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Search Marketing: Dear Steve Harty, Chairman of Bartle Bogle Hegarty

Written By Noah Mallin | July 1, 2008 | Share This |

Bartle Bogle Hegarty

Does Bartle Bogle Hegarty really not believe in search? Do you, Steve Harty, Chairman of BBH, really think that your clients and prospects don’t Google? Yesterday there was a lot of talk around our office about your quote in a recent AdWeek article by Andrew McMains (we attributed it to Brian Morrissey due to an error in their content management system). For those who didn’t see the quote, you said:

We’re not convinced that the people we are marketing to are using that as a channel…We have a more targeted strategy than, ‘We’re open for business.’ Search is kind of indiscriminate in a way.”

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Ad Agency Callout: Reprise Media to Bartle Bogle Hegarty Honcho Steve Harty -You’re Wrong About Search Marketing

Written By Joshua Stylman | June 30, 2008 | Share This |

Warriors - Reprise Calls Out Bartle Bogle Hegarty

AdWeek today has an interesting article by Brian Morrissey examining how big agencies use or don’t use Search Marketing to market themselves. The thrust was that few of them do - which seems to me like a real wasted opportunity. I was almost done with the piece when I got to this quote from Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) Chairman Steve Harty:

“We’re not convinced that the people we are marketing to are using that as a channel…We have a more targeted strategy than, ‘We’re open for business.’ Search is kind of indiscriminate in a way.”

The inference is that search is only useful as a broad entry point for lead generation. End of story. How wrong you are, Steve.

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Universal Search: Clueless! – ISP’s act like AP, Greed for Money Upfront will lead to a Kick in the Rear

Written By Noah Mallin | June 17, 2008 | Share This |

Clueless

The recent kerfuffle involving bloggers and the AP fired some interesting connections in my neural net. The attempt to levy a tax on bloggers for the right (nay the privilege!) of linking to the AP’s content smells a lot like the recent attempt of a few internet service providers to charge extra to high-bandwidth users.

The common thread between these two hair-brained schemes is an attempt to force old-school ideas about economics onto the new world of the internet. The irony is that the Internet at its best is probably the closest human beings have come to the perfect marketplace envisioned by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.

In Smith’s ideal marketplace, all buyers and sellers have access to the same information and equal access to the marketplace, allowing prices to find their natural/optimal level. In a broad way that has been mostly true online whether we are talking about the cost of advertising a product or the product itself. In fact, the auction-based search model is about as close as you’re gonna get.

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Reverse Optimization: AP to Bloggers, “Hands Off!” ; Bloggers to AP, ”Don’t Make us Angry – You Wouldn’t Like Us When We’re Angry…” ; SearchViews Officially Joins AP Boycott

Written By Noah Mallin | June 16, 2008 | Share This |

Hulk

After hustling, begging, pleading and cajoling for every link we can get, it comes as a shock to find a content provider so out-to-lunch that they actually begrudge the link love. What’s up with that, Associated Press? The old media consortium of umpty-ump newspapers and other dying media types issued a blogger fatwa on Friday that temporarily got drowned out by GooHoo and Tim Russert’s death.

Seems that the AP sent a nasty latter to the operators of Drudge Retort, a user-powered news aggregator (and now aggravator, heh heh) like hundreds of others out there (not to be confused be-hatted muckracker Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report, which Retort was initially set up to combat.) Only this time the AP decided to get tough:

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SEM: You Say Tomato, I Say Disaster – Crisis Management and Search

Written By Noah Mallin | June 11, 2008 | Share This |

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

Who would have thought that the least healthy thing on McDonald’s menus might end up being the tomatoes? Certainly not Mickey D’s, which ended up on the griddle during this week’s tomato scare.

Check out the peak in search volume on Google Trends for “Tomato Scare” (my new favorite fake band name btw) and “Tomatoes” between June 8th and June 10th:

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Search Reputation Management: Old Man McCain Uses Young ‘Uns Search Thing-a-ma-jig to Find Him a VeePee

Written By Noah Mallin | June 10, 2008 | Share This |

cheney gun

Ripely aged Republican Presidential candidate John McCain jested yesterday that he would be using Google to study up on potential running mates.

