Questions About Sempo Aug. 18th Newsletter Options

[Jill]

Dear SEMPO Board of Directors:

I have some questions regarding your latest newsletter, dated August 18, 2004. I am emailing these to you, as well as posting them in a moderated-only forum at my HighRankings.com forum. (Link to be posted in the email.)

I hope that you will take some time to respond to me either personally (on the record) or in the forum thread, as many people seem to have the same questions and concerns that I do, as well as some others.

Here are my questions based on the information in the Aug. 18th newsletter:

1. Communication to Members
    - SEMPO forum in beta
          - looking for moderators (email info@sempo.org)

Where's the forum? Can we see it and test it? It's in beta so it must be up somewhere. What do the moderators need to do? How many do you need?

2.  - Increased membership communication
      (http://www.sempo.org/downloads/SEMPO_member_meeting_8.2.04.pdf)
    - Membership levels being reviewed
    - Volunteers from SES contacted and being put to work
    - committees that are active or being formed: education, b2b, Europe, Japan,

I didn't download the pdf, but it appears that it's the minutes of the boring San Jose meeting.

That's a GOOD thing to send us. Tell us what it is in the newsletter so that we know!

What does membership levels being reviewed mean? An increase in dues? Less categories of membership?

3. SEMPO Governance
      - Lawyer engaged to review operations; preliminary review completed
      - Governance documents in legal review

Why was a lawyer engaged, and what did they find in the review? There must be something in writing there, why can't members see it, or at least know what it's all about?

What are governance documents, and why are they being reviewed?

4.  Executive Director
      - Identification of types of management structures completed
      - Job description posted on sempo.org (www.sempo.org/jobs.php)
      - members asked to provide candidates for position (email info@sempo.org)

This is good and was discussed in San Jose. Has the job been advertised anywhere else? I would imagine it's going to need to be out there on job boards and in newspapers. They're looking for a professional, it's not something we can just email info in with our friends' names. So tell us more about this job candidate search.

Give me the job description and we'll post it here at the forum and in my newsletter. (Although I doubt we have the right target audience.)

Elected Board Member Positions
    - Election committee formed of member volunteers (new members welcome to committee)
    - By-laws will be modified and legally reviewed to reflect new process
    - Board of Directors election process will being developed based on new by-laws
    - All new processes will be communicated to members

This all sounds really promising! I'm surprised they didn't give more detail here. Tell us what the duties of the election committee will be. Good to know the new processes will be communicated to members, but when and how?

Outreach to Target Audience
    - Advertising campaign launched August 2nd
          - http://www.sempo.org/press/ad-campaign.php
 

What media did the ads go out to? How much did it cost?

- Results of first round of research to be released to public via press
interviews, analyst briefings and editorials
    - members to be notified when research is posted on sempo.org
    - intention and direction of research announced
      (http://www.sempo.org/qa/downloads/Rick-Bruner-SEMPO-SanJose-Research-Preview.ppt)

Heard about this at the SJ meeting too, which was good to know.

And then it ended:

Welcome to all the new members that have joined recently. Visit sempo.org and the member area to keep up to date on the progress of SEMPO and the work being done to promote SEM to the rest of the world of marketing.

I did look in the members only section of the SEMPO site, but didn't seem to see any actual new info to see the progress.

If a SEMPO representative could simply elaborate on these things and address my concerns, I know it would at least go a long way towards giving you the extra time you need to take care of the matters at hand.

I was anxiously awaiting this last newsletter which is why I was so disappointed to see it was just a table of contents.

Many of us really do want to stick up for you SEMPO. Give us a good reason to! Please answer these basic questions from your members and the SEM community at large. (There may be others to come.)

[Jill]

There's a couple of other questions from people here that haven't yet been approved through moderation. Just so anyone who posts here knows, I'd like to wait a bit to give people from SEMPO a chance to respond to the first questions. Don't want to barrage them all at once.

If/when they respond, I'll approve the rest of the questions. (Or maybe one or two at a time.) But feel free to keep posting them, and hopefully we'll see someone from SEMPO here during the week to answer them.

[Jill]

Sorry, I posted a reply from Dana Todd (SEMPO board member) here before actually getting her permission (which a few of you may have read). Basically, I'm reposting the info, but some of the things that pertained to legal stuff is apparently for members-only discussions, not for forum postings, so I have removed some of it.

At any rate I do have some good info and some answers to my questions, so thank you Dana!

Regarding the legal issues, Dana said that they've gotten an initial review as a preliminary task, so as to save some money when they retain a law firm. His findings are inconclusive, but mention some areas of membership that are gray and need to be reviewed further by a nonprofit attorney. Having gone through this initial review to document their concerns, he says, will help cut down on the eventual attorney’s fees in the first phase of the relationship.

Dana swears that there is no disaster, no emergency, no IRS investigation, no drama, and she expressed surprise at the momentum that has built up in the forums surrounding these issues in such a short period of time. She characterized things as more of a "hmmm...probably should have that looked at" situation.

Regarding their advertising campaign, Dana said that it is running now, and they're adding some new venues next month. The initial rollout venues are listed in the powerpoint slides in the Members section. Primarily they're hitting Adweek/Brandweek sites and emails, Mediaweek emails, CoolNews Reveries email newsletter right now. Next rollouts are ClickZ and possibly some specific event advertising (Ad:tech). They also have some run-of-site ads on Forbes that will be launching in September (one of the volunteers has them for a client and is giving them some remnant inventory free). Dana said that she just saw a new batch of ads that one of the volunteer companies did, and they're doing touchups on those to replace the current ones so that they're fresh.

Regarding the SEMPO forum, Dana said they are in beta, but that these are primarily to be used as sort of “virtual meeting rooms� for the committees, as well as a general series of feedback forums. They don’t want them to become a “how-to� forum like HighRankings or Webmasterworld. It’s just for members to discuss SEMPO stuff with each other and help expedite communications. One of their biggest goals right now is making sure they leverage their volunteer squads properly, and give them enough direction without having to personally manage every decision and task. She said they were stretched pretty thin on the Board, but had dozens of new volunteers sign up at the last meeting, and they "don’t want to waste those brains and hands."

They're working to integrate the forums with the member logins, so that you don’t have to set up a separate password/login. It may be a couple of weeks until that’s working smoothly as they're customizing the forum software. When the forums are up and running they'll send out an invitation to the membership. Each committee will have its own forum thread.

Both Dana and Barbara Coll (in an earlier email to me) made it very clear that they are working extremely hard on all the issues and that they're pretty much going as fast as they can.

For my part, I can appreciate that, but I don't feel that that's an excuse not to simply be more clear and give these kinds of details. I shouldn't have to ask "as a friend" for the answers, because I'm simply a SEMPO member like the other 250 members. Instead of each of them asking and getting a personal response like I got, it would be a lot easier (one would think) to send this info out to the group.

At any rate, there have also been vacations (as Greg their PR guy mentioned the other day) which also slows things down. Dana had in fact just returned from hers when she replied to my email.

I hope that either Dana or any of the other board members will continue to keep me, as well as the rest of the SEM/SEO community up to date with what they're doing to get things on the right track.

I'm sure we'll have other questions for them, and perhaps they can post the answers themselves (which would make my life easier!).

Please feel free to discuss this in a new thread as the posts in this section are all moderated and won't go through.

Thanks again to Dana for speaking out when no one else would!

(IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/appl.gif)

Jill