Huis - Jake Matthews

SEO Gemini

Brent Csutoras posted today commenting on being a social media scorpio based on Helen Overland's post at Search Engine People about the Zodiac sings of celeb SEO's.

Helen's post is a lot of fun! 

I'm not a celeb by any means, but it's fun to think about your sign and your profession. 

I'm not sure that my Gemini description actually matches my full profile, though I'm definitely a "born communicator".

Gemini (SEO)

Born communicators and great PPC managers, Geminis delight in discovering new ways to optimize your campaign. Known for being well organized, their complicated and color-coded spreadsheets can make sense of any logical challenge. These smart people can easily identify ways to spend less money and make more profit. Just remind them that they have to make the changes to the account.

...but I'm honored to share a Zodiac sign with with these three industry celebs:

Industry Celebs:
Kim Krause Berg
Rae Hoffman
Shana Albert

I actually feel I'm more of Pisces SEO with the celebrity likes of:

Bill Slawski
Charlene Li
Dave Harry
Eric Lander

...nonetheless, I LOVE that my birthday is in May; the weather in NY is always good!!

What's your sign and where do you fall on the SEO Zodiac?

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Dear YouTube, Your advertising sucks!

What's up with YouTube pasting their site with crazy flash banner ads and nasty overlays? This sucks! It ruins the user experience.  YouTube needs to find better ways to monetize.  They are alienating the very users that make the site so great. They need to put much more focus on the actual users and small guy's UGC and find a way to monetize that rather than screwing with our minds by placing really bad banner advertising in our faces. Stop killing the user experience YouTube!

 

Yahoo buying radio ads

Today I heard a radio advertisement for Yahoo! Search touting the search engine as being great because of a partnership with McAfee to ensure that your search results are safe.  This just hammered home for me how hurting Yahoo! must be right now.  It's getting bad at Yahoo! when a search engine has to buy radio ads to get more users and traffic, and tout safety/security features to gain users.  This is almost as bad as Ask.com's question asking feature.  How sad.

New Media Industry buzzing along

Andy points out a recent study from PQ Media / USA today showing that online search spending will grow 113% from 2008 to 2012, up to $26.1 billion.  Video and other areas will grow too - obviously.  Pretty cool to see such positive predictions with all this negative news that's been out there.

Yahoo's webmap on Hadoop

John points out that Yahoo! is now using Apache Hadoop to scale out it's webmap.  Jeremy interviews two leaders of the Yahoo team on the history of Yahoo's webmap and where they are going.  Pretty interesting video to watch in this post.  1 trillion links between indexed pages- fun, fun!

Yahoo Mobile Advertising: More Major Brands - BofA, Subway

It's been a while since I looked over some of the major brands that are employing Yahoo's Mobile platform to get their brands out there.  Lately there have been a ton of ads from FlyCell which is rather appropriate because they are simply selling ringtone downloads (of all the known 1 hit wonders) to mobile phone users. Personally, I can't stand music ring tones...

But some bigger brands are really leveraging things well.  Here are a few that I have seen lately... and I really like some of the simplistic designs because they still have impact:

Subway - Doctor's Associates, Inc.

Avis - Avis Rent A Car System, LLC

iShares - Barclays Global Investors, N.A

Bank of America - Mobile Banking

This last one is interesting because they really leverage the mobile angle well from design through to conversion. The Bank of America ad links out to this page which allows you to either submit your email to get a direct link back to the BofA dot-mobi site or just click through to www.bofa.mobi which forwards to https://www.bankofamerica.com/mobile/. 

I've spoken about getting dot-mobis and how I think that can be valuable and important for big brands. The company implementing the mobile component herein is Ipsh and they state the value of the mobile side as such on their site:   

"How can the mobile campaign actually move the needle and address a marketing paradigm for the brand? Is it about 1) user acquisition? 2) retention? 3) loyalty? 4) increased transactions? 5) a brand new revenue channel? Whatever the need of the brand is, we’re addressing it. Maybe mobile isn’t the right call. If it is, which technologies do we employ? SMS, WAP, WAP ADVERTISING, JAVA, BLUETOOTH, LBS? Perhaps it's a combination of them all. Maybe just one."

