YBO Interactive Blog

Nearly 15% of Fortune 500 companies communicate with consumers via blogs, according to a study conducted by Burson-Marsteller.

Why is this number so low? I think the most common excuse would be “we have nothing to say”.

David Wallace wrote a great post about corporate blogging. Here is his answer for the we-have-nothing-to-say excuse:

• Write opinionated posts related to news and events surrounding your industry.
• Announce new products and/or special offers.
• Write in-depth product reviews.
• Highlight customer testimonies and praise.
• Do a Q&A style of post to deal with most common inquiries from clients.
• Publish company news - the more personal, the better.

Cover news in your specific industry. Add your own commentary to make your content unique.

I think that marketing managers don’t realize what a powerful communication tool a blog can be.

There is no reason to be afraid of it.

The beginning is always hard, but once you start, I promise, you WILL find yourself blogging about things you want to tell the world, and wait for comments, instead of sending those regular web1.0 emalis…

update: SEC had announced that companies may now spread their official news by posting information on their websites and blogs, rather than press releases distributed by press release companies. How cool is that!

This is a story about the guy that owned ILoveJackDaniels.com. One day, the guys from Jack Daniels contacted him and asked him to stop using their trademark including the domain name he owned. Like many such cases, where the little people have no money to fight the giants, the guy gave up and moved his site to a new domain - addedbytes.com.

The thing is, they are going to let him redirect his traffic from the old domain to the new domain only until June 2009!!!

And then what???

It simply doesn’t make any sense. Not using the domain name is one thing (I would argue on that one as well, but he decided not to). But not using the domain name to redirect his traffic? What about all the links that he gathered througout the years? They are all gone!

I hope that I’m not violating Jack Daniels trademark by setting the title of this post to the title I chose.

Their acts are simply outrages. I don’t drink Jack Daniels but if I would, I would stop now.

Checkout this excellent post by SEOmoz, 8 Innovative Design & UI Elements That Make Sites Better

My favorite item was news via the Logo that shows a super cool use for your logo for hot news or announcement. This is the most innovative logo concept I’ve seen , the only company I saw that changes it’s logo every now and then is Google, but who am I to say a word about Google’s innovation…

Another great item was the Product IS the homepage which is a very creative way to make the home page behave like a landing page. Very unusual, very nice. I WILL do that.

There are more cool tips there. Worth reading.

The Official Google Blog has a nice post called Introduction to Google Ranking. Surprisingly (or not…) this post doesn’t tell anything that you didn’t know, nor reviles any secret that can help you do better in anything…

However, there was one thing I did learn from that post: Google’s system is SIMPLE!  It is really is! At least that’s what the guy says.

Being involved in many software projects throughout my career, many of them coded with my own fingers, such a statement makes me smile

KISS! (Keep It Simple Stupid!) has always been a good advice for developers. The thing about developers is that their mind (I was there, I know) doesn’t work like that. They always always always tend to make everything complicated. Simplicity, doesn’t seem to work in this profession…

Maybe the ones that can make it simple work in Google?

A Google Groups thread has a discussion about blocking a whole continent from seeing your website. This guy has a lot of African traffic that he doesn’t want (because he has no customers in Africa?) and he wants to block them based on their location.

The answer he got from the Google guy is that this is against Google’s webmaster Guidelines.

I think this is absurd. The thing about Google Webmaster Guidelines is that you can’t ignore them. If you ignore them, they will ignore you, and we don’t want that to happen, right?

Now , what can we do if we find something really stupid in Google Webmaster Guidelines? Is it safe to ignore it? I don’t have the guts to say yes, although I think that this is the right answer. If the traffic from Iran is wasting my bandwidth and I don’t want to do any business with that country, what is wrong with sending the Iranian visitors to a page that says “Your region is not supported. Good bye and have a nice day (and on a personal level - stop supporting worldwide terrorism…).

I do agree with the Google anti-cloaking policy, I think it makes sense and goes together with their do-no-evil vision.

However, on this one, I think they went too far.

update (july 5th 2008) :
A correction was posted on the google groups thread. The guy from Google was wrong, he didn’t fully understand their policy…

After a bit of double-checking, I have a clarification where I was mistaken. Sorry about the confusion!
The important part is that you do not treat the Googlebots any different than other users from that region. So if your site blocks users in the region where the Googlebot comes from (based on the IP address and your IP/Location lookups), you should be blocking it as well. Blocking users outside of the Googlebot’s region would generally be ok.