DBE Through a Kid's Eyes

Yesterday, April 25th, was Bring your Child to Work Day and DBE had the good fortune to be joined by Zachary, the 10 year old son of our Business Administration Manager, Candida Pangaldi. We all thoroughly enjoyed having Zachary with us and loved his take on what we do and how we do it. For your reading pleasure, in his own words, here is Zachary's post for DBE:

I spent the day with my Mom for Bring Your Child to Work Day learning what she and others she works with do at Digital Brand Expressions. There were several meetings scheduled for me to meet with people and learn what they do. It was a busy schedule. My Mom helped me come up with a few questions I could ask each of them to learn more about what they do at DBE.

First, I met with Rob at 9 a.m. Rob does site clicking and coding. He used a lot of big words and some I didn't know what they meant. But he was very nice.

Next I met with Marc. He uses programs and gets reports, stats, and graphs that help him figure out how many people are on the sites now and how many people are on there for other months. This helps DBE help other companies get more customers. I think his job is very interesting. He told me to do his job you have to take a Google class and open book test along with other types of classes. His favorite part of his job is to figure out how many people are on different sites.

At 10:15 a.m. I met with Lauren. Lauren works with Adam and she makes close relationships with DBE clients. Lauren told me that to do her job you need to go to college and get a degree. Her favorite part of her job is working with her clients.

Then I met with Adam who works with Lauren. Adam tests out other client’s products and gets to travel to where the clients are located. Adam told me his favorite part of his job is that he gets to travel to different places and try out other client’s stuff.

At 11 a.m. I met with Mrs. Fielding, the owner of DBE. She has a very busy job making sure everything runs smooth. She said she is always on the phone and works on getting new clients for her company. She showed me what Google and Yahoo! see behind the websites. I thought that was really cool! Mrs. Fielding is so nice and showed me a lot.

I met with Meghan who does DBE’s writing for websites at noon. She posts blogs about different tips, writes a lot, and researches ideas. She is still going to college and she is always asking others for advice so she can learn more. Her favorite part of her job is getting to write blogs and tips for other people.

Lunch time! I got to have pizza with the whole company in the conference room… yum!

At 3 p.m. I met with Trishna and Bethany. They make advertisements for Facebook and other websites. They showed me a video advertisement for Coca Cola and how marketing works. Then they showed me a funny picture of a Star Trek app that you can post a picture of a person to and make them a Star Trek character. They took a picture of Adam and turned him into a Borg. It was pretty funny. I learned that Trishna is going to school to get her Masters degree in marketing. Both Bethany and Trishna love making advertisements for websites.

I met with Andrew next and learned he puts up pictures and description boxes for clients on websites like Pinterest. I thought his job was cool. Andrew is just finishing college. He also took the Google class and test just like Marc. His favorite part of his job is posting things on the internet.

At 3:30 p.m. I met with Pam. Pam is the boss of all of the teams. She makes sure everyone is doing their job and when she gets an idea she tells the clients as a suggestion to help them build their business. She told me she is good at her job because she got a college degree and has learned through experiences.

The last person I will tell you about is my mom who I spent most of the day with. She is the Manager of Business Administration. She takes care of office things, computers, employees, and manages DBE’s money. I think she has a pretty important job. She told me her favorite part of her job is getting to do a variety of things so she is not bored and working with great people. I think she is pretty lucky to work at DBE and I love her.

Adding Content for SEO

How to build an Optimized WebSite

You’ve just launched your beautiful, streamlined site. Now why isn’t there any traffic?

It seems like the latest trend in website design is minimalism.  If you’re launching a new site or redesigning an existing one, think about one thing; “How are people going to find me?”  Even after taking care of all the technical aspects to make sure your site loads quickly and can be crawled by the search engines, you need to do more.  While it may look great to limit the content on your site to a handful of pages, it’s not a good idea from an optimization perspective. 

I’m sure you’ve heard that in SEO "content is king".  To attract search engine visibility for a variety of keywords, each keyword needs its own page of well-written, engaging content.  Great content gets referenced and linked to by other websites which is a key search engine ranking factor. On top of that, people share great content with their social media networks, making social signals another factor the search engines are now taking into account.

For an evaluation of a well-constructed site, and a list of tips and design ideas, request our full POV.

Pharma Marketers Blaze a Trail in Social Media

Where do you turn for healthcare information?

New research indicates that nearly half of US adult consumers used social media for health-related purposes in 2012, and that number continues to rise as social media earns acceptance as a universal communication tool.

 
With the exception of a few shrewd trailblazers, pharmaceutical companies in the US have long been skittish about using social media to connect with consumers due to a lack of social media guidance from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The growing opportunity to connect with patients, caregivers, and healthcare providers through social media, however, is leading more pharma companies to explore their options.

Social media communities and technologies can be leveraged to meet a variety of objectives, including patient loyalty and support, physician education, clinical trial recruitment, consumer research, disease awareness, corporate social responsibility, and brand protection. Protocols and staff training help manage compliance challenges and make social media a manageable – and highly effective – marketing tool for drug companies.

At DBE, we’ve had the satisfaction of helping guide our pharmaceutical clients through the social media adoption process, working closely with their teams to develop strategies that support larger brand goals, and delivering results that are demonstrable through online conversations and bottom-line numbers. Contact us to learn more about how we’re helping our pharma and healthcare clients – and how we can be helping your brand.

After Thoughts from SESNY

It’s been about 2 weeks since SESNY.  I covered the conference as a social reporter for our client SEMPO and captured some tweet highlights in my guest blog for them last week. Interestingly, unlike other conferences I’ve attended, I find myself still thinking about some of the overarching themes that emerged there and wanted to share some thoughts:

• As a conference name “Search Engine Strategies (SES)” is no longer representative of the evolved state of our business.  Fortunately, as I discussed with Incisive’s Matt McGowan while at SES, they purposefully delivered keynotes and a number of sessions that reflect the now-accepted understanding that sophisticated marketers consider search (SEO and PPC) as part of a larger digital marketing strategy that is integrated with offline tactics as well.
  
• The term “content marketing” is being used by many to bridge the growing synergy between SEO and Social Media.   Unfortunately, I think it’s becoming one of those broad, corporate speak buzz words that sound good but lacks definition or, worse, means something different to all who hear it.  We here at DBE actually prefer to use the term “context marketing” that addresses the need to put the right content in the right place(s) to drive connection with your target audiences.  Context marketing also extends beyond SEO and Social to include other emerging media delivery channels like video and mobile.
  
• Speaking of buzz words, “big data” was bandied about quite a bit at the conference and I wonder if it’s plateaued as a concept (i.e., big data your 15 minutes are up).  Don’t get me wrong - the need for analytics is more important than ever to drive program improvements and to justify investment.  But it seems like more and more marketers understand it’s not really about the amount of data you have but how you leverage it that matters.  In fact, we've seen how “small data” insights can often lead to big revenue increases for our clients.

Stay tuned.  I’m headed to an iStrategy conference in a couple of weeks and am looking forward to see how it compares/contrasts with my takeaways from SES.