Marketing Tom - Internet Marketing

Keep Track of your To-Do Lists with Ta-da Lists

I just came across a neat new tool, called Ta-da Lists, which allows you to make lists of things you need to do, such as Bills to Pay, Things to do for the Holidays, Search Engines to Submit to, Blog Articles to Write, Directories to Link to, etc. To-Do lists are one of the suite of elements that belong to Basecamp, the brilliant project management tool created by the same team. The cost of Ta-da Lists is free and is well worth trying out - it even lets you share your lists with others and even to subscribe to your lists in RSS!

Original Source
Ta-da Lists - Keeping is simple. (Marketing Playbook)

Inland Revenue (UK Tax Office) Manages a PR of 6/10

I've just been on the Inland Revenue's site and noticed that its Self Assessment page for tax returns had a Google PR (Page Rank) of 6/10, on  whilst its 2003-04 Tax Returns, Notes and Help Sheets managed a PR of 5/10. And no, I don't make a habit of frequenting such sites!

A9 Launches Online Local Yellow Pages (with photos)

A9 has just launched a new search product, in partnership with Yellow Pages, which gives users the opportunity to get address details, view maps and even photographs of business addresses. Coupled with the ability to view books (through Amazon), a search engine (results enhanced by Google) and image search (enhanced results by Google).

According to an article in Business Week - Amazon Elbows Into Online Yellow Pages:

Few of A9's individual features are unique, but they're wrapped together in a package that Sherman thinks will be appealing to people who want a more visceral connection with businesses in their local communities. Search on "sushi," for instance, and the site -- which knows where visitors live from their Amazon account or deduces it from their network address -- brings up a list of nearby sushi joints along with a map showing where they are. They also can click a button to call the business using a free Internet phone service.

Here’s what A9 had to say about the process of capturing the images:

Using trucks equipped with digital cameras, global positioning system (GPS) receivers, and proprietary software and hardware, A9.com drove tens of thousands of miles capturing images and matching them with businesses and the way they look from the street.

Currently 10 US cities have been mapped with 20 million images with plans to roll it out across the entire US.

Russell Beattie on the other hand had this to say about the new technology in an article entitled A9: "Never been done before?"

My bullshit meter went off when I was watching the A9 video about how they added photos to their yellow pages search, and how something like this had "never been done before." Uh, yeah. That's wrong.

My old apartment in Madrid. That's from a yellow pages service called QDQ in Spain. You can pan and zoom and walk around all of madrid, with photos on all sides every 10 meters.

I can vouch for that, here’s an article I wrote in February of last year: Photographic Street Map. Still, I think it's a very cool new addition to A9 - I'd just like to know when those trucks will start rolling out across Europe!

Original Source
A9 Debuts "Yellow Pages" - Now *That's* Local (John Battelle's Searchblog). Incidentally, it is well worth reading his article in Business 2.0.

Does Your Website Lack Personality?

The other day I was reviewing a site that had been developed for one of my clients (previous to engaging me!). This B2B site had a few thousand products, was relatively easy to navigate around and offered clients the ability to pay through a variety of means – their terms and conditions were spot on, too.

However, one glaring omission was the fact that the site didn’t tell the visitors who they were, what their experience was or even how their service was different. This was not a start-up company either. These people had many years of industry experience, knew the industry and their clients intimately, knew their products and their applications inside out and had clients across the length and breadth of the UK, from small sole traders to large multinationals.

With this sort of background you would have thought that they would be SHOUTING it from the rooftops, or at least their Web site!

But not one single page, paragraph or sentence mentioned the company’s pedigree.

This is not an isolated case, either – I have probably dealt with around 3 companies in the last month who have developed sites which lack, what I would call, personality. 

Google Hires Firefox Programmer

In a move that is sure to fuel speculation that Google is planning to launch its own Internet browser, it was announced this week that Google has hired the lead programmer, Ben Goodger, of the Firefox browser. Here's what they had to say on Wired:

Among other clues pointing to browser interest at Google are the registration of the gbrowser.com Internet address, the hiring of some key programmers, and sponsorship of a Mozilla programmer meeting. Even without a browser, Google is involved in significant competition with Microsoft. Both companies are working on desktop search tools, and Microsoft is pushing its MSN Search service as an alternative to Google.
(Google snaps up top Firefox programmer)

Using Keywords to Speak your Audience's Language

It's amazing how many marketers fixate on their site's HTML, believing that's where solutions to their search engine marketing (SEM) challenges are found. But they're looking inward when they need to be looking outward.

