Between Stations » advertising

Web 2.0 Idea That Screams ‘Uh-Oh’

Julie — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 20:51:23 +0000

The Romney campaign is doing an advertising mash-up contest in partnership with some online software people and Yahoo.

The chirpy press release assumes that this will be done by supporters. I can’t quite tell if there’s going to be full editorial review of submissions before they post to the site. If not, this just screams ‘bad idea.’ It screams it as loudly and screechily as an auditorium full of tween girls watching the dreamy boy band of the month. Given the high negative ratings, uh, enjoyed, by Romney in polls, this has the potential to be either a big ouch or a big editorial time suck for some poor intern.

Hazards of Web 2.0

Julie — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 03:04:02 +0000

The greatest hazard of Web 2.0 is a failure to be genuine.

Today’s failure to be surprised moment is that WalMart’s back-to-school foray onto Facebook didn’t ’start a conversation’ on dorm decor. It got them slammed for labor practices. Mind you, they’re claiming future roomies are using the site to coordinate, but it just doesn’t look that way on the surface.

WalMart’s past ’social’ experiments have been a bit lackluster in actual result.

The real takeaways on this are first, it’s risky to be Web 2.0 when you have a lot of bad PR to start with. Second, you can’t change the conversation just by trying to participate. Web 2.0 actions need to be compatible with who you are, and recognize who others think you are. Sure, you can use Web 2.0 to ‘move’ who you are to who you want to be, but depending on where you start… it will take a while.

Mythology of Sponsored WordPress Templates

Julie — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 16:16:03 +0000

The WordPress Themes site did a massive housecleaning of sponsored themes the other day. Some of the users of WordPress are happy, some unhappy. Some theme designers are happy, some unhappy.

The basics of the situation is that many of the themes with sponsored links on the WordPress site got nuked. Most theme owners claim there was little notice to get themes updated and into compliance with new policies. Others claim that even themes that complied with new policies got nuked.

Reading some of the justifications from some of those happy about affairs shows quite a bit about myths surrounding the idea of inbound links.

I’ve seen a number of people claim that when you use a sponsored template, with links to the sponsor in the footer, you are ‘giving away your PageRank to this sponsor!’

I really see several issues with that assertion:

Most blogs don’t have much in the way of PageRank to ‘give away.’
Those that DO tend to create custom designs, or know enough about branding to want to avoid heavily spammy sponsored links.
Most of the themes I’ve seen that have 3-4 sponsored links look really bad. Ugly = not likely to be downloaded.
Providing a few outbound links on ANY site isn’t going to trash your own ability to rank. It’s all a matter of proportion.

I honestly doubt all that many sponsors of the spammy-class of sponsored themes (ie, themes with 4-5 outlinks on it) see a lot of rank help from the activity. It doesn’t fall into the same class in my mind as the people who comment-spam blogs on Bob Dole drugs, but it’s not altogether dissimilar.

The people who know least about sponsors and themes and etc. most likely use hosted solutions and don’t know how to download themes anyway. Those people also likely have the lowest PageRank, anyway.

Those who know at some level that all the footer links at least look bad, might be spammy, and might be intended as SEO (but kind of fall into Dunce Hat SEO in my book) are the people less likely to have downloaded these themes.

Those who are pretty sure, if nothing else, that the spammy footer links are ugly, and who have high-traffic blogs, are likely also the ones who get some customization done and don’t need sponsored links anyway. And those are the blog owners who could actually help a sponsor.

(And that’s before even calling into question if the links count for much anyway. Footer links are the dead real estate and code zone of a page, and are typically easy enough to discount in an algorithim the way most page code lays out. But I won’t even go there right now.)

Reliability of Online Reviews

Julie — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 22:44:05 +0000

This one’s for the Funk King of Minneapolis, Paul Jahn.

There’s a Salon blog post today on the reliability of online reviews. Here’s a choice bit:

Online ratings are beset by one main flaw, something pollsters call “response bias.” Because people are more likely to rate products that have moved them in some way — either positively or negatively — ratings for most items brim with extreme opinions. On Yelp everyone is above average; company CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told me that 85 percent of local businesses on the site get a three-star or better average rating.

The article is pretty good, so I won’t rehash it here. One thing that notably isn’t mentioned is ‘business owners posting wretchedly fake reviews in some mad faux-SEO urge.’ I’ve seen some awful, awful fake reviews — no real human writes like these reviews, or would say these things about a business such as that reviewed.

The visual range depictions discussed in this article won’t do much about those written reviews, although they’ll show the bias in the starred reviews a little more strongly. On the other hand, Paul and I have discussed that if a reasonable person found these fake reviews, they’d make a sane reader less likely to go to a business. Even though there’s massive response bias in even real reviews, at least they’re real.

