Based on the jury’s verdict, Judge Margaret B. Seymour of the United States District Court for South Carolina, entered judgment today against Search Engine Optimization (“SEO”) and web-hosting firm Bright Builders Inc. on counts for contributory trademark infringement and unfair trade practices for assisting with the construction and hosting of the web site www.copycatclubs.com (“Copycat”), an online business that sold counterfeit [Roger Cleveland Golf Company] golf clubs. The judgment included an award of $770,750 in statutory damages against Bright Builders and $28, 250 in statutory damages against Christopher Prince who owned the web site.

This represents the first time that an SEO/Web Host or other Internet Intermediary was found liable for contributory infringement without having first received actual notification of the counterfeit sales from a third party. The case was presented and pursued by Cleveland Golf/Srixon based on a theory that Bright Builders knew or should have known of the infringing conduct based on the name of the website, the content of the website, and certain discussions Bright Builders had with Prince regarding his web site. The jury accepted this theory finding Bright Builders was liable for contributory trademark infringement of eleven of Cleveland Golf’s registered trademarks.

“For Internet Intermediaries like SEOs and web hosts, this should be a cautionary warning,” says Christopher Finnerty, a partner at Nelson Mullins Law Firm in Boston who represented Cleveland Golf/Srixon. “The jury found that web hosts and SEO’s cannot rely solely on third parties to police their web sites and provide actual notice of counterfeit sales from the brand owners.”

Let’s rewind there for a second.  The company that owned the site was hit for $28,250.  The SEO (and Web developer / host – I think this role was significant in the ruling) got a grand piano dropped on their heads for more than 27 times that amount.  While I didn’t see the contract, don’t know how long they performed SEO services for Prince, or if there were performance incentives, I have to think this judgment dwarfs what Bright Builders ever made on this contract.

Normally I write about search engine marketing and social media for end users, but this case is probably more interesting to providers of SEO services like us.  So, if you’re not that, you probably don’t want to read further on for analysis, unless you’re a Law & Order type of person.

What this Ruling Means Legally for SEOs

On the face of it, this ruling didn’t seem to make much sense – at least in terms of how the damages were split.  Therefore I reached out to good friend and practicing attorney Chris Gardill of Phillips, Gardill, Kaiser & Altmeyer, PLLC.  Chris will be the first to tell you he is neither an IP attorney nor a litigator, but he’s very much a technophile with a great understanding of social media and way more SEO-related knowledge than 99+% of bar passers*.

* Why does no one call barred attorneys that? That’s a pretty awesome description.

Here are Chris’ notes, which he was kind enough to share and allow me to reproduce on the Found blog.  If you’d like to read more of his thoughts on the law, all things Apple, and WVU athletics, follow him on twitter.  Note the last several paragraphs for free basic advice on ways SEOs can protect themselves in similar cases, although I’ll echo the common disclaimer that you should consult your own attorney on all contract matters.

Justin,

I have gotten a chance to review the docket of the case you found the write-up on that recently resulted in a jury verdict against the SEO/web host and in favor of Cleveland Golf from the District Court’s electronic filing system. I have also attached the Court’s order denying the SEO’s Motion for Summary Judgment that provides additional clarity to the case, particularly in the areas of the attached document that are highlighted.

The first observation that I would have is that you were reading Nelson Mullins’ press release on the case, so the ultimate ramifications of this case “could” be a bit overstated as there are clearly some marketing aspects in the “article” from them. The second, which is something that is discussed endlessly in law school settings, is that bad facts make for bad law. As you’ll see, this seems to be a very egregious set of facts that may unfortunately have far-reaching implications to more legitimate endeavors elsewhere, and it’s a problem that we who work in the legal system deal with regularly. The third is that, regardless of how blind justice is supposed to be, choosing your attorney wisely CAN absolutely make a difference.

