Natural Search Blog » brand names

AT&T Acquires YP.com for $3.85 Million

Chris — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 20:41:49 +0000

AT&T has acquired YP.com for $3.85 Million. I distinctly recall back when AT&T previously bought YellowPages.com in for $100 million in 2004. Does this make sense?!?

Back in 2004, I laughed and laughed and laughed, and I told coworkers that it was a huge waste of money, because, I said, “they won’t be able to buy themselves into the top position for searches for ‘Yellow Pages’”. SuperPages.com long held that distinction under my SEO direction, and I knew that purchasing the term in a domain name alone would not depose all the work we’d done to rank tops for it. As time passed, however, yellowpages.com has indeed deposed the Superpages forerunner.

Still, the domain name didn’t accomplish this alone. There were a mixture of factors involved. AT&T used a considerable war chest of new capital to gain marketshare in the YP space. I believe they likely undercut other players and made major traffic deals with partners in order to gain greater traffic — so, some of their position was purchased. Also, the AT&T company has much greater prestige and far more customers than the previous owners of the “yellowpages.com” domain name, and they could leverage their print phone book covers to further promote the URL. This meant that far more people were inclined to link to them, and the domain name itself, embedded in all those inlinks, gave AT&T a defacto advantage in the PageRank game.

Further, Google itself shifted ranking factors slightly between now and 2004, placing a bit greater weight upon keyword terms within domain names.

And, after I left the Superpages, a number of my recommendations for ongoing SEO were neglected to some degree by the people overseeing such work. This resulted in Superpages getting deposed from its longtime slot as first position for “yellow pages”, and Yellowpages.com has been occupying that position for a while since.

Just for the sake of egos and prestige value, it might appear on the surface that AT&T’s investment in the yellowpages.com domain name was justified in order for them to achieve top ranking. But, this is the world of business, and considering the direction in which society and commerce has been shifting, their purchase of that old domain name and the more recent purchase of YP.com appear to be at a hyper-inflated cost that is way out of whack with any good business rationale.

First, I know for a fact that they never have gotten sufficient value from that original $100 million dollar domain name. Knowing exactly how much traffic goes to the top position for “yellow pages”, I know that it’s never paid for itself, and it’s unlikely to do so. (Okay, so I know that they also got a number of other business assets along with the domain in that original $100 mill price-tag, but even considering that, this domain was a very bad buy.)

I’ve written previously about the decline in user searches for “yellow pages”, and that decline is continuing:

(Google Trends graph shows ongoing erosion of user searches for “yellow pages”)

Fewer and fewer users are typing “yellow pages” into Google, as this graph demonstrates. It would’ve taken “yellowpages.com” a good many years to repay for itself even when the traffic for “yellow pages” keyword searches was good, but with this declining trend in those searches very apparent, this is no longer a realistic longterm investment, and it will turn more rapidly into a major capital loss.

Considering this ongoing, downward trend, the monetary worth and traffic-bearing value of both “yellowpages.com” and “yp.com” are declining. Many feel that the overall concept of “yellow pages” could be fast disappearing as well, and that will leave these as very dated-feeling trademarks only a short ways down the road. I’d say there are a very good number of young consumers today who don’t even know what “yellow pages” is! So, even the brand name value of these appears very short-lived.

I’m doubting that even the short term, ostensible existing traffic of YP.com is worth this $3.85 million price tag.

If I were an AT&T stockholder, I think I’d be mad enough about this to demand an accounting. With a number of major yellow pages companies experiencing significant business problems currently, this purchase is just incomprehensible. But, since AT&T’s yellow pages business unit is still attached to their telephone company, perhaps they have the luxury of wasteful spending on this piece.

Yellow Pages Guerilla Ad Campaign

Chris — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:27:56 +0000

I was speaking at the Search Engine Strategies (”SES”) Conference in Toronto a couple of weeks ago, and was impressed by the YellowPages.ca booth in the exhibit hall:

I’ve seen other, equally-large booths for online yellow pages companies, but this one seemed particularly attention-getting and inviting. The glowing yellow desk and the simple design made the thing very friendly-looking, and the geek in me was drawn to the near-real-time search volume graph they had playing up on one screen.

YellowPages.ca appears to continue to be functioning successfully, although it’s also likely getting impacted by the IYP industry rumblings and fears. The Yellow Pages Group parent company has apparently started launching aggressive ad campaigns to promote the use of their legacy printed yellow pages books as well as the YellowPages.ca online directory and their mobile search services. (ad campaign press release)

The ad campaign is using large yellow darts to beat the message in that consumers will be able to find exactly what they’re seeking through using the yellow pages — perhaps as a subtle dig at Google, since Google Maps searches may also include broader keyword-match results that might be unrelated to a user who is strictly seeking business listings.

The Torontoist reports on a part of the yellow dart campaign that is using some cute guerilla marketing tactics — check out the photo of a plumber’s van pierced by a giant dart, parked on a street in Toronto. The YellowPages.ca logo is prominent on the side of the dart, and the dart’s fins read “plumber found”.

I also noticed this interesting YellowPages.ca landscaping ad on an embankment alongside some commuter train tracks in Toronto. These landscaping ads strictly sported company logos as far as I could see and were apparently targeting the eyes of passengers as they passed along in the trains.

