Are Big Brands Stealing (Buying) the SERPS?

Coke still hasn’t quite figured it out yet, as KillerCoke.com is still staring at them menacingly from the number four spot. Pontiac and Mazda, after a short scuffle over competitive keyword bidding, seem to have forgotten each other for now, too.

But notice the domains listed in the organic results for "Pontiac":

1.    Pontiac.com
2.    Pontiac.com/solstice/index.jsp
7.    Pontiacunderground.autos.yahoo.com
9.    GmcCanada.com/English/vehicles/Pontiac/index.jsp

You’re saying "so what?" right? It’s reasonable that Pontiac or General Motors-owned sites show up in the top ten. That’s relevance.

But what makes the Yahoo forum greater than ClassicalPontiac.com, or GMC Canada, or any of the other 35 million results?

SEObook’s Aaron Wall would argue that Google is "over-representing site authority in their relevancy algorithms." This isn’t to say that Yahoo’s Pontiac forum isn’t a great authority, only to note that some links are worth more than others in Google’s eyes.

Wall says big brands with big budgets "have begun abusing the hole with the use of infinite subdomains." They have a tremendous amount of authority, and can set subdomains to leverage that authority, linking to the sites they want to rank higher.

What may be more ethically questionable than that is that these big brands are buying up the other sites they want to rank higher. The end result of that is they are manipulating the search results so that only sites they own with positive messages about their brands show up.

Add that budget leverage to an innate ability to outbid smaller competitors on highly competitive keywords, and you have SERPs literally owned by big business.

"While small businesses are worried about the risks of buying or renting a few links," writes Wall, "some large corporations are launching shadow brands or buying out competing domains en mass."

He uses eBay (which just pulled its ads from Google), Monster.com, Bankrate, and Yahoo as examples. Yahoo has at least nine verticals with Nintendo Wii coverage, Bankrate nails the rankings for "mortgage calculator" and Monster.com has a bag full of educational subdomains.

This type of manipulation isn’t much different than Black SEO Google frowns on, nor is it all that different from buying links, which Google also isn’t crazy about. This will be Google’s next relevancy challenge, then, to find a way to prevent the dollar from overriding the relevance.

While I strongly believe that Second Life has enormous potential as a business environment – and, thus, is something people in business ought to be paying close attention to – I’m certainly not on a mission about it to persuade all and sundry to see it my way.

Either you will or you won’t. It’s entirely your choice.

But you owe it to yourself (at least) to consider as many angles as possible before you land on one side or other of the argument.

If you Google or Technorati for Second Life, you’ll turn up a mixture of intelligent commentary and lots of hype. It’s largely the latter that plays a key role in helping some people be skeptical and dismiss the whole thing as an overrated game.

It seems to me that too much of the negative commentary focuses on here-and-now matters that are largely to do with the frustrations of today’s technology.

I’m referring to things like slow networks, unable to connect to the Second Life grid, graphics issues with the program on your PC, having to upgrade it from time to time, and so forth. And some people seem to be hung up about how many avatars are online at any one time, kind of wondering why all the 2 million registered users aren’t hanging out in world.

Clearly such issues play a significant role in your Second Life experience, but they are not the important issues!

What’s far more important is to look beyond this myopic view and focus on what people are actually doing in Second Life (almost in spite of the technology).

• Think about why companies like IBM, Dell, Adidas, Pontiac, and many more are investing time, energy and money in experimenting with and in this virtual world.
• Why Endemol is running a Big Brother contest in world.
• Why NBC/iVillage has ventured there with ‘Girls Night Out.’
• Why ABN Amro Bank opened a virtual branch in Second Life.
• And why Altered, the new film from the creators of ‘The Blair Witch Project,’ will be premiered at 5pm PST today at the Pontiac island.

In a pretty thoughtful piece in Second Life Insider last weekend, Tateru Nino wrote about the virtual world nay-sayers, and why they are saying no. The post included this credible view:

…Not all of our naysayers are strictly on the outside, either. Some of the most vociferous are residents who can’t let go. They may not log in anymore. They may have even cancelled their accounts. You’ll still see them, however, posting on blogs and forums – presumably to try to ruin it for others, though their motives in this wise would seem to be obscure. Many people just consider that to be griefing.

