Marketing Pilgrim

The Maryland Court of Appeals has overturned a previous ruling that would have required a website that was being charged with defamation due to comments from anonymous ‘users’ to turn over their identities immediately.

All of this stems from a case where a Dunkin Donuts franchise received some non-complimentary anonymous comments about its bathroom cleanliness on the online forum NewsZap.com run by Independent Newspapers. The store is in Centreville, MD and having never been there I, Frank Reed, have no comment as to the cleanliness of their facilities. I will say though that I have encountered a few Dunkin’ Donut restrooms that could be introduced to some disinfectant and air freshener for sure but I digress.

The Internet content economy is like the candy rack when you were a kid. You know what I mean. You covet that bag of Skittles but you’re caught a little short on funds that day. So to feed your candy habit you sneak a bag out of the store. You know you broke the law but it seemed so innocent and what the heck, every kid deserves a bag of Skittles now and then right?

Well, for all of the folks out there looking through the content that exists out on the Internet and then ‘borrow’ it for their own sites or blogs there may be more retribution than you are used to. The NY Times does a great job of sorting through this increasingly complex subject. Seems like one of the interesting offshoots of a crappy economy is that everyone suddenly gets protective and starts to clamp down so nothing can be done for free anymore. I believe this is good thing for people to protect their efforts but the reality it is also near impossible to do.

It’s Monday (okay, well, Tuesday by the time you’re reading this), there’s a lot of news out there. To keep you on top of it all, we’re rounding up all those loose bits and putting them here.

• Have you heard of this little thing called “Twitter”? Yeah, this link isn’t about that. But if you were on Twitter today, you couldn’t have missed the chatter about Skittles’s latest move—turning its site into a gateway to its content on Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia and . . . okay, Twitter. I lied.
• Poor YouTube. After all the hype of the “YouTube presidency,” President Obama is moving on: embedding cookie privacy complaints from watchdogs precipitated a switch to Akamai to host the president’s weekly videos.

UPDATE: Is this a re-brand of Live Search to Kumo or is Kumo just being used as a staging site? It seems that if Microsoft just wanted to test a new interface, it could do that without using the Kumo brand. Still, we’ve put in a request for an official response from Microsoft and will let you know what we hear back.

UPDATE 2: We’ve received an official response from Microsoft:

Microsoft is using the Kumo.com URL for internal testing purposes only. Given the depth and breadth of our current online service offering, we recognize a need to sharply define and align our online brands. However, we have nothing new to announce at this time

The session on search marketing tactics served up a strong panel of speakers. As a result a range of interesting ideas were addressed from common sense optimization tips, to leveraging shopping feeds . . . and even Twitter.

Ethan Griffin – Groove Commerce

First up Ethan’s shared some ECommerce optimization tips with the audience, which included some of the following:

• Use the H1 tag
• Use unique product descriptions (don’t just copy and paste supplier info into the web pages)
• Pay attention to internal linking issues
• Don’t bury folders/directories so that pages appear too deep in the site
• Have the most important content at the top

In respect to SEO activities and links Ethan recommended that webmasters still submit to directories, consider creating separate blogs to drive traffic, use social media and leverage online PR.

A new form of email spam has surfaced, but this time with a recession twist. The email message focuses on the recession, but they are now including search engine links to trick your spam filters. According to MediaPost, the links included in the email don’t redirect to the spammer’s Web site, nor do the links perform a search in search engines using particular keywords in hopes of the spammer’s domain showing. Instead, the link performs a search for the spammer’s domain name. What’s worse, many of the sites the spammers lead unsuspecting users to is full of malware. To be honest, I’m surprised this hasn’t been done before.