With regard to the third observation (yes, I’m going out of order), Cleveland Golf was represented by at least 4 different partners at 2 different offices of Nelson Mullins (a national law firm with hundreds of attorneys and a sub-specialty in IP law) along with local counsel in the case. To say they came to play and dedicated some resources to pursuing this case is an understatement. I can only assume this sort of thing would be a bad problem to such manufacturers, though, so I can understand from that aspect why they pursued it the way they did. Although the lawyer representing the SEO might be just fine, it appears that he (because there was only 1) was at least out of their league. You’ll see that the SEO’s lawyers did attempt to get the case dismissed pretrial with a motion for summary judgment (that led to the court’s ruling that I’ve attached), but it was a poor effort (1.5 page motion) that did not conform to either the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure or the Local Rules of the Court and apparently did not contain any sort of coherent legal argument. Because every court’s rules are basically designed (at least in theory) to not allow an opposing party to escape substantive culpability on mere technicalities, you really have to be pretty bad (or simply not care what you’re writing) to put together pleadings that plainly violate the rules. I will say that you cannot possibly file a summary judgment motion in federal court, though, and have it contain all of the requisite pieces under the applicable rules in a page and a half. Since the SEO’s lawyer got pummeled so badly at the pretrial stage, it’s also safe to assume that Cleveland Golf’s lawyers might have also done a better job convincing the jury of their client’s case, too.

On the first issue, you’ll see that the website that seemed to cause the biggest issue was one that was set up using the domain name copycatclubs.com that boasted on the front page and in the metadata that had been inserted into the site, for SEM purposes I presume, information relating to the site being a place to acquire both original and “copied” golf equipment. That, along with other facts in this case that are mentioned in the Court’s order, made it clear that all of those involved should have been pretty openly aware that the owner was selling counterfeit items. There was also a good deal of information relating to how intertwined the SEO was in setting up the site and also organizing and branding the business that they could not have “not known” that the material they were dealing with might have been problematic on a number of levels. I don’t know this for a fact, but I assume many of your clients who sell goods on an e-commerce site might be similar in that they do not have retail locations, so their website is where all of their business originates from. Because of that, I’m sure the degree that the SEO/web host was involved in the setup of the business and the structure of the site is quite extensive and situations like this are not all that uncommon despite how that issue might be portrayed in the court’s order. However, because of the facts present and the nature of what they were dealing with, it seems pretty plain that all involved knew, or with any amount of common sense, “should have known,” that what they were doing was wrong or improper in some way. In other words, what was going on here was a pretty blatant set of facts and the SEO/web host was in a position that they should have known what they were doing was wrong.

That leads to the problem that I mentioned about bad facts making bad law. Yes, this was a pretty bad set of circumstances and, looking at the situation objectively, I understand how the jury could have found the SEO liable like they did. Does it mean, like the partner from Nelson Mullins says in the release, that all SEOs now have some affirmative duty to be proactive and perform due diligence on behalf of their client or risk being found liable for infringement for things that they assist with posting or somehow enhancing search results on them? Unfortunately for your company, maybe, but I’d like to think not under a better set of facts. I think it would be logical, for example, where an SEO or a web hosting company just steps in to meet with a client about developing a website or some kind of SEO work, provides ideas and is provided with some artwork and content (particularly if the site owner in an e-commerce context later adds the actual content or goods for sale independently of the SEO/host), that there is a compelling argument to be made that the SEO should not be liable. Unfortunately, until this issue is fleshed out in other courts (and, particularly, appellate courts), it is just an argument and it will take further court cases or, for example, legislative changes to our patent and trademark system in the country, to achieve more certainty.

There are probably some learning points to take away from this case, though. The biggest one is probably to examine the contract or engagement letter the SEO uses when they are engaged to perform work for a client, and determine if the agreement contains any information relating to the intellectual property the SEO is being asked to work with or provided by the client. In light of this case, in an ideal set of circumstances, the agreement should contain representations that the client warrants to the SEO that it has the appropriate licenses, intellectual property rights or whatever else to have a right to use whatever the SEO is being asked to post to a site or somehow promote or manage for search/ad purposes. Such a contract provision should also have the client providing an indemnity to the SEO for any infringement claims, so that the client is required to indemnify/hold harmless/defend the SEO with regard to any claims that might be made by a third party at a later time like what happened here. Taking some basic steps like examining what the SEO’s contract says, as well as exercising even a bit of common sense judgment when meeting with a client or during the engagement to make sure what the SEO is being asked to do is not somehow blatantly illegal, will serve the SEO well later if a problem were to develop.

I hope some of this commentary helps you with the situation. With the caveat that I gave you earlier, you can feel free to use it or post about it like you discussed before if you think it would be helpful to others. Obviously, if you have any questions about what I’ve written or other aspects you’d like to talk about, don’t hesitate to ask.

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

I’m not clicking on this. I’ll offer you what is meant by it from elsewhere. Marissa Mayer from Google has been talking to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch about Contextual Discovery:

Contextual discovery, Mayer explained, encompasses “local Search, Maps, Earth, Latitude, and all the local products.” By “taking a users location as a piece of context for finding what they want without them actually searching for anything,” Mayer added.