So begins an interesting article by Fredrick Marckini, titled Keywords: Speak Your Audience's Language, in Clickz. In it Fredrick gets to the heart of good search engine marketing, namely that the answers to good Search Engine Marketing don't really lie within the code but with your target market. This is a theme that I have banged on about on Marketing Tom - that in order to succeed with Search Engine Marketing, or for that matter any marketing, you need to step out of your company/industry box and start speaking the language of your target audience.

This reminds me of an article by Bryan Eisenberg called the Empathy Sell which drives home the importance of putting the customer at the heart of your SEM activity. These are some great quotes that he uses to emphasise the  role of customers, all of which appear in my E-marketing presentations:

The advertising man studies the consumer. He tries to place himself in the position of the buyer. --Claude Hopkins, "Scientific Advertising"

Talk in terms of the other man's interests. --Dale Carnegie, " How to Win Friends and Influence People"

Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person -- a real person you know, or an imagined person -- and write to that one. --John Steinbeck

So, it's not rocket science, but good old-fashioned common sense.

A View of Blogging From the Man Behind Apple's Famous '1984' Advert

Steve Hayden is the  vice-chairman of New York-based Ogilvy and Mather and is the man responsible for creating the famous 1984 ad for Apple, which introduced Apple Macintosh, and which has been hailed by some sources as being the greatest-ever advert. In an article from Fortune magazine - Want Truth in Advertising? Try a Blog - Hayden shares his thoughts on how blogs are changing the relationships between corporations, clients and advertisers. Coming from a top advertising executive this article makes for very interesting reading and, as with many article relating to corporate blogging, flags up the importance of blogging to business in general.

Original Source: Business Blog Consulting

ChangeThis - Writing Manifestos for Change

There are some sites which really do have that WOW! factor and make you say, "wish I'd thought of this first". ChangeThis is just such a site. In a nutshell the site works like this: people (anyone) submit manifesto proposal on any subject; the editorial board identifies what might be of interest and, once selected, the general public then vote on which one should be written up into a full manifesto (proposals are made up of 300 words). Once your proposal is selected, you write it up and ChangeThis will create a smart pdf document ready for site visitors to download -  for FREE!.

So, as a visitor, you could be getting great pdf downloads from some of the most important business, political or 'green' thinkers, for FREE and as a manifesto writer you are getting your thoughts out to a huge global audience.

The inspiration for the site came from Seth Godin and was developed by Amit Gupta, Catherine Hickey, Noah Weiss, Phoebe Espiritu and Michelle Sriwongtong in the summer of 2004.

The following have all had their manifestos printed on the site:

• Tom Peters
• Amnesty International
• Malcolm Gladwell
• Seth Godin
• Al Gore

and here are some of the latest manifestos:

• The Hughtrain Hugh MacLeod | You've read the Cluetrain, now HUGH MACLEOD brings you The Hughtrain.
• Beginner's Guide to Business Blogging Debbie Weil | *** FREE For 15 Days Only! *** The what, why, and how of business blogging, by business blog expert, Debbie Weil.
• Two Tomatoes SectionZ | Ever wonder if locally-grown produce is actually better?

It's quite a 'democratic' way of spreading knowledge, in that anyone can write a proposal, which can be voted on (only once) by visitors to the site and this, in turn, can be read and forwarded to anyone on the web. Simply Brilliant!

Jux2 Search Engine Tool

Chris Sherman, Associate Editor of SearchEngineWatch, always has some good tips to offer search engine marketers. His article entitled Three Cool Search Gizmos is no exception and he lets readers know about 3 neat tools that marketers will find of use. The first, and by far my favourite, is called Jux2, which is a search engine that compares the results across (at present) 3 major search engines: Google, Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves. The search results are neatly displayed and can show which websites appeared on 3, 2 or 1 search engines. As the guys at Jux2 say:

Using jux2, we learned that search engines are more different than people think, typically sharing fewer than 3.5 of their top 10 results (see the other statistical data).  We also found that a comparative tool like jux2 gives users far more control over their searches and, in many cases, better search results than from any single search engine.

The second tool comes from Whois Source which lets you know about: "domain ownership, server details and other information about web sites". The third is Printer Friendly, which is a bookmarkelt that scans a page for the "printer friendly" button and loads that into a new browser window - ideal for quite a few marketing sites!

