Josh Groban’s lesson in integrated marketing
So I was thinking whilst watching TV and browsing the net and tweeting - other people also do this right, but are they really interacting on the net and at the same time reacting to what they see on the TV?
A quick trip to search.twitter.com revealed I wasn’t the only one tweeting about the exact show I was watching - Never Mind the Buzzcocks (a BBC TV show with a relatively small audience). I think there are some really important lessons in the offline/online advertising split to be had from this little experience. Everyone talks about synergy between offline and online, but very few agencies or companies of any kind actually manage to pull this off.
If I was Josh Groban’s manager right now I’d be well chuffed. His performance on Buzzocks (funny, likeable, self deprecating) has not only boosted his profile slightly, but also given him credibility in an X-Factor dominated pop music market. It’s almost irrelevant whether he sells more albums to the viewers of the show - few Buzzcocks viewers are likely to ever buy a Josh Groban album, even if it’s for their mum…
The fact is, I’m now talking about him, so are other people who watched the show; his mindshare against X-Factor, Leona Lewis, and John Sergeant has grown and he will sell more albums as a result. I still hate his music, but I now have far more respect for him than the aforementioned pop 3.
So to compare Josh’s Twitter performance against 2 other high profile celebs on the show:
Josh Groban - constant tweets throughout - examples “a really funny guy.. who knew?”, “who knew Josh Groban was so funny?”, and significantly a few minutes after the show “looking through my old cds for my Christmas mixes and found Josh Groban’s Noel album… I forgot how amazing his voice is!“:
Grant Nicholas - 1 tweet during the show, more about the host Simon Amstell’s performance:
Heston Blumenthal - nyaah nothing at all for 6 months:
So my point is… we’re all missing something in the marketing game. Orange really didn’t get it - it’s not about telling people to search online. It’s about getting people to talk online - search is a part of that, but the key is to have, to be, to make something worth talking about.
Intelligent marketers and forward looking agencies will understand this and in time be able to integrate TV and online in new and innovative ways. I look forward to experiencing a fully integrated online & offline marketing experience one day soon…
Spam, confusion, and annoyance - welcome to SearchWiki
Even though SearchWiki is a very annoying service that adds clutter to the otherwise useful Google SERPs, I have to give it credit for a new hobby - SearchWiki comment watching.
The comments are filled with helpful tidbits like “test”, “this is good”, “where does this comment appear?” and other enlightening information.
Beyond TechCrunch’s porn spam, I have a few favourite comments, including the anonymous searcher who has commented on most Google results with “turn off this searchwiki crap fuck fuck fuck i hate searchwiki” 
It’s like a new art form…
Searching for [google]:
Searching for [mcdonalds]:
Searching for [microsoft]:
And Microsoft’s Norwegian result:
Awesome stuff 
Anyone else found any amusing/surreal comments?
Electronics reviews = spam
Google’s search results for product reviews truly suck hard, particularly in the electronics vertical. To be fair, so do Yahoo’s.
Recently I’ve bought a laptop, a new PC (custom built), and a new TV, and like many customers I like to read impartial expert reviews of products before I buy them. For cheaper products I don’t mind using the customer reviews on places like Amazon, but when I’m spending upwards of £100, I usually like to get an expert’s opinion.
For a long time now this has been all but impossible to do, because both Google & Yahoo’s search results have been flooded with crap from sites such as reviewcentre.com. Often these results are simply holding pages “awaiting” a review - an example of this is shown below:
These pages rank because they’re on domains with a high level of authority, and there is often some unique content such as a price comparison feature - of little value to a user looking for reviews.
Then there are the retailers/affiliates who target the keyword [reviews] in order to benefit from the (likely highly converting) search traffic in this area. Often there are no reviews on these sites either.
Increasingly it seems that the only way to get legitimate reviews is to type in the model #, and then some random feature of the product or some superlative such as ‘good’, ‘great’, ’superb’, etc.
Will someone please build a site that aggregates only expert reviews of a range of products? Please?
Yet more duplicate content fuzz
Read this post from Google on duplicate content, then read (and pay more attention to) Graywolf’s post.
I was going to blog about this whole thing, but Graywolf has summarized it well.
All I’d add is that Google are playing a dangerous game by pretending that they can handle duplicate content. What Google are effectively saying here is that people with good intent don’t need to worry about duplication, because Google’s algorithm can handle it. Maybe on a macro scale it can, but on a per-website level, and for the average webmaster, it really can’t.