TechCrunch describes this as “Google results without the search.” Yes, Google is offering up results, possibly search results, without your actual intent searching for keywords. A lot like how AdSense shows ads based on the contextual relevancy of the page, Google can use other signals to show relevant ads and search results to a user based on location specific data.

So, you’re walking through your local mall with your Android device and, as you happen to glance at a spangly new top in Aeropostale, your phone vibrates and pings you with some offer or other.

If only you’d switched off Gaydar!

You see, Google is basically talking about being able to push offers to you via your mobile device.

Forget the ability to find something without searching. You’ll just get pushed coupons while you’re window shopping.

There’s no doubt it works. Mall food courts have been doing this for years. Next time you go to one watch how the food outlets with employees offering rubberized chicken on a toothpick fare so much better than those that don’t.

But, at least these people are looking searching for something to eat.

And that’s the key. There still has to be some kind of searching going on.

Otherwise, Google turns into some guy handing out flyers for a cheap car wash.

Does standing in front of a shop window for thirty seconds or more indicate you’re interested and spark an alert? Can the phone’s GPS workout you’ve spent most of the afternoon looking at electronics stores and send you offers once you’ve visited three or more?

It’s actually results coupons/offers without having to type stuff into a browser.

Which could be rather useful, no?

Paul Woodhouse

Paul looks after the SEO side of things here at Direct Online Marketing as well as trying to work out the best social media strategies for our clients.

The target company who raised the ire of the plaintiff in this case?

From the San Francisco Chronicle, via Webmaster World via a tweet from pageoneresults:

The Target retail chain will make its Web site accessible to the blind and pay $6 million to visually impaired Californians who have tried unsuccessfully to use the site, under a settlement announced Wednesday.

The nationwide settlement, filed with a federal judge in San Francisco, is intended as a model for the retail industry, said a lawyer for the National Federation of the Blind, which sued Target in 2006.

The company must now equip its Web site, www.target.com, with an embedded code [ed note: ALT tags] that can be read by software to provide a vocal description of the page, and links that allow a blind person to navigate the screen with a keyboard instead of a mouse. The improvements are supposed to be completed early next year and will be monitored by the National Federation of the Blind for three years.

In its lawsuit, the federation accused the company of violating federal and state laws that entitle the disabled to equal access to business and government services.

In a key ruling, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel…said the American With Disabilities Act requires removal of all barriers to “a disabled person’s ‘full enjoyment’ of goods or services,” quoting from the 1990 law.

That’s a little longer than I normally go with quotes, but there’s a lot of good information here.  Let’s break it down to the most basic levels:

SEO Basics: The ALT Tag

When you go to seo school*, the first thing you learn after school orientation and the SEO General Theory 101 is probably the title tag.  Or at least it would be if I ran the curriculum because I see this neglected so often.  Around lunch time, you’d learn about the alt tag.

* No such thing, but imagine if there were – it would be filled with 18 year olds blowing off link building classes because they were too hungover from the kegger at Sigma Epsilon Omega on Thursday night.

An alt tag is an extra piece of html code you can use to give an image or other type of multimedia file a description.  Sometimes it shows up in a pop up box when you hover your mouse over an image.  Without delving deeper into seo basics (you haven’t paid your tuition yet), just accept that it is a good thing for making your Web site search engine friendly.

ADA-Friendly Web Development

The alt tag, short for alternative text, wasn’t really developed for SEO purposes (most of the things seo practitioners utilize aren’t).  Their benefit was to developers so that they would know what the heck an image was supposed to be without having to pull it up visually.

Armed with this piece of information, the Americans with Disabilities Act was extended to include Web sites.  People who are visually impaired have special computers that can read to them what the rest of us see.  They can also describe images…if they have an alt tag.  Therefore, all government sites require ADA guidelines such as the use of alt tags for all federal contracting work.

Whether and how this actually extended to non-government Web sites in the real world was pretty much up in the air…until yesterday.

Your Take-away of the Day*

Use alt tags. They help with your natural rankings, the blind / visually impaired access your site (and purchase if you’re a retailer), and your developers.  They also keep you compliant with what is looking increasingly as if it will be mandatory ADA guidelines, meaning you can find a better way to spend your $6 million.  If I could come up with a con, I would.  Even with content management systems, the ability to add alt tags is pre-built in.  No excuses!

