Search Sense

Search marketing - so say Dell, Hitwise and David Beckham.

Especially if the PPC is the weapon.

I read with interest Heather Hopkins’ analysis in NMA this week on using search marketing to counter negative PR.

She recalled Dell happily sitting top of natural search listings and suddenly their laptop batteries started exploding. Dell were slow to react and found themselves displaced by Google News and blogs who quickly picked up on the story.

Heather proposes using paid search as a counter to this negative PR. If Dell had bid on the term “Free Battery Replacement”, they may have been able to use the story to positive effect.

Last year I was involved in looking at this very possibility for a certain celebrity. They were experiencing problems with personal life rumours ranking above their own site.

Tactical use of paid search for reputation management seemed like an interesting angle and we set about designing a service for celebrities and corporations to help manage their reputations.

My current business, Spannerworks, is very active in helping corporations and individuals understand and map out their social networks through some pretty smart technology. It provides insights into the key influences and authorities within a network.

That insight is key to using tools like paid search in a tactical fashion and also to rapidly identifying the network effects of ‘X’ – where ‘X’ is breaking news, a marketing campaign, a rumour, a product launch, etc.

The insight helps focus and target a paid search response, and if that response is helpful, engaging, and in your natural voice, then you not only limit the damage of “negative PR”, but it can strengthen customer relationships, create loyalty and increase sales.

Ignore it at your peril…

If you’d like a look at our network mapping or brand management services give Antony Mayfield or myself a call or post something on our blog.

The cracking new James Bond movie, Casino Royale, has earned the praise of many of my fellow Spannerworkers and is now apparently attracting more attention from people using search engines than Harry Potter or the usual Christmas season number, Harry Potter, according to web numbers seers, Hitwise.

: : I note that The Sun’s canny search marketing team has been winning out in AdSense sponsored links on Google for “James Bond” and “Casino Royale“.

Don’t think much of the landing page though - surely a mini-Bond portal would hook more visitors than the search results page that came up when we visited.

The 3 big players in search Google, Yahoo! and MSN have agreed to accepting a single protocol for site submission. The Sitemaps system was originally devised by Google as a way for site owners to submit a URL feed of their site for inclusion in their index. This was particularly useful for dynamic sites which would otherwise be ignored by the engines. Yahoo! followed suit with their own version of the programme, but, this meant creating two different feeds and submitting them to each engine separately. So, todays announcement is very good news for webmasters and site owners, as they will be able to use a single feed and protocol for all the major engines. While Ask was not included in the discussion, it is hoped that the system will be adopted by all search engines.

This is great news for search engines, web masters and the all important user. For smaller search engines who may not have the capability to crawl dynamic content, this system can provide a way to increase their database. Users will have access to content that would otherwise be invisible. Many large non-commercial sites which have huge numbers or articles without the means to make their sites search engine friendly will have the opportunity to increase their readership.

For more information http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/11/joint-support-for-sitemap-protocol.html

Marketing professionals from the UK’s leading companies came together to talk about search at a recent Hitwise search seminar that was a complete sell out, held at the Waldorf in London.

With search spend expected to reach £1 billion in the UK alone this year, Hitwise and other industry experts - including Yahoo! Search Marketing, Microsoft and Spannerworks - discussed how to efficiently balance your paid and organic campaigns, and how to take advantage of new search opportunities.

This event I saw as being significant just by the volume and seniority of the delegates - it seems that search has well and truly arrived in the mainstream mix of media offered by the UK’s leading brands.

Heather Hopkins of hitwise comments on her blog about the event and specifically how search can help marketers during a product recall.

If you’d like a copy of Spannerworks’ presentation, please contact Charlotte McDougall on +44 (0) 1273 828100 or cmcdougallREMOVE@spannerworksME.com.

Google Earth has a great set of old maps in it which let you see various parts of the globe as they were recorded in centuries past. If you’re planning a retro-refit to the office, these could inspire some excellent art for your corporate HQ reception…

Here’s a view of our local area in 1790…

As the French Revolution raged across the channel, Spannerworks’ hometown, Brighton, still wasn’t on the map, although its neighbour and and one half of the future city, Hove was.

Actually there was a fishing village here called Brighthelmston, which you can just make out on the crease of the map. Despite many of the grand Regency buildings here already having been built, the town apparently hadn’t re-branded yet or put itself properly on the map.

This look back in time comes from a layer in the latest version of Google Earth - a map of the UK in 1790. You can find this and some other fascinating historical maps under the layers / Rumsey Historical Maps section.