B(abble)log
While I'm not entirely sure if "Brian" is real, it's a very funny reminder that not everyone wants to participate in this crowdsourcing thing. (Hat tip to Johnnie Moore.)
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I saw this at Ads of the World, and thought it was very clever. Cheap, effective advertising. Hats off to Calgary's CrackerJack Media.
Thanks to @ncbeets, @hackernewsbot @brazenlab for the heads-up about this hilarious 404 page from Blippy. Go ahead. Click on the unicorn.
Happy Canada Day everyone!
It’s nice to see some of the search engines celebrating as well!
Over at Google the normally multi-coloured logo has been replaced by red and white, with a maple leaf smack-dab in the middle.
And Yahoo.ca, well, there’s no celebration of Canada Day per se, but Canada Day was trending. (Along with those other elements of Canadiana - the NHL free agency, HST and weather.)
Have a safe and festive holiday!
Both insightful and baffling, the Google Suggest tool offers up search terms as you type your query into the search box. The query suggestions are based on worldwide users searches, sites in Google’s search index and ads in its ad network. If you happen to be signed in, then it also draws from your own search history.
Let’s see what the Google Suggest search psyche says about the three most popular search engines.
Google:
Bing:
Yahoo:
What can we surmise from this highly scientific experiment? Not much really, except that #1) people want to get to the root of Google's popularity, #2) there's a general confusion around the tagline "decision engine" and, by the way, how the heck did it get on my new computer? and #3) Yahoo is, well, slow.
What do you do when your product is a massive fail, and consumers openly say it is horrid? If you are Domino’s Pizza, you boldly embrace the criticism. And, you create a microsite (PizzaTurnaround.com) as a platform to document the change.
On the cusp of its 50th birthday, Domino’s Pizza has put out a new campaign owning up to a product that many people really didn’t like. (In a survey, Domino’s Pizza tied for last place for taste …with Chuck E Cheese. Ouch!) The new “Pizza Turnaround” video was created by powerhouse agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky.
In the four-minute video focus group members said repeatedly that the crust is like cardboard. Other pizza flavour insights include “totally void of flovour” and “the worst excuse for pizza I’ve ever had”.
As comedian Stephen Colbert pointed out while lampooning the ads, “It takes alpha meat balls to stand up and say ‘America we suck’.”
Exactly. You have to give Domino’s kudos for their humility and transparent approach. The company is taking wonderful, brutally honest step forward, trying to reclaim its image.
But back to the microsite. How does it fare as a content channel?
It’s got the usual social network links to Facebook and Twitter (which are both great examples of social media use and interaction). However, the microsite lacks an RSS feed and a link to their YouTube channel. And, while they have a small members-only Flickr group for employees, there is no group for us, the hoi polloi.
You have to give Domino’s high credit for bringing in a feed from Twitter, and not filtering the results. Many of the comments weren’t exactly shining examples of brand love when I was there. But, bravo for showing the comments – warts and all. It boosts credibility and authenticity.
In addition to driving traffic to the site from Twitter or the Domino's homepage, traffic from natural search queries should never be overlooked. From a search point of view, it would have been nice to see the microsite appear in more niche searches like “Domino’s Pizza taste” or “Domino’s Pizza crust”. (It does currently rank #9 for “new Domino’s Pizza”.) And, I’d love to see the banner text rendered as readable type to search engines rather than a graphic.
So why not extend the campaign as part of the Domino’s Pizza website, much like Blendtec does for the Will It Blend campaign? I’m not sure.
I don’t know if the microsite creates any extra value. Users need to click through to the Domino’s pizza site to order, find a nearby location or get a coupon. While comments are allowed, there is little other way to interact or create content on the site. For example, have Domino's customers create a new tagline for the pizza, or upload their own experiences which could be shared.
Will the commitment to a better product continue on with the microsite, or will it have a limited shelf-life and eventually fade away? If there is a long-term commitment to better taste and a better product, why not incorporate it into the main Domino’s Pizza website?
The site is no doubt a work in progress and it will be interesting to watch how it evolves.
Earlier this week, Google announced its foray into real-time search, and as soon as you can say "Bob's your uncle", there are real-time results from various social networks at the top of Google's listings for various queries. The cool thing for searchers like you and me, is we can get information about events from a variety of platforms - Twitter, blogs, etc. For example, when I googled "leweb", here are some of the real-time results Google displayed:
You'll see a mix of results, including a post from ReadWriteWeb as well as various people on Twitter who are discussing the event. The conversation, as they say, is wide open for anyone to see.
Want to know what people are saying about a company at any given moment? You can do that too.
The other day I was having a series of conversations with some friends about Montreal restaurants – the good, the bad and the downright pretentious. As a lark, I googled “pretentious restaurant Montreal” expecting to get blog rants, various foodie forum discussions and the like. (I did.) But, imagine my surprise when Google Local Business listing served up some pretentious restaurants for my viewing pleasure.
I understood the location-based aspect of the Local Business result, but surely, the restaurants weren’t entering “pretentious” in as some of their keywords for the business listing description? I suspected it was tied to the reviews that were being pulled in. But best to try this again just to make sure. How about “worst restaurant in Montreal”? Why, yes, once again Google Local Business pulls through.
How about "worst customer service Toronto”? Bingo!
To confirm my suspicion that these results were triggered by a mix of location (Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal) listing keywords (restaurant) and keywords from consumer reviews I double-checked with some colleagues, Martin and Xurxo at Bloom Search Marketing (the experts in paid search) and Dev Basu, a leader in SEO, SEM and local search marketing. They agreed.
Companies take warning: This is the power of consumer-generated reviews. Right now it’s a high concentration of hotels, restaurants and travel. But as user-generated content continues to grow, it will influence your ranking - not only for the keywords you used, but for other unintended keyword queries. More than ever, companies need to monitor what is being said about them so they can address service issues and correct the problem at the source.
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