I hope you have your digital marketing cap on because we have some great stories to share with you this week from the DBE team:

• It’s not too late to start “Rethinking your strategic planning for 2021.” This article recommends splitting the year into two halves. The first half is for what is practical given the current realities. The second half is for a little bigger dreaming. In both cases, keep it simple, focusing on just a couple of strategies.
• Have you heard of DuckDuckGo? No, it’s not an app version of the game Duck, Duck, Goose. But it is a search engine of a different feather in that it is taking a privacy-minded approach with its business model. Last week, DuckDuckGo handled over 100 million searches in one day for the first time. A far cry from the 5 billion searches per day conducted on Google, for sure, and yet it may be on a path to overtaking Bing one day.
• Google threatens to pull its search engine in Australia. And there’s more…Facebook is making threats too. Should you care? We think you should, that’s why we’re sharing. There are multiple layers to the issues here: sharing news, not sharing news, paying for shared news, who sets the terms for paying for news…you’ll see, it’s a lot…
• Proper grammar can make or break brand credibility, with many people more inclined to trust content that’s cleared the typo and grammatical errors hurdles. Not sure if this attention to detail is still important? This article spells out the benefits of careful content reviews for marketers.
• Marketing to teens? Watch your tone.
• We’re big fans of Dan Nestle’s podcast, “The Dan Nestle Show,” and are looking forward to being his guests. In the meantime, this interview with Dan Golden of Be Found Online has some wonderful perspectives on where search engine marketing has been and where it’s going. We were buzzing about it for days and thought you’d appreciate this podcast too.

Do Good Spotlight: Wikipedia

That’s right, Wikipedia. We recently included an article about the future of Wikipedia, in What’s Hot Wednesday, and we donated too. Need a refresher on this organization hyper focused on truth and free access to information?

Wikipedia is a free and open encyclopedia, hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. The heart and soul of Wikipedia is their global community of over 200,000+ volunteer contributors and billions of readers–united to share unlimited access to reliable information.

You can learn more about Wikipedia Foundation and make a donation from here too.

Okay, that’s it for this week. Here’s to hoping the groundhog sees his shadow but that you get lots of winter fun in before the days grow longer! Enjoy!