Fantastic Linkbait: Google doesn’t need to find Chuck Norris for you!
This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while - I saw this mentioned on John Battelle’s blog. Type “find Chuck Norris” into Google’s search form, and then hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button, and you’ll get this:
The result is a Google search results page with no listings and the message at the top states:
“Google won’t search for Chuck Norris because it knows you don’t find Chuck Norris, he finds you.”
But wait! This result page is actually a hoax, only pretending to be from Google! It’s actually produced by Arran Scholsberg. Arran is a student at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and is a web designer and photographer.
Popularity: 35% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 01/28/2008 | Permalink | 
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Filed under: Google, Link Building, Marketing, Searching, TricksChuck Norris facts, Google, hoaxes, linkbait
The Simpsons & Great Participatory-Viral Marketing
This past Saturday, I mosied over into central Dallas to check out the Kwik-E-Mart that was created to promote The Simpsons film, set to air nationwide later this week. The Kwik-E-Mart was created out of a 7-Eleven convenience store – surely the first ever instance of the subject of a satire being remade to more closely resemble the satire itself. The Dallas Kwik-E-Mart is one of the eleven created nationwide out of 7-Eleven stores, and it’s a simply fantastic piece of viral marketing, participatory marketing – and yes, linkbait.
Read on for more details…
Popularity: 11% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 07/23/2007 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Link Building, Marketinglinkbait, Participatory-Marketing, The-Simpsons, The-Simpsons-Movie, Viral-Marketing
SES Keynote with Steve Berkowitz had Surprise Appearance by Ms. Dewey
At the SES Conference in New York this week, Danny Sullivan’s keynote conversation with Windows Live Chief Steve Berkowitz featured a surprise appearance by Ms. Dewey - the beautiful avatar of the Windows Live promotional search interface.
Ms. Dewey flounced onto stage in the middle of the interview, throwing out a number of cute bon mots and clever retorts to things that Danny and Berkowitz said.
As soon as I heard her voice and she went on stage, I started clapping, along with one or two others in the audience. I’m guessing that not everyone has actually been aware of who Ms. Dewey is, since most search marketers obsess more about Google and Yahoo!, in that order. So, it was sort of tragic that the audience didn’t really know who she was, or what was up when she invaded the stage.
When she heard my clapping along with the other few folx who recognized her, Ms. Dewey turned towards me and gave me a really enthusiastic “thank you!” Having the pretty geek poster-girl give me such a heart-felt thank-you really woke me up, I can tell you. The Ms. Dewey character is played by the gorgeous actress, Janina Gavankar.
I previously blogged about the Ms. Dewey Live Search interface as a cool, interactive avatar for the search service, and pointing out a bunch of the funnier responses that she has pre-programmed for various keyword searches — check them out for an idea of what she’s all about. This link-bait promotion was wonderfully built in order to promote Microsoft’s Live Search service, and to persuade users to submit searches through it.
When I saw Ms. Dewey come out, I grabbed the opportunity to snap a few pics, including the one above. Click on it to view some more in the same series.
Although she wasn’t widely known when she came on stage, I think the audience caught on that it was some sort of promotional stunt within just a few minutes, so by the time she exited, the audience was fairly captivated by her, and everyone applauded.
Popularity: 17% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 04/11/2007 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: MSN Searchdanny-sullivan, Janina-Gavankar, linkbait, Live-Search, Ms.-Dewey, Search-Engine-Strategies-Conference, ses, Steve-Berkowitz, Windows-Live, Windows-Live-Search
Blog Tag - You’re It!
Okay, so, I’m late to the Blogtag game, but better late than never, right? I’m not sure who came up with this, but the idea behind the game is that you have to tell 5 things about yourself that most of your readers might not know, and then “tag” five other bloggers by linking to them. Stephan tagged me back around Christmas timeframe, and I was so busy vacationing, and then getting back into work-groove that I neglected to play out my piece in this cool little SEO meme. So, here goes.