* wanna go play by the bay, eat some hay, whaddya say, I just may.  That’s a Happy Gilmore reference; I’m not trying to imply that blind people (or federal regulators) scream at golf balls. Although some of them probably do just like the rest of us.  I hate golf.

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

Downstairs neighbor or confused cable guy?

The last period of non-service lasted almost a full weekend and the following Monday saw the cable guy arrive to try and sort it out after four or so previous visits. He started by checking the the cables downstairs and noticed that there was a three way splitter when there should only have been a two way splitter with a third cable running off somewhere untoward. It was either case of somebody ‘borrowing’ our connection or one of the cable guys being a bit thick – quite possibly both. He also changed up the modem – and since then it has all worked perfectly.

It’s just a shame it took over six months to get somebody out who knew or cared enough about sorting it out. Time Warner were just the same in the last place I lived. They sent out three guys who couldn’t give a monkey’s and the last guy was so excited by high definition himself that he called through his special code so we could get a few extra channels. He stopped for a brew and was more than happy to talk shop. He loved installing cable and evangelizing HDTV. He was a high definition prophet spreading the word.

Last Sunday, as we headed home, we stopped at Polaris in Columbus – too much with a hangover – and checked in at Circuit City. I have a love / hate thing going on with big box electronics emporiums seeming I love the electronics aspect, but hate the idiots that work there. I’m glad they don’t sell true high end stuff otherwise we’d all be doomed.

However, the one guy who we asked about buying a Wii (yes, I know I should know better – if you’re after one use Wii Alerts) could not have been more helpful. He rattled through the reasons why the Wiis were in short supply but told us that there might be a couple of Gamestops that might have them and pointed us in their direction.

I wanted to shake his hand considering some of the tawdry twaddle I’ve heard invented by some of these people as if selling is a free-form jazz scat, but I was a bit rough from the night before and I was getting freaked out by the fact that he had the eyelashes of a girl.

It’s way too easy though to simply blame the salesperson or the installer. The fact that Comcast or Circuit City has these people at all is more by accident than design. The vast majority of salespeople on electronics retailer floors come at you as if they’re about to take a bullet and leave you wishing you had a semi-automatic to fire a few.

“I’m alright, just looking”

In the online world, this is the equivalent of the pop-up advertisement. And, in the online world you can easily set your browser settings to eliminate 99.9% of these types of intrusions with a pop-up blocker. In the online world of shopping the customer is armed with all the facts, figures, reviews, and prices to make them more than dangerous. They finally make them right.

It’s one of the reasons I now shop with my PDA. I once started a stampede in CompUSA after comparing skus that had been improperly placed on monitors and knowing which one was the heavily reduced one on their Website. (By stampede I mean I ran through the store to get the last one without care for the young or infirm. I’m not as fleet of foot as I used to be.)

Depending on your space, there’s a whole lot of people looking for what you do and finding people better at it than you. Well, maybe not better, but how would anybody know if you’re not getting in on the conversation. Not only that, but customers are getting way too big for their boots. You’d better have sales staff who know their onions because I can assure you that anybody researching where they’re going to be spending their hard-earned moolah and on what will.

So, unless you own a virtual monopoly in your area, or don’t care in the least about expanding your business further than your nose, or you don’t care about getting a better bang for your advertising / marketing buck, I suggest you don’t bother with building a Website, marketing it, or advertising it.

After all, there are still plenty of idiots who’ll part with their money that don’t know any better. For the time being, they’ll do nicely as your target demographic.

But remember that this particular group is shrinking as they find information on anything from anywhere at their fingertips.

Paul Woodhouse

Paul looks after the SEO side of things here at Direct Online Marketing as well as trying to work out the best social media strategies for our clients.

“I don’t trust buying over the internet.”

Are you kidding? I could have strangled him. Not because fear of buying over the internet is irrational – it is not. But because he has always impressed me as a man of reasonable intelligence and logic, yet he asked told his internet marketing client that he doesn’t trust buying over the internet. Know your audience! Lie to me for pete’s sake!

But unlike the truly irrational approach some pundits in my area have taken to the internet and all things new (duck your head in the sand and wish yourselves back to the good ol’ days), I saw this challenge as an opportunity.

So I said to my soon-to-be-former attorney, “I know – I always like buying locally, too. The best is when they have sites for me to research at home before buying online or going into the store to buy. But when I can’t buy locally, I buy online.”

