If I’ve ever seen a clever linkbait, it’s making cartoon characters of egotistical megalomaniacal SEO people that just lurvvee attention. This is especially pertinent when an extremely well respected marketer has put you in his circle of trust and taken the time and money to make something which represents you, even if it is not exactly the best example of altruism

Here is mine and of course I love it too – thanks Aaron

Chris Angus graphic by SEOBook.com

Do you remember that Coca-Cola/Mentos video that was such a hit on YouTube several years ago? A couple of nutty performance artists captured themselves making dozens of geysers by plunging Mentos into big bottles of Diet Coke. Something a friend said to me the other night made me remember it. ‘Advertising is a kind of failure,’ he burbled over (maybe?) his sixth pint. Admittedly, he was being argumentative, but it got me thinking. The old idea that you don’t need to advertise if you’ve got an awesome product, or service, therefore leaving it all to your customers, gets a different slant in today’s world where User Generated Content and Social Networks are revolutionising the media ecosystem.
Now, it seems, your customers can make pretty influential decisions about how they choose to shout about your product. In the early days, it was pretty much just review sites, but now that blogs have made publishers of us all, and YouTube has given every artist the chance to perform to the world, consumers can manipulate the way we perceive brands all by themselves, like those inventive performance artists did. At the outset, Coca-Cola were antsy. They felt the video wasn’t in line with their brand personality. Eventually, when they realised how many sales the whole thing was generating, (probably by kids who wanted to pop their own mentos down a bottle and see the spray go) they got behind it.
I’ve come across an interesting site:(http://www.udemy.com/). It sounds like something you might find in a Japanese restaurant, but it’s actually a pretty cool platform, which has expanded the world of education by enabling anyone to teach and learn online. It used to be that if you wanted to learn about something from someone with a serious qualification you needed to pull out some decent A Level results to get you anywhere. Udemy has taken professors out of their institutions, giving anyone access to them and…get this…for free.
My opinion? Well, anyone can write a blog or make a movie and share it with an online community. Sometimes, like those geyser guys, they might find themselves communicating their work with a far bigger audience. But now people can share their knowhow. This is beyond wacky consumer advertising or the whole, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ parades we get continually on the web. This is about proper knowledge. Whether there are professors out there – or simply people with wisdom they want to pass on – they can set up their own online course so that anyone who wants to can learn. It’s a great form of democratisation. This is user generated content at its finest.

It’s a common senario to signup to a website and then unsubscribe after your purchase or when you don’t require the service any longer…What’s less common is when companies completely ignore unsubscribe requests. Especially large ones like Prizes.org which belongs to Google inc.

In a nutshell — I signed up to prizes, paid $200 and played around with a contest. I subsequently received  several emails from prizes.org and unsubscribed each time I received one. However, it’s not stopped them from sending me more emails and then more and more and more and more.

One starts to question their own sanity and so I took a screenshot to verify that I wasn’t losing my marbles:

And I’ve received several more of these after that particular unsubscribe request above – even though I’ve unsubscribed to every email since.

Please sort your shit out Prizes.org or Google or whoever runs the email marketing and stop spamming me – thanks.

GoDaddy “supported” SOPA until they started to lose customers; It will come as no surprise that GoDaddy.com have stopped supporting the bill in order to stem the hemorrhage of  domain transfers to other registrars.

What makes GoDaddy look even worse is how they have turned on a dime in terms of what they were standing for. While one may not like the enemy, one respect them for the principals they are willing to go to war over. However, nobody likes a spineless bully that changes their tune when a fight comes their way.

Boycott GoDaddy to demonstrate to other corporations that they will lose customers if they support a bill of censorship and oppression.

Losing a deluge of customers seems like fair justice to the arrogant butt kissing executives at GoDaddy.com that have a reputation of doing and saying as they please. They can’t.

Now all repeat in unison:

Boycott GoDaddy
Boycott GoDaddy
Boycott GoDaddy

I read a powerful article on Aaron Wall’s blog today, definitely worth a read, especially if you work in marketing.

The article : http://www.seobook.com/forget-seo

Silly little quiz put out by MI5 – I wouldn’t bother wasting 30 mins solving the puzzle, the results are disappointing as it simply links you through to another page where you can apply for a job that’s in the public domain anyway.

Here is answer:

Pr0t3ct!on#cyber_security@12*12.2011+

http://www.canyoucrackit.co.uk/ <—- Quiz Link

From destroying the market five years ago and basically putting everyone else out of business, Google has now put a value on premium web-analytics programmes.

I see this as a great opportunity for some new Web Analytics start-ups to form and challenge Google, there are too many privacy issues with Google for them to own the whole market.
Thank you Google for creating a new market, I’m sure in doing this, it will spin off a few more entrepreneurs that will go from rags to riches within a couple of years.

Once upon a time there was an example of a hidden email address to teach researchers that taking hidden email addresses is probably a bad idea. Mostly because they are spam traps.

Here is an example of a hidden email address:

spam@hidden.com (Can you see it with your own eyes?)

The End.