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Don’t Hang Up! Google Really Phoning Local Businesses.

Written on August 3, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing, searchengineguide

by Miriam Ellis

If you own a local business and get a phone call from a rep identifying himself as contacting you from Google (even if the call is coming from India), don’t make the mistake of assuming it’s yet another annoying phone scam. Mike Blumenthal has just reported confirmation from Google that these phone calls are legitimate and are part of Google’s 2010 effort to clean up local business data quality. This unexpected new move from Google has three interesting aspects to it worth pointing out.

The Good

I fully support any efforts Google makes to clean up spammy issues in Google Maps and Place Pages. This latest phone call program apparently stems from a new policy of verifying community edits made to business listings. So, if someone tries to make an edit to your business listing, you may get a call from Google asking whether the edit that’s been suggested is an accurate one. Frankly, considering the great silence that has historically surrounded Google Maps, I was amazed to hear of Google reps calling business owners. This is really something new.

This program may help prevent negative competitive editing and hijacking, to some extent, so that’s the positive aspect of this activity.

The Bad

The Google phone reps are not allowed to give out any type of contact information or call back number to the local business owners whom they are phoning. There goes a sense of trust in the legitimacy of the phone call! If I hadn’t read the news about this and a client phoned me saying they’d been contacted by a ‘Google employee’ who wanted their business data, I would tell the client this was likely a scam. Business owners are inundated with phishing and telemarketing calls. How many of them are going to trust that Google is really phoning them? It’s really unfortunate that Google didn’t come up with a more trustworthy way of implementing this program.

The Ugly

Saddest of all, one has to fear that real scammers will benefit from this scenario. Once business owners understand that Google might actually phone them, how easy would it be for the bad guys to pretend they are from Google (after all, they don’t have to provide any type of ID, thanks to Google not requiring this of their own employees) and get access to unsuspecting business owners’ data, Place Pages and more? The results of this could get ugly, indeed.

In Conclusion

It’s pretty easy for business owners to learn that certain entities will never contact them for particular types of information. For example, online banking entities warn their clients that the bank will never send them an email requesting their account details. Paypal provides similar warnings. Business owners learn not to respond to suspicious emails, once they have been advised not to.

Now, here we have Google, whose reputation for silence has engendered the belief that no one would ever actually hear from them, suddenly phoning the public. It’s great that they are making these calls, but I would exhort Eric Schmidt to consider putting some type of safeguard in place so that business owners can identify that these calls are truly coming from Google.

I would suggest that an email be sent out to the business owner, notifying them that a call will be coming in from a Google business rep within the next day, week, or something similar. This would enable the business owner to cross reference the email and the phone call, arriving at some semblance of validity. Of course, scammers could duplicate this process, but at least it would give the business owner something along the lines of a heads-up that a real Google rep needs to speak with them.

I don’t know if Google is depending upon the element of surprise in these calls to see if a phone number is answered by a legitimate business, but we’re really looking at a problem if the business owner is trying to hide details from Google while Google is trying to hide details from the business owner. It starts to look like a strange boxing match, doesn’t it?

It will be very interesting to start hearing more anecdotes from SMBs who receive these calls as time goes by. If you run a local business, I’m glad you are reading this article; per usual, Google hasn’t done much to educate their public regarding this new policy. At least, having read this, you will know that a call from Google may be the real thing. May I suggest that you use this unprecedented opportunity to ask some of your most burning questions about Maps and Places? The chance may not come again.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Don’t Hang Up! Google Really Phoning Local Businesses.

Skype Launches New Pay-Per-Call System for Advertisers

Written on July 21, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, marketing

Skype has partnered with Marchex to offer a new pay-per-call advertising service in the US, Canada and Western Europe. The Click & Call program works with a “Free Call” button that can be placed anywhere on the web. When a customer clicks the button, the Skype software launches and the call is connected at no cost to them. The advertiser pays a fee only for the calls they’ve received and they can set a budget so they won’t be surprised by a large bill at the end of the month.

Skype’s Click & Call system might seem like a good alternative to acquiring an expensive toll free number, but there is a downside to the system and it’s a pretty big one. In order for the call to connect, the callee must have Skype software on their computer and Skype’s browser plug-in. The system is also not available for Macs and it won’t work on Skype mobile.

On the other hand, since you only pay for the calls that come in, there’s really nothing to lose by setting up an account with Skype. If you’re running a service business that gets a large number of referrals on line, an instant, free phone call could be the deciding factor between you and your competition.

