Online Marketing Blog

When I attend or speak at conferences, I always, like to visit the exhibit areas to see how they’re laid out, scope out which search marketing agencies are exhibiting and to visit friends from other companies and search engines. While checking out the Interactive exhibit hall here at DMA06, I noticed a few things:

There were hardly any search marketing agencies. Kevin Lee was there with Did-It and I believe I saw iCrossing. That was it. Apparently SEOInc had a booth in the other monstrous Exhibit hall that was made up of list brokers, direct mail companies,etc.

WebmasterRadio.FM man of many talents, Daron Babin, gave a little video interview at DMA 06.

Be sure to check out WebmasterRadio.FM for live interviews and the best Internet radio shows on search marketing.

I believe their next stop will be WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon conference in Las Vegas Nov 14-17, which will be one hell of an event. There will be four keynote presentations including John Battelle, Danny Sullivan, Guy Kawasaki and Jon S. von Tetzchner, the fellow behind the Opera browser.

The DMA06 conference is getting rev’d up with pre conference sessions Satuday and Sunday. The new search engine marketing certification program started on Saturday with Jeannette Kocsis, VP of Digital Marketing at Harte-Hanks, presenting on “Introduction to Search Engine Marketing” and I followed up with “Search Engine Basics”.

Unfortunatley, I was not able to sit in on Jeannette’s session, but Amanda Watlington said there was great feedback. Here’s the description of the module:

This Friday starts an exciting journey for the next 10 days or so. I will be leaving for San Francisco on Friday to the DMA06 conference in San Francisco until the 18th. I was just in San Francisco a few weeks ago for a SEO video shoot with AllBusiness.com.

On Saturday I’ll be doing one of the four modules for the DMA’s new Search Engine Marketing certification program. Then on Monday I’m doing a “Blogs, RSS and Podcasting” panel with Amanda Watlington and Stephan Spencer. My presentation will be about using blogs for public relations. On Tuesday I’ll be doing a search marketing lab where a panel reviews web sites from the auduience and that evening I’ll be participating on a panel on using RSS for marketing.

The Direct Marketing Association has officially announced their Certification Program in Search Engine Marketing today. The first modules are being offered at DMA06 in San Francisco in October. There will be two levels of certification focused on agency and in-house marketers:

• Level 1: Designed for individuals able to work under the direction of an advanced search engine marketer. These individuals would know and be able to employ current best practices in organic or paid search marketing.
• Level 2: Designed for individuals who are capable of devising, creating, and managing effective search engine marketing programs within agencies or as lead members of in-house marketing teams. At this level, individuals can seek advanced certification in organic or paid search.

I’ll catch hell from our PR people if I don’t mention somewhere that I am speaking at 2 and possibly 3 different sessions at the DMA06 conference Oct 14-19. The DMA annual conference is the largest marketing conference in the world.

One session is a 2 1/2 hour SEO 101 class on the search engine landscape and the other is on blogs, RSS and podcasting with Amanda Watlington and Stephan Spencer.

After that I’ll be doing a presentation on social media optimization for the eComXpo vitrual tradeshow Oct 24 followed up by a session on SEO for a local event, VISI Data Center 2.0 on Nov 2.