“You know, basically it’s a Google…what you can find out now on the Internet — it’s remarkable.”

Yes, remarkable. Still, there is a lesson here for all you whippersnappers on the importance of search reputation management. Let’s take a look at some potential McCain veeps using what President Bush calls “The Google.”

One of the few things about Dick Cheney that isn’t shrouded in mystery is that he’s enjoyed an unprecedented level of power for the person in the number 2 spot. Might he want to extend his tour? Here’s what McCain would see were he to Google Cheney today:

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Hey, You, Get Off of My Name!

Written By Noah Mallin | June 3, 2008 | Share This |

Bo Diddley

Bo Diddley, the pioneering rock n’ roll genius who died yesterday knew a thing or two about marketing and branding. Consider this: Ellas McDaniel re-dubbed himself as Diddley, had his first hit record with a song called “Bo Diddley” (the first of many times he would work his new name into a song title and lyrics) and made sure that the ubiquitous shave-and-a-haircut beat that was his trademark was referred to far and wide as “the Bo Diddley beat.” The man was SEO before there were any E’s to S.

Now imagine if you popped Diddley’s name into your search engine of choice and the results page featured a big ol’ ad that said “Bo Diddley Music” with a click- through to Chuck Berry’s site. Though Search Engines frown on this when the name is under copyright it does happen and in some cases is part of an overall marketing strategy.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article that focuses on the naughty folks who contravene the search engine’s ban on using another company’s copyrighted name as a paid keyword. The accompanying vid however deals with a slightly different and murkier issue, perhaps because author Emily Steel is talking to someone from a company that hopes to get paid for protecting your good brand name from being sullied. Here it is in living Murdoch-vision:

The general practice of buying up terms, phrases and even copyrighted names associated with a competitor is not uncommon, though the effectiveness is open to debate. If your brand is the victim of this kind of keyword jacking it’s a terrible scourge. On the other hand, if your brand has used it to checkmate a rival’s campaign, it’s flippin’ genius.

A good example of this can be found in Reprise Media’s own typically thorough (excuse us while we plug ourselves) Superbowl Search Marketing Scorecard from this past February. CareerBuilder did a series of ads based on the theme of “Follow your heart.” The clever folks at Monster.com bought that phrase and other similar ones and even integrated it into their online ad copy. No doubt many job seekers who may not have been aware of Monster found that they offered an alternative to CareerBuilder that met their needs.

Whether or not you are using someone else’s brand name or campaign is maybe less important than why you’re doing it, and where you’re sending people once they click. Sending a bunch of folks who are looking for Bo Diddley to the Chuck Berry product only works if the landing page you send them to doesn’t make them feel tricked and hostile. Sending them to a page that says “If you like Bo Diddley, check out Chuck Berry’s CD” and includes the ability to sample some tunes could actually create a positive experience for the user.

This also can have some bearing on the price advertisers pay for their ads. Most search engines incorporate landing page content into their quality score – the algorithm that is used to determine the price they’ll pay in the auction. In fact Google makes this very clear in their Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines for AdWords. If your landing page doesn’t feature content that’s relevant to the keyword you’re buying? Prices will go up and in some cases your ads will even be deactivated. Not the kind of ROI most advertisers want.

Ultimately, the question of whether or not companies should be able to buy competitive brand terms comes down to intent – deception vs. comparison:

Enterprise Web 2.0 Worth $4.6 Billion in 2013

Written By Drupad Sil | April 21, 2008 | Share This |

Forrester Research

Forrester Research today released a six-year Web 2.0 Market Forecast. From the report itself:

“Enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013, with social networking, mashups, and RSS capturing the greatest share. In all, the market for enterprise Web 2.0 tools will be defined by commodization, eroding prices, and subsumption into other enterprise collaboration software over the next five years; it will eventually disappear into the fabric of the enterprise, despite the major impacts the technology will have on how businesses market their products and optimize their workforces.”