(click to enlarge)

The question remains, however - will massive ad campaigns and clever promotions be sufficient to bolster online yellow pages usage during a time when users appear to perhaps be migrating to the major search engines for business searches?

Local Search Behemoth InfoSpace Cashed Out

Chris — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:58:10 +0000

Last year when InfoSpace decided to sell off Switchboard, other directories, and their mobile services, I wondered if they were just cashing out. Yesterday’s New York Times article, “Once an Internet Giant, InfoSpace Dismantles Itself“, would appear to verify that they did indeed cash out.

The article further reports that the www.InfoSpace.com domain homepage began redirecting to www.Superpages.com a few weeks ago.

InfoSpace continues to operate, albeit at a much-reduced size in terms of numbers of employees and assets, focusing on their metasearch services such as Dogpile, MetaCrawler, and WebCrawler.

It may be that the operators of InfoSpace are indeed looking for their next big thing to do as a company, as was hinted at in their press statements last year. It still makes one wonder what that would be, since they had been a general search engine, then local search engine and mobile services company. The metasearch area seems like a very, very small slice of the pie in advertising terms, and one would expect it to shrink as Google appears to be eating up greater amounts of overall marketshare according to some reports. These changes would all appear to be eroding the value of the name brand as well — something not good, even if the plan involves the eventual sale of that intellectual property asset.

If InfoSpace is to rise back up again it will need a visionary to help it find the next big thing. Interestingly, one of the founders, Naveen Jain, went across the street when he left the company back in 2002, and opened up another competing local search oriented company, Intelius (provider of background checks and criminal record searches), which by all outside appearances seems to be operating quite successfully.

While some are critical of various Intelius marketing efforts, I’ve long noted the robust services they provide and have been impressed with their ability to affectively market their products and increase distribution through the internet using noncontroversial promotions. I’ve even purchased their services on occasion. Regardless of business practices involved, Naveen Jain helped create a compelling product while at InfoSpace and he’s repeated some measure of success at Intelius as well. InfoSpace needs a similar sort of visionary for the sake of long-term viability or they’ll ultimately cash out for investors as only a short-term investment.

Online Reputation Management Through Search at SMX West

Chris — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:41:49 +0000

I was interested to hear the presentations in the Reputation Monitoring & Management Through Search session at the SMX West Conference yesterday in Santa Clara, and the five presenters didn’t disappoint.

(click to enlarge)

First up was Andy Beal, who I was particularly interested in hearing since this presentation came just after he announced his new online reputation management monitoring service, Trackur, and he also announced he’d have a number of free copies of his book at a booth in the exhibit hall later.

Additional speakers included Chris Bennett, Veronica “Niki” Fielding, David Wallace, and Jonathan Ashton.

Chris Bennett

David Wallace

Veronica “Niki” Fielding

Jonathan Ashton

I guess that the most interesting takeaway for me was in terms of how beneficial proactive online reputation management can be at insulating a company or person from negative press if/when something does arise in the blogosphere or in general internet space. Setting up a presence under your name in multiple different services like LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Myspace, etcetera can help you control the message about you that users will find on the first page of keyword results for your name.

Should you buy search ads for your brand keywords?

Chris — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 16:17:19 +0000

I confess, as a search engine optimizer, I used to think that buying ads for one’s own brand name was a complete waste of money. After all, all companies should rank in top slots for their own brand name(s), if they’re doing their SEO right, and if you’re ranking tops then people will be able to find you if they’re looking for you. As such, I thought that buying ads for your own name was just paying for clicks that should rightly come to you anyway.

But over time, I’ve heard other experts stating that their research shows that having ad presence for brands along with natural search ranking appears to enhance overall click through rates in a synergistic manner. And, with greater experience, I’ve seen a number of cases when companies really should be buying their own brand name keywords for ads!

I see that George Michie over at the Rimm-Kaufman Group criticized a recent Microsoft study claiming that some advertisers are wasting money by buying their own brands in paid search ads — and I think George was right to criticize this. Read on and I’ll elaborate…

I’ve seen a lot of cases where companies frequently don’t rank well for some of their brand-name combinations. Sure, one can argue that if their natural search optimization were done better, they might rank at the very top of the SERPs for those combos. But, I see cases where quite a few companies have products that are more typically purchased through particular department stores, resellers, or other distributors, and those other companies may have so much better search rankings that the original product creator is not likely to ever rank above them.

In these cases, I think that buying one’s own brand names in paid search makes a lot of sense!

For example, I love these Jhane Barnes clothes I can get at high-end department stores like Nordstroms — if you do a search for “Jhane Barnes trousers”, you get a search results page where the official Jhane Barnes site is only listed in the sixth position down:

(click to enlarge)

Now, I know that it’s likely that most of the Jhane Barnes sales likely happen in department stores, so it’s maybe not upsetting to them that they’re ranking lower than Neiman Marcus. Quite simply, Jhane Barnes (PageRank = 5) is not likely to ever outrank much more widely popular sites like Neiman Marcus (PageRank = 6) or Bluefly.com (PageRank = 6). Even if Jhane Barnes were to fix all of the SEO flubs that I see going on with their site, I’m not at all sure that they would overtake the Neiman Marcus or Bluefly pages that I see outranking them on that longer-tail search combination.

