Part II:

Transcript

Dana Todd sits down with Brett Tabke to discuss SiteLab, SEMPO, the maturation of the search industry, and her biggest industry specific pet peeve.

dana todd sempo sitelab interactive brett tabke webmasterworld searchengineworld seo sem google dance smo video pr

Brett Tabke: This is Brett Tabke we are back here in Silicon Valley with Miss Dana Todd of SiteLab founder. Were you the co-founder or did you start yourself it yourself exclusively?

Dana Todd: I started it with some partners. Actually there were five of us originally and now in our tenth year we have three fulltime partners and as well as some majority shareholders and folks who help to keep reinvesting in SiteLab.

Brett Tabke: Excellent. So have you guys always done search marketing or marketing in general.

Dana Todd: We are actually a full service interactive agency. We are boutique so we are small, but we have actually done, we continue to do web development, flash development, creative banners, media placements so if you have looked at the spread of our profit centers it is actually pretty evenly divided between what you would call promotional types of services like search marketing and banner buys and other types of media PR and web development and high-end development. So we do a lot of flash programming as well.

Brett Tabke: You are longtime speaker on the search marketing conference circuit at Search Engine Strategies, PubCon, AdTech. You are on the AdTech advisory committee. We were cofounders of SEMPO together.

Dana Todd: Exactly. I am proud to say it is still going strong.

Brett Tabke: Yeah, and you were most recently president of SEMPO last year for two years?

Dana Todd: Yeah

Brett Tabke: So in fact you joined us here today just coming from a SEMPO meeting.

Dana Todd: Matter of fact yeah I am still on the board so I will retain that position for this year as well.

Brett Tabke: Excellent. In fact in you pretty much saved that organization to my way of thinking completely.

Dana Todd: Oh, I would like to take all the credit, but I cannot. I would say there is a big old board and a lot of volunteers that hold together and continue to make it happen. So it wasn’t me it just was everybody’s hope and desires to make it work.

Brett Tabke: Yeah, it was quality leadership. It was quality leadership that.

Dana Todd: Well, thank you.

Brett Tabke: Because it was a rough start for us when we started SEMPO. It was a hard year.

Dana Todd: It is a hard year and this is a weird industry. We are weird people. We are not joiners, we are basement people you know eating pizza and typing. We are not joiners unless there is booze involved so that is why of course SEMPO meetings always have booze .We made that executive decision a long time ago.

Brett Tabke: That was first budget item.

Dana Todd: Must have, must have beer. Keep the people happy, but the people join it because they want to as much as you stay in a basement all day long you still have that need to reach out and communicate with people, which is why obviously the WebmasterWorld forums are so incredibly popular people do have a need to go, "I just saw something funny what do think of that?" You know there is a need to understand, there is a feeling of inclusiveness that it is us against the machines you know.

Brett Tabke: What are some of the big industry trends you have noticed through SEMPO talking with everybody?

Dana Todd: Probably the biggest, the biggest global change is the maturation, the maturing of the industry as a whole. It is really funny we were just coming from the SEMPO meeting and were looking at back in the day you know when the Google dance occurred every 30 days there were these tumultuous upheavals constantly, we were in a constant state of not just minor change, but major changes all the time. There is a feeling that you really had to just obsess on a daily basis about every piece of information that you had. Now I mean it started with Google not going through the 30 day cycles and people not seeing dramatic increases you could actually feel like you could relax a little bit and start to define best practices and start to hire around that and grow your business practices around that. So now in these umpteen years later we are seeing that being further adopted by in-house people. So as internal corporate marketers are embracing search marketing to bring that in-house it is stabilizing things and broadening the knowledge and seeing applications growing in ways that we never anticipated so it is truly a much more mature industry now than I think it has ever been. It is not people still like to think of it as the Wild West. I think it is maybe as California, but it is not really the Wild West per se. It is not Arizona or Montana.

Brett Tabke: Well, it is maturing but we are still growing. I think we see the growth in the labor market.

Dana Todd: Absolutely. There are, if you look at the job board at SEMPO it is you know 30 feet long with open positions. So there are definitely a lot more places for people, bodies to come in and bring their expertise from the outside world into search marketing. The cool thing about search marketing is that it's a very, I like it because it appeals to both left brain and right brain. It can bring in all kinds of people. It is a very inclusionary sort of tactic and study. So from an academic standpoint you could bring in people from philosophy, politics, math and analytics and programming of course. You know all of these disciplines, and even so far as linguistics and English majors and people who are interested in understanding language, demand driven language which is what we are really sort of seeing now and so just modifying the way we speak to each other and the way we speak to our audiences.

