May 14, 2008

Obama Needs You! Obama Campaign Endorses Search Engine Watch Jobs Board

obama%20campaign.jpg

Barack Obama needs internet marketers to win the Presidential Election. So his campaign wisely advertised on the Search Engine Watch Jobs Board.

You know Obama Rocks the Youth Vote but he's not stopping at the primaries. Here are the first two requirements for joining the Obama internet revolution:

We're looking for internet experts who strongly support Barack Obama for President and have expertise in one or more of:
* Search Engine Marketing
* Search Engine Optimization

You can check out the full requirements for the Obama For America internet marketing gigs here. Note: This is a short-term gig. There's no guarantee this will turn into a Cabinet-level position.

But wouldn't it be great if the new President named a couple Joint Chiefs of the Internet? After all, Secretary of the World Wide Web doesn't sound like much fun.

Or how about Internet General?

Yeah, we like the sound of that.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Consumers Ok with Social Ads, But Rarely Find Them Targeted

Consumers are fine with ads on social networks, but do not find them targeted to their needs and desires, according to a new Prospectiv survey.

87 percent surveyed felt that ads didn't match their preferences.

Of those:
-- 58% felt that most ads do not match
-- 29% felt that no ads match

Still, 85% of participants said they would prefer ad-supported networks to paying for premium sites. And these are the types of ads they respond to:

-- One-off coupons and discount offers from the brands and products they
buy (62 percent)
-- E-newsletters featuring coupons, discounts, news and tips about
favorite brands (24 percent)
-- Invitations to join interactive email groups, online forums and social
networks for sharing and communicating (14 percent)

Prospectiv surveyed 800 people who use sites like Facebook, MySpace, Hi5 and Friendster.

"These poll results clarify that members of social networking sites are open to offers and promotions as long as they are targeted to their interests," said Jere Doyle, Prospectiv's CEO. "The next step for the web publishing industry seeking to monetize their online communities is to improve ad relevance, and the best way to do this is to work with online lead generation providers and ad networks that have the brand relationships, technologies and services to ensure that the ads presented are tailored to their audience's needs and wants."

What do you think about the data? What kind of ads should be used on social networks? Leave us a comment and let us know!

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Google News Clusters: Keep 'Em Un-Separated

The Google news team has improved the "clusters" in their search results. Clusters are similar news stories that are grouped together. Previously, clusters were formed for 3 days, and then the individual news stories were kicked out the house to make it on their own.

Now, those clusters will exist for the full 30 day indexing of the news stories.

Writing on the Google News Blog, Lucian Cionca commented on how this change affects the big picture for Google News: "I think this brings us a step closer to our goal of making news universally accessible from as many sources, perspectives and languages as the world can offer."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Student Searches: The Top 15 Searches for the K-12 Set

What are your kids searching for during the school day? netTrekker d.i. has released data about the Top 15 In-School searches for the first quarter of 2008. And here they are:

1. Games
2. Dogs
3. Animals
4. Civil War
5. George Washington
6. Holocaust
7. Abraham Lincoln
8. Multiplication
9. Math Games
10. Weather
11. Frogs
12. Fractions
13. Planets
14. Sharks
15. Plants

The results were tracked by Thinkronize, the developers behind netTrekker d.i., which is a safe educational search engine.

"Search engines like Google(TM) and Yahoo® pull together lists of the most popular keyword queries, underscoring our nation's interests and fixations and showcasing trends and patterns," said Thinkronize CEO Randy Wilhelm. "Our report offers a different view -- a real-time school-based mirror of what our children are searching for -- both for academic purposes and out of genuine curiosity."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Search Engine Watch Forums Names Chris Boggs Associate Editor

chris boggs

Chris Boggs, manager, Search Engine Optimization for Brulant has joined Search Engine Watch Forums as Associate Editor. Chris is a highly sought after speaker on the circuit. He's presented at Search Engine Strategies (SES), PubCon and SMX among others.

Chris will be teaming up with Search Engine Watch Forums Editor, Frank Watson, founder of Kangamurra Media.

Chris and Frank write the weekly SEM Crossfire column for SEW Experts: debating, arguing, and discussing the hottest search engine marketing and SEO issues in the industry.

So what can you expect from Chris in the Forums? The best example may be found here.

I also asked Chris to warn me about what kind of trouble he plans getting me into:

"I am very excited to become more involved with SEW Forums. I can really say that I learned a lot from the forums when it they first started, and I have continued to benefit from community participation. I have unfortunately had less time to participate at SEW forums as I used to, but I plan on ramping back up during the off-hours. One thing I am tied of seeing at SEW and other forums is so-called experts coming in and making absurd or non-factual statements."

