Some of Alan's views on this digital marketing malarkey ... there's more on: AlanCharlesworth.com

Thursday, September 27, 2007

excellent PR [and branding] - practice

Back in April I made a comment about folks making it hard to seek permission to reproduce their content [see bad PR-and-marketing practice] - well here's someone who knows how to play the game properly. I get the Hitwise newsletter and intend to use some of their stats in my next book. Do they make it hard to seek permission? On the contrary - they have a section in the newsletter which says:
Job done. Guess who will have their organization featured in a text book to be used by people learning about e-marketing - some of whom will end up working in that field and so may become clients of said organization.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

excellent corporate blogging response

September 19th saw word starting to spread around the 'search' blogs about some anomalies with Google's search results. The first one I saw [though it may not have been the first of its kind] was by Barry Schwartz on searchengineland.com.

The fifth comment on the blog - sorry, I couldn't work out how much time had elapsed as I'm not sure whether the blog was recording the local time of the commenter - there was an entry from the head of Google's webspam team, Matt Cutts saying that they were on to it and things should be sorted in 2-3 days.

Now that is the way to address negative issues about your organization.

Of course you have to be monitoring the web - blogs and all - to pick these things up. My bet is that around 99 point something of organizations do not. It's not rocket science, you can get software to do it for you.

Friday, September 14, 2007

ditto below - and childish - practice

After I had finished the previous entry I went back to reading blogs - and found this ...

... yep, three of the four comments were from these folk. They must be teaching SEO at infant's school now.

Postscript - a few weeks after this posting, I came across this article - online brand protection best practices
- which explains what's going on.

amateur - and shoddy - practice

I was scanning around the online version of auto express [while I was having my lunch-time sandwich, honest] and I visited a few of their blogs - including the replies. On one I came across the following ...

... but just dismissed it as an entry [perhaps] from an non-English speaking reader. But I soon realised it was on every blog.

What's happening is that the company [computing.smart-guide.com] - it's a poor 'domainers/parked domain name' site - is trying to generate links to its site to raise their PageRank. Guess what? This is amateur SEO stuff. Grow up people, produce some good content and you will get legitimate links. Oh, and by the way, Google will recognise it as a sham - like I said, amateur.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

facebook doesn't recognise academic staff

I can't say I've ever had anything but a professional interest in the social media - but today I finally got round to registering on Facebook. Which I did - but because without at least one you are pretty much anonymous, I tried to join a network. I had three choices, see below:
I didn't like the 'regional choice' [Newcastle - there is a certain rivalry between the cities]. I'm not a student, so 'college' was not an option - so I went for the 'work'. Problem is, it asks for my work email address - and as I work at a UK university, it ends in .ac.uk. And apparently facebook thinks I'm a student, not an employee [see below]. Harrrumph.