Brett Tabke: Well, with a long list of job openings comes a need for a qualified labor pool and we were just talking earlier about your moment with SEMPO Institute Training.

Dana Todd: Absolutely. So one of the things that we are most proud of is launching the SEMPO Institute and it was a labor of love, that and a lot of volunteer labor. We had probably I would say 60 or more volunteer authors, contributors and editors who pooled their knowledge into a set of best practices and tactics in the traditional SEO disciplines as well as paid search advertising. So we have got three courses now, we have a fundamentals to bring people in from any discipline outside of our market and come in and ramp you up to get you understanding what you need to know about search and then we have two advanced tracks, one for SEO and one for search advertising that are equivalent to college courses as far as the intensity in the work that is involved, quizzes, there is a test for each lesson. Each course has approximately ooh, 13 or 14 lessons and some of the lessons are quite robust. So we do see it being a fairly hefty involvement, but already we have only had a few people through the advance search advertising courses, but their employers tell us that they are much better and much more productive now as employees. We have had over a 168 students total entering the university, the institute and so many of them have graduated now. One guy actually completed all three in fairly record time. I was surprised. He is just soaking up the knowledge. It is great.

Brett Tabke: Excellent, excellent. Have you done anything with social media at all? It kind of seems to be the buzz in the industry these days.

Dana Todd: It is very sexy, isn't it?

Brett Tabke: SMO.

Dana Todd: Yeah, SMO, SMO. No. Gosh it sure looks like PR to me, doesn’t it? I think we would just like to come up with new labels. Well it is a different type of PR, it is a different type of discipline. It is harder to price as an agency because it looks more like a consultation service as opposed to a media buy because you call it social media, but it is really not social media, it is media relations. It is media relations in a number of different channels essentially. So yes, we are doing some actually for a couple of clients who have a target market that is essentially entirely online so they didn't want to do any offline they really wanted to do guerilla or grass roots type of growth. You really have no choice but to go directly to the blogs, the video channels, the various sharing in communities and talk about particularly this particular client is in sports, the online sports and gaming industry. So gamers hang out at gamer sites that is where they are. They are not watching television.

Brett Tabke: Right. Right. Well, are you doing anything with video then?

Dana Todd: We are starting to. I'm very excited. We want to do more obviously because you can optimize videos, we can optimize existing assets and we are getting into actually our first production of a video for a client. So usually we are on the receiving end we are sort of the last channel, oh, yeah, search. So we get the assets that they have already used for maybe a direct response or a television commercial so you are really just sort of stuck optimizing a 30-sec or a 60-second spot, but I would like to do more specific to internet. We also do a lot of flash development as well.

Brett Tabke: Interesting. I did not realize you guys were going down that road.

Dana Todd: Well, heck yeah we do all kinds of stuff.

Brett Tabke: As a full service I should expect it I guess. So last question, what is your biggest pet peeve about the industry these days?

Dana Todd: Ah bloggers, no just kidding, kidding, totally kidding, totall kidding. Well, probably my biggest pet peeve is the devaluing of the services. In many cases we still see, so we have on the SEMPO site there is a little kind of a RFP form where people can submit a request for services to our membership you know I monitor them pretty frequently it helps me to get a feel for some of the demand out there for search marketing services and there is still a great gap of knowledge about how much work search marketing is. It is not, like all marketing, it is work. You could put a little into it or you can put a lot into it and your result is pretty much dependent on your level of effort and resources going in. So I consistently see people coming in with unreal expectations of being number one for you know really difficult category like financial services at a whopping budget of $4,000. It is just not going to get you there, it is not. Just like you could not go and try to dominate the US commercial or consumer space for VOIP you know with a budget of $50,000 dollars. You are not going to do it sorry you will buy one commercial in one metro and that is it. So either you really, there truly is a major knowledge gap there and of course SEMPO is constantly trying to reeducate the public and let them understand how to be better buyers and consumers in social marketing.

Brett Tabke: Appreciate you taking the time with us. Thanks Dana.

Dana Todd: Thanks very much.

Brett Tabke: Thank you.

Dana Todd: Bye, bye.

[edited by: Vanessa_Zamora at 5:14 pm (utc) on Jan. 7, 2009]