Archive for February, 2007

To those of you with Adcenter master accounts which contain multiple “sub accounts” you should know about a glitch that can put you in a pinch with all of your accounts off-line - and YOU in a financial pinch.

If any one of your sub-accounts’ credit cards expire or get declined they’ll all be put on “account hold” even though each sub-account has its own credit card number. Last Summer, Microsoft told me a fix was in the works. But yesterday, after it happened to me for the third time the Microsoft rep called it a “feature” that “protected” client accounts (I drilled, but couldn’t get any sensible explanation of how.)Â

When this happened, in each case, there were no email notifications sent (I have “microsoft.com” whitelisted) so, the only way that you’ll know is by a sudden removal of your Adcenter traffic. Furthermore, there is no indicator in the accounts list on Adcenter to show you which account has the credit card glitch. You have to check inside each accounts billing list activity to see it.  Microsoft told me they had “a few problems” with outgoing card notifications. Oh.. kay…

How could SEMs be stuck holding the bag here?Â

If you end up with a deadbeat client with an open balance and a bad card, you could get stuck with having to pay it yourself to clear up the account and get your other clients back on-line! Microsoft won’t unlock the other accounts until ALL accounts are cleared up.Â

For me it was no big deal, I only had a few clustered together, and it was a simple expiration date issue tat was cleared up right away, but I run hundreds of thousands of dollars through pay-click campaigns and this could be a disaster if they had been grouped in a bigger way and the balance was higher. (Account grouping is very tempting for a time-strapped SEM wanting to avoid repeated log-ins.)

I asked Microsoft if they could break apart my accounts for me and they wouldn’t, saying I’d need to create them all from scratch and they were really “sorry I’d lose all my historical data.” At this point I have little choice.

Superpages.com is rolling out a new system that is supposed to improve relevance. It’s the latest in pay-per-click systems to move from the highest-bidder-highest-position and include other aspects of the ad. While it’s not entirely clear what those “multiple facets of your ad” are it stands to reason that factors similar to other pay-per-click engines will be applied.

Keywords in the business profile and searches from audience members of various categories will be taken into account.

There will be 2 weeks of testing, and then it will start being rolled out to existing advertisers. Advertisers will be getting emails about their accounts.

I asked about the dangers of people spamming their business profiles to get added rank and there was no real answer, so I guess we’ll have to see.

Many people take little time to get their business profile right, so I guess it’s time to spend some time on that!

WLEX News (our NBC affiliate) will go High Definition this Spring, making it one of the first mid-sized markets to broadcast news in HD. About 30 stations nationwide broadcast news in High Definition. It stands to reason, as many of the news stories feature our georgous landscape around Lexington - and it will look great in High Def. I’ve been on their news broadcast before talking about Web Marketing and they’re a nice bunch of folks.Â

 “WLEX has always been at the forefront of the latest developments in broadcast technology, setting the standards and leading the pack in local news coverage,” said WLEX President & General Manager Tim Gilbert. “We were the first on the air in this market, first in color, first with stereo, the first morning newscast, and the first and only station with live Doppler radar. Now WLEX is making history again by being one of the first to offer local news in HD. We’ll deliver the dependable, accurate coverage our viewers count on with picture and sound quality like they’ve never experienced before.”

I hope the new system is a big hit. Goodness knows people are watching enough TV.

Local TV station websites aren’t faring so well. As with many such sites, it’s a design stuck in 1999, and another example of a news portal gone haywire. And what’s the deal with “black background” news sites? How about something lighter and more cheerful? RSS feeds? User interface design rigor?

Rustybrick at SEOroundtable has drawn attention to a very interesting thread which should make those in charge of client webservers prick up their ears. I encounter resistance from some clients when I suggest a hosting change once I see they’re using a cut-rate provider. DNS changes, server switch-overs, and broken 404 pages are all major poison to your Google rank. It’s also sounding like you may not get back where you were in the Google index - as it’s my understanding that Google counts “length in index” as one of its 200 ranking factors.

People wonder sometimes why I run my own servers and have a backup SLA of 4-6 hours. I think his observation speaks directly to the need for this. SEO and server uptime are peas in a pod, folks.

So the next time your host says “your site will be off-line for a few hours while we do maintenence” think about the implications to your rank!

Mark Wilson at Gizmodo just referred us to the x-paste toothpaste despenser, a very cool-looking way to get toothpaste onto the brush and off of the counter that will be sold at Sharper Image. To most, this was just a cool gadget reference, something that Gizmodo does every day with great skill. But to me, it was much more.

It was the first blog post that brought a tear to my eye.Â

You see, my late grandfather patented a toothpaste dispenser as a part of his dream to escape the coal mining career that was slowly breaking his body (and, sometimes, his spirit.)  He’d been bruised and had his arm broken by the billy clubs of state troopers as they broke the economically disasterous and sometimes violent coal mining strikes that plagued the land in the 1960s. The safety of coal mines was abysmal, in fact, his leg was crushed in a cave-in making it hard for him to work. So with his Ben Franklin notebook in hand, he sketched idea after idea, and in 1965, he took this one to a lawyer in the tiny town of Central City Kentucky, spending his savings to file patent 3,198,389 for the “Tooth Paste Dispensing Cabinet” shown here.

Modern technology and design has made the x-paste dispenser a true marvel that my Grandfather would have admired.  But even with his fake-wood-grained version and its “denture tray” practicality, he is someone I admire for trying to use his brainpower to pull himself out of the hole where he spent his days. I think with a little more advice and time, he could have taken his product to the next level and made it into a success. For today, I’ll hear his voice in my head talking about it, once again seeing him trace the motion of the gears as they squeeze the toothpaste onto the brush there at the kitchen table of their tiny house, and for a moment I’ll see it hanging on my bathroom wall signed “TBD, Inventor.”

Update: A great post about starting small with a new product was found over here at newsday.com. I thought it was relevant to this post. Perhaps it would have been a better way for him to go than to go directly to GE and Sunbeam, like he did.

David Meerman Scott recently posted a very well thought out post “How to Pitch the Media” which rang true as I purged at least 10 unsolictied pitches for irrelevant stories from my inbox for Business Lexington this morning. The pitches were ridiculous - general, poorly written, disorganized, and time consuming to read. Honestly, I just organized my in-box and found that my company received 4,450 emails that were not spam (66,138 were) in January. I monitor 1920 RSS feeds (loosely) and 300 or so rigorously. I don’t need your bland, poorly thought out ideas.

• Read the magazine and understand something about why it exists. Uh oh, you say, now you can’t spam the journalists with mass email. Nope, sure can’t. Often the magazine will push out its stories on an RSS feed, giving you the perfect vehicle for keeping up-to-date.
• Tell them why this story or idea is unique. Is it new? Why shouldn’t they just take the pitch and write about the competition? Even though journalism is only about 5% of my work week, I hate receiving pitches that reek of laziness.
• Don’t insult their intelligence.
• Provide URLs for reference in the story that are clickable.
• Make it immediately apparent that you’ve done your homework. Think inverted pyramid.
• Make your note skimmable - make the key points visible in the preview pane. Marketing Sherpa tells us why it’s so important.
• Don’t bother with stories about promotions, name changes, internal reorganizations, sponsorships, donations or other internal matters.

If you plan to pitch bloggers, I recommend checking out this post, which includes some rules which demonstrates that the blogosphere is different than the standard journalistic brigade. And there is also evidence that bloggers’ importance seems to be gaining ground all the time.