A definition before we jump into the discussion. Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t include pure ad spending dollars spent on services like Facebook, Blogger, or Twitter, instead counting productivity tools based on Web 2.0 concepts. So, Facebook as a whole wouldn’t count, but money spent on the creation and syndication of a Facebook app or social network widget would.

According to the report, social networking spending will take up almost half of the total, coming in at about $2 billion, followed by mashups, RSS, and wikis, all three of which total approximately $1.6 billion. From Larry Dignan at Between the Lines:

“The top spending categories aren’t all that surprising. For instance, social networking is a decent substitute for knowledge management applications, a category that companies haven’t yet cracked. In other words, social networking could yield ROI. Mashups could also deliver faster time to market and it doesn’t hurt that giants like IBM are pushing them.”

So, what are some of the issues this developing market will face? Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb explains:

“For vendors specifically, there are 3 main challenges to becoming successful in this new industry, including:

1) I.T. shops being wary of what they perceive as ‘consumer-grade’ technology

2) Ad-supported web tools generally have ‘free’ as the starting point

3) Web 2.0 tools will have to now compete in a space currently dominated by legacy enterprise software investments”

There are even problems with the definition of Enterprise 2.0 itself. From Dennis Howlett at Irregular Enterprise:

“[Forrester’s definition is] an incredibly loose definition and one that could be applied to any number of technology components from CRM through to supply chain management and pretty much anything in between. The fact is that with so many definitions floating around, I’m of the view that Enterprise 2.0 does not exist except in the minds of those who are selling technology components. That’s not a recipe for success.”

What’s the bottom line? The big picture seems pretty clear: the flexible communication and networking tools created in the past few years will probably find paying customers in the form of big corporations looking to become more lightweight. The interesting questions are how quickly it’ll happen, how much internal resistance there will be, and how they’ll be integrated into existing internal applications.

5 Questions with Tony Pierce, LA Times Blog Editor

Written By Sepideh Saremi | March 25, 2008 | Share This |

los angeles times blogs tony pierce

Tony Pierce oversees the nearly three dozen blogs at the Los Angeles Times. Before working at the LAT, Pierce edited LAist, a blog that covers local L.A. culture and events. He has also worked at Buzznet and the E! channel, and he runs a popular personal blog from which he’s created two books, aka blooks.

Searchviews asked Pierce to share his insights on blogging and media convergence: what it takes to successfully integrate blogs in a news organization, how best to leverage social media sites to meet page view goals, and where video and mobile fit at the LA Times. Here’s what he had to say.

Searchviews: The traditional journalism world has misunderstood or been suspicious of blogs in the past. While many journalists have come around to blogging and other forms of social media (like Twitter and Facebook) in the last couple of years, relatively few newspapers have demonstrated that they really understand where these media fit in their business or how best to utilize them. What role do blogs play at the LA Times, both when it comes to using them as a tool and platform for journalism, and also when it comes to bringing more readers (and ad revenue) to the LA Times site? How do you hope to evolve blogging at the LAT? And what role do you play in teaching old-school journalists about new-school tools, like blogs?

Tony Pierce: Blogs play an extremely important role at the LA Times. Part of the responsibilities and goals of a news organization is to inform, enlighten, and enrich its readers in a timely manner. Not only can blogs do that, but at the Times we accomplish that daily. Be it liveblogging the NCAA tournament, hosting live video chats after Presidential debates, or getting deeper into stories than the actual newspaper has the physical room to do - blogging is the perfect complement to what most people have come to expect from traditional newspapers. For example, one of our newest blogs, L.A. Now, posts about a dozen or so blog entries a day. Only online could you have a post at 9 am talking about a local story in print, a comment or ten from the readers in that post, a rebuttal from a columnist in that same blog by noon, and a column in the paper the following day because of that exchange. Journalism, the market as a conversation, and the dialogue between writers and readers is changing very quickly, and the Times has woken up and is taking a leadership role in that change.

