B2B Marketing views, news and interviews.
From MSN Search’s WebLog:
“If you know a business-owner who would be interested in advertising their business on MSN Search, please forward this email to them and encourage them to apply to participate in the US Pilot by completing our online registration form at http://advertising.msn.com/adCenterPilot/89620.asp.”
Tags: MSN AdCenter, Search Marketing, AdCenter Pilot
Most times when I have computer problems or when internet goes down, it’s like being dead in the water. Like yesterday the motherboard on my Dell Inspirion 5150 started to go wacky, intermittently causing the screen to go black, requiring a reboot each time until I get a replacement. Then today our internet was down for about 5 hours. All I needed next was for the phone system to go on the blink.
So what happened? A ton of new business inquiries, a speaking engagement, interviews with Inc Magazine and US News & World Report and we signed a new client. Not so dead in the water after all. I did miss eComXpo though, but I can blog about that next week since they provide access for 90 days.
The National Arbitration Forum announced today that a ruling has been issued in favor of Yahoo! regarding the rights to 54 Internet domain names, including homepageyahoo.com, yahoocalendar.com, and fantasysports-yahoo.com, among others. This is the latest in a series of claims that Yahoo! has won in defending its brand and name.
Yahoo’s law firm filed a complaint with the National Arbitration Forum on August 5, 2005. via National Abritration Forum blog.
Tags: Yahoo, National Arbitration Forum, Domain Disputes
Pitching bloggers and journalists directly is often times hit or miss unless you have a long term relationship. Even so, here are some good guidelines for pitching blogs to follow.
There’s a good Media Relations with Bloggers article from Media Metamorphosis that presents some alternative ways of reaching bloggers and journalists. The just of it is, find out what blogs the journalist reads and using a combination of relevant comments and trackbacks, gain visibility and start a conversation.
One interesting tool for discovering what blogs/sites your intended audience reads is Rollyo, a service that allows you to build your own search engine of sites you want to track.
Yahoo Search Blog posts that Yahoo has partnered with several public and private organizations inclusing Adobe, Internet Archive and University of California to create the Open Content Alliance.
“the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content.”
In light of the controversy over Google print regarding copyright, the press release announcing the Open Content Alliance addresses copyright concerns:
“In order to respect the rights of copyright holders, content under copyright will be made available through the OCA only with the copyright holders authorization.”
There’s a good overview at ResearchBuzz where it’s suggested that Google Print and the Open Content Alliance could exist as compliments to each other rather than as competitors.
Google is one of several companies including Earthlink that have responded to a RFP asking for free Wi Fi access in San Francisco. Google has been testing Wi Fi in certain spots in San Francisco and New York this year. If accepted, the program would be supported by Google ads. Despite the attraction of free 300 kilobits per second, there have been some concerns regarding privacy. Lots of buzz on this over the weekend.
Tags: Google, Wi Fi, San Francisco
Happy news from Search Engine Roundtable: Barry proposes to his girlfriend Yisha using Ask Jeeves.
“I proposed via Ask Jeeves. I brought Yisha to my office, ask her to search on her name. While she was doing that I kneeled behind her with the ring and flowers. She typed in her name into Ask Jeeves, full name, and up came a special Smart Answer (thanks to Jim Lanzone and team) with the proposal.”
You know you’re a search geek when you propose using a search engine! Congratulations Barry and Yisha.
Google to build monster office on NASA property -“Google Inc. confirmed Wednesday that it will build up to 1 million square feet of offices at NASA Ames Research Center and collaborate with the space agency on research surrounding topics such as supercomputing that could benefit everything from moon launches to online searches.” – SFGate
Yahoo Desktop Search Out of Beta and adds contextual web search – Yahoo Search Blog
Many marketers are still clueless on search engine optimization via OMMA East conference. A bit of an understatement I’d say. At the same time, that also means huge opportunity for search engine marketing firms. – MediaPost
For those of you still gaga over PageRank, SEO Chat has a “search by PageRank” tool. The search results are ordered by PageRank, but what’s really useful are the links to view META Data, Inbound Links, Analyze Links, Cached Version and Similar Web Sites.
A bit late on this I know, but better late than never! Andy Beal who was previously VP at Websourced – KeywordRanking has started Fortune Interactive.
“an interactive marketing agency that focuses on search engine marketing – and have joined forces with an expert in linguistics, LSI and artificial intelligence, Michael Marshall.”
From the looks of the content on the site, they’ve focused on solving what most dissatisfied SEO clients complain about – proactive, ongoing communication. That, in addition to something called SEMLogic – which uses clustering and latent semantic indexing to examine a client?Ǭís industry, competition and key phrase selections.
Andy also writes a blog called Marketing Pilgrim. You can see Andy in action at the upcoming Pubcon 10 conference in Las Vegas.
The Times Online reported today the results of a recent survey of PR consultants on blogs and brand reputation:
“Nearly 60 per cent of respondents said that companies have not yet woken up to the risks, and 64 per cent said that a disgruntled employee or customer could cause significant damage to a firm‚Äôs reputation by posting damaging remarks on blogs”
For companies evaluating whether they should start a business blog or not, consider:
No blog – means not engaging in the dialogue that is happening with or without you. Unaddressed or poor response to negative commentary on blogs about your brand can be disasterous. Land Rover, Dell and Kryptonite Locks are perfect examples. There are others, but they are my clients 🙂
Google decides today is it’s birthday. I had previously posted that Online Marketing Blog/2005/09/search-engine-and-blog-news-bits.html”>Google was 7 on Sept 7th, but they’ve removed that info from their site and decided today is the day.
Happy 7th Google!
If you have the time, there are some interesting things you can find in your blog’s referrer logs on a Saturday morning. For example, I noticed traffic coming from a place called Netvibes so I checked it out.
Wow.
Netvibes is a very customizable content aggregator, rss reader that was just launched a week ago. It’s very much like Google’s personalized search and MSN’s start.com functionally because of the use of Ajax. With Google, you have to login to drag and drop content. With Start and Netvibes you don’t. All three offer preset news feeds, weather, etc.
Netvibes offers some additional features such as the ability to import, download and listen to podcasts and also check your e-mail on one or many Gmail accounts.
