The Marketing Association, formerly the New Zealand DMA, is an industry body serving New Zealand marketers with professional development, networking, advocacy, government lobbying, and more.
Being on the leading edge of marketing in New Zealand, the organisation needed a website that conveyed that they understood the evolving model of the Web from passive publishing to participatory conversations. So the site was redesigned to have a very bloggy feel to it. Functionality includes a banner ad management system, content management system, and a members-only area.
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A lot is at stake here for Web marketers. Whether you are knowledgeable about search engine marketing or just an observer at this point, you need to follow this development. Your search rankings - free and paid - in all the major search engines are important marketing assets.
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Microsoft’s new MSN Search is poised to take some of Google’s market share. That’s good news for marketers, if you know how to optimize for MSN Search. Happily, it doesn’t appear to be difficult. The tried-and-true optimization tactics appear to work quite well.
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Our work with DineWise, a one-stop shop for all your online gourmet frozen food needs, focused on building them a successful E-Commerce platform. DineWise offers chef-prepared meals in convenient, individual packaging that are ready in minutes. This required high-level database integration to handle the complexity of the DineWise product line, while offering user-friendly, customized meal planning to online purchasers. The development and launch of www.dinewise.com has allowed DineWise to become one of the nation’s premier online providers of complete meal solutions, specializing in customized meals and meal planning for diabetic and healthy lifestyles.
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Ever since I discovered the wonderful ITConversations.com, I have become a real fan of podcasting. Podcasting is a way of delivering audio files to your PC and then to your MP3 player (e.g. your iPod) whenever they are updated — automatically at night while you sleep. Although podcasting is quite new, there are already episodic radio shows being made for delivery via podcast. It’s amazing the quality of some of the audio commentary being published out there on the web, free for the taking. Bloggers are really the driving force of podcasting right now. On the commute into the office they make a recording of themselves and post it onto their blog. The BBC really legitimized podcasting by delivering the series “In Our Time” via podcast. With plans to put all of the BBC’s radio archives online and to continue to deliver new shows online, it is possible we will see thousands of classic BBC radio shows podcast. It’s great to see a traditional broadcaster right at the cutting edge of technology!
I love the way that podcasting democratizes radio broadcasting. Literally anyone can do it — even me! It takes a bit of fiddling to get the right setup in place for good quality audio recording — particularly when there’s someone on the other end of a phone to interview — but I’ve finally nailed it.
I conducting my first successful podcast interview today. I phone interviewed Marc Holland, CEO of Sky Radio Networks. I’m not going to put it online yet, as the podcast is supposed to be released in conjunction with the publication of my upcoming MarketingProfs article on podcasting (due out within the next week or two). I will post here to my blog once the article and the podcast interviews are online.
You may wonder why I selected Sky Radio as my first interviewee. Well, while I was writing my podcasting article for MarketingProfs, it occurred to me that podcasting would be an obvious next evolution in Sky Radio’s business model. Sky Radio is the exclusive producer of the in-flight business audio programming on many of the major domestic airlines. They’re the folks you hear on the business channel when you fly United, for instance. I think their interviews would be fantastic material to make available on a podcast RSS format, as sometimes you don’t get to listen to all the shows or you want to recall something you heard half asleep 30,000 feet up. Podcasting would allow business execs who don’t even fly to regularly partake in these audio interviews as they become available. If Sky Radio developed a strong listener base and online distribution channel for the podcasts, then they could charge for this just like they charge for having professionally-produced interviews distributed to air travelers.
I’ve lined up some more great podcast interviews, so there will be lots to come! As they say in broadcasting, “Stay tuned!”
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Most email marketers agree that ethically, email address harvesting and sending unsolicited opt-out messages are taboo and should be avoided. I of course agree. It’s always fun to talk ethics, but let’s bring the discussion to a practical level. I contend that harvesting and opt-out are both impractical for legitimate email marketers.
