Starting March 18, I will be serving as a member of SEMPO board of directors along with 12 other members. I am very excited to have the opportunity to serve the organization, which has more than 800 organizations, companies and individual members from around the world, educating the industry and people about the search and digital marketing.

Since the day I joined SEMPO, I’ve believed in the cause and the role it has in the industry. I was a founding member of SEMPO Japan, which is the first regional group within SEMPO. After I helped establishing SEMPO India and SEMPO Singapore, I was appointed as a chairman of SEMPO Asia in 2007. In 2009, after establishing SEMPO Greater China, we grew to SEMPO APAC, and our activities now reach to Australia and New Zealand.

The great news is that new Board of Directors include members from 7 different countries. I trust that this new BoDs will bring SEMPO to the next stage of truly global organization.

Last week, I was in Japan for business, and was able to attend the first SEMPO Japan meet up of the year in Tokyo. SEMPO gave great presentations about Search, Social Media, and Mobile market, which were very well received and appreciated by the attendees.

SEMPO APAC has a monthly webinar designed for the search marketing practitioners in Asia Pacific region. While the live webinar is provided in English, the Chinese version of the slides are also available for download for the participants from China.

The groups in other regions such as UK, Canada, Scandinavia, and Spain are organizing wonderful activities, too. In US, members in cities such as New York, Boston, Atlanta and San Francisco also have exciting events coming up this year. SEMPO is not only for agencies but also great for in-house people. In fact, SEMPO’s In-House Committee is one of the biggest and most active groups we have.

I hope that you’ll check out SEMPO to see if you find anything you are interested in. If you have any questions or comments for SEMPO, let us know. (info@sempo.org)