Okay, when dating my last serious boyfriend I flew a lot on American Airlines. Got rather used to it. He was in Missouri and I in Texas, direct and cheap was American. So I used my Aadvantage membership a lot. I've joined every extra point program they have that makes sense short of the credit card (I don't open any more credit cards because I am set with the ones I have). So I get emails a lot about new programs. Some of them get deleted (I'm ...

In the past 10 years or so, I've seen my share of different kinds of spam. The banks, credit unions, PayPal, eBay, and the bills in the mail for SEO services. I got one today that was different. Two emails from the Arlington County Payment Portal telling me I had three parking tickets from December 15th. Arlington, VA. 5 days ago. I LIVE IN TEXAS! Okay, so that was the biggest thing, just like the banks. I don't live there and haven't been in ...

Being in school for an MBA, you hear the same companies talked about over and over again. That's the good and the "bad" ones. Worldcom and Enron are favorites for what not to do. Google and Sun Microsystems are the most recently talked about in my organizational behavior class as the "good kids." There has been a lot of buzz about the new search engine Cuil, including my own review, and many others. But now we have reached terminal velocity, ...

At SEMforSMB, I hear one speaker say that one type of permission marketing is Viral Marketing. He was saying that things like widgets and linkbait are just as good as emails, etc. I am not sure I agree there, if you think about what some people consider viral marketing. I must define before I move ahead, so please wait before butchering me. :) If linkbait is done the right way, it is just an extension of your regular marketing. It is an ...

Okay, off search engine marketing for a second. I'm not sick, promise. My other love is traditional marketing and when companies get things right. A friend of mine recently had plastic surgery and elected to participate in a 10 year study (yeah, I talked her into it). Well she sent me a link to the company running it (Natrelle) and I signed up to get more information about their product. Skip to a few weeks later, and I get a notice about a ...

There has been lots being debated about ethics in SEM, and I do mean all of SEM. We have all gotten the question "so what do you do?" and tried to explain to no avail. People always resort to the "oh, you're one of them???" And I spend the next 10 minutes explaining that I do not spam, make pop-ups, or otherwise annoy the hell out of people. With a recent piece of link bait it went further: there was a debate about whether Google should be ...

I think this man is the only one who "gets" it. Seth Godin hits the nail on the head again with his newest post, and I wish more CEOs and VPs would read and understand it. He asks a simple question "Who answers the phone?"At my last company, our customer support came out of Pakistan. Yep, one of those annoying companies you call and get someone that doesn't speak English very well. Don't get me wrong, I loved all our people in Pakistan, but the ...

It's 2008 and there are still companies doing the "Guaranteed #1 Ranking in Google" crap. I was in LinkedIn today and saw an ad for guaranteed rankings. I am NOT linking to them through here, but the name of the site is BeRankedNumber1 dot com. They even have a live chat person. I was curious, so I got online and asked what they do, what tactic they use. The response asked for my site and they'd tell me. I said no, that I wanted to know how ...

I've got to sound off about this. It's minorly related to SEM, but it needs to be said. The economy is in a collapse, we all know it. But those of us who work for a living aren't really feeling it. I just took a job as an in-house SEO. The people I market to are in financial trouble and we provide help. This is not affecting me or the SEO world from what I can tell. For the top executives at Bear Stearns, they feel it. Their "life savings" are ...

I was reading a Seth Godin blog entry today about his new book, Meatball Sundae. This entry was about organizations new obsession with Web 2.0 and Social Media Marketing. One thing he said hit home: They [company's efforts] fail because the Web and the New Marketing work only when applied to the right organization. New Media makes a promise to the consumer. If the organization is unable to keep that promise, then it fails. I see that a lot in ...