I went out on the hunt for companies through Google, industry bodies and asked for recommendations on LinkedIn. Eventually I ended up seeing 5 companies, which was quite a badly surprising experience with:

• Barely any preparation from some
• Obvious nerves from the people we were meeting
• Absolutely boring - some of them wanked on about things that really weren’t relevant

It got me to realise that I was once someone unprepared, nervous and boring. Glad to be gone from that side of the table I say.

We ended up choosing the smallest company from the bunch, without the blue chip client list and high profile portfolio - but they had “it”. 2 months down the track, they met the tight deadline and hit the budget and now we have myambition.

Key things that made these guys stand out and perform from the other guys was:

• No fat in the company structure - it’s ridiculous when a company of 18 has a CEO, 5 account managers, 3 in the project team with  50% doing any real work. It really costs the customer time to right through the many people
• First point of contact that knew their stuff - Account managers in web agencies are monkeys, they pull in someone with a tiny bit of sales experience who’s willing to accept a piss poor salary and in a multi-choice question would not know what HTML stood for
• No scheduling - We got a dedicated resource for the course of two months, one design, one developer - both with enough experience to handle it on their own. There wasn’t issues of having one week here and there to fit in with a ton of other clients
• Variable priced contract - Corporates love a fixed price contract, but they end up screwing over both parties. The agency puts a buffer in the budget to make sure they make money, expecting clients to make “unreasonable” changes and push out the man hours. What I’ve always seen happen is that, because it’s a fixed price the agency actually has to work harder in the planning phase to make sure everyone knows what they’re getting. It doesn’t work because it is so unflexible. Sure you need planning - and a lot of it but things will always change along the course of a web project, the beauty of the web is how easy to you can change, I don’t know why everyone takes the fixed priced options.

I don’t think I could ever go back to the agency world. Apart from the guys at Known who I’ve been working with, every agency I’ve seen is too small/unexperienced to put out a great website, or too big that it becomes a bigger project than it really is to pay a CEO salary, while the underpaid oompa-loompas on the floor do a rubbish job.

I’m soon going to attempt to get a number of blogs setup at work - but of course I’m going to face challenges getting people into it. I’m confident I can make it work, but if I’m slack myself - how do I expect others to get into it?

There’s one reason why I’m slack. I started the blog to help myself get a job. I got a job, I stopped. Which leads me to the conclusion:

To be motivated to blog - you need to get something out of it in the short term.

It’s easy to say you get the best out of it in the long term - but it’s much easier said than done.

As I’ve recently moved to Sydney - I had the joy of setting up a new bank account. I did my research and weighed up pricing and features to see pretty much the same product. I got sold on the brand. NAB painted me a pretty picture of themselves, using bright colours and smiley face rainbows - they had me falling in love. Being new to the country, I hadn’t been exposed to the old “National Australia Bank” brand which is still used in ads along the train line to the airport for some terrible reason. If they still had this logo, I wouldn’t have lusted after them.

They’ve done a great job of making their brand appealing, but as soon as I had to deal with them, I was disappointed. Happy go lucky turned into old time processes that got in the way of pleasing me. I won’t go into the details - but it’s been two weeks and I still don’t have an EFTPOS card and wasn’t allowed to take cash out of the account for the first few days.

So here’s the obvious point: why did they rebrand to appeal to someone like me when they probably know that they can’t live up to that promise? 

Sure they need their processes to make the business operate, but making it seem like I’m going to enjoy it being their customer just makes them look worse and accentuates the pitfalls.

I previously dealt with a client who threw around the strap line ‘Making life easier’ like there was no tomorrow. The thing was, they didn’t make life easier at all. Their old way of thinking and processes made it bloody difficult for their customers. This company needs applauding though - their marketing team had the balls to strip the tag line from the brand because they couldn’t live up to it.

Marketers get too carried away with the warm and fuzzy. There was a time (or so I’m told) where consumers would buy whatever was advertised. Marketers had the power, now consumers have the power. We can see through the fuzzy. This is why it’s most important to get the product and service right, first and foremost.

If Yahoo! advertised and got warm and fuzzy on you, would it take you away from Google?

The problem with most SEO’s is that they are focussed on getting rankings. Sometimes the easiest way to get rankings is using ‘techniques’. More and more often though I see search results rankings that can not be explained by SEO techniques. Inbound links, title tags and good quality content are of course important, but certainly not the be all and end all.

Let’s take a step back here.

What is the point of a search engine?
To help a person find the information they are looking for.

So, when a user types something in they want to find something related to what they typed in.

What is the point of a search engine ranking sites?
To help a person find the best possible information for what they are looking for.

So logically the order of search results should show the best site, with the best content, and the most relevant to a persons search words.

OK, that’s obvious - what’s my point?
The best site has content that the person wants and is easy for them to get.