I’d bet that Jhane Barnes would make more money selling directly to consumers than selling through these distributors, though, and getting position higher on the SERPs would help with that. A paid search ad for their brand name would help insure they’d get up there. And, as a consumer, if I rapidly saw their official site when I came to this SERP, I might be inclined to click through to check their prices first, in the assumption that they might have just a slightly lower price than Neiman’s for the same item, or I might get discount offers from the later on.

Let’s look at an even more dramatic example, though. Let’s do a search for William Gibson’s newest book, “Spook Country”:

(click to enlarge)

Notice how the highest couple of links in the SERP is to the book’s pages at Amazon.com? The next is Wikipedia. The next two are, thankfully, the author’s own site. The two after that are to magazine and news sites, and so on. Now, you can buy the book through the author’s site, but it just has links off to other places like Amazon and Barnes & Noble to buy the book. But, how about the big publisher who manufactured and promoted the book?!?

Putnam Adult, the imprint of the book, is owned by the Penguin Group USA, the publisher. They’ve got their own online shop where this book could be purchased, assumably at higher profit for Penguin than if the book is bought through distributor book shops. The Penguin Group’s listing for Spook Country is all the way on the second page of the search results in Google — a place where practically no consumer is going to click to buy.

The Penguin Group USA website has a Google Toolbar PageRank of 7, but their pages are not likely to ever outrank the internet behemoths of Amazon.com (PageRank = 9) nor Wikipedia (PageRank = 9). They might even have considerable struggle with getting above The New Yorker (PageRank = 8), and The Los Angeles Times (PageRank = 8).

The best way to ensure that The Penguin Group’s page selling their own book makes it into the field of vision for online consumers would be to buy the keywords for “Spook Country” and “William Gibson” - ads in the sidebar or above the natural search results would undoubtedly drive up their direct sales, reducing how much they’d pay to the distributors.

Of course, to have me, a dyed-in-the-wool natural search expert endorse paid search may invite all sorts of criticism! I used to hear the paid search reps touting branded keywords as enhancing overall click-through, though, and I couldn’t help but be suspicious of their motives, since they have an obviously vested interest in increasing paid search purchases. However, I think that there are objectively logical reasons for using paid search placement for brand keywords, just like the examples shown above, and I think that there could indeed be a positive psychological effect on brand recognition when both natural and paid search placements appear on the same page. At very least, if you’re in both, you’re taking up more of the page’s overall real estate, reducing the space taken up by other parties.

I believe that a strong search marketing program has both paid and natural presence.

So, George Michie is right, though I don’t know that I’d go so far as to call affiliates “thieves” , since affiliates are frequently more facile, quick and efficient at targeting market niches that the bigger, product-originating companies have difficulty in catering to.

Build It Wrong & They Won’t Come: Coca-Cola’s Store

Chris — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 17:01:43 +0000

I just wrote an article comparing Coke’s and Pepsi’s homepage redirection, concluding that Pepsi actually does a better job, though both of them did ultimately nonoptimal setup for the purposes of search optimization. Clunky homepage redirection isn’t the only search marketing sin that Coca-Cola has done — their online product shopping catalog is very badly designed for SEO as well, and I’ll outline a number of reasons why.

In this article and in the redirection article, I’m criticising Coca-Cola’s technical design quite a bit, but I’m not trying to embarrass them — like any good American boy, I love Coca-Cola (particularly Coke Classic and Cherry Coke). In fact, this could ultimately benefit them, if they take my free assessment and use it as a guide for improving their site. I’m doing this because Coca-Cola is the top most-recognized brand worldwide, and the sorts of errors they’re making in their natural search channel are all too common in ecommerce sites. I chose Coca-Cola’s e-store because they make such a great example of the sorts of things that online marketers need to focus upon. If such a juggernaut of a company, with huge advertising and marketing budgets makes these sorts of mistakes, you could be making them, too.

Let’s first take a look at the Coca-Cola store’s main page. Their store’s listing in the search engines is pretty good, coming up in first slot for searches like “coca-cola store”:

(click to enlarge)

It’s a bit weird to me, however, that they apparently purchased Sponsored Links in Google above the listings, and in the sidebar as well. Now, I know that a number of marketers like to say that appearing in both the sponsored links and in the natural search results improves overall click-through, but for one’s own brand-name searches, it simply seems wasteful to me. Why pay for traffic that you’d likely already be receiving for free? You should be coming up tops for your brand-name searches already, and you shouldn’t have to pay for them.

Now, the description snippet that comes up below their link in the listings: “The Coca-Cola company’s store offers a variety of products, collectibles and gifts including apparel, memorabilia, and Coke Polar Bears merchandise.”, could actually be just a tad better. Users are unlikely to be searching for terms like “variety of products”, “company’s”, “gifts”, and “apparel”.

The use of “collectibles”, “memorabilia”, and “Coke Polar Bears” terms are probably pretty good, but I would drop some of the nonoptimal/less-optimal terms in favor of some of the top items that Coke fans would be searching for. Instead of “apparel”, most consumers would be searching for “clothing”. (Don’t believe me? See the relative popularity of searches for those two terms using Google Trends .) One of the top most-popular items is Coke glasses or mugs - it would be great if the description mentioned that. Also cool if the description mentioned “signs”, and “bottles”.

If they wanted to change their description snippet, they would need to add a META Description tag into the code of their homepage. Their snippet in Google is currently being pulled from their DMOZ listing , because they have no META Description tag.