I don’t buy their line that duplicate content penalties are a “myth” (as I’ve seen a direct 3 month duplicate content penalty on a large site), but I do think that there are filters applied that can effectively kill a website’s ranking for competitive terms, which can amount to the same thing.
Although
Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
That point is largely ignored for the rest of the post. But it is the most important point - the best way to avoid duplicate penalties, filters, whatever you want to call it, is to create a good information architecture from the outset. This doesn’t just help the search engines (even if Google appear to down play it in this post), it helps your users.
Has Web 2.0 finally jumped the shark?
A social network for dead people in the Techcrunch 50?!??!!
Is your web analytics solution causing duplicate content?
Duplicate content is a pervasive problem for a lot of websites, and can be difficult to understand for the average webmaster. Recently, I’ve come across problems caused by a couple of big name web analytics packages.
The issue stems from the use of various URL parameters to track a visitor’s session on a website. This is slightly different to the old session ID parameter problem, in that it doesn’t create quite as many duplicate pages; but it is important nonetheless.
I’ll work through a couple of examples of this; firstly I’ll look at Omniture’s SiteCatalyst product, using Channel 4’s website as a guinea pig. SiteCatalyst’s tracking code appears in a URL as intcmp, which stands for ‘Internal Campaign’, and can be identified quickly in the SERPs using a search like this:
As you can see from the snapshot above, there are nearly 10,000 results with this parameter added to the URL. If you visit any of these URLs you can delete the ‘?intcmp=blah’ section and get exactly the same page. Internal campaigns come and go, and as the campaign disappears, the link to the campaign disappears, but leaves behind an extra URL that the content can be accessed from.
A nice example for Channel 4 is this Internal campaign URL:
- http://www.channel4.com/bigbrother/?intcmp=homepage_flash (PageRank 3)
Clearly this link was indexed through a Flash based link on the home page. When this link disappears from the home page, it leaves this URL behind, sapping authority and causing duplicate content from the original page:
- http://www.channel4.com/bigbrother/ (PageRank 6)
Now moving on to the second culprit, WebTrends, there is a very similar issue here. This time the nasty campaign parameter is WT.[something] - this is broken down in the following image:
This time the chosen victim is a site called LuxuryLink - let’s take a look at the SERP:
Again, a couple of examples from this - the tracked version:
- http://www.luxurylink.com/LL/home_win_trip.php?WT.ac=MOENON03 (PageRank 5)
And the untracked:
- http://www.luxurylink.com/LL/home_win_trip.php (PageRank 4)
So this time the tracked URL has actually gathered more authority than the non-tracked version, but still the page’s authority is being split and duplicate content is created again.
How to fix it
Now this is not necessarily the fault of the web analytics companies, and definitely not the webmasters. There are many reasons why URL parameter tracking needs to be employed, especially in large companies where the split between the marketing team and the web development team is too pronounced to be able to implement HTML code changes with ease.
However the ideal solution is generally to use a combination of on-page JavaScript and browser session cookies in order to track visitors to your site. This doesn’t interfere with your URLs - remember, cool URIs don’t change!
If that is not possible for whatever reason (or if it is and you have URLs with the parameters above indexed in Google), use your robots.txt file, and use it wisely. I’d always recommend using Google Webmaster Central’s robots.txt syntax checking tool before implementing any major changes to your robots.txt file, but these rules should clear out the duplicate URLs:
Omniture:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*intcmp=
WebTrends:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*wt.*
Over-powerful domain authority in Google
Some interesting results for the query [airline tickets] in Google today - at numbers 3 & 4 there are 2 results from Bebo, the well-known airline ticket supplier.
Hang on, Bebo - isn’t that a social networking site rather than an airline ticketing company? As outlined by Trend Labs recently in a post entitled Spam Early Spam Often, fake Bebo profiles are being set up and used as a way to lure unsuspecting users into clicking on nefarious links within a profile.
This now appears to be affecting Google’s results too, at least for this query. This profile appears at #3 for the query:
Although these fake profiles have very low quality content and just link to an incredibly spammy domain, they have around 1,000 (spammy) backlinks according to Yahoo, and apparently that’s enough for Google to put them above the fold for a competitive query such as this.
Even though Bebo is a well known social networking site. Not anything to do with airline tickets. Simply being hosted on Bebo is enough to rank for this term.
Bring on the semantic web…