socio-lazy beings

How many phone numbers can you say you actually know by heart? If you are like me, you probably remember your home number, maybe your office number and your direct extension and perhaps a few 1-800 branded numbers from the radio jingles you hear in the car.

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The Paris Hilton Search Paradox

Search Engines’ holy grail is to serve relevant search results. Their livelihood depends on that. But what is “relevant”? On the road from textual search to semantic universal search, SE’s are trying to resolve the relevancy puzzle. Machine based database queries cannot truly decipher my human intentions. The popular example used for the “search intention” conflict is the Paris Hilton paradox. Am I searching for Paris Hilton the celeb or am I working on my travel plan for my vacation in France and trying to find a hotel?

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As we engage in another medical project for clinical trial patient recruitment online, this time related to diabetes, it seems like a good time to write about the subject. In Israel, most medical device and pharmaceutical companies may not be aware of the great advantages of running patient recruitment campaigns online. Boy are you guys missing out! Read more »

Israeli SEO companies going wild

As an SEO contractor takes on a project, they experience immediate pressure to show results.  No matter how well they’ll try to communicate to their clients that “whitehat/textbook” practices take time, they will forever be judged by how fast Google ranking for  their websites improved.

This pressure leads SEO companies to use aggressive and sometime questionable practices.  Contractors use their own existing pool of web pages (some of the more questionable companies even use their other clients’ sites!) to seed backlinks to their newbie client’s website.

There are also  SEO companies collaborating with one another to create a strong backlinking cooperation pool. The sophisticated companies will develop a cooperation that is dynamic and categorized by topics and relevancy, thus benefiting from stronger weight in the SE’s. This practice is called link farming.  The search engines, recognizing this problematic practice that fill the Internet with bogus content and paid-for links, have vowed to fight the phenomena and punish the link-farmers.  But the reality is that little has been done to successfully prevent the phenomena and it is still a prevalent tactic used by the SEOs looking for fast and dirty results for their clients. Read more »

On one hand, �I notice that so many people believe there is some secret to success online — those are the people who fork up hundreds or thousands of dollars to the gurus and the conference organizers — hoping “this will be the day when I find out that one secret that I need to turn my business into a goldmine”.

On the other hand, it seems like there is a belief that anyone can go online and reach their goals if they just spend a few months learning, Read more »

Dror and I have been talking a lot about social media in this blog and among ourselves. Not surprising since we are Internet marketers since before the start of this century. But we feel we have to talk about social media more than we actually want to. So many customers are looking for social media solutions, social media consulting, social media experts. Its like what was going on a couple years ago with SEO. �And you can see it reflected in the rapid growth of social media “experts” offering their services.

Actually, I am not a social media consultant or social media expert, at least I would never introduce myself that way. I know a whole lot about social media and how it can fit in, or not fit in, to an overall Internet marketing mix. And Dror knows even more than I do. �But when a company jumps on the bandwagon and without any clear goals or strategy, decides it needs a Facebook fan page or Twitter account, count me out. It’s probably not a client I could end up pleasing. Why? Becuase I would be honest with them, even if it cost me getting a job. Ween a CPA tells me he wants his own Fan page, I am compelled to tell him that CPA’s don’t have fans. Sorry to all the accountants in my family. But I could probably come up with some much better ways for him to achieve his goals Read more »

Or

What do banks, realtors, accountants, law firms and your mother in-law have in common?

The answer  – you don’t want to join their Facebook Fan page!

Hold on  - before you start accusing me of being socially-media incompetent, hear me out. I am not a hermit, I do have friends, and some of them are even real. I even admire some people. But only for a very small select group of people (such as Michael Jordan and Sting), would I ever consider to be a devoted fan.

The dictionary defines fan as “an ardent devotee; an enthusiast which is short for fanatic”.  When Facebook designed the “fan” page functionality , they probably had in mind a nifty little feature designed to help their ongoing battle with MySpace, which had experienced great success among artists and musicians. I cannot imagine they envisioned scenarios that included banks, accountants and furniture stores. Their attempt later to correct this with an “official page” and “community page” just proves my point.

Fan worthy example

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Too many business people are entering the social marketing sphere with false assumptions. They think it is FREE. They think it is EASY. They think it WORKS.
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Two weeks ago, the new Tranzila site went up. Itzik Nozatski is already bouncing off the walls with glee at his 15% bounce rate. Fifteen Percent!!!!!! He was kind enough to immediately notify us  and credit WebWhile with the success. After all, Dror Gliksman, WebWhile’s ace Internet marketing strategist, Read more »

Remember the first time you seeing some brand that, despite being shoved into your face, you still loved it?

I clearly remember the impact the first time it happened to me. The day Michael Jordan and Spike Lee, sorry, Mors Blackmon, challenged everything we knew about advertising in the early 90’s TV-30-something-landscape, with a pair of Air Jordan Nike shoes. It was fresh, transcended over the early 90’s and took branding far beyond everything I knew about being unique and attention grabbing. The ad stood above every other commercial just as MJ leaped above every opponent, leaving them all in dismay.  It pulled us into Spike’s Lee’s “do the right thing” world, emphasizing black and white, challenging the rules of gravity in TV advertising.

Is it the brand? Is it the brand?

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