The homepage is a bit thin on text content, which is really central to search optimization. Other than the “Coca-Cola” name in the footer copyright statement, the only beneficial text on the page is in the three changing featured product boxes on the left side and one or two of the navigation menus in the header. Yet, most of the terms in the pulldown menus are not what users would search upon: “Serving”, “Gifts”, “Personal Care”, “Juniors”, “Women”, “Men”, etc. The featured products in the sidebar have little hyperlinked images with them, but those images do not have ALT text set up with them, so there’s lost opportunity for providing more keyword weight on the page and for the pages being linked to.

Fortunately, the header menus are built through DHTML, so the links within them are actually crawlable by search engines. Many sites have dynamic menus built purely in Javascript, Flash or Java, creating a barrier for search engine spidering, since they cannot easily navigate through those formats. It’s also good that Coke provides an alternate link for users and search engines with the “See All Product Categories” link.

One big problem with Coke’s store is that they apparently sessionize users by placing a Session ID on URLs for some sets of users, and they haven’t set their application up to drop those IDs out of Googlebot’s spidering of the site. If you do a search for pages on the Coke store which have “jsessionid” in their URLs, you’ll see that over 4,000 pages have been spidered by Google which contain the IDs . Since every user is assigned a different Session ID, this is resulting in pages getting indexed under multiple variant URLs. This causes duplication in a major way - diluting down the PageRank of the site, which can cause lower overall rankings. Stuff like this needs to be managed better to reduce duplication and give each page as much ranking potential as possible.

All of Coke’s product pages are also thin on text content, and are not passing unique keywords through all the different key page parameters that they should be. For instance, on this earrings page :

The title only says “Coca-Cola Store”, which is the link text that would appear in the Google search results if this page came up relevant to a user’s search - not only does this not communicate the page contents to users (likely resulting in lower clickthrough rates on that generic link), but it also results in not coming up as high as they could/should when users are searching for the specific type of content found on the page.
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Just as with the homepage of the store, there’s no META Description. For these product pages, Google will cobble together some of the visible text from the page in order to create a description snippet on the fly. Since there’s also not much other visible text on the page, this results description snippets which don’t look so hot:

(click to enlarge)

There are H1 tags on the page, but their text is not ideal:

Red Square Recycled Glass Earrings

. It probably would be better to put the Coca-Cola name in the H1 tag with the product name — if they did, this page might come up for long tail search terms like “Coca-Cola Earrings”. As it is, it doesn’t even come up in the results for a very precise query, such as “Coca-Cola Red Square Recycled Glass Earrings“.
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Instead of linking back to “Home” in the breadcrumb, it would be better to link text like “Coke Store” or “Coke Store Home”.
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None of the hyperlinked thumbnail images on the category pages have image ALT text, which is another lost opportunity to convey link weight for keyword terms to the product pages.
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The site is structured with unnecessarily long page URLs:
www.coca-colastore.com/coke/coke/jump/product/W10965/Red_Square_Recycled_Glass_Earrings.html
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It’s believed that shorter URLs with far fewer subdirectories in the link will generally appear to be more important to search engines, since resources located closer to the domain name are typically more important in the site hierarchy.
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Keyword text in the URLs is using underscores to separate words: “Red_Square_Recycled_Glass_Earrings”. Search engines do not treat underscores as “white space” characters like spaces, tabs, dashes, colons, etc. So, Google searches for “Glass Earrings” will not appear as relevant to pages with “Glass_Earrings” in the URL as they would for pages with “Glass-Earrings” in the URL.
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Various navigational routes to site pages are resulting in multiple, duplicate URLs. For example, the text links for products on category pages are completely different than the image links to the same product:
www.coca-colastore.com/coke/coke/catalog/product.jsp?navAction=jump&navCount=10&id=W10965
www.coca-colastore.com/coke/coke/jump/product/W10965/Red_Square_Recycled_Glass_Earrings.html
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Once again, duplication reduces focus on the individual pages, and dilutes down the potential PageRank of every page on the site.

Some of their items are targeting speakers of foreign languages, but they don’t display any of the targeted language text on the page. For instance, they should at least include the Coca-Cola name in Cyrillic for this Russian hat.

I also see some additional items impacting usability, beyond the search engine optimization issues:

The site’s internal search engine isn’t set to automatically stem common variants of search terms, such as inclusing of plurals. For instance, I searched for “clocks”, and it found zero results. But, you can find eight items if you search for just plain old “clock”! Very bad! How many users would realize that their search engine doesn’t handle similar term associations very well? This has to result in fewer sales than they might otherwise get.
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Hitting the “BACK” button in the browser sometimes results in a blank page - the BACK button is really a core piece of usability which should be supported as much as possible — no excuse for this to be happening for the pages where it occurs in the Coke store.
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The lack of ALT text throughout the site causes a barrier to users who have display of images disabled in their browsers, or who are using audio browsers to read pages to them — so, lack of ALT text is not supportive of users who are visually disabled.

Back to the main subject — natural search optimization for the Coca-Cola online store — if Coke fixed all the issues I identified, I’d estimate that they’d probably be able to increase the traffic and sales to this site by somewhere between 25% to 50%, and they could probably save on some of the Pay-Per-Click ad clicks in the search engines as well! Imagine all the many ways that users might be searching for these products, and since Coke isn’t singing to the search engine for those terms, many other sites will come up as more relavent for the searches. For instance, a search for “coca-cola jewelry” has nothing from the official Coca-Cola site coming up on the first page of natural search results in Google. Likewise searches for “coca-cola glasses” and “coca-cola clocks“.

