A little bird told me if I would like to improve my knowledge, grow up and become expertise in the industry that I choose for my career path, I need to invest time and money on building up a social presence by attending conference organized by gurus, experts in the industry. It is true that the more you go out, the more interesting or boring people you may meet and of course bigger chance to promote yourself.

I’m used to place myself apart from the events that I feel likely nothing could be learned from the speakers, especially things rooted from overseas. Because, most of documentations could be found online and if you have a certain amount of vocabularies, you will figure out how to do SEO and Social Media. And if you are into it and always want to stay ahead in the industry, you can subscribe many bloggers such as Matt Cutts, Randfish, Danny Sullivan and actively research in Search Engine Land, Word Stream, Hubspots.

Although SEO/Social Media has actually come to Vietnam for around 10 years, it only started to receive community’s concerns from last 5 years. What SEO/Social Media gurus do in Vietnam pretty much response to what were stated in blog posts of top SEOers. It leads to the fact that many speakers tend to translate and re-present what were written in the blog into a verbal way via paid conference like the one I took this afternoon the SESOMO.

I do know this kind of conference has objectives out of the box such as selling courses or services or at least improving brand awareness. Indeed, they do a great job since many people look at them as the leaders of the industry and of course, they will have potential clients by the end of  the day.

SESOMO attracted my eyeballs when I was surfing Facebook last week. Because Google replied me no answer for this search query, I felt so interested and happy to reserve a seat at this conference. I was interested because of the creative combination of words (SE – Search Engine ; SO Social; Mo – Mobile) and I was happy because I thought that Vietnamese SEOer finally had something brand new and different to share with the community.

Ok, here is what I learned from the conference

1. The reason why the conference is held: “It is about the community, we want to build up a community where people can have a transparent view of what SEO and Social Media is” said by Mr. Vũ Việt Dũng

2. SESOMO is a marketing term created by Vietnamese SEO/Social Media gurus to point out the combination of optimizing search engine for mobile and social networks (of course involves website basis). In turn, notice people to be aware of the aggressive progress of mobile marketing and social media marketing.

3. Mr. Trần Ngọc Chính almost re-present most of what I have read in the document SEO Trends 2013. He presented quite well and definitely cover most of the main points.

4. Will Lì is a new Social Media guru, I first met, who brought a new breeze to the conference. Although I expected to hear more from Mr. Dũng, Will did a good job to make everyone laugh but still a professional presenter. What a pity since I could not remember of what he shared in the meeting.

5. Mr. Tuấn Hà is such a professional speaker and his talk is very much valuable, which I can add in my strategic plan for upcoming social media plans:

+ To take the advantage of check-ins function on Facebook to link to your FB company’s pages.

+ Take time to to write reviews on Google+, Google maps because It will affect the author rank. (I am not quite sure of this point because I cannot find any links to the reviews that I commented except blog posts on different sites that I had contributed to)

+ Optimize Facebook will affect your presence on Bing Search Engine and Google+, Twitter for Google Search Engine.

+ To optimize Mobile marketing, SEOer should optimize on-site and off-site, build a responsive website for mobile and localize your presence on search result pages.

6. “Pagerank high is so annoying because the webmaster or web admin will waste time to delete the comments or find the way to restrict the number of comments with links.” Said by Mr. Đăng. I totally agreed with him on this term but I have another case which probably should be put into the investigation. If there were two websites having the same amount of backlinks, one had a PR 4 another only 5, which one will be showed on the first page for the same keyword?

7. Mr. Vũ Lê is the honest guy when he shared his story about doing black hat SEO for Soundmax. So at least one of our speakers who dare to speak out the truth. I doubted whether he is still using tricks now, but still everyone likes to do easy job and receive good payrolls. I myself usually analyze black hat tricks to enhance my white strategy in an acceptable level.

At the end of the meeting, a very interesting situation happenned. A lady from a game mobile firm stole the mic and asked all the speakers to take photos with her at the socalled “the biggest SEO conference of 2013 in HCMC”. She was very smart to ask the social media gurus how many likes and how well this photo can make her company’s FB fanpage go viral. Noone coukd resist on her proposal which then remained in me a special curiosity about her job and the company behind her. In fact, she was the highlight of the conference and certainly I did talk to her and know that she worked for MC corp.

For a sustainable progressive development, I think Vietnamese SEO and Social Media gurus should invest more time on reading and experiencing official techniques by themselves since actually SEO is very easy for those who have marketing mindset, interesting writing style in SEO model, basic coding skills and no fear of failures. That’s it…!