Face Value

July 28th, 2006

This is a collection snapshot of the most popular videos from YouTube. See any patterns? They are all one person on the camera - no expensive special effects or tricks, just pure uncensored, unprocessed, honest thought.

Pause to think about that when developing your video marketing for the Google Video advertising that has been unleashed on the network.

I’ll leave you with Seth Godin’s money advice:

First rule: great product development and marketing almost always comes from organizations that don’t have enough money. Having less money keeps you from trying to buy your way out of trouble.

Second rule: learning to live with less money means you will develop skills and resources instead of buying them. And it means that when you have less money (again), you’ll be prepared.

Third rule: When you need money for something specific, go get it. But just for that. With good terms. As soon as you spend money to protect your money or leverage your money or account for your money or send a message about your money, the money is not only wasted, it hurts you.

zoomzoom welcomes Chris Gedge

July 25th, 2006

zoomzoom would like to welcome Chris Gedge who is joining our marketing team next week. As well as being a graduate in e-commerce and Cisco, Chris has had extensive experience in the field of search engine optimisation. While working for his client cheap laptops he achieved 1st place in Google for the search term refurbished laptops, 2nd position for “used laptops” and 2nd for “cheap laptops”. These terms together have almost 200,000 monthly searches.

Chris will be filling our advertised position for SEO Consultant and will be handling new business and integrating to work with our current client pool.

Opting out of DMOZ snippets

July 25th, 2006

After performing a search, Google automatically pulls the title and descriptive snippet from the Open Directory Project. Google now supports a “NOODP” tag which will allow you to “opt out” of this description and write your own.

Using the script:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”>

Not all search engines will support this tag, so to only apply it for Google change “ROBOTS” to “GOOGLEBOT” so the script appears:

<META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”NOODP”>

You’ll of course have to wait for the page to be crawled again for the changes to take effect.

Technorati and Social Search

July 10th, 2006

As Google endures another round of webmaster ranting and raving (another update that has seemingly wiped out up to 90% of some large sites from it’s index), I thought it would be nice to instead take this chance to talk about another rapidly growing form of search.

Whilst traditional search engines are great for looking for information, products, and reviews - their failing is that they can take weeks or months to index new content, and older pages tend to rank better anyway (due mostly to more natural inbound links). Companies are now getting wiser to the web as the important marketing tool that it is, but are starting to realise that it’s also a powerful networking and discussion tool.

So how do we tap into the discussions of the day, and see if anyone is talking about our brand? Blog and social search sites such at Technorati can search all the very latest buzz about your brand, and can give you valuable feedback, or warnings of negative PR as it occurs. As a topical example, try this search for Zidane and see what bloggers are saying about ‘that’ headbutt.

As sites like technorati, digg.com and other social sites become ever more popular, we as businesses must realise that individuals are finding power to express their opinion on a global scale that has never before existed, and more importantly that anyone who is looking for information about your brand can find that opinion instantly. Whilst negative articles can damage your brand - ignoring this feedback can be far more costly in the long run.

Advanced Search

July 5th, 2006

I’m commonly asked to find a particular piece of information off the web and as you can guess, my first question is always, “Have you Google’d it?”. The answer is always “Yes, but I couldn’t find it”. Thirty seconds later I have the information they need, from Google.

Although not surprised, there are few people who know how to get the most out of their Google search, whether using negative keywords, filetypes or specific information on websites.

So for all of you, I give you the guide to How To Get The Most From Google