All of these sorts of problems are dirt-common in the online retail space. Coke has so much brandname goodwill built up that they’ll still get really good traffic through their website. However, they’re paying a lot to affiliates and to advertising fees for a multitude of keywords for which they could be getting free traffic. Learn from Coke’s example in this article and clean up these sorts of items - you’ll drive up your revenue and perhaps reduce your costs in the process.

We know that most top companies have trouble maintaining the focus, knowhow, and prioritization necessary to optimize their online catalogs. We have a solution for these barriers which can get sites optimized with virtually no internal effort and pain, and I’ll be outlining this solution in a follow-up article here tomorrow.

Coming Soon to NYC: The Googleheim Museum

Chris — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 16:11:08 +0000

[Source: SEO-AP] Due to budget cuts of the NEA and gross mismanagement by the Guggenheim Foundation board of directors, one of America’s top museums has been in danger of closing down in bankruptcy and selling off priceless artworks in order to repay debtors. However, Google [NYSE: GOOG] company has apparently made a unique sponsorship offer to the Solomon R. Guggenheim, and the deal is apparently set to initiate on June 1.

Source: Google internal documents outed earlier today on Natural Search Blog.

Information related to the deal was discovered by this reporter while browsing through 3D images of buildings created with Google Sketchup (while researching an article on Sketchupâ€™s University Contest). Apparently, Google personnel had generated a new faÃ§ade of the building in the application in order to use the images in a proposal to bail out the museum. Due to a temporary glitch, links to the confidential building diagrams showing a new exterior could be found for a short while in the applicationâ€™s online data warehouse. These images showed a new logo reading â€œGoogleheimâ€?, apparently a cross between the well-known Google brand name and the Guggenheim name.

The proposed exterior showed the newly Google-ized logo broadly splashed across the museum, replacing the much smaller signature letters of the current museum name. Other information regarding the deal was leaked by a few unnamed sources within the company, and the deal was subsequently confirmed to by Google spokesperson, Erin Fors.

Architectural rendition of the future new Googleheim Museum

The Bush Administration has steadily cut funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) while increasing war funding — a move that many felt was done specifically to repress the often loud voice of the liberal arts community. When Republicans took over the House in 1995, they tried to eliminate all funding for the NEA and cut its budget by 40 percent to $99.5 million in 1996-97. The Bush administration’s proposed budget for fiscal 2008 includes $128.4 million for the NEA. Both artists and museums have felt the brunt of the NEA budget cuts and recent, marginal increases provided by the government to deflect the criticism of stifling war criticism have not been sufficient to completely fix the suffering Guggenheim.

The Guggenheim Foundation has overstretched itself in recent years by opening satellite museums with extensive, expensively-built architecture in Las Vegas, Venice, Berlin, and Bilbao, each of which have failed to bring in the numbers of visitors projected to help offset the costs and pay for the construction loans.

Google is now sweeping in to save the day, so long as they’re able to get some brand name equity in the deal, and so that they can further their information retrieval goals.Â Google’s mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” As part of the deal to take over the museum, they intend to use a unique laser scanner to convert all of the flat art into digital format. This laser process known as Multi-Wavelength High Saturation Scanning requires dozens of passes over each artwork, using different light wavelength laser beams in order to capture subtle color variations which can occur under various lighting conditions. This scanning process is highly controversial among curators and art preservationists because the process apparently damages paintings irreparably.

â€œWe used multi-wave scanning on a 16th century illuminated manuscript,â€? says Dr. Timothy Potts, director of the world-famous Kimball Museum in Fort Worth. â€œThe manuscript pages appeared burnt afterwards, and became so brittle they literally disintegrated. I wouldnâ€™t use this type of scanning unless it was the last-ditch possibility for preserving the image of an artwork that is already in danger of decomposing.â€?

Google apparently disagrees. â€œMulti-wave scanningâ€™s broad spectrum lasers provide the very best technology for capturing the essence of any given painting,â€? states an unnamed Google engineer. â€œWeâ€™ve been using this method for preserving the illustrations for particularly rare books as we scan in libraries. The resultant chroma is far better saturated than other methods.â€?

â€œWe know that the future of art viewing is going to be a digital experience. Analog art, requiring you to travel to a location and view the art in person is going to become a thing of the past.â€?

â€œLook,â€? the engineer stated impatiently, â€œthis is the best means there is for preserving the image of the artwork for future generations. Replicating many copies, all of which are digitally identical will insure that future generations have the same viewing experience as the people of today. NOT scanning an artwork using mult-wave is simply irresponsible!â€?

Some appliance dealers in Manhattan are now reporting a number of significant orders for the industryâ€™s largest flatscreen monitors to be delivered to the Guggenheim by the end of the summer.

The scanning process is the smaller side of the controversy sparked by the museum takeover. After this reporter mentioned the specifics of the takeover to various interested parties around New York, it appears that the new name for the museum and its giant letters are poised to ignite a furor of anger from ethnic anti-defamation leagues and historical preservationists.

Adam Brenner of the Manhattan Cultural Anti-Defamation Society states, â€œTheyâ€™re ruining the historical integrity of the building and the city. What exactly is wrong with keeping the old Jewish name? Solomon Guggenheim was a philanthropist and businessman. We should continue to honor him through the museum name.â€?