“Yeah, Justin, but I’m an impulse buyer. I want to take it home with me right away.” How economically sound from a man with both law and accounting degrees. I said, “Just humor me as I do a quick search.”

Wookin’ pa Wii in all da wight pwaces

So I typed “wii” into Google and got this as the top pay-per-click result:

Immediately in the ad, two of my lawyer’s three concerns are immediately overcome.

1. They’re in stock and ready to ship today!
2. They should be fairly cheap, given the url of the site (lowestdeal.com).

So we clicked through and found a Wii in his price range with all the accessories needed to make his family’s season a wee bit merrier.

The Wii: Be a Better Father

Yet, he was still concerned about the Web site and whether he’d get ripped off. It wasn’t like he was buying from the online store for Target or Amazon (which are both also advertising via Google AdWords for the greatest invention since at least the polio vaccine).

Side note: I have never Wied (ski is to skiied as Wii is to Wied?), but I don’t get it. I mean adults are flipping out over this thing and buying it “for their kids” as an excuse to play at night. Whatever happened to my old college girlfriend (right)?

To reiterate, his fear about getting scammed, is very legitimate. I don’t know lowestdeal.com – it could be selling your information to Nigerian phone rooms, or it could simply be a place that gets it hands on hot (not “hot” that way, well maybe not) stuff and sells it (allegedly) fairly inexpensively. Is it the new cyber-Wal-Mart?

The only thing I do know about the site is that it knows what it’s doing with Google AdWords. The ad text is great and it’s capitalizing on a very in-demand product. They better know what they’re doing. I don’t know what they’re paying, but I’m sure advertising on “Wii” right now is costing them more per click than what it costs me to take my old girlfriend out for a spin.

I won’t get into what they could have done to allay my lawyer’s concerns here. That would be a whole separate post on reducing anxiety, an incredibly important part of getting people to submit information online whether it be for the end conversion goal of a sale or simply submitting an email.

I will say that I did pass on a couple sites to him to check credibility: bizrate.com, a fine shopping comparison site, and one of my personal favorites, badbusinessbureau.com (also called ripoffreport.com). A mixed record from this quick check: no listing in bizrate and one complaint on ripoffreport that didn’t necessarily seem all that bad. Also one complaint that I could find in Yahoo! Answers, again that may not have been completely fair to the company.

If you haven’t checked out your company on ripoffreport, do it today.

Again, no endorsement here – that site could be the future inventor of the beer-wich or it could be shipping weapons-grade plutonium and illegal immigrant cats inside a Wii console shell. Shop at your own risk, people!

$100 / Barrel Oil

Finally, related to absolutely nothing other than me wanting to brag, I took 2 cents off my dad today. We set up a bet about a year ago as to whether oil would next hit $100 or $40. I am brilliant! (I don’t count the time I said the Colts should take Ryan Leaf over Peyton Manning, or expected great things for Ronnie Paulino in 2007, or didn’t see how Goto.com – the granddaddy of paid search marketing – would be successful (ouch!!!), or…).

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

Capello during one of his more sanguine moments.

Personally, I’d love to keep with the sports theme and educate you with the news of England’s new national soccer coach who just so happens to be an irate Italian with a negligible grasp on the English language. Currently, he’s being advised not to learn too much English so he can sidestep the media more easily. You may scoff that the most important job in England has been taken by an Italian, but the second and third most important jobs (the Prime Minister and the Queen) are occupied by a Scot and a German respectively. Dear old Blighty is quite the multicultural cosmopolitan hotbed y’know.

I just want to assure you it won’t be that bad changing your constitution to allow a former Austrian Mr. Universe, whose movie catchphrases make Dubya sound Churchillian, to run for President.

Anyway, mentioning two-and-a-half Jackasses (I’ll let you squabble over who) brings me neatly round to the online-earth-shattering event happening today: the first ever feature film to be released online – Jackass 2.5.

The “Jackass” gang is about to attempt its most audacious stunt yet: online-first movie distribution.

In a radical departure from the traditional movie business model, Paramount Pictures Digital Entertainment and MTV New Media are co-producing “Jackass 2.5,” a sequel to its two-time boxoffice hit that will skip multiplexes entirely.

Instead, “2.5″ will be offered online for free over a two-week span beginning Dec. 19 courtesy of Blockbuster and its new online property Movielink, which will exclusively host the 64-minute film during that period. The movie will be made available at blockbuster.jackassworld.com.