105 Real-life Marketing Lessons from Marketing Sherpa

For another year running Marketing Sherpa has compiled a list of real-life marketing stories in a FREE downloadble PDF, called Marketing Wisdom 2005. As the marketing blurb says, "[Marketing Wisdom 2005] Includes 105 real-life marketing lessons learned from MarketingSherpa readers including the folks at Timberland, Pacific Shaving, and ING Direct:

• Email tests that worked
• Search marketing tactics
• Site design to raise conversions
• Direct mail, radio, & telemarketing stories"

Haven't read it yet but if it's like last year's, it will make very good reading.

Robert Scoble, PR Firms and the Blog Business Summit

From the 24-25th January the Blog Busines Summit will take place in Seattle. One of the most prolific bloggers Robert Scoble will be giving the keynote address, with the subject The Blog Advantage. There are a number of interesting sessions going on with subjects including: Blog Business Models: What Strategies Make Money; Building Traffic: Posting isn’t Enough!; Picking a Platform: Blogging Engines Compared and Marketing Strategies and Tactics: PR and Beyond.

The actual blog on the site actually does an interesting test to see how Robert Scoble compares to the major PR firms on search engines and Alexa - How Robert Scoble Compares to the Top PR Firms. The results, though not surprising, are very interesting and should make PR companies take notice.

If you are celebrity spotting, Tom Peters has mentioned that he would be making an appearance at the summit.

Fighting Comment Spam

Over the past few months I have received on this site, and on another blog of mine Mad About Madrid, a huge amount of comment and trackback spam. Comment spam is a technique used by certain webmasters and owners of websites to develop links from blogs (often with a high PR) to their own site. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about it:

Adding links that point to the spammer's web site increases the page rankings for the site in the search engine Google. An increased page rank means the spammer's commercial site would be listed ahead of other sites for certain Google searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers.

Comment spam falls into diffferent categories with the most basic being a blatant link left on an article to the spammer's  website. Some of the more subtle ones leave a comment on the blog which you think is innocuous enough but on closer inspection is still spam.

My own opinion is to stamp it out wherever possible and I always delete comment spam wherever I see it. Why should others benefit from the hard work and time that I put into building my site? However, I´m always happy to accept comments from people who I believe add value to an article or who raise reasonable objections to what I write.

If you're using TypePad, make sure that you receive email notification of new comments and trackbacks. Delete spam comments and trackbacks before Google or other search engines spider your site. You should also make a note of the IP address of the spammer and add it to your IP banning list.

It wouldn't do any harm to look at what they're doing at  Chongqed. You can leave details of the spammer on the site, find out which sites spam and help to stam out spam. Adam Kalsey has a good article about the subject with 184 comments (hopefully not all spam!).

Related Articles
Six Apart Guide to Comment Spam (Six Apart)
Comment Spam Manifesto (Adam Kalsey)
Comment Spam Compiled and Interpreted (sitepoint)
How spammers are targeting blogs (BBC)
Combating Comment Spam (WordPress)
Solving Comment Spam (Simon Willison's Weblog)

Bill Gates gets quizzed by Gizmodo

Here's an interesting interview that I came across via Marcomblog. It appears that the the guys at Gizmodo, the gadgets blog, were contacted by Microsoft and asked if they'd like to interview Bill Gates. Guess what they said? !!

In an interview between Joel Johnson and Bill Gates - G-Money and Me: Bill Gates Interview - the Microsoft boss discusses blogging, RSS, the PC and Apple. It makes for very interesting reading (the Apple stuff I quite liked) and here are a couple of Gates quotes:

I think blogging is super-important and we've got to do a lot more software. The phenomena for us is we've got in beta this MSN Spaces thing, and it lets you leverage everything you do around Messenger—that's your buddy lists and those relationships—to set up blogs, and who has access, and who gets notified. We've got up over a million people [who] set up blog sites.

Almost everything that's being published on the web now has RSS notification on it, so what would have been a website I would have gone to my favorites list and looked at, now I get the notification. I have the add-on to Outlook that lets me see those things.

Search Engine Marketing Resolutions

A New Year! and why don´t we start with some New Year resolutions? These are some of the tips I saw on Shari Thurow´s interesting article SEM New Year´s Resolutions on the Clickz site.

Resolution 1: I will stop focusing on positioning as an SEO benchmark.
Resolution 2: I will use the most appropriate search terminology to describe my services and processes.
Resolution 3: I will integrate search into the Web design, development, and usability processes.
Resolution 4: I will stop making erroneous cause-and-effect conclusions without testing and verifying.
Resolution 5: I will stop using Web standards as an excuse for limited design skills.
Resolution 6: I will follow all the search engines' guidelines, terms, and conditions.

Do you think you can keep them?