Will taking that leadership role attract more readers and revenue? Probably. Who knows. The more important thing is that as long as the Times continues to adjust for the inevitable, it will remain one of the centerpoints of conversations about current events related to LA and the rest of the world.

I hope to continue to be a part of blogging at the LAT as it evolves with journalism, and as journalism evolves with blogging. This evolution isn’t always an easy task. However, blogging has survived the original demonization of its critics, while at the same time the mainstream media has found ways to incorporate digital journalism into its offerings. Likewise, I have found myself being asked by a variety of veteran journalists at the Times for more and more help in regard to learning about the intricacies of blogging, its subtleties, and how it can be used best at the Times. So this belief of “traditional journalism” being suspicious of blogging is about to die off, along with the Mark Cubans and those who believe that the Earth is flat.

In many ways, blogging is simply a means with which to convey ideas, a delivery method, and a new tool for writers to express themselves. Nothing at all to fear, unless for some reason you have something you are afraid might get exposed.

SV: Tony, part of your job at the LA Times is launching new blogs; for example, you recently brought Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on board and he’s done some interesting stuff with video and written about everything from jazz to politics. What new blogs are you planning now, and what ideas make for viable blogs? In other words, what should newspapers or other media companies consider when they’re planning new blogs and hiring bloggers?

TP: We are planning a wide spectrum of new blogs that I am not at liberty to reveal at this time, but they will leap from and be based within every section of the paper that you could imagine - from the front page to the back page.

Kareem has been quite a blessing. I don’t think anyone anywhere has a Hall of Famer writing for them, from their heart, every day, about sensitive and interesting topics. And as you said, he does it with video, audio, and the written word. His Rolodex is endless, so one day you might see him doing an interview with will.i.am and the next day he’s exchanging emails with Senator Barack Obama. The day after the Super Bowl, Kareem reminisced about hanging with the Manning brothers, and the day after the Grammys, there was a picture of him with Herbie Hancock. Last week he was on the Colbert Report, and when the Lakers return you will see him inches away from the court with the Lake Show. And he writes about all of it. He is a totally fascinating man with an amazing and unreal life, and we are so lucky to have him writing about it daily.

When newspapers are planning new blogs they should consider what jewels they have in their backyards. It might not be ESPN’s Collegiate Athlete of the Century, like Kareem, but odds are they have more than a few precious gems on their radar. My advice is to reach out to those people and let them do what we’re doing with #33: let them write about whatever they want, using whatever format they feel most comfortable with. Not everyone wants to write about what made them famous, not everyone wants to type away at a keyboard. Most people are complicated. So let them tell you a wide-ranging assortment of things in a variety of ways. The blogging medium is dynamic and limitless, so don’t let your own boundaries limit your bloggers. Let them go, let them experiment, encourage them, and be there when they need you.

SV: Your past projects have included a really popular personal blog, a stint at buzznet.com, and a position as editor-in-chief at LAist, which is part of the Gothamist network of city blogs. At LAist, you were particularly savvy at and strategic about using Digg to break page view records each month. How are you using social media tools like Digg at the LAT now? How do you approach building an audience and traffic differently at the LAT as opposed to at your previous gigs?

TP: I’m not saying that Digg wasn’t part of our later success at LAist, but we doubled and tripled our readership before we ever got a following on Digg. In fact, at Buzznet I helped attract over 13 million pageviews in 8 months without even one click from Digg. There are 120 million blogs out there, countless websites, and more than a few newspapers, search engines, and email addresses. Simultaneously, there are people out there who want to see what you’ve got.

Social media tools like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Facebook, MySpace, and del.icio.us are all fine for certain stories - very few of which we write about at the Times. I love Digg, I am on it several times a day, and I don’t mean this disrespectfully in the slightest, but in many ways it’s lowest common denominator, college freshman lulz. I love Digg because in my heart, that’s who I am. But that’s not what the LA Times is, and that’s not even what the majority of what LAist is or was.

