I was happy to learn that finally, Vitaly Borker, the e-commerce bully and owner of decormyeyes.com that terrorized countless customers, was put behind bars. This story was first reported by the New York Times. The shocking twist to this story was that the more abusive Borker acted and the more complains he generated, the higher he was ranked by Google so he was getting rewarded with even more traffic and more victims. It seemed at the time that none could stop him, but as a result of the NYT story, Google fixed its search algorithm to prevent negative reviews from generating positive search results and law enforcement has finally caught up with this unsavory character. Read the story finale.
I was happy to learn that finally, Vitaly Borker, the e-commerce bully and owner of decormyeyes.com that terrorized countless customers, was put behind bars.
Based on a July, 2012 About.com "The Trust Factor" study, reviews played a bigger role in cultivating trust than friend "likes" and recommending brands. Other key trust promoting factors are: accuracy, expertise, transparency as well as useful mobile content, location-based services and video. Read full emarketing article.
Many advertisers feel compelled to use Social Media as part of their marketing mix. It surely is popular, fun and trendy but how much does it really costs? Do its benefits justify its costs? This chart highlights some important cost factors and benefits to consider. In my opinion Social Media ROI has more to do with the quality of the umbrella creative and media strategy and of course budget. Social Media, as this chart shows becomes exponentially more effective when integrated with traditional media.
Many advertisers feel compelled to use Social Media as part of their marketing mix. It surely is popular, fun and trendy but how much does it really costs? Do its benefits justify its costs?
Desperados beer it's making an impact online with this seamlessly well executed YouTube takeover that pushes the limits of technology by allowing the viewer to interact with live action and sharing it realtime bringing friends and their photos into the picture via Facebook connect. Thanks Digitalbuzz for sharing the news and the video.
Just when you thought that Facebook, Twitter and perhaps Foursquare were it, here comes Color, a mobile social media app that is getting a lot of attention and investment money. If you wonder what can be so frightening and amazing about this app imaging yourself taking pictures or videos in a public place and automatically sharing them with everyone in your proximity with the same app. That means friends and strangers alike. You can see their photos and videos too as long as they are within 150 feet. When you leave your images disappear as well. If you are let's say in Times Square Color will provide you with an amazing dimensional experience of the place through the countless angles and points of view of strangers. Color's technology uses a clever combination of GPS and light and sound matching to locate you and other Color users in your proximity. To download color go to Color.com Read more about Color's technology and who's investing in it.
Just when you thought that Facebook, Twitter and perhaps Foursquare were it, here comes Color, a mobile social media app that is getting a lot of attention and investment money.
During the critical shopping months of the last holiday season J. C. Penney beat millions of websites to the top of the search results rankings on many competitive keywords such as "dresses", "furniture" or "home decor". J. C. even beat Samsonite on searches for "Samsonite carry on luggage". Not an easy thing to do, taking into consideration that Google's goal is to find the most relevant websites. Is it J. C. Penney a more relevant search result for Samsonite searches than Samsonite.com? So how this could have possible happened?
It turns out that J. C. Penney's Search Engine Optimization consulting firm used a "link scheme" a trick banned and highly penalized by Google, thousands of random websites with enormous amounts of keyword links to J. C. Penney's website landing pages which automatically made it the most relevant website for those keywords.
But the intriguing part of this story is that it took evidence collected by The New York Times for Google to take some action. Within hours Penney's rankings for many keywords went from number 1 to 70 and lower. Still why it took Google so long to detect such a blatant and widespread deception? it could be that the $2.46 million a month J. C. Penney spends on paid search ads made Google look the other way?
The European Union is already investigating possible antitrust abuses by Google. Money talks even for godly Google. Read the full story.
During the critical shopping months of the last holiday season J. C.
The Huffington Post got $315 million from AOL and Demand Media raised $151 million in its January public offering. One thing that have helped these two companies with such high valuations is their search engine optimization skills. However one serious drawback particularly for web publishers is their dependency on writing stories based on trending Google searches. After a while to maintain a high level of incoming traffic (and money), web publishers are finding it hard to beat the habit of writing articles for S.E.O. instead of for quality.
Google is refining its search algorithm to prevent low-quality content to be top ranked in its search results as publishers are moving from S.E.O. to S.M.O. (Social Media Optimization) the next battleground in the never ending search ranking and clicks war. Read the full "Web words that lure the readers" article.
When Google claimed that in its Art Project's reproductions of painting master pieces "you can see things not normally visible to the human eye" there weren't kidding. After reading this article in the New York Times about Google's Art Project, a website that gives you access to a selection of high-resolution images of art treasures I was skeptical. After taking a close look at some of these paintings I almost fell off my chair. I can't explain the feeling of looking at, for instance, Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night" painting so close and with such a detail that an inch of the painting becomes its own little masterpiece. Thanks Google!
When Google claimed that in its Art Project's reproductions of painting master pieces "you can see things not normally visibl
Surely this App looks fun but what I like most is how well tackles the needs of users with a variety of engaging interactive games and tools (access to live streaming video from different locations), social sharing and a photo contest. The need of advertisers by allowing an integrated sponsorship with viral potential (Toshiba will show the photo contest winner face in its massive screen right next to the Times Square Ball) and finally how it fulfills the potential of Apps as a viable marketing medium generating revenue for ad agencies and developers. Download the Times Square Official New Year’s Eve Ball App for Mac and Android. Enjoy it! Happy New Year!!
As I reported last week in my "When e-commerce turns ugly and Google makes it even worse" post, a New York Times article exposed a loophole in Google search that allowed unscrupulous online merchants to grow their businesses by improving their rankings in Google searches as a results of customers complains. The more complains the higher the rankings they got. Kudos to Google for their quick reaction to fix this problem. Read the full story.
As I reported last week in my "When e-commerce turns ugly and Google makes it even wo