Yes, you read it right, for free.

Irrespective of whether you want to watch a load of outtakes from Jackass 2, or whether you care about idiots hurtling at full pelt into a lamp post with their chest hair ablaze in a shopping trolley, this could signal something monumental in the movie industry.

Give them their due, at least they aren’t charging initially to flog this particular horse. The movie franchise is possibly one of the worst examples of the disdain some corporations hold their customers in you could ever dream of. Jason vs Freddy anyone? They’ll churn out any old cobblers and get us idiots to stump up the cash for it.

But, this has every chance of stalling should the user experience not be up to scratch. I presume I’m like the vast majority of internet users in that I don’t watch feature length stuff on my PC monitor. However, I should be able to test my xbox 360 as a movie streaming media extender with this one and watch it on my main TV. Well, the Movielink Website says I can, and Blockbuster will be showing it through them.

UPDATE: Looks like you have to download Silverlight according to the Jackass Blockbuster site. This is looking more of a novel experience by the minute. I should be able to still watch via my 360.

While I may not be quite the target demographic for the film itself, I’m the exact demographic who will be interested in this kind of thing should it work correctly; and I really do want it to work correctly. (NB: target demographic used in the sense of being sneered at for being stupid enough to fall for some latest marketing spiel as opposed to movie buff excited by technological progressiveness.)

So, while I try and negotiate with Justin whether I can claim the popcorn as expenses, this is a case of being one for the movie studios and Blockbuster to lose – I don’t need any winning over for the concept (we’ll keep DRM as an argument for another day).

I shall keep you posted. I’d invite you all round, but it’ll probably take me four hours to set-up – and that’s just the popcorn maker.

UPDATE: ‘Twas a busted flush. I spent twenty minutes investigating streaming possibilities and probabilities and gave up. Browser-only viewing is akin to going straight to portable DVD. And the movie industry wonders why its in a spot of bother? Fools.

Paul Woodhouse

Paul looks after the SEO side of things here at Direct Online Marketing as well as trying to work out the best social media strategies for our clients.

As the History of Burnley & Pendle buses site explains:

There followed a period of “bus wars” with intense competition on the “main line” routes. Victoria coaches soon pulled out also Blackburn Transport and Tyrer Tours were “bought off”. In an attempt to stave off the competition five ex. London Transport Routemasters were acquired in 1988 and painted red & cream in an “Eastenders” livery. Each bus was given a name from the TV soap. These were Dirty Den, Queen Vic, Wicksi, Dot Cotton & Albert Square.

I remember them quite well as they ran the bus route near my house. But, as soon as they arrived, they’d disappeared again. Not a weary, wistful goodbye, no nothing.

Anyway, a good few years later, my buddy disappeared off to Hungary. I remember him ringing me one day from Budapest to tell me that he’d spotted the Dot Cotton bus hanging about in the carpark of some dubious Hungarian drinking joint.

The next thing you know, it’s frontpage in our local newspaper with fond testimonials from the locals, my buddy having contacted the local paper and taken some photos.

And so we come to Wheeling, where today’s front page story in The Intelligencer is a spurious tale about buses. Apparently, the local Ohio Valley Regional Transportation Authority has just starting flogging its clapped-out bus fleet on eBay. Maybe other transport authorities have been doing this for years, but The Intelligencer were “unable reach other transit officials for confirmation at the time of press.”

If you can cut through the dull details of how many miles each respective bus had on the clock, you’ll detect an attempt to politicize proceedings by faintly decrying the perceived lack of transparency in these online sales. Although, it isn’t too tricky to work out why noses are slightly out of joint once it’s been explained how the OVRTA used to sell their buses via sealed-bid auctions having advertised the auction in – yes, you’ve guessed it – the local newspaper.

Yet again, the online world of ecommerce trumps old media as even bus authorities in Wheeling are open to the idea of needing a more competitive marketplace offering better returns to sell their rickety stock.

The two they managed to get rid of on eBay today brought $10,890.46, but there’s no mention of how much a bus used to fetch under the sealed system.

It makes a change hearing about local authorities playing it clever for once. Not that you’d guess as much with the barbed last lines of the article:

Anyone can bid on a bus up for auction on eBay, including the Ohio County Commission, which is contemplating providing bus service from Elm Grove to the county’s new retail development site, The Highlands. There has been some contention on the OVRTA board about whether the bus company should provide service to the site. Some say it may be fiscally irresponsible to do so, while others say they simply want a trial run to test ridership.

