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Humour in copywriting can be tricky. Finding that “universal LOL” is extremely difficult. When it works, it’s brilliant. When it falls flat, it sits there in a mirthless mess for all to see.
Last weekend, this flyer arrived in my local newspaper. I don’t know if the "modelquin" idea seemed like a whole whack of good silly fun at the concept stage, but these ads for Old Navy are more creepy than hilarious to me. I looked into it a little more, and apparently I’ve been living under a rock. The Crispin Porter + Bogusky ad campaign started two months ago. (BTW, CP+B are the folks behind that other creepy plastic mascot – Burger King’s King.)
Alex Bogusky is quoted as saying, "We're taking a poke at fashion. We're doing it in an entertaining way with some characters that are having fun and feeling good."
Oh.
Well, I’m sure my feelings are apparent, but what about you? Does it work for you?
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Yesterday at Searchology, Google showed off some of its new tools to make the web a little easier to navigate, by viewing search results in new ways. One of these methods is Search Options. It now appears at the top of your search results just below the query box.
It allows you to filter results by type of results (video, forums and reviews) as well as by date, so you can see more topical and recent results. There are also some new ways to slice and dice your results...
Wonder Wheel, a type of visual concept map, is a cool new feature that puts related topics in a visual wheel, with the original query appearing in the centre. If you want to see a text version of the related queries, simply click on “Related searches” to get this…
You can see the video here:
Yesterday I was having a conversation with a friend who asked if Twitter was good for optimization purposes. My answer was the wonderfully ambiguous, “Well, yes and no.”
We’ll start with the no part.
Twitter, like many other social media sites, adds a “nofollow” attribute to all outbound links. Google, Yahoo and MSN exclude links listed as “nofollow” links from their algorithmic calculations. One of the few search engines that ignores the “nofollow” command is Ask.com, which has a small part of the search engine market share. So, try as you may, linking to your site or your blog will not increase your number of incoming links.
But all is not lost.
In an interview at WebProNews, Joe Whyte said, “I tend to think that link value is still passed but at a much lower value. We also know that these links do get picked up and put into Google's and Yahoo's backlink checker and we know that nofollow still allows spiders to cache and index, which is still great.”
And yesterday, things got even better as Twitter's new VP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram, who incidentally was VP of Search Quality for Google, announced that Twitter will soon be crawling and indexing links.
This means Twitter will go beyond tracking conversations and enter a new phase of real-time search. As well, Twitter Search will get “get a reputation ranking system. That means that not all tweets will be equal; rank will be calculated for each twitterer, probably based on several criteria such as number of followers, number of retweets and so forth.” (From Mashable)
I suspect that just as Google uses domain age, no doubt length of Twitter use will play a part as well.
It’s a very exciting and potentially huge development.
The bottom line is brand recognition and visibility. You can use Twitter to create community and share your latest post. The site visitors can then share and bookmark your post through Sphinn, Buzz Up, StumbleUpon or any other number of tools. Additionally, as you build your community, “RTs” (retweets) help spread and maximize your message, getting it out to more and more audiences. And don’t forget that Twitter has just become an even better resource for keyword research. Use it to better understand your market and what they are looking for.
If you are looking at Twitter from a pure Google PageRank angle, no it is not going to help with optimization… but going beyond and looking at how interactions with your community can help create a more solid relationship with your potential customers and attract people to your website, then Twitter is fantastic for optimizing your site.
- This is one of my favourite quotes this week, “Not all marketing stories are literal; be aware of the story told through your site design choices.” Read this outstanding article by David Rossiter that reflects on storytelling, user-friendly design and the social web.
- Finally, Twitter has brought real-time search to us all!!
- Wolfram|Alpha hasn’t yet launched but that hasn’t stopped it from being called a “Google killer” The search engine uses natural language queries and doesn’t just supply results, but rather answers them directly.
- With Swine Flu being the conversation-de-jour. Lifehacker reported on a Google Map mashup to track the disease.
- All you emotive people out there will be glad to know that Gmail has added more emoticons.
- Are you a B2B marketer? Gord Hotchkiss has authored a white paper titled “Mapping the BuyerSphere” in which he examines different buyer roles, the identified risk control mechanisms, and the relative effect of a vendor's credibility and positioning. You can download it here.
- Mitch Joel offers his insights on speaking in a powerful new way as part of Cluetrain Manifesto's 10th anniversary. Read other posts expanding on Cluetrain’s tenets at Cluetrainplus10.
- Online Marketing Blog has some great tips in Public Relations Activities That Affect SEO. As Lee Odden points out “content that can be searched on can be optimized.”
- The always-inspiring Valeria Maltoni has written 5 Marketing Ideas You Can Use Today.
- Is it any surprise that even online men feel the need for speed? Find out more about gender issues in website usability.
Friday Fun
Twitter Magnets – Don’t say I didn’t warn you – it’s addictive!
Kathryn from Zoonini and I would love to thank everyone who has enjoyed and shared our public service announcement Do I Need a Flash Intro? We got over 50,000 unique visitors in 4 days from over 130 countries. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!
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