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Thanks to @ncbeets, @hackernewsbot @brazenlab for the heads-up about this hilarious 404 page from Blippy. Go ahead. Click on the unicorn.
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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.
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.
Resources:
Google Business Listing Quality Guidelines
As a copywriter, you can imagine that I don’t really appreciate the phrase “people don’t read on the Web” being bandied about too much. Profession aside, it’s just not true.
In the later half of 2006, the Poynter Institute conducted an eye-tracking study to see how 582 people in four U.S. cities viewed their hometown newspapers (both broadsheets and tabloid format) and Web sites. That study indicated that people may read more of an article on the Web than in print, much to the delight of online publishers and bloggers everywhere.
Participants were given 90 minutes to read the newspaper or Web site as they normally would. The study examined how print and online readers navigate through the paper or the Web, how much do people read and how much readers remember.
The result were this:
- Online participants read an average of 77 percent of story text they chose to read.
- Broadsheet participants read an average of 62 percent of stories they selected.
- Tabloid participants read an average of 57 percent.
People DO read on the Web.
Quite a bit actually. But here’s the caveat: It’s just not in the same way that you’d curl up with a good book.
Well-known Web usability expert Jakob Niesen talks about the online F-factor. F stands for fast and also mimics the horizontal and vertical scanning patterns of online readers. People have learned to scan web pages at lightning-bolt speeds in order to pinpoint key information or quickly determine if a web page is relevant to their query.
What does this mean for online writers toiling over each and every precious word? It means writing differently for the Web in key areas:
Get to the point – Put the most important information first.
Use of headings and subheads – Your headings and subheads are a great way to divide up information as well as provide strong keyword prompts about that the next section may cover.
Start with keywords – Because readers scan down the left-hand side of the text upon initial viewing, make sure that information-carrying words come first.
Break up long paragraphs – Facilitate scanning by varying paragraph length and breaking up very long paragraphs into more digestible chunks of text.
Please don't do this, in real life or online! Keyword stuffing turns people off. Period.
Thanks to @zoonini (The amazing Kathryn of Zoonini Web Services) for the graphic design help! We're on a mission to save good people from bad websites, stay tuned for our upcoming launch of When Bad Websites Happen to Good People.
- 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!
Last week I had the pleasure of speaking with Sara Falconer from the Hour.ca and we had a great discussion about promoting your business on the Information Super Highway! We talked about why the Internet is different from any other marketing channel and how to avoid some common mistakes.
And, today, the article is out. Here's an excerpt:
With Oprah and Ashton Kutcher introducing micro-blogging site Twitter to millions of people, there's no excuse for you not to be using online tools to promote yourself or your business... that is, if you can get it right. Too often, social media campaigns and websites are bogged down by lack of clarity and self-indulgence, say web designer Kathryn Presner and content strategist Charlotte Riley.
Read the complete article at the Hour.ca.
Approximately nine years ago I was working at LookSmart on a project called LookSmart Live. Similar to Ask Yahoo, people would send in their online stumpers and our team would do our best to dig up the answers on the Internet. The search skills I honed at LookSmart Live have served me well, as on a daily basis, I’m scouring the Web, conducting research for clients or getting information to write about a particular topic. (And, of course, looking for the occasional recipe.)
I thought I would put together some of the tricks I’ve learned over the years that make my job of finding things a lot easier. Generally speaking, search engines exclude “stop words”. (the, for, a) As well, uppercase and lowercase don’t really matter. For example, searching for “Turkey” or “turkey” yields the same results.
Let's start with some basics:
brownie recipes
This is the way most people search - by entering their keyword phrase in Google. This sort of query returns results that mention both “brownie” and/or “recipes” on the same page, or in the browser title or incoming links.
“brownie recipes”
By putting double quotes around a set of words, you get search results for the exact phrase you are looking for. (Often called "an exact phrase match.")
brownie OR recipes
Using the Boolean command “OR” tells Google to search for pages that have either “brownie” or “recipes” in the title, in in-bound links or in the body of the copy.
brownie recipes –walnuts
The negative search term uses the subtract sign to exclude words. For instance, this search will return pages with “brownie” and “recipes” but exclude pages with the word “walnuts.” (For all you walnut haters out there.)
brownie recipes ~good
Through the mighty tilde (~) you can add synonyms. This search will return results that include synonyms for “good”, like “best” in the body of the copy or in the title or incoming links.
brownies site:epicurious.com
This command allows me to search a particular site for a brownie recipe, in this case the Epicurious.com Web site.
intitle:"brownie recipes"
Using the intitle command allows me to search for brownie recipes (I’ve used the quotes to ensure both words) in browser title. If I wanted to restrict my search to pages with “brownie recipes” in the title of the Web page and that were a specific file type, such as a PDF, I would add the “filetype:” command afterward. Like this: intitle:"brownie recipes" filetype:pdf
inurl:brownie recipes
This command restricts the search to words found in the URL.
inanchor:brownie recipes
This command allows you to search for these phrases in anchor text, the text-based link clicked on to go to a web page.
Random Search Tips
Need to know the time somewhere else in the world? Just type the word “time” before the location:
time Melbourne
Get weather information the same way:
weather Toronto
Local search
Use the postal code or city name to find local results - for example poutine H4A 1E9
Vertical Search
Don’t forget Google verticals – they can save so much time. Search for:
News
Blogs
Images
Video
Books
Financial/market information
There are tons of other tricks and tips, so this post will be continued...
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