This is a light hearted post. If you want to insult someone here in the UK - you call them a tool.
Andy Beal, Aaron Wall, Bill Slawski, Cameron Olthuis, Christine Churchill, Chuck Price, Jeremy Schoemaker, Jim Boykin, Jim Gilbert, Jill Whalen, Lee Odden, Neil Patel and Todd Malicoat aren't tools. I'm sure they're all very nice people!
I'm being silly, of course. At the most this AdWords creative from Jim Boykin is an illustration of the sort of culture issues a global AdWords campaign can encounter - even if the language, more of less, stays the same.
I initially noticed the AdWord because the author is bidding on SMX as a keyword. That's a compliement to Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman and his team (they aren't tools either) but if Third Door Media was a client I would encourage them to stop this sort of thing (trademarks and polite 'please stop' emails allowing). You don't want to invest the sort of energy they do in promoting SMX only for a related product, that isn't yours, to come along and ride in your slipstream.
I've not looked at Boykin's Internet Marketing Ninjas videos ($2995 is more than my curisoty budget allows) but - as Andy Beal points out - Jim already has a good reputation in training, and nobody on Jim's ninja list would allow their name to be associated with a poor product. So I'm sure the videos are very good. RustyBrick, who isn't in this set of videos, has also said positive things and Jeff Quip started a popular Sphinn on the news.
My word - a bit of research before posting certainly helps - wikipedia notes that 'tool' isn't just a UK insult as the US army also uses it. The likely first instance of the word being used as a slur may be from 'labor reform resolution drafted by the Female Labor Reform Association in 1845'. Well! We learn something new every day.
Monday, January 07, 2008
Jim Boykin insults Andy Beal, Aaron Wall, Schoemaker, Stuntdubl, himself and others!
Thursday, May 10, 2007
bigmouthmedia is big mouth media
I was emailed today by a journalist who managed to call the digital agency I work for "bigmouthmedia" and "big mouth media" in the same email. Not in the same paragraph though. I've also seen "bigmouth media" used.
This is one of the "quirks" associated with having a slightly quirky brand name. There are additional variants that people search on and which you therefore need to ensure you need to be optimised for. That said, there is no way that a significant high street name would allow the wrong use (with spaces, in our case) of their brand name on their site. I made the controversial decision to test this on our Flickr account though.
Brands can be tricky like this. This is one of the reasons that I'm very pleased Chris Sherman and Danny have set up the Brand Aid column on SearchEngineLand.
I'm very interest to see what will be written about. Too often forum and blog based SEO chat simply could not apply to big brands and their websites.
Here are some (fairly) common pit traps:
- A corporate font - this used to haunt me back in the 90s when this was common. Brands would spend tens of thousands (or more) in designing a font for themselves. The only way to get this font, in a cross-browser safe way, onto the site was to use images. As a result key messages could not be seen by the search engines. This is one of the reasons why Google themselves use the example of just having a graphic logo rather than the name of your company on the site.
- Weird spellings - for example 'x' rather than 'ct' in a word (connexions rather than connections) or 'ez' rather than 'easy' (ez-Andrew rather than easy-Andrew).
- Concept names - for example, 'desktop storage' rather than 'portable hard drive' or 'floating hotel' rather than 'cruise ship'.
- Commonly misspelled names - for example, from the UK market, I could pick 'Thomson' which often picks up the extra P or 'Ernest Jones' where 'Ernest' is spelt in dozens of different ways!
- Brands versus Everyday - for example, companies calling themselves 'Monday' or 'Circle' and then struggling to rank for their own name.