Oh, Spam, How I Love Thee

Julie — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 17:13:41 +0000

Attached to an image touting the standard array of designer pharmeceuticals, I give you today’s assortment of weird text snippets, suitable for reading at a poetry slam or even your next SEO pitch:

I think highly focused ads are the answer.
The benefits of local search are clear: it allows you to find customers in your area who are willing to purchase from your company. Yesterday, Google released a new service with the name Google Analytics. ’s iTunes music service. com Do you want to be mentioned in this newsletter?
Just tell us why you switched from another SEO tool to IBP and how IBP helped you to improve your web site. Should you use Google Analytics or should you stay away from it? The more Google knows about you, the better they can get your money.
What should you do now?
Get high quality incoming links with the right link texts.
When Google entered the market, incoming links seemed to be the trick of the trade.

Google & PPC

Julie — Wed, 23 May 2007 19:14:31 +0000

In all the hub-bub about Google Universal Search, and the impact of Web History/Personalization/iGoogle on results, there’s something I don’t know that I’ve seen, but seems like an inevitable next step:

Impact of Universal and History on the display of PPC.

One of the places where AdWords pales in comparison to the MSN AdCenter is in its behavioral targeting category. Given that it’s being said that Web History is impacting search results for users, and now we have Universal Search impacting the results pages… it’s really a no-brainer to have these elements hit the profitable part of any given search page.

While Mom-n-Pop PPC advertisers may not use much in the way of behavioral targeting features, if available, big-brands and agency PPC buyers will be all over it.

Certification is Tiring

Julie — Thu, 17 May 2007 17:16:52 +0000

I give you David Temple, lord of the SEO/SEM Certification Blog, studying hard for his Google AdWords exam:

SEOing is hard. Good thing he’s a professional.

SEO 12 Step Program: Rank-Checkers Anonymous

Julie — Wed, 02 May 2007 19:35:12 +0000

1. We admitted we were powerless over search engine rankings–that our obsession with Googling ourselves had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to high rankings.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines as we understood Them.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our web sites.
5. Admitted to Google’s reinclusion request form, to ourselves and to our SEO the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have our SEO remove all these defects of web development.
7. Humbly asked Google to forgive our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all web pages we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such web pages wherever possible.
10. Continued to take link inventory and when we reciprocally linked with link farms admitted it and removed said links.
11. Sought through link-baiting and white hat methods to improve our conscious contact with Google, as we understood It, praying only for knowledge of Its will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to all web site owners, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

(with apologies to all AA members)

Commercial Mash-Ups

Julie — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 17:06:01 +0000

Musical mash-ups were all the rage for a while, but mentally, I often like doing commercial mash-ups. Sometimes, current ad campaigns just scream for it.

Take, for example, current advertising for OnStar and warning against crystal meth use:

OnStar: Ads depict real calls from OnStar users. Bad things happen to them or near them, and they are able to get fast help due to OnStar.
Anti-meth ads: There is a PSA that depicts a real 911 call from a cell phone. (Clearly, pre-E911.) The couple is wasted on meth and lost in a snowstorm. The PSA explains that they ended up freezing to death.

The tasteless mash-up conclusion: If you insist on being a meth-head, do it in a vehicle with OnStar. Then you won’t freeze to death.

Ceding Control & Its Hazards

Julie — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 15:00:38 +0000

I think Aaron Wall of SEOBook wrote a great post this week about Google and the ‘death’ of affiliate marketing. He really focuses on AdSense publishing, but I believe it goes further than that.

He doesn’t mention Google Analytics, but I think GA also factors into Google’s reach for control. There’s some extent to which I believe that the ‘free’ implementation of GA may have a greater price than many perceive.

First, it’s free up to 5 million page views/month… unless you’re displaying AdSense. Then, it’s unlimited. By doing both AdSense and GA, you’re providing Google a lot of traffic data on your site.

…the Service is provided without charge to You for up to 5 million pageviews per month per account, and if You have an active Adwords campaign in good standing, the Service is provided without charge to You without a pageview limitation.

Google may retain and use any data they collect via one’s use of the GA service:

Google and its wholly owned subsidiaries may retain and use, subject to the terms of its Privacy Policy (located at http://www.google.com/privacy.html , or such other URL as Google may provide from time to time), information collected in Your use of the Service.

Generally speaking, they cannot disclose specific, identifiable information about your site data to others without court order or consent. However, nothing within anyone’s privacy policy I’ve ever seen or written restricts a company’s ability to take the confidential data and use it internally.

I just think this opens a huge can of worms. You run a business that you want to develop qualified leads from search engines. You are handing a complete picture of all your traffic issues to one of your traffic sources — who can then learn all about where all your traffic is coming from, not just the traffic they’re sending you (or the traffic they can identify via people using Google Toolbar and Web History…).

Obviously, with some sites, this gives Google insider information to bid on other services to absorb into empire. This could lead to a better bid… or an early bid that’s lowball, but more than a lot of people ever thought to hope for. With many others, it gives them information to create speedbumps and roadblocks to search optimization.

This is why I typically tell my clients to pay for an analytics package, and why the company I work for provides an analytics package. It just seems safer and less fraught with peril.