Hey, me too, Chris. But what do you plan to do about it?

"Those types of participants can take my new position announcement as notice that I’m tired of being nice. I and other Moderators plan on urging people to back up their statements with proof, or suffer public ridicule. Those people that are newer to the industry and openly want to learn (and do not claim falsely to be experts) will hopefully be less likely to be derailed by advice based on zero sum experience."

Wow. You heard it here first.

Hello Chris, goodbye B.S.

photo credit: SearchEvangelist on Flickr

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 8:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Branding is Dead; Long Live SEO

There's been a lot of talk recently about how SEO is dead, and branding will rise out of its ashes. I have to disagree. If anything, branding is the marketing technique on its way out--a victim of how search has changed the way people think and shop, online and offline.

Once upon a time, a consumer had to juggle a lot of information just to make a relative intelligent purchase. In 1991, if you wanted to buy a portable compact disc player, you had to know:
1. What you wanted to buy (portable compact disc player) R.I.P. Branding
2. What brand you wanted to buy (Sony)
3. What product you wanted to buy (Discman)
4. What store to buy it at (The Wiz)
5. Where to find that store (Menlo Park Mall)

Aside from Step 1, every other piece of information came to you from branding. Sony did an amazing job branding the Discman, to the point where it was synonymous with "portable CD player." The Wiz was also an obvious choice based on branding; after all, no one beat it. And Menlo Park Mall was close to my house and it was the mall from Mallrats. If you wanted to research prices, you either had to go store to store (and presumably know which stores to go to) or compare Sunday circulars. To compare products, you needed a copy of Consumer Reports. All that knowledge, or the ways to access it, was put into your head through branding.

Today, it's quite different. Looking to buy a new MP3 player in 2008? With a search engine, that's about all you need to know. A search in Google for "mp3 player" brings up C|Net's MP3 Buying Guide. After reading some reviews, you decide on a flash memory player and then on the Creative Zen 16GB. You might then check out the prices quoted on C|Net, or search for "Creative Zen 16GB" in Google, or in a price comparison engine like Google Product Search or Shopping.com. And you'll likely end up getting the Zen from whichever store has the best price and seems trustworthy.

Branding still matters somewhat. After all, you might recognize the names "C|Net," "Creative" and "Zen." But you didn't find them based on their brand; you found them via search. In fact, the branding that matters the most were those of the tools you used: Google, Google Product Search and Shopping.com.

Search drives the sale; branding only validates it. We've been conditioned by search not to be brand loyal. We may check out Amazon.com for the MP3 Player, but we have no qualms about buying it elsewhere. We have a world of information at our fingertips, and we only need the barest bit of data to access it. Why remember a brand when you can so easily find it again? Even when branding works on us, we validate that branding by searching for the brand in a search engine instead of going straight to the brand's web site. If that branding fully worked, the lucrative field of reputation management would disappear.

So branding isn't exactly dead yet, but in a world where we've been conditioned to use brands as--at most--a secondary measure of a company's worth, and to validate branding through search, it's importance continues to wane. In that world, a world where search still leads the way in driving revenue, SEO cannot die.

Posted by Eli Feldblum at 7:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (25)

Advertisers Can't Sell Hard Liquor But Google Can

Google AdWords has a strict no advertising rule for hard liquor, as they call it. You will not find ads for terms like rum, gin or vodka. Well... vodka searches now add a twist. Google has started to promote their vodka sellers with the top entry.

Before you get to the search results, there is a Google Checkout listing promoting various vodka sellers. Now that does seem like they are contradicting their own rules.

One hopes this was an oversight, since there are none for rum or gin as yet. Maybe vodka is just such a good Checkout seller that it has reached some number where it automatically gets the Checkout promo?

Hopefully someone at Google will publicly address this one. Right now, I would guess every vodka seller is signing up for a Google Checkout account. Not a bad mistake to make, if it generates new shopping cart customers.

Posted by Frank Watson at 1:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

SEW Experts: Google's Superiority Complex

In the end, is Google's search advertising system better than Yahoo's, or are they just monetizing better? In today's Searching for Meaning column, "Google's Superiority Complex," Kevin Ryan says it sounds like a little bit of both, but we shouldn't count Yahoo out.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

SEW Experts: Emotional Motivators in Landing Page Optimization

Visitors will arrive at your Web site with their own needs, perspectives, and emotions. In today's By the Numbers column, "Emotional Motivators in Landing Page Optimization," Tim Ash explains that since you don't know much about them individually, you can influence them collectively with the design of your site.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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