Five Things You Didn’t Know About Me:
1. - I’m fascinated by the Voynich Manuscript. It’s compelling to me as an enduring mystery — likely one of the top seven mysteries in the modern world. Many cryptographers and linguists have attempted to decode it, and failed!
If I thought it was more than an antique hoax, I’d be writing my own Perl scripts to try to break the code down. My first decoding book was written by Martin Gardner, and I used what I learned from it in third grade to break a coded message I found in my great-great-grandmother’s autograph book. I guess the takeaway is that I’m just damn compelled by puzzles. I used to compete with people in high school to see who was the fastest at solving mixed-up Rubik’s Cubes. I think my record was right around 42 seconds. (I’m not that fast anymore, but I’m obviously still a geek.)
Popularity: 13% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 02/16/2007 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Blog Optimization, General, Link Buildingblog-tag, Link Building, linkbait, Links
MicroSoft’s Ms. Dewey Linkbait: Avatars for Blogs & Other Uses
MicroSoft has launched an avatar-fronted search interface called
Ms. Dewey, in order to promote their MS Live search service. An avatar is a term coopted from virtual reality which is used to describe the graphic representation of a person within the VR environment.
The Ms. Dewey avatar is a clever piece of Flash engineering coupled up with various video files and the MS Live search engine. Ms. Dewey is played by an actress named Janina Gavankar, who apparently prerecorded a bunch of video snippets which are queued up contextually for various responses to search terms that are typed into the submission form field. After you submit a search keyword, she says (and sometimes does) something witty, then the MS Live search results scroll down in an AJAX menu beside her.
Try out these particularly funny search terms on Ms. Dewey:
| Congress gmail President Bush Dick Cheney weather forecasts Yo Mama |
Painting Lord of the Rings UFOs MySpace FireFox Halo 2 |
A “share this with a friend” link is included, making this qualify even more as some nice linkbait, as some online marketing folx refer to it. While quite a few folx have turned their noses up at Ms. Dewey as not being a serious search service contender, they’re perhaps missing the point that she’s pretty fun to interact with, and as a promotional effort goes, it’s probably pretty effective linkbait. Within just a short timeframe, many people will have emailed links to Ms. Dewey to their friends, getting a whole lot of people to use MicroSoft’s search engine who otherwise wouldn’t have tried it out.
I’d only say that the design group has dropped the ball a bit by not highlighting their MS Live brandname on the search results. (They also dropped the ball by advertising Ms. Dewey’s email address through the interface, ms-dewey, because it’s inoperative, at least when I tested it. “Status: 5.0.0 - Remote SMTP server has rejected address”. They should have had someone responding to those notes, or they should’ve created an intelligent agent to respond to submissions to it.)
It’s maybe mentionable that Ask dropped the Jeeves butler mascot from the frontend of their search earlier this year, and here MicroSoft is adding a human mascot onto their search. Ask was never this attractive, though, and this ploy doesn’t seem in the least retro. Slick!
Interfaces like Ms. Dewey actually aren’t all that hard to do, and there’s one company that has made it really easy to incorporate interactive avatars similar to this within your blogs and other websites. Read on and I’ll describe how you can use avatars.
Popularity: 10% [?]
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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 10/30/2006 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Link Building, MSN Search, Marketingavatars, linkbait, MS-Live, virtual-reality, VR
Fishing for “link love” with “link bait”
Yum…. Link Bait.
I agree with Eric Ward: the phrase “link bait” just sounds UGLY.
But the technique works. Who can resist linking to the uproariously funny “The top 10 unintentionally worst company URLs“. Apparently I can’t, because I just did!
One of my favorite “link bait” morsels of late has been this how-to post about link baiting, by the inimitable Rand Fishkin. Go and gobble it up!
Popularity: 6% [?]
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Posted by Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts on 07/30/2006 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Link BuildingLink Building, link-bait, Links
