Give Back This Holiday Season

When caught up in the hustle and bustle of the holiday season – whether you’re rushing to holiday lunches, fighting your way through mall traffic, scrambling to find the right presents, or planning around a holiday party – it’s easy to overlook the spirit of giving that makes this time of year so wonderful.

Putting a twist on the traditional employee-to-employee gift giving, the DBE team modified our Secret Santa plans this year to give contributions to charities that are important to our team members instead of buying gifts for each other. Each of us made a list of our 3 favorite charities and/or causes and put our lists into a box. We each chose a Secret Santa recipient from the box and made a financial contribution to one of the organizations that he or she listed. At our holiday dinner earlier this week, we shared with each other which organizations we donated to and taught each other a little about their charitable missions.

Some of the organizations we contributed to include:

• CASA of New Jersey - Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) volunteers ensure that children in foster care have a voice in court proceedings that determine their fates.
• Make It Right Foundation - Helping build sustainable and high quality homes at an affordable price for the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
• National Breast Cancer Foundation - Provides ongoing educational programs and funding for free mammograms to women who cannot afford them.
• Udavum Karangel – Provides support to orphans and people in distress in India, including the donation of food, educational materials and health care.
• National Center for Missing & Exploited Children – Helps to prevent child abduction and exploitation and provides assistance to victims and their families.
• The Bridge School – Assists children with severe speech and physical impairments by providing educational programs to facilitate the use of augmentative and alternative means of communications and assistive technology.
• Children’s Wish Foundation – Provides once-in-a-lifetime experiences to children diagnosed with life threatening illnesses.
• Coats for Kids – Provides new winter coats to children in need to both keep children warm and healthy as well as to foster self esteem.

Additionally, our team will be going to help out at Mercer Street Friends Food Bank in the beginning of 2008, as they indicated they have a great need for volunteer assistance after the holidays. We’re glad to have done some good in the world during this holiday season and look forward to the volunteer activities we have scheduled for early next year as well!

To all our blog readers, DBE wishes you the very best during the holidays and throughout the New Year. See you in 2008!

The “Search Marketing” Forest

The Marketing Executive Network Group (MENG) just released its first annual survey of its members on marketing trends and buzzwords. Top-Line: Search
Engine Optimization (SEO) is now clearly recognized as an important trend across both consumer and b2b markets. But I see a much more underlying significance in the survey results…

Please first understand the significance of the survey participants – 31% were Owner/Partners, 22% were C-Level Executive Management and 31% were VP level/Senior Management. That’s 84% of the respondent pool who are either the actual decision-makers or are high-level decision influencers.

So what’s on the mind of these leaders?

Well, again, at first glance, “SEO” is the second most important concept (topped only by a hodge-podge of “marketing basics”). The bigger story here, as revealed in the highlighted chart below, is that 6 of the top 10 marketing trends identified by these high-level marketers include elements of what we at DBE are now calling “search marketing.”





How is search marketing different than search engine optimization? Take a look at all the following marketing buzzwords/concepts used by the MENG survey respondents to describe the marketing trends highlighted. These themes were identified independently of SEO by the survey respondents. Yet, we believe all 19 can be grouped together with SEO and, as such, demonstrate our expansive definition and rationale for “search marketing:”

Lead Generation
Personalization (1 to 1 marketing)
E-commerce
Competitive Intelligence
Fragmentation of Media
Leading through Analytics
Experiential/Emotive Branding
Importance of “Stories”
Viral Marketing
Word of Mouth
Blogging
Web 2.0
Mobile Communications
SNS (Social Network Sites)
CGM (Consumer Generated Media)
Electronic Media
Long Tail
Segmentation*
Marketing ROI*

*Note: the last two were actually ascribed to the Marketing Basics trend but most certainly apply to search marketing.

Here’s the bottom-line bad news/good news as I see it for our clients and others engaged in SEO:

Bad News: SEO is clearly out of the closet and, as a result, the battle for natural rankings is going to get more competitive as more of the 85% of sites that are not yet optimized begin to get engaged.

Good News: Most marketers have not yet grasped that SEO is only one dimension of the search marketing prism. In other words and to shift to another metaphor, while they have identified a number of the new tactical trends/trees, they don’t yet see these are all part of the larger search marketing strategy/forest. And that’s good news because we do see the forest and are already working with our clients to seize the opportunities therein.