Writing in GigaGamez yesterday, Wagner James Au wrote a compelling post on Second Life around the concept of “it’s too hyped- and it’s not hyped enough.” Some excellent history and detailed commentary on many of the tech-related issues I mentioned above.

But maybe the best view of all came in this comment to Tateru Nino’s post:

…Does all this naysaying really matter? No. At the end of the day those who are into it will be into it, those who aren’t will resist it and the public will vote with their feet – they will either grab it with both hands and it will inevitably lead to (not be) the future of the Internet, or it won’t. And if it is, a whole lot of the naysayers will be left behind.

Amen to that.

Related posts:

Second Life insights from Text 100
Second Life: Reality not escapism
Real-world opportunities in Second Life
Get a Second Life now

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

No Googling With Google

From the article:

Not only is “googled” inappropriate, but apparenly the word “hottie” is frowned upon as well.

Google was sensitive about the use of its trademark before Merriam-Webster officially added “to google” to the English language. Last October, I received a particularly snippy email (which means it wasn’t nearly as serious as WaPo’s paper letter) asking that I make it clear that a person could not google something on Yahoo! (I’m paraphrasing).

Funny, the company didn’t seem to mind when Pontiac made use of the phrase, instructing consumers to google Pontiac on national television. In fact, the company consented ahead of time.

And, as The Independent points out, the company takes a much different stance on intellectual property when it comes to Google News and Google Print. Well, that’s convenient.

It’s understandable Google’s trademark managers don’t want to risk the Xerox and Kleenex branding death march, even if its unclear that genericide will apply to an Internet company in the same way it does to consumer tangibles. In the dotcom world, it seems very clear to everyone what is meant by “googling” something.

But then again, it took “escalator” 50 years to become generic. Too bad for Otis Elevator, who trademarked the phrase. The genericization of the word crippled the company, right?

Oh. Guess not.

Google needs to realize the meme that is Google.com has juggernauted far beyond the point of no return. It’s too late, without taking down your site altogether, to perform a lexicographical Googlectomy. It’s part of the language. Good luck in changing it back.

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The scenario denotes two important developments: the emerging of a new TV-to-Web advertising strategy as major companies are not only pointing to URLs, but also inviting viewers to do a search; and that bidding on competitor brand keywords can be an effective (albeit potentially expensive) strategy.

Mazda bought the words “Pontiac” and “Pontiac Solstice” to bolster exposure for the MX-5 Miata, Pontiac Solstice’s chief rival in the two-seater roadster market.

Acknowledging the power of the Google brand, now used in the common vernacular as a verb, as a symbol of relevancy and credibility, GM chose the search engine for its TV spot as the most recognizable call to action. After all, nobody says, “just Yahoo! it.”

Though the cleverness of the TV-to-Google campaign backfired a little, it is definitely a harbinger of things to come. We should expect to see more of that while noticing also a stronger Google hold on the search market.

In a USA Today article, GM marketing director Mark-Hans Richer said Mazda had been taunting them like this for a while (though John Battelle says it was his idea). “We find it flattering that they’d like to take the market-share leader for the last 18 years and compare it to a newcomer. We think it’s a wonderful comparison,” he said through his pearly whites.

A faint “tee-hee-hee” could be heard from the Mazda camp. In the same article, vice president of marketing for Mazda, Don Romano, says the company will continue looking to bid on competitor brand name keywords while looking for more “alternative modes of advertising.”

Primarily focused on a younger market that’s typically more interested in the roadster model (they forgot about Mr. Notyounganymore booming Kanye West from his speakers while pretending to care about Miss Implants’ thoughts on iPods), Romano said marketing to that demographic is a new game altogether.

“What we’re finding is that this younger demographic is not sitting in front of the television watching commercials,” he says.

That is, unless you count the Super Bowl. This Sunday’s Steelers/Seahawk match-up continues the trend of TV-to-Search advertising. Brands that advertise during the Super Bowl experience a serious spike in search traffic during the next 24 hours.

“In an era when consumers turn to search engines to research companies and investigate products, Super Bowl advertisers must harness the online demand they’re creating, and turn viewers into instant customers,” says Peter Hershberg, managing partner and co-founder of Reprise Media.

Currently, GoDaddy.com is the champion of Super Bowl-to-Search-to-Website advertising. But then again, that’s where Miss Implants works.

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As long as certain conditions are satisfied, this is perfectly legal in the U.S., as many of us have long argued. It’s “in line with forms of comparative advertising” that have been legal all along.