Fors politely responded to the concern, saying, â€œGoogle’s research indicates that many users already mispell the historical name of the museum compared with our highly-recognizable company name, so evolving it into the â€˜Googleheimâ€™ name will already improve the spelling of countless schoolchildren and will increase the name recognition of the institution while still preserving the roots of its legacy founder’s name. Itâ€™s actually a brandname mashup â€“ another great innovation by an imaginative company.â€?

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have apparently long held admiration for the architect of the Guggenheim, Frank Lloyd Wright, and even ordered Google employees to create a custom Google logo commemorating the architectâ€™s contributions and to display it on the date of his birth in 2005.

Google also has offices in Manhattan, and itâ€™s known that their employees have been visiting the museum with some frequency.

Artists we interviewed for this story are still stunned at the news of the planned changes to the august institution.

“It’s not Google owning the place or renaming it after themselves that unnerves me the most…”, says up-and-coming abstract-compound artist Margaret Withers of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, considered by most to be the new Art Capital of the World.

“After all, it just demonstrates the natural progression of the museum
institution in a post-modernist world. The renaming could transcend the
commercial aspects of this buyout to the point of becoming Pop Art or
maybe even a sort of deadpan Kitsch. However, I am concerned about this
bizarre scanning process as my intent for my paintings is for them to
live on for posterity.”

Artist Margaret Withers in her studio. File photo, 2005

Some of Withers’ paintings which are owned by a major private collector are currently being considered as a possible bequest to the Guggenheim and Withers worries about their fate in light of the scanning process. “I’ve asked my patron to hold off on willing them to the museum until I can tell which way the art world is likely to go. I’m concerned about the future of American art when the art world moves toward a desire for destruction and forms an unholy liaison with the vast corporate machinery, it wouldn’t surprise me if Wal-Mart one day becomes the largest and only art dealer.”

Withers looks uncertainly out the window of her studio, and nervously nibbles the handle of a paintbrush.

Other artists are less philosophical about the concept. Many in the art world consider viewing a piece of art to be an experiential act which cannot be adequately duplicated by viewing any sort of reproduction, no matter how good the quality of the scanned image. At least one critic likened the scanning process to the scientific destruction of a painting that happened when wealthy author Patricia Cornwell destroyed a painting byÂ Walter SickertÂ in order to test for DNA evidence in support of her pet theory that the artist was the infamous Jack the Ripper of old London.

One thing is certain. The changes introduced by Google into the conservative and slow-to-change art world are not likely to be met with ready acceptance and adoption over night. Dozens of artists have immediately begun adding stipulations into agreements for selling their art, specifying that the paintings can never be sold to Google or to the Guggenheim, or even loaned to them. And, at least one group of collectors is already coming together to lob a class-action lawsuit at Google to halt what they call the â€œcultural burning at the stake in an act of supreme hubrisâ€? of works which they donated to the institution.

Ultimate Local SEO Tactics

Chris — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 14:45:46 +0000

After I earlier wrote some Extreme Local Search Optimization Tactics, one of my SEOÂ coworkers, Steven Spaulding, “out-extremed” me by joking that one could go even further by getting a custom city name made from beneficial keywords! For example, one could end up with a street address like:

257 Viagra Drive, Cialis, Texas

(Ugh!Â I’m probably going toÂ regret using those keywords in my blog posting!)

Until Steven joked about this, it just hadn’t occured to me to even consider using a city name for keyword optimization purposes. It’s undoubtedly far-fetched, but I began to wonder, is it within the realm of possibility? Actually, I think it is. So here’s this post - an addendum of sorts on my previous article. Here’s two more local search optimizationÂ strategies which are so extreme, so over-the-top, that I’ll label them “Ultimate Local Search Optimization Tactics”. Someone with enough money and desire might be able to pull one of these off!

So, read on if you’re morbidly curious, and don’t worry, Dave Naffziger, these are so extreme that they’re unlikely to cause you to lose any sleep!

Rename a City forÂ YourÂ Keyword OptimizationÂ

When I first started thinking of the possibility of using a city’s name for passing keyword text, I immediately thought of the small town of Braselton, Georgia. For all you other children of the eighties, you may recall that Braselton was the town that the actress, Kim Basinger, bought back in 1989. I seem to recall that the town sorta put itself up for sale in hopes of getting some major capital influx to renovate the place, and Basinger, along with Ameritech Pension Fund, ganged up to buy it. Unfortunately, Basinger’s involvement went up in smoke pretty rapidly since she was having separate financial problems, and the plans to reinvigorate the town as a tourist attraction with movie studios and a film festival have sadly faded.

Braselton’s marketing plan was actually a great idea, though! There’s tons of old, faded little towns in America which have a major desire for economic renewal, and perhaps selling off the town name to a major sponsor could be a win-win situation for everyone involved! The company gets more exposure and the town gets a much-needed influx of development capital. Stadiums, amphitheatres, and arenas all over the country have moved to a similar name-sponsorship arrangement, so it naturally might work for cities as well. How many of you reading this live near a Verizon Wireless Music Center or Theatre in the US?