Because of the OVRTA board’s inaction, county commissioners are expected to consider purchasing their own bus — possibly one of those being auctioned by OVRTA on eBay — to begin a trial run to The Highlands.

Ouch! That’s almost as catty as Eastenders.

Paul Woodhouse

Paul looks after the SEO side of things here at Direct Online Marketing as well as trying to work out the best social media strategies for our clients.

Honestly, it’s fun. Whether it’s a small sheet metal shop getting its blog archived by The British Library, its sister company getting its planters on the TV, a small rural pub interviewed by BBC radio, a car sourcing company getting the Lamborghini factory in a twist over who had offered them one of 20 pre-sold $1.4 million Reventons – it all brings a smile to my face.

Now I’ll admit that most of this came about primarily due to having a blog as part of the marketing soufflé, but they all had a very nice SEO side-effect in that they brought in some awfully nice one-way links to each respective site from authority sites that wouldn’t even accept your grandmother as deposit.

So it’s no mystery as to why I was drawn to this particular article discussing how badly some big name brands fared when it came to optimizing their sites for search. It pipes:

“Quick, who’s the largest online retailer of shoes? Nike? Footlocker? Payless? Timberland? Not even close. The winner is Zappos.com, an eight-year-old company that, until recently, had little or no brand recognition. In 2006, Zappos.com sold more than the online sales of all the well-known brands listed above, combined.

Recently, Oneupweb looked at the top 100 online retailers, including some of the world’s most recognizable brands, to see how well they optimized their websites. What we found surprised even us.

Many of the world’s leading brands ignore SEO and maintain poorly optimized websites. In fact, 60 percent of the leading online retailers had little or no optimization on their websites. As the success of Zappos.com and other savvy internet marketers illustrates, extraordinary customer service combined with sound SEO can help a company overcome the obvious competitive advantage of branding alone.

Nike and brand marketing are synonymous. So, we were surprised to discover little or no sign of optimization on the company website. Someone searching for “athletic shoes” will not find Nike.com in the first three pages of Google results. In fact, the site barely shows up on page one of Google for the branded search term “Nike Athletic Shoes.”

Nike has an online visibility strategy. The company supplements its well-known branding efforts with paid online advertising for important keywords. Research indicates PPC campaigns are much more effective when combined with natural search. They aren’t in Nike’s case, leading us to speculate about how much more effective Nike’s online and offline marketing efforts could be if they were integrated into a well-executed SEO program.”

As much as I like the idea of Zappos caning Nike like a public (read private if you’re American) school headmaster suffering from an involuntary twitch, I’m going to have to defend Nike, or at least address one or two points that the article seems to miss.

1. Zappos doesn’t sell Nike athletic shoes, only Nike glasses and watches.

2. “60% of leading online retailers do little or no SEO.” Is this a contradiction in terms?

3. When you search for “Nike athletic shoes“, Nike appears #1 in the PPC listings. You also have a host of other sites appearing that sell Nike brand footwear.

4. When you search for “Nike athletic shoes“, Zappos appears #2 down the right in the PPC listings and their landing page is currently down. Research also shows that PPC campaigns work better when your server doesn’t time out. But, that wouldn’t matter seeming they don’t sell Nike shoes anyway.

Rather than asking who sells the most shoes, we can also ask: who is selling the most Nike brand shoes – Nike or Zappos? And it doesn’t require one of them there scientific types who specializes in rockets to tell you that it might very well be Nike.

But Nike is doing much more interesting things than competing with a load of online companies already selling its footwear. Marketing Pilgrim takes up the rest of the story:

“The NYT has a great summary of Nike’s “Nike+” effort to engage runners and get them to connect and compete with each other. In conjunction with Apple’s iPod, runners can time their laps, download their progress, and keep track of how their friends are doing–all without forceful participation by Nike.

This use of social media is helping Nike to better allocate its marketing budget.

Last year, Nike spent just 33 percent of its $678 million United States advertising budget on ads with television networks and other traditional media companies. That’s down from 55 percent 10 years ago, according to the trade publication Advertising Age.

Between 2003 and 2006, Nike “increased its nonmedia ad spending 33 percent, to $457.9 million, according to the Advertising Age data.”

How is this working out for Nike? Standing back, and letting the consumer decide how to interact with the brand, appears to be working. Recent reports suggest that 40% of Nike+ users end up converting to the Nike brand running shoes.”

