TopRank Marketing has been fortunate to present at the Direct Marketing Association annual conference for 4 years in a row and a 5th appearance several years before that. (See photos from DMA07 here) Over 10,000 marketers attend the DMA show making it the largest marketing conference in the world and with this year’s show being held in Las Vegas, it should be another great event.
The DMA has traditionally been known as an organization steadfast in marketing principles and rooted in traditional marketing education but has made quite a bit of progress in the online marketing space with it’s Search Engine Marketing Certification program and upcoming attention to social media. In fact, this year’s DMA08 show includes online marketing sessions on:
- Affiliate marketing
- Consumer generated content
- Blog marketing
- Email marketing
- Pay-per-click advertising
- Online public relations (TopRank)
- Search engine optimization
- Social networking
- Web analytics
That lineup of conference programming is really filling out and offering companies that “get” direct marketing, an opportunity to really dig in to many aspects of internet and search marketing you could only previously get at events dedicated to SEM.
People speaking on Internet and search marketing topics at DMA08 include: Heather Lloyd Martin of Successworks, Graeme McLaughlin of BCAA, David Berkowitz of 360i, Olivier Lemaignen of Intuit, Randy Peterson of Proctor & Gamble, Dave Lloyd of Cisco, Paul Bruemmer of Red Door Interactive, Craig Macdonald of Covario, Duane Forrester of Microsoft, Jeremy Schoemaker, Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts and Andrew Beckman of Location3 Media.
I do plan on a bit of blogging during the week, so hopefully I can get a few interviews in along with session liveblogging.
On October 16th, Matt Bailey and I will be presenting a series of Search Engine Marketing primer workshops (actually, mostly Matt) on SEO, blogs and online PR. Post conference workshops are smaller and give attendees and speakers a much better opportunity to get specific and get into meaty Q/A.
Matt will be talking about SEO and Blogs and I’ll be focusing on none other than online public relations. But of course, I couldn’t leave out some aspect of blogs as marketing and PR tools since they can be applicable to just about any digital marketing effort.
If you’re attending the DMA08 conference in Las Vegas this year, be sure to check out these post conference intensives. I suspect many attendees will be able to justify the expense of at least part of the conference just by the information we’ll be providing. Here’s more info on the session I’m presenting:
Search Marketing and Online Public Relations
The future of organic search optimization is heavily influenced by the effect of combining SEO and online public relations tactics. Online marketers stand to gain a distinct competitive advantage by leveraging media consumption trends and understanding how SEO and PR intersect through optimizing news content such as press releases and online newsrooms. Learn results-focused PR tactics such as pitching bloggers and online media as well as proactive online reputation management and PR analytics.Date/Time 10/16/2008 9:30 AM – 11:30 AMRoom LV Hilton Conference Room 7-8
There’s obviously a lot more going on at DMA08 than search and internet marketing with hundreds of sessions, keynotes, pre and post conference events and special activities. You can read our past coverage of DMA and while I don’t think there’s anyone officially blogging the event, there is a frequently updated news feed at MyDMA365.
Please let me know in the comments below or via Twitter if you’re attending and we can have a DMA08 Tweetup!
