other brand page:

A note to HootSuite users: You’re supposed to see the pink dots on dates where your page posted but I didn’t see any on ours. My guess is that this is because we didn’t post using Facebook directly. Interestingly, we had one post on the 2nd of October which was a Facebook Question (meaning we didn’t use HootSuite) but obviously, it still didn’t show up in there. Not sure what happened. (I’ll post again if I see any changes on our Insights page.)

I don’t know if I’m blind but I can’t seem to find the Engaged Users and Talking About This graph that Facebook included in their Insights document. It’s supposed to look like this:



If you’re able to see this on your Insights page, please let me know where you found it.
 
What’s good about this new set of metrics is that you get to drill down on where your most active Facebook fans are from. You also get to find out if they like answering your questions more than commenting on your posts or even analyze which type of content is most likely to be shared.
 
AND you find out that no matter how annoying the Ticker was (I’m used to it now), it actually helps your Facebook page. But I’m pretty sure you already knew that. Check out our Like sources:



I wish they broke it down even more though. I want to see which Facebook Likes are directly from our Page, from the News Feed or from the Ticker.
 
Overall this is good news. The weekly Active Users and New Likes didn’t really help much and I’m happy Facebook is offering even more detailed analytics.  
 
….Except for this one bit of change they’re going to make. Facebook will soon be getting rid of the Reviews tab.
 
This does not make me happy because we now have a lot of reviews and they’re all 5 stars (fine, maybe 99%)! We’ve had this tab up since 2009 and I cherish this section of our page just because it’s so hard to get people started on writing reviews.
 
Since the brand we handle does not have a physical location, I’m not sure our Facebook fans will even get a chance to write a recommendation for us.
 
This is sad news. So if you have a lot of reviews on Facebook (using the Reviews tab of course), I suggest you save them now for future reference… and for sentimental reasons.
 
For Facebook Page owners and admins, you can try out this new Insights page by going to http://www.facebook.com/insights/ and clicking the link up top to view the new Facebook Page Insights.

How to Sync Your Files Through the Interwebz

If you work on your computer a lot (and you probably do if you’re reading this), I hope you’re not using your USB stick to transfer Word docs or Excel files so you can work on them at home.

Probably the only time I will think of using USB sticks is when I’m transferring BAFs (big ass files). And by that I mean 3GB and up. But on the off chance that you still plug in that USB stick every day for transferring work files so you can edit them later on, maybe I can show you a better way.

My work needs me to be on the internet ALL the time (okay fine, just most of the time). I need to constantly have access to files I just sent, files that have been sent to me or files that are just sitting there but at one point could be urgently needed. It’s nice to have all my work-related files available from my office computer.

But sometimes these things happen:

• Diarrhea. Can’t stay at the office obviously. But you need to get sh*t done. (Pun intended)
• Vacation. Or maybe even weekends. (Don’t deny it, you check emails even when you’re not supposed to.)
• Work computer died. (Something to do with torrents? Hmmmm.)

You NEED to be prepared. Now that free Wi-Fi is offered almost everywhere and ‘unlisurf’ plans are available even for prepaid accounts, you have no excuse not to have access to the internet. (Note that I didn’t say fast internet!) Unless of course you’re still using a brick phone…? Exactly! 

So let me share with you my top 2 tools for SYNCING your important files at work with your home (or any other) computer.

 

1. Use Dropbox or Sugarsync.

Some of you might find this too basic but see, I’m also trying to write thispost for people like my sister who doesn’t care about online tools and how itwill help her tremendously with her school work. “Huh, what’s the internet?”

I’m kidding. She knows what the internet is although she probably thinks it’s Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg will be very happy to hear that.

But yes, I will have to explain what the ‘cloud’ is.

Just imagine an actual cloud.

Okay that looks good. Now imagine that’s the internet.

Actually, ignore that. Here’s a better image thanks to whatisthecloudcomputing.com:

If you upload your files to any of these tools, that cloud I showed you saves them so that even when you’re using a different device like your mobile phone or your mom’s computer, as long as you remember your login details, you can still access those same files and even make changes to them.

I don’t need to email myself documents anymore!

Work on that article from your office computer and when you get more ideas for it after you get home, you can just easily access that same file from your home computer and make changes. What? You need to run errands the next day? Does that involve falling in line and waiting for eternity? Don’t worry, you can access, make changes or add even more content from your mobile phone. All changes are saved and synced! Phone, work or home computer, it’s there. 

 

Just download Dropbox or Sugarsync!

If you only want to sync documents and not your entire photo album, I suggest using Dropbox instead as it is free as long as you don’t use up more than 2GB.

You just drag all your files that you want synced to your Dropbox folder and you’re done. You can access it from your phone (you need to install the app of course) and from other computers (either through the desktop app that you download and install or through the Dropbox website). Don’t forget that you need access to the internet to do all this.

I’ve been using SugarSync  for about 2 years now and it has helped me countless times especially during the days I’ve mentioned above. One thing to keep in mind with Dropbox is that they don’t encrypt your files. If you’re planning something against the government, downloading files you don’t want other people knowing (hmmm) or just plain paranoid, this is definitely a deal breaker.
With SugarSync, I just sync all my work folders so that if I have unfinished documents that I need to work on when I get home, it’s just there! I don’t need to drag files tofolders. And I can even work on it while I’m on my phone.

Pricing for SugarSync starts at $49.99 a year for 30GB. Dropbox on the other hand is at $199 a year for 50GB.

Again, if you don’t wantto pay, just use Dropbox’s free 2GB!
 

2. Use Google Docs.

If you haven’t noticed the upload button when you go to your Google Docs page, you can actually upload all sorts of files to it! This feature has actually been available since 2006 (FIVE years ago) but I’ve never really paid attention to it until… last month.

Best thing about this of course is it’s free. So if you’re dead broke, but need to protect more than 2GB of data, then Google Docs it is.

Now as to that question about your files being safe… I’ll leave that up to you.

Check out how it looks like now:

That’s Word, Excel, PDF and PowerPoint right there. They look fine when accessed via Google Docs. Of course you’ll lose comments and edits if you like tracking changes made to your Word documents so I hope you’re not expecting to get all the capabilities of  a full Word doc version. I consider this the super last resort if you don’t want to download anything and just want to be able to quickly upload your documents and access them later on.

I won’t be using this though because I’m happy with SugarSync. I don’t need to do anything, it just saves all my changes automagically!

There you have it! 2 simple ways! I’m sure most of you already know this but for those who are still highly dependent on them USB sticks… it’s time to move on.