And that’s the key issue – Nike is in the business of getting people to buy athletic shoes of the Nike variety, and it’s Zappos’ business to sell (athletic) shoes of any old variety. Would Nike shift more of their own shoes if their own site ranked better in search engines? It obviously wouldn’t do them any harm but would it be as cost effective as getting people more tuned in to their actual brand?

SEO should be a given of any Web site – a fundamental basic if you will. It’s about making sure your site has a fighting chance to be found and that search engines can read the content it contains to the best of their ability to ensure it’s indexed correctly. But, SEO in itself is more a case of leading horses to water as opposed to making them drink.

Then again, there are certain occasions where buying and selling don’t matter one iota, as this lady reminds us with her Zappos experience.

Paul Woodhouse

Paul looks after the SEO side of things here at Direct Online Marketing as well as trying to work out the best social media strategies for our clients.

I’d love to tell you I’m looking particularly gorgeous this Monday morning due to a weekend of uninterrupted beauty sleep on a brand spanking new mattress, but I’d be lying. Firstly, it’d take considerably longer than a weekend to put my pudgy face right. I’ve also had the mother of all toothaches – one of those blighters that doesn’t care how much it costs to rectify it – all weekend, which has hardly afforded me a wink.

I know, cry me a river. But, you’ll be pleased to know that my considerably better half has had a log of a time.

But if I had visited the land of nod I’d be better versed to answer the following quandary asked in this article: “What if you woke up one day to find that Google had slipped in popularity and several million users had migrated their searches to Yahoo!, Ask and MSN Live Search, or even one of the newer search engines like Snap.com?”

Prior to joining Direct Online Marketing™ the very thought of it may have filled me with the day and night terrors. Even though I’ve always done a bit with blogs and other forms of social media and managed to get referrals from other engines, I’ve always primarily optimized for Google.

The chart below shows the breakdown of online searches by engine share:

The article manages to go into further detail about identifying your site objectives in order to devise an alternative search strategy.

• Ecommerce sites want to increase sales while decreasing marketing expenses.
• Content sites want to increase readership, visitor interest and site stickiness.
• Lead-generation sites want to increase segment leads.
• Self-service sites want to increase customer satisfaction while decreasing customer support costs.
• Social-networking sites want to increase membership numbers and the amount of member interactivity.

The above objectives require different optimization strategies and different measurement metrics. That said, consider starting by identifying your business goals, performing extensive keyword research and some basic predictive ROI modeling; then you’ll be prepared to take a look at executing a search marketing plan without Google.

Next, it is important to understand why businesses use search engines, a.k.a. interactive marketing, within their standard five-year marketing plans. Essentially there are five reasons:

1. Create brand awareness
2. Sell products/services
3. Generate leads
4. Drive traffic
5. Provide information

There’s plenty more. Also, it’s not a bad primer article for looking at the reasons to implement alternative search engine strategies. But, there’s one thing for sure – Google’s success is no flash in the pan, and I won’t be losing any sleep over it disappearing overnight.

While it’s never wise to throw every single egg you have into one basket, I’m pretty sure Google will be around for a while and so will all your various other engines with their own variants of PPC and organic listings.

In the meantime, if anybody knows of a decent dentist, please let me know.

Paul Woodhouse

Paul looks after the SEO side of things here at Direct Online Marketing as well as trying to work out the best social media strategies for our clients.

The main conference site has been up for a while and contains all the
speakers, topics, conference agenda and registration information.

However, today finally sees the conference blog let loose into the

Speakers at the Online Marketing: Innovations That Work

Steve Colon, WebTrends
Jeff James, Microsoft
Jose Mallabo, eBay
Jeff Ostiguy, g8wave
Lindsay Patross, iheartpgh.com
Justin Seibert, Direct Online Marketing™

And what
’ll be talking about is:

• How businesses are improving their customer relationships

• Cutting edge Web techniques to enhance public relations
• The best uses of – and uncommon tactics for – search marketing
• The differences in mobile and other forms of online marketing
• How you can track campaigns across different channels
• How to maximize your ad dollars for total efficiency

And who should attend:

Internet Marketers

So if you happen to be one of the above then why

At $99 (including breakfast and lunch) if you register before
^th it certainly beats the living daylights out of having to

Hopefully, I’ll see you there.

Paul Woodhouse

Paul looks after the SEO side of things here at Direct Online Marketing as well as trying to work out the best social media strategies for our clients.