I’m so sick of hearing from PR “professionals” who don’t have a clue about how to pitch bloggers. It’s obvious they don’t even read my blog. This is spam, pure and simple. It’s just the next evolution of spam – the progeny of the “reciprocal link request.” I used to get those every day before […]

Success on YouTube is as much about effectively tapping the social network as it is about the content. Brand-building viral videos such as the ones I blogged about recently only happen if the conditions are right. If you don’t follow MarketingProfs, you may not have seen that my article “How to Market on YouTube” came […]

Jeff Molander of Molander & Associates has given me a scoop on their new service that they are about to roll out — ProtectMyMark.com. Jeff has been kind enough to send me a sample report so that I can actually see what a merchant can get from using their service, and it looks really good. […]

The other day when I was on whitepages.co.nz I kept getting this tasteless banner ad: Not only did I find the ad irritating and gross, I thought less of the White Pages brand after I saw it. It is an animated GIF banner, where the piece of poo actually flies across the ad from left to […]

They say that “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” But not if you’re a site owner! I’ve seen designs copied, content copied, even entire sites copied. It’s so easy for someone to “view source” and take whatever they like, without regard to copyright. You can locate copyright infringers pretty easily with Copyscape if they’ve […]

For years, Starbucks didn’t seem to have a clue… the Starbucks.com home page showed up in Google with the title “Cookies required.” It wasn’t even “Delicious, fresh-baked hot-out-of-the-oven cookies required!” Finally now they’ve corrected this to a ho-hum “Starbucks.com.” These guys don’t exactly looked “clued in.” For an offline equivalent, I’d imagine a yellow pages […]

We’ve all seen websites that say “(c) 2004, All Rights Reserved” at the bottom. Now you’ll hopefully start seeing the (cc) symbol, which stands for Creative Commons, and means that only SOME rights are reserved. Creative Commons is a legal concept championed by the intellectual powerhouse amongst copyright lawyers Larry Lessig. Copyright law is decades […]

Public relations in the blogosphere seems to operate under a new set of rules than traditional PR. With traditional PR you hire a PR firm that has relationships with various journalists and media. With the new PR, you start your own blog (assuming of course you have something worthwhile to say) and you work to […]

I spoke at the Strategic Branding conference in Auckland yesterday. My session was on new ways to brand in the online channel. Of course branding campaigns appear in many forms online besides the ubiquitous banner ad. It was my job to provide the audience of brand marketers a crash course in blogs, RSS feeds, paid […]