Marchex will be handling the day-to-day operations of the program which include detailed call analytics. Skype emphasizes that only standard metrics will be included in the reports and that the personal information of the individual Skype customers will be kept private and protected but I can see that becoming a concern if the program takes off.

You can click here to watch a short video that shows how the system works.

Advertisers wishing to participate in Click & Call Advertising with Skype supported by Marchex, should visit www.skype.com/go/clickandcall.

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Bing’s Cashback Program Shuttered

Written on June 7, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, marketing

Believe it or not, it has been just about one year already since bing was brought to life by Microsoft. Out of the gate there was significant buzz and plenty of hopeful Microsoft folks and industry pundits who thought that maybe, just maybe, there was a threat to Google’s search dominance. In many ways, bing has made some inroads. One program that was started during the MSN Live search days that there was some hope for was the bing Cashback program . We say was some hope because Microsoft has shut down the program.

The bing Community blog tells us:

One of the principles we have here at Bing is to constantly experiment and learn. We do this to ensure we are keeping pace with new social and technology trends, and can continue to deliver great value for our customers and advertisers.

As part of this “test-and-learn” mentality, we will be retiring the Bing cashback feature, which means that the last day you can earn cashback will be July 30, 2010.

Why are we doing this? When we originally began to offer the cashback feature, it was designed to help advertisers reach you with compelling offers, and to provide a new type of shopping experience that would change user behavior and attract a bunch of new users to Bing.

In lots of ways, this was a great feature – we had over a thousand merchant partners delivering great offers to customers and seeing great ROI on their campaigns, and we were taking some of the advertising revenue and giving it back to customers. But after a couple of years of trying, we did not see the broad adoption that we had hoped for.

One has to wonder that a program designed to give shoppers cashback would be one that would garner enough support to make it a mainstay for bing who needs to do whatever it can to look different than Google (even though Google appears to like how bing looks based on some recent activity). The users of the service were loyal enough but there just wasn’t the numbers that bing needed to keep the doors open on the program.

As with anything there are two sides when examining what this really means with regard to bing and its success. The econsutlancy blog has one side with

While it will be interesting to see what Microsoft cooks up next in this area, one has to wonder: if Microsoft couldn’t obtain the type of adoption it had hoped for by enticing consumers with cash back, how will it drive adoption when it isn’t paying them to use Bing?

While paidContent had this to say:

This is likely a sign, however, that Microsoft’s search engine efforts are growing up, especially since Cashback always seemed a bit like a desperate attempt to get users, which Microsoft now seems to be (finally) gaining. The company has 11.8 percent of the search market, up from 8 percent before it relaunched its search engine as Bing a year ago, according to comScore.

What are your thoughts? If bing turns into just another search engine with no differentiating offers and services will it have the muscle to truly compete with Google? When you are trailing the leader by as much as bing trails Google it would make sense that there should be offers to make a searcher stand up, take notice and change behaviors. Does bing really have what it takes?

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Bing’s Cashback Program Shuttered

Twitter To Launch Its Advertising Platform Tuesday

Written on April 12, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, Object, book

Hot on the heels of the TweetUp announcement comes news that Twitter plans to announce its own advertising platform on Tuesday. The New York Times says the program will be called “Promoted Tweets.”
The advertising program, which Twitter calls Promoted Tweets, will show up when Twitter users search for keywords that the advertisers have bought to [...]



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Twitter To Launch Its Advertising Platform Tuesday

Bing Makes Gains In Search Advertising Share: Report

Written on April 12, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, book, marketing

Echoing recent stats that show Bing slowly growing its search engine market share, a new report says Bing is also increasing its share of search ad spending and clicks. The news comes from the latest quarterly report written by Efficient Frontier, a search marketing agency that manages more than $900 million in digital spending annually.
The [...]



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Do You Know The True Value Of Your Paid Search Traffic?

Written on April 12, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, book

In paid search the more accurately we can gauge and react to the “true value” of the traffic for each ad the better the performance of the program.



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Google’s SiteLinks Program Very Good …. For Google

Written on March 24, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, marketing

Last fall Google made it easy for brands to make their paid search ads around their own branded terms stand out with its SiteLinks program. The idea being that these brands should have some advantage since they are, well, the brand.

Seems like a great idea except when some of these brands have been getting their search bills. The program works so well in some cases that the search spend because of these special ads have gone up dramatically for some.

AdAge reports

A typical search ad contains one link, or sometimes two — one to the advertiser’s home page and sometimes one geographic link. Ad Sitelinks allows advertisers as many as five links in three lines of text. Macy’s, for example includes links to “free shipping deals,” “shop online,” “find a store,” and “account login,” in addition to a link to its home page. Toys “R” Us includes a link that says, “Buy one get one free little tikes!”