I think that the ads and the mobile approach is pretty powerful stuff.  The more and more un-teathered we get the better.  As marketers, reaching people on the run is going be increasingly important.

In the end, I really just enjoy seeing the different banner designs that come out in mobile form and the individual approach / pitch each one makes.

Aaron Wall's Internet Marketing Mind Map

Aaron Wall put up a really interesting "Internet Marketing Mind Map" several days ago. It's really great to browse through. 

Interesting as well, he points out on his blog some of the flaws of pull marketing. From what I understand, due to releasing the mind-map on his Tools site, the map did not garner as much attention as it may have if he'd put it right on his blog site.  The post on his blog made me think a bit deeper that perhaps all marketing may be "pull" (because unique ideas have "pull" ) and "push" marketing really equates to sales.  It's definitely a subject worth examining over and over.  Nonetheless - unique ideas are what really drive any type of marketing....if it is unique and edgy, and you use both pull and push to get it out - you're moving it forward. 

Oh, don't forget hard work too!

Yahoo! Continues Mobile Banner Push

Yahoo! continues to employ display banners on its mobile web pages.  All during fashion week Yahoo! was promoting it's own content services along with Elle Magazine with banners for Fashion week.

Here are some of the example banners that they were using in New York:

Here is a link to the page that the banners went to: oneSearch http://us.m.yahoo.com/p/search?p=fashion

Among the content that they promote on this search result page are Flikr photos, celebrity blogs, Elle content, links to Yahoo! News, Yahoo Local New York City Guide, and advertisers featured collections in Elle including Burbury, Armani and DK.

Yahoo is really pushing all of it's broad "portal" services in search these days and what better channel to promote it than tied to local events and local mobile banner advertising.

Starbucks Continues Yahoo Mobile Banner Ads

Today I was browsing on Yahoo! Mobile again and found that Starbucks is still taking advantage of local mobile advertising.

Here is the current banner that is running

Starbucks has been running a campaign for a while now.  I started seeing this type of banner a couple of weeks ago while browsing in New York City. This banner above is unmistakably Starbucks' brand.  It makes sense too because anything to do with Starbucks should be locally based advertising...mmm "so close you can smell it"

MarketingVox was out in front with news way back in early 2006, that Starbucks and Yahoo had some joint ventures on a micro-site.  It looks like Starbucks is still nice and cozy with Yahoo! 

I must say that the Yahoo! Mobile experience is still quite good.  Yahoo oneSearch continues to provide relevant results and is really user-friendly.

Paul Yiu, Yahoo!'s Mobile Search guru mentioned in the announcement on Y!searchblog that you need to download Yahoo Go 2.0 in order to use oneSearch, but that is not necessarily true.  I believe it's best to download Go if you don't have a "smartphone", but since I have a Blackberry 8830 World, I've been using oneSearch without Go, and it seems to work just fine.  Go seems more so to just pretty things up when browsing Yahoo! news and such.  It does present search results in a really pretty format, shows images and suggests a lot of local results that without downloading Go, oneSearch does not present.  With Go downloaded, certainly Yahoo has a better opportunity to display better advertising too, so I can see why Mr. Yiu would want all users to download it.

W3C Mobile Web Initiative

In case anyone is looking a central source on developments in leading edge, standards based mobile web technology, you can find it over at W3C Mobile Web Initiative  You may also contribute to their various working groups and test cases/environments.

From the W3C Press Releases area the purpose of the program is as follows:

The mission of W3C's Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) is to make Web  
access from a mobile device as simple, easy, and convenient as Web  
access from a desktop device. Through the MWI Sponsorship Program,  
key players in the mobile production chain, including authoring tool  
vendors, content providers, handset manufacturers, adaptation  
providers, browser vendors and mobile operators lead the Initiative.  
MWI participants develop authoring guidelines, checklists and best  
practices, as well as a database of descriptions that can be used by  
content authors to adapt their content to a particular device.

In a couple of past posts I've been tracking some mobile issues.