Right here in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area where I live, we have a number of these major name-brand-sponsored venues:

The Dr. Pepper StarCenter in Frisco
The American Airlines Center in Dallas
The Smirnoff Music Centre in Dallas

While most companies operating under “Marketing 1.0″ might unimaginatively want to rename a city by their brandname, those wishing to leverage keywords for web search and local search optimization might instead choose to name the town something beneficial, and make sure they have an office presence in it. If targeting for local search, they might also want to find a town near to a major metro area for this purpose.

So, okay - finding a small town that would be willing to sell up their namespace as a sort of billboard could be hard to accomplish. And expensive. But, there are so many smalltowns in America that it mightÂ instead be possible to locate one which already has a name that’s optimal for one’s business, depending on how imaginative you are, and how easy it would be to find terms that would be applicable to the business.

When the Citizens Bank of Windsor opened up a branch in the small town of Tightwad in Missouri in 1984, they had no idea that they were about to tap into a niche banking market that no one knew existed. They opened the branch, naming it the “Tightwad Bank”, and word of the humorous name slowly began spreading across the country, viral marketing-fashion. The bank managers evidently played into the joke by makingÂ their logoÂ depict aÂ fist clutching a wad of dollars. Initially, as newspapers spread word of the bank through their filler columns and such, many people wrote or called into the bank to open accounts. Apparently, if someone lost a bet and wished to pay it or other bills off, they’d obtain checks from the bank with the tightwad fist printed on them, and express their contempt while paying off the debt.

In January of thisÂ year, the Tightwad Bank closed its doors after 22 years. After the novelty wore off, the town dwindled and business at the bank dropped off as well. But, the Tightwad Bank is still a good example of how a town’s existing name could give enhancement to a business’s marketing efforts. Here’s just a few I’ve seen that could potentially be used for marketing purposes:

Accident, MD - convenient name for attorneys specializing in personal injury?

Christmas, FL - good location for Xmas seasonal businesses?

Romance, WV - shouldn’t Match.com open up an office there?

Belcherville, TX - a town that really should be sponsored by Gas-X.

Carefree, AZ - “carefree” somehow makes me think of ads for feminine pads or deodorants or something.

Prosperity, SC - apropos for retirement investment firms?

Grapevine, Tx - neighboring town to mine - perhaps good for wine industry, no? It’s likely a case of a town named after its industry, since there are a few wineries there.

There’s also a number of town names which would ratherÂ lend themselves to the adult-oriented industry. Ahem!

So, after considering the use of city names in addresses as a way of getting keyword optimization, we have to now consider another extreme tactic. What’s left?!?Â Â Â Â Â Â Â

Rename Your Country for Brand/Keyword Value!

By now you’re rolling your eyes, and you’ve justifiably written this off as the ludicrous ravings of a poor, in-house SEO who’s finally lost his tenuous hold on sanity. Hold on! Sorry, but I didn’t exactly invent this particular tactic, either!

Is it reasonable or even possible that someone might be able to buy their way into getting an entire country renamed for the purposes of keyword optimization or brand name promotion?

Well, recently, a company/collective called Pirate Bay attempted to purchase an entire island, Sealand,Â with the intention of renaming it their brandname. For those who’re unfamiliar, Sealand is a man-made platform that Great Britain used for defensive purposes in World War II, and which they later abandoned. A man named Paddy Roy Bates took over the structure in 1967 and declared it an independent principality, declaring himself, his wife and son to be the “royal family”. In more recent history, Sealand and an ISP, HavenCo Ltd, set up internet access and hosting on Sealand, gaining a lot of interest from internet privacy and security buffs for providing hosting that is highly independent from oppressive government restrictions.

Fast-forward to the present, and we have The Pirate Bay, a company/collective that has gained underground fame on the net as the world’s largest bittorrent tracker/directory. American movie studios (MPAA) and other concerns have been campaigning to shut Pirate Bay down, reacting to the perceived threat in a manner very reminiscent of the fight against Napster. Last year, Swedish police raided Pirate Bay and closed it down, but after a short stint, they were back on line. Considering the ongoing threat, Pirate Bay is looking to find a data haven where they can’t be shut down, so they’ve spoken of purchasing anÂ ultra-small country likeÂ Sealand, or Ladonia.

According to one report, part of Pirate Bay’s motivationÂ was also that they wanted to seeÂ their name on Google Maps - indicating that they’re not only seeking data haven, but are also intending to rename any country they might purchase in order to gain brandname optimization in local search to a degree:

“We have 20,000 to 25,000 dollars to spend and we are looking at some alternatives. Really we just want somewhere we can name The Pirate Bay, so we can look on Google Maps and find ourselves there.”

As it turns out, Pirate Bay’s play for Sealand hasn’t panned out, since they’re far short of the 750 million euros price tag. Even if Pirate Bay’s unserious purchase attempt was little more than a publicity ploy, they’ve attempted an ultimate local search engine optimization tactic that others will surely consider. There’s lots of little islands around the world, potentially much cheaper than Sealand, and someone’s going to buy one and rename itÂ for the prestige, if not the keyword potential.

Should I play this Extreme game any further by wondering aboutÂ the potential forÂ using planets or satellites for the purpose of marketing and optimization?

I’ve previouslyÂ posted a joke blogÂ about optimizing “roof ads” for the satellite pics in Google MapsÂ and other mapping systems, but that tactic is now turning serious with Pirate Bay’s goal and actual ads like Yum! Brand Inc’sÂ KFC space adÂ that’s spread across the desert near Area 51. My friend, Lana Davis, is going to snort now as I mention her company, Yum!, yet again. Yum! company’s Pizza Hut intended to use a laser to beam their logo onto the face of the Moon way back in 1999, much like how the Gotham City mayor or police chief will beam the bat-symbol onto the clouds whenever they need to get Batman’s attention for some crisis.