An SiteLink ad for Toys R Us looks like the one below.

The trouble is that often times a searcher will click on the paid ad instead of organic ad that they would have clicked on in the past. Google meanwhile gets to sit back and say that their program is a success because the brands are getting their clicks. Of course, they are also pretty excited about the extra search revenue being wrung out of some of these advertisers.

These deeper links bypass the advertiser’s home page but are giving them a huge increase in click-throughs; Google estimates a 30% to 40% increase over standard search ads. That click-through success has caused trouble for some marketers: Consumers searching for a brand using Google will click on the sponsored ad and not on the organic result. And all those clicks on the Sitelinks ad are also driving marketers’ search ad bills up 30% to 40%.

Not everyone is all that upset though because the extra cost, while sometimes capturing their existing customers, are allowing for a brand to take up considerable real estate in the SERP’s. One such brand, Nationwide Insurance, sees the program as a winner because it allows for greater flexibility in their search messaging.

For a company already spending 50% of their digital marketing budget on search, Nationwide is happy to reach existing customers and sell them additional products and services.

“In contrast to the organic results, I control the experience there,” said Chris Cotton, director of interactive marketing for the insurer. For existing customers, he said, “it allows me to demonstrate other products they may or may not have.”

So as with most things Google somehow manages to have its cake, eat it and then do a “burp and blow” over everyone and come away with accolades for innovation and more cash in the coffers. Time and again what looks like a scheme to extract more money from advertisers to some can be a complete advertising blessing to others. Good work if you can get it, right?

How do you view these ads? Are they a good thing or a bad thing for the overall market? We know they can work for the brand itself but what about others?

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Google’s SiteLinks Program Very Good …. For Google

The Coming Decade & In-House Search Marketing’s Coming of Age

Written on January 13, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object

In October of 2000 a start-up company launched a self-service ad program with 350 customers. The company was Google and the program was, of course, AdWords. While practitioners of SEM were then relatively rare, those employed full-time by companies to optimize websites for search engines were almost unheard-of. Some ten years [...]



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The Coming Decade & In-House Search Marketing’s Coming of Age

Third-Party Affiliate Programs: Roll Your Own Instead

Written on October 28, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: marketing, seo

Posted by MichaelC

One of the best ways to build inbound links is to create an affiliate program.

Cup of Joe: The Danger Of Being Oz

Written on September 26, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing

Thursday marked the 70th anniversary of the film classic The Wizard of Oz. One of my favorite parts of the movie is when Dorothy discovers the true identity of the Wizard. This scene is symbolic of many political and social truths in our society.

Coincidentally, we saw this same scene play out in the Internet marketing industry this week. On Wednesday, Seth Godin, launched Brands in Public. In short the program aggregates mentions of brands from different social media sites to a single page on Godin’s Squidoo. While Godin claims that he consulted many brand managers about this idea and they all supported it, there was a barrage of criticism from folks in the Internet marketing industry. Most of the criticism drew attention to the fact that Godin himself has been a champion of transparent marketing tactics such as “permission based marketing” however, this program seeks to leverage the hard work of other brand builders with out their permission.

It appeared on Wednesday that Godin’s curtain was pulled aside and his true identity revealed. As the scarecrow might say, “You humbug!” Despite all of his high ideals and transparent philosophies, Godin is looking more like a spammer than the international marketing guru we have learned to love. Perhaps, Seth Godin’s true genius isn’t in his books or his blog, but rather in his ability to market himself as a champion of transparency while simultaneously hiding his true agenda behind his own emerald curtain.

In all fairness, Friday, Godin released details about changes that the Brands in Public program will be taking. Now, they will only create a page for a brand if the company requests it, and the company will have joint control of the page. This seems to be in direct response to the surge of criticism on Wednesday. It’s a positive turn of events, but the question that I have now: Is Godin’s curtain now permanently open? Now that we have seen Godin behind the curtain will he begin being truly transparent?

The Biggest Danger of Personal Branding

The biggest danger of personal branding is not in failing, but succeeding. To have a successful, well known personal brand means that you are held at an extremely high level of scrutiny. Your supporters and brand enthusiast will have high expectations that you must reach.

Because of this you must be careful to always be sincere and engage in an honest dialog. If you can do this successfully then when your emerald curtain is pulled aside there won’t be any surprises!

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Cup of Joe: The Danger Of Being Oz