The trouble is that Google is not a person. It’s pretty close, but at the end of the day it’s an algorithm. It needs to a way to logically determine which site is best.

To measure this best factor Google is going to use a bunch of things to determine a web pages score. User experience is of course a huge factor if a human was going to score a website. Google can’t tell a good design, or if something is interactive and capitvating for people viewing. What they can measure though, is the bounce rate* of a site.

It’s a dead give away to search engines that your site didn’t match the users expectations, why else would they be leaving.

My advice is to always think about users first and search engines should be kept happy naturally.

*Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors to your site who leave after seeing just one page. For example, 100 people visit your homepage, and 25 of them decide to leave without viewing any other pages. This would mean you have a bounce rate of 25%

Essentially the new law makes it illegal to:

• Not disclose that you are being paid to write a blog post about a product
• Pretend to be a consumer

All in the name of consumer protection. I must applaud the law makers over in the UK, we might get a law like this in New Zealand in 2025.

It’s a nice time to be a consumer, where companies are needing to be transparent to be competitive.

In my experience with banks and insurance companies - transparency is not usually a term they know about. The financial services industry has the biggest challenge with ‘new marketing’ in my view. They have made screeds of money over time that they aren’t as likely to get away with now. Somehow they need to be transparent and add more value for consumers - great customer service isn’t going to be enough. Although they’re spending a bunch of money online - they’re not embracing new marketing and instead dishing out a meatball sundae.

NZ Marketing Magazine and DLB (NZ Marketing Association) seem to be constantly regurgitating messages about “embracing new marketing” at the moment, so I apologise for the cliche.

However, these days are coming to an end and it seems that ranking on paid search results is becoming more and more of a challenge. Especially with a quality score to filter out the terrible ads that don’t actually add value for users.

I recently have been working on a campaign for a client - targeting highly competitive terms. I did all I could on the campaign in terms of optimisation and bid a huge amount on the keywords. The result? The ad showing up a tiny portion of when it should, driving 2 clicks a day, a huge cost per click and a ‘Poor’ quality score.

So I discussed with issue with a Google Optimiser - and they essentially said there was no solution but to wait for improvement. But in doing so they gave me a good description of the way quality score was working in this case.

Here’s a summary of the impact of quality score in this situation

• When you don’t have enough data for your own quality score - you get the average of other advertisers for that specific keyword. In my case, there are a ton of dodgy advertisers which will not be relevant for users so overall have a poor quality score.
• When there’s lots of competition, you absolutely need a good quality score to get displayed. My ads were put in the place of a bad ad and therefore not showing up.
• The only way to improve quality score is to prove that your ad is of quality to Google. You can only do this by showing valuable clicks and beat the average performance for that keyword by other advertisers.

This basically means I’m stuck in a rut, as I’m sure many other advertisers are who actually are selling a good quality product. No solution yet either.

To start with; “Chief Blogger” is a wanky title. Hiring someone to blog is essentially the same as hiring someone to manage PR which defeats the purpose of blogging in the first place.

The best thing I’ve seen in company blogs is the passion that comes out of them. Google has their geeky engineers talking directly to other geeks. We love it. It’s not someone blogging trying to manage the brand; it’s the Google engineers being the brand. Sure the chief blogger could be passionate and be a part of the company, but he/she would still be out of the front-line where sometimes the best insight comes from.

It’s best when people are talking to people.

After using a Mac I grew fond of it all, but now I understand the true satisfaction to actually own one. As lame as I sound, part of the elite.

Apple do a hell of a lot to ensure post-purchase satisfaction with nice extras like Apple branded polishing cloths. Everything inside the package, right down to the polystyrene is ‘cool’. Only Apple could pull off ‘cool’ polystyrene.

Top line of the message contained one of those “this is why we’re emailing you messages” explaing how and when I subscribed. This time it’s a little different though.

You are receiving this email from AA because we want to keep you informed of special Membership travel offers

So they’re emailing me because they want to keep me informed? That’s not how it works, and it’s pretty much admitting to spam. Good work AA.

Chumps.

I don’t think that Google will be hit as much as Mr Pauly is making it out to be. They may face trouble with a lack of consumer buying (following through to a lack of searching), but not from marketers cutting their budgets. Here’s why:

1. Search marketing budgets are tiny compared to other media spends by well known brands
2. It’s certainly one of the most measurable - and usually profitable
3. Reducing search marketing budget is going to directly reduce revenue
4. Branding budgets are used to grow a brand - wouldn’t it be most logical to cut back on growth/less measurable expenditure first?

It’s fairly safe to say that a Google budget should be the last one cut.

By the way: NZ Herald, you’re lazy for publishing this article. If you’re not going to write your own content, at least publish articles by industry experts, not opinion columnists.