In order to get people to link to you, you simply have to find out what blogs, web pages, or media outlets are interested in your story and you have to tell them that your story exists. That might mean sending an email to an editor, or linking to a blog in one of your stories, or calling someone, or building a relationship with a so-called competitor. Eventually, when you see something being written, you will know exactly who you are going to tell. Likewise when people link you, you should write down who they were and what they linked you for. That way, when something else comes down the line, you can let them know that you have something new for them.

In November of last year, Andy Malcolm and Don Frederick were getting about a quarter million hits on their political blog Top of the Ticket. Last month, they got something like 1.6 million because they got in the practice of emailing the right political blogs about their posts. Yes, sometimes they’d get snotty emails back saying the blogs weren’t interested in such and such, but for the most part, bloggers are grateful when you make their jobs easier for them - especially if you have done your homework and have fed them a story that fits in with what they blog about. By the way, Top of the Ticket has been on Digg a few times, but I don’t think they were on it at all last month.

SV: The LAT very recently introduced video to the site. How long before we see a video-only blog from the paper? How about seeing more video on the other blogs?

TP: The Times is very dedicated to all sorts of multimedia in our blogs, and video is one of the most spectacular aspects of that. [LAT Multimedia Director] Barbara Morrow and her team have remodeled a portion of the 2nd floor that now looks like a TV station with online video editing bays, camera packages, and stuff I hadn’t seen since my days at the E! channel.

People will be pleasantly surprised when some of these video packages start finding their way onto the website, because the production values are so good that they will say, “Wait, this is the LA Times?” The concepts of what we are going to cover with video are things that you wouldn’t even be able to predict, but I have seen the future and you will love it and you will say, “Why didn’t someone do this earlier!”

That said, I doubt you will see video-only blogging for several reasons. First, Google is your friend and Google has a very hard time knowing what’s in your video unless you have some text around it. And second, we have a staff of some of the best writers in town - the writing complements the video, and the video complements the writing.

Meanwhile, we have had lots of video in our blogs that many have enjoyed: video of some pilgrims from Costa Mesa on the Hajj; when Dan Neil covered the Detroit Auto Show he took lots and lots of video, and when yours truly went to South by Southwest, we were one of the first outlets that had video evidence of Lou Reed singing with Moby.

You will definitely see more video in lots of other LA Times blogs; stay tuned.

SV: The Pew Internet and American Life Project recently reported that the cell phone is the one tool most Americans would have the hardest time giving up. How should newspapers respond to this increased dependence on mobile technology? What is the LAT doing about it?

TP: The LA Times is currently in the process of upgrading its mobile site in a way that anyone with a Blackberry, iPhone, or mobile device will appreciate. I can’t imagine having to go without my iPhone, and I scorn PEW for even floating that possibility out there. How dare they!

Wal-Mart Finally Gets Blogs

Written By Sepideh Saremi | March 4, 2008 | Share This |

wal mart corporate blog

Wal-Mart’s latest blogging effort may be titled “Check Out” but it looks like the company’s finally getting it when it comes to blogs. From the New York Times:

Instead of relying on polished high-level executives, it is written by little-known buyers, largely without editing. The result is an intensely personal window into the lives, preferences and quirks of the powerful tastemakers at Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, who have spent years shielded from public view.

Compared to many past corporate blogging efforts, which are either super-stiff or super-fake, Wal-Mart’s Check Out blog does well by its writers and readers because it relies the personalities of real people, even if they sometimes say things that are a little questionable:

But all that uncensored rambling has its potential drawbacks, like irritating suppliers or consumers. Mr. Muha, the video game buyer, may have ventured into dangerous territory, for example, when describing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

“The bad guys are the usual Middle Eastern extremists. I guess they are the new Nazis for the modern era,” he wrote.

One consideration Wal-Mart is missing with this blog is SEO. The site lacks good title tags and meta descriptions. A Google search for “walmart blog” puts Check Out in fifth position; above it are links to Wal-Mart watch-group blogs, Wake Up Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart Watch.

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