Marketing Pilgrim

The UK’s public service broadcasting behemoth, the BBC, has been going through some tough times the last few weeks. However a major announcement has been lost through all the talk of job loss, changes in programming and shifts in budget. Soon all the international visitors to the hugely popular BBC website will be served adverts. With such a huge audience it promises to sound the death knell for struggling portals like Netscape.

Ciaran Norris over at Altogether Digital highlighted the potential problems for the other portals and news sites.

Click here to continue reading...

In-game advertising really seems to be gaining some traction at the moment, and British Government intelligence organization, GCHQ, have taken the step of buying in game billboards to try and attract computer savvy graduates to consider becoming spies.

While the move isn’t quite as bold and the US military’s ‘America’s Army’ where a whole game and community has been developed to aid recruitment, it definitely shows more companies & organizations exploring the possibilities of in-game advertising.

GCHQ are using advertisement mimicking real world billboards within Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Double Agent on x-Box Live and across a number of other games including Rainbow Six: Vegas, Need for Speed Carbon & Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

Click here to continue reading...

Yet another traditional media company has got money burning a hole in their pocket and bought an online web property. Discovery Communications, owner of the similarly titled television channel, has bought out the online knowledge depository site HowStuffWorks for an estimated 250 million dollars.

The website set up nearly a decade ago by Professor Marshall Brain of North Carolina State University fits well with other educational properties owned by the group.

Although many of their Television channels have comprehensive web presences the acquisition of the pure play online offering is quite a departure.

Click here to continue reading...

We’ve not been having a great summer over here in the UK, but where-ever you are, the summer might be the ideal time to up the ante and make an extra push on your search marketing efforts.

Other SEOs are on Holiday – even the smallest niches, the chances are there are other websites competing for links and position in the rankings. If you can use the time, when they are off holidaying or enjoying longer lunch breaks to get extra links, you’ll gain a real competitive advantage. Similarly if you or your team are taking time off, don’t let your marketing efforts stop completely, delegate the work or find a friendly intern from your local college to help out.

Click here to continue reading...

There has been plenty of chatter in the last couple of days about ways that people could be negatively affecting your search engine marketing strategy. People are right to be worried, you only have to look at your search referrals to see how many people are typing in your brand name into the search engines. If there’s some mud slinging going on in your SERPs; plenty of people could end up reading it.

The Google results aren’t the only battle ground for disgruntled customers or unethical competitors. Everyman and his dog are getting involved in social media, and it’s here where the next round of fights will take place. So it’s worth thinking about where and how your rivals could be doing damage to your business.

Click here to continue reading...

The invites to Kevin Rose’s latest twitter-like project, Pownce, have been like hotcakes, and after 24 hours playing with the site I’ve come to the conclusion though it might not be the most creative web2.0 app out there, but it’s got a very good chance of becoming far more successful than any of it’s more innovative predecessors.

Click here to continue reading...

After four months of work and cryptic blog posting, The Economist Group’s small development team have announced their latest project a socially motivated social networking site.

Now known as “Lughenjo” the group have been working on a project who’s aim is to harness the knowledge and skills of The Economist’s readers to help NGOs, Charities & other organizations.

Lughenjo users will be able to answer questions that are posed by accredited international development organizations. Think Yahoo! Answers for good.

Click here to continue reading...

It seems like its been planned for a best part of a decade but today finally saw Tony Blair hand over the keys to Ten Downing Street to Gordon Brown. This of course gives us the perfect opportunity to have a quick look into how well Brown and his spin doctors are getting on in the social media space.

Click here to continue reading...

Everyone’s favourite hype fiend Jason Calacanis has announced a scheme to have Mahalo scale its human edited search engine results. Following a similar model to the former Weblogs Inc. re-launch of Netscape.com they are hoping to recruit prevalent social media users to help create their hand-made search results, for the internet’s most searched 10,000 terms, by paying the researchers between $10-15 per results page.

In my previous article about Mahalo I discussed some of the reasons why the engine might take off, despite many people’s belief that the model won’t scale, and was generally quite positive about the venture’s prospects, however the new “greenhouse” initiative has raised a number of questions in my mind about the future of the project.

Click here to continue reading...

It seems everyday a search engine is launched or relaunched and today it seems we’ve got one expanding. Baidu the hugely popular Chinese Engine is attempting to make the move into the European search arena.

e-consultancy thinks the move is bold and pretty naive, given their search technology is built around the Chinese languages. Similarly their somewhat vague distinction between natural and paid search might prove unpopular in certain quarters.

However they have set up an office in continental Europe and following their expansion into Japan, are hoping they can make a dent in Google’s strangle-hold on the European searchers.

Click here to continue reading...

Ask have used Danny Sulivan’s new event SMX as an opportunity to unlease their new Ask 3D user interface. And like Mahalo and Google’s Universal Search it’s a brave attempt to introduce multimedia like video and maps into their SERPs.

Andy has already had an extensive video demo of the new UI in use, and it’s up for everyone to play with at ask.com. So far there new algo seems to have done a good job of integrating local and video listings into their results, which seems in part down to a strategic relationship with recently stock market listed Blinkx.

Click here to continue reading...

It seems the SEO community isn’t too impressed with Jason Calacanis’ new search engine Mahalo. It’s not at all hugely surprising given his somewhat antagonistic relationship with the industry. However unlike some people I don’t think the project is destined to fail.

I agree with a lot of the faults that have been pointed out with the idea; but I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a minute and point out five ways in which Mahalo will succeed.

Click here to continue reading...