Okay, so I won’t count Planet Optimization or Moon Optimization, yet, since they’re perhaps technically infeasible at the moment. But once you see companies using City Name Sponsorships or buying entire countries for the sake of Brand-Building, you can just count on the fact that the marketing arms race will continue to escalate up into planetary scale.

Pork Board Thwacks Mom to Safeguard their Money-Laundering Scheme

Chris — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 09:57:42 +0000

So, the blogosphere was full up last weekÂ with postings about Jennifer Laycock, the well-liked search marketer who put up a website to support a breastfeeding nonprofit group. I heard her speak on Linkbaiting last year at SES San Jose, and she was fantastic! I’d even spammed some of our staff at my company with a note mentioning that session.

Well, one of her fundraising methods is to sell t-shirts with humorous phrases on them referring to milk and breastfeeding, and the one bearing the slogan, “The Other White Milk” attracted the ire of the National Pork Board who own the trademark “The Other White Meat”. Laycock blogged about the National Pork Board’s demands, and many other bloggers jumped to her defense in a small blogstorm.

Most folx mentioning this failed to mention what use the National Pork Board has put “The Other White Meat” slogan to: avoiding controls on how they spend money. Read on and I’ll elaborate.

I got interested in what the National Pork Board was using “The Other White Meat” slogan, and found that they only bought the asset during the last year, and some of the circumstances were already perhaps ethically dubious by some people’s perspective.

According an article by Parke Wilde, the National Pork Board bought the slogan in order to circumvent federal restrictions on how the National Pork Board may use money. In 2006, the National Pork Board bought the brand from the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC). Apparently the Pork Board will be making payments for the slogan for quite a number of years, and Parke slams this as deal only benefitting insiders.

According to Parke, the National Pork Board is a government agency which essentially taxes pork farmers, even though hog farmers voted to end these types of assessments. According to the hog farmers, the Secretary of Agriculture made some sort of backroom deal with the National Pork Producer’s Council to continue the assessments despite lack of support from the small farmers. According to the hog farmers, the NPPC is primarily an ally or PAC for big agribusiness corporations.

So, let’s parse this out. The National Pork BoardÂ bought a slogan from an agribusiness PAC at a huge sum that was likely not independently appraised. Moneys from pork assessments placed on farmers who do not feel represented by the process are now funnelling to the NPPC, who are a PAC lobbying for the interests of large agribusiness concerns that likely don’t represent the interests of all the smallÂ hog farmers whose taxes are funnelled their way.

If you read the above links, you begin to suspect that perhaps the National Pork Board is composed of people who may not be representing the public good. The criticism is all too believable for any of us who’ve grown to a cynical view of government thatÂ is swayedÂ by the fat-cat lobbyists of rich PACs.

So,Â Jennifer accidentally stepped in the wrong end of a swine pen.

TheÂ National Pork Board bought this asset last year at a humongous price, and now they must continue the pretense of its worth by “safeguarding” the trademark as though it was “Coca-cola”. I think we should call for an independent audit of what the mark’s actual worth may be, andÂ then force theÂ National Pork Board to alter it’s amount of payments to NPPC to reflect the independently assessed value. As Parke skillfully suggested, there likely isn’t all that much competition for that particular mark, meaning the dollar amount in an open market would’ve likely been far lower.

So, what should be done now? Jennifer reports they’re working with her on some solution, since this was a littleÂ embarrassing to theÂ National Pork Board. Here’s my suggestions:

1st,Â Jennifer’s slogan was a satire.Â As such, I believe it’s protected speach and a fair use. It’s in no way going to confuse consumers, so they should just drop it. If they take it to court with her, they risk losing some level of control of their mark.

2nd, I’m sick of major corporations handling this sort of thing by using a big legal hammer in this way. I remember when Disney threatenedÂ children’s daycare centers in Florida because they’d painted Mickey and Goofey pictures on their walls. In a publicity coup, Universal Studios turned around and said they were welcome to paint Bugs Bunny and friends on the walls, and they’d even provide the paint! I also recall when United Media went after fan groups that usedÂ their Snoopy and Peanuts characters on newsletters and such. Lawyers did the same thing to fan groups for the Three Stooges. Don’t these corporations see that they’re harming themselves when they do that? It’s all out of proportion to the actual risk.

Yes,Â you can’t let everybody use your mark, or it becomes public domain and you lose control of it. But, you also can’t be slapping down your own fan base or you’re an idiot. George Lucas does this right — he lets fan groups play around with his marks and characters so long as they don’t do it for profit. That’s a beautiful way to handle it!

So, you vicious corporate lawyers, I have an alternate solution for cases like those fan groups using your marks: send the well-meaning fans a nice note, instead of a cold cease-and-desist. Tell them that in order for you to protect the good name/image/whatever, you can’t really have unlicensed people using it. Tell them that you really appreciate their love of your product, and that as long as they’re not using it for making profit, you can give them a limited license of use for some pro-forma amount, like $5. This solution satisfies all needs: protect your mark, and stop clobbering the people who made it a success in the first place.