This stellar move by Mazda leverages three powerful principles of keyword advertising. First, it targets a highly salient keyword that is theoretically available at decent cost. Second, it leverages someone else’s media spend. If Pontiac is devoting some of its ad budget to telling people to “Google Pontiac,” then the number of searches on “Pontiac,” by people actively seeking to learn about car features, goes up. Other advertisers can piggyback on that awareness (without spending the same TV and print ad dollars) by bidding on the same keywords, and measuring the results. All perfectly legal. Not only legal, but savvy.

Third, the landing page is a direct marketer’s dream: it’s lead-generation oriented. The results of the ad can potentially be tracked all the way through to sale. Or at the very least, a metric like cost-per-test-drive can be generated, and further inferences made based on known ratios of test-drive-to-sale. (And, you still have that consumer’s info, for the next low-cost postal mail campaign.) Oh, baby. What are the “brand” gurus going to do for a living? Where’s the fancy flash animation? (I love those flashy car websites, don’t get me wrong. They whet the appetite. But getting warm bodies into dealerships is a lot more tangible.)

The only drawback here — and Google loves this part — is that Google’s seen this coming for a long time. They either want to see less of this kind of advertising, or know that the ones who will ultimately go gonzo for it are the deep pocketed crowd, such as ego-driven automakers. Currently, low quality scores seem to be rampant on trademark or brand related keywords. Low quality scores translate into a mandatory high minimum bid in AdWords. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re forced to bid $5.00 just to show up at all. To show up at the top of the page, we might be looking at a CPC of $10-12 or more.

Then again, it’s possible that quality score might be raised in this case if Mazda actually puts a comparison on the page, and mentions Pontiac in detail in the comparison, because that would make the landing page relevant. The algo’s a secret, and so are the innards of Mazda’s advertising account.

Advantage, Google (doesn’t that sound familiar?). Now they’ve got ego-driven honchos in bidding wars for each others’ brand names. When Google demonstrates how to make money on something, Yahoo usually isn’t far behind in copycatting it, so I’d expect Yahoo to loosen their editorial restrictions on such words inside of a year.

Andrew Goodman is Principal of Page Zero Media, a marketing consultancy which focuses on maximizing clients’ paid search marketing campaigns.

In 1999 Andrew co-founded Traffick.com, an acclaimed “guide to portals” which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.

General Motors and other US automakers have suffered greatly at the hands of Toyota and its foreign carmaking counterparts. Now, GM has taken the audacious step of encouraging viewers of its TV commercials to “Google Pontiac,” MediaPost reported.

BuzzMetrics VP of marketing Nate Kalehoff described the regionally-run commercial he saw in Orlando in his article:

Kalehoff also noted a quote from GM sales and marketing chief Mark LaNeve about the power of Google: “We’re touting Google, frankly, because it stands for credibility and consumer empowerment, and we like the association.”

“The Search” author John Battelle suggested a competitor like Toyota might consider bidding up the keyword “Pontiac,” and make GM engage in a bidding war.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

In the style of talk radio – the show is described as ‘FastLane Radio’ – the 12-minute podcast is a telephone interview/conversation between host Deb Ochs and Clay Dean, GM’s Director of Design for Small and Mid-Size Vehicles, about the development of the new Pontiac Solstice car including discussion on its features, why it might appeal to people and how the car will further develop in future.

With a music intro, here’s how the show starts:

You’re about to merge into the GM fast lane and head straight behind the scenes of some of the latest happenings at the world’s largest auto company. FastLane Radio will bring you conversations with the personalities at GM that you can’t get anywhere else. And now, here’s your host, Deb Ochs…

and ends, with music outro:

…We’d like to hear your comments and suggestions for FastLane Radio. Please email us at podcasts (at) gmblogs (dot) com.

Last month, Shel and I interviewed Michael Wiley, GM’s Director New Media, GM Communications (transcript / podcast). We discussed Michael’s plans for podcasting following their experiment in mid February. He told us:

[...] We’re working on a weekly programme, still finalizing the concept, you can expect it to be much more like a radio programme, probably a 15-minute weekly programme.

This is the first fruit from that concept. If Michael’s plans are complete, it looks like we can expect the next show sometime next week.

GM’s definitely in the fast lane with podcasting as a marketing communication tool. Congratulations, Michael, great job!

Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.