Let’s look at why…
Harvesting of email addresses from the Web will inevitably pick up “honeypot addresses” that will end up in your opt-out database. A honeypot is an email address hidden in the page somewhere where no one will click on it, but email harvesters will still capture it. Any emails received at the honeypot address will then get the IP address of the sending mail server “blackholed” for a period of time, so that emails to other addresses on the receiving email server will not get delivered.
Frequently the ethical question is posed as to whether the opt-out email is spam if the content is squeaky clean. The answer is an unequivocal YES. It’s still spam because you do not have a prior business relationship with the recipient, you were not granted permission by the recipient in advance, and your email is unsolicited. It doesn’t have to be “bulk” to be spam. Spam is spam to the recipient regardless of whether you sent 100 or a million; it’s immaterial to the recipient what is going on outside of their inbox. And spam does not need to be a sleazy message to be considered spam. A church could “spam” people with donation requests by email if they are unsolicited.
So back to the practicality and repercussions for a moment… Imagine this: you send out unsolicited emails requesting people to opt-in and you have no prior business relationship with them. Some of them inevitably will report you to SpamCop. Your ISP will be notified by SpamCop, and they will need to either give you the boot or justify in a response to SpamCop why you don’t deserve the boot. ISPs take SpamCop very seriously, as they don’t want their SMTP servers blacklisted. More than a couple SpamCop complaints and your ISP is going to be very grumpy with you.
So in all, this whole approach is quite an impractical one. Spammers must be very good at hiding their tracks (e.g. by sending spam out through “zombies” which are PCs compromised by viruses/trojans) or must ‘move house’ constantly. Unless you’re willing to live like that too, you’ll find that the email harvesting and opt-out approaches will burn you.
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“I recommend Netconcepts to any web marketer who cannot prioritize resources to search engine optimize internally. Over our 6 years in partnership, they have never steered us wrong!”
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In the midst of choosing an SEO vendor to advise or implement search engine optimization for you? Don’t base your decision on just a ‘gut feel’. Effectively separating the wheat from the chaff requires that objective rather than subjective criteria be used. These include:
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A couple months ago I shared one of my Google secrets, since that secret no longer worked. 
Specifically, it was how to obtain a list of the most important web sites according to Google.
Now, surprisingly, this little trick appears to work again (it stopped working in 2003), thanks to a bug introduced into Google’s algorithm. Two months ago, a search for http would have revealed results like HTTP - Hypertext Transfer Protocol Overview and Welcome! - The Apache HTTP Server Project. Today, these sites appear nowhere near the top of the results. Instead, the top results are occupied by a “who’s who” list of highly important web sites — sites that don’t include the word http anywhere in the text of the page.
As already noted by blogger Nathan Weinberg, this same phenonemon occurs when you search for www.
One thing I found curious is that http and www Google queries return different results. Now these results are NOT in order of PageRank score, at least not the PageRank scores as revealed by the Google Toolbar. You can verify this to be the case yourself simply by using SEO Chat’s PageRank Search tool. Indeed, it’s a well-known fact within the SEO community that the PageRank scores served up by the Google Toolbar servers are not the actual PageRanks used by Google in the ranking algorithm. PageRank debate aside, perhaps this list offers us a (now) rare glimpse at some of Google’s Chosen Ones — the most important sites on the Internet according to Google.
What makes me say this is due to a bug in Google? For one thing, these results are NOT relevant to the search query. Secondly, I’ve uncovered another bug newly introduced into Google’s algorithm, namely that the inurl: query operator does not work properly, and I think these two bugs might be related. For an example of this second bug in action, search Google for site:blogs.msdn.com scoble inurl:msnsearch and the top search result is currently blogs.msdn.com/mikehall/archive/2004/11/10/255417.aspx. Note there’s no msnsearch in that URL!
I’ve compiled a list the top 1000 results for each of the two queries for your convenience. You’ll see, they do vary quite dramatically:
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US telecommunications giant Verizon already has 5 million pages in Google and 7 million pages in Yahoo! but Netconcepts President Stephan Spencer says there is room for improvement. It is all about making sure every page is indexed by the search engines as his company devotes six team members to the job.
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