What's The Difference Between Marketing And Advertising?

People often confuse the concepts of marketing, advertising, public relations and branding. Advertising is marketing, public relations is marketing and branding is a result of advertising and marketing. However if you are still confused, I stumbled across a graphical representation on Ads of the World that does a pretty good at illustrating the 4 concepts.

For quite some time I have been a fan of the website Ads of the World. Obviously a large majority of the ads showcased on the site are from "overseas" and some of the ads wouldn't see the light of day here in the states. Nonetheless, it is a great site to see some good creative. ANYWAY, for those of you seeking the answers, here they are.



Oh yeah, happy Halloween!

 

Only In Iowa Does A Dog Shoot Someone

I started reading this and I thought it has to be a joke. Now, the dog didn't really pick up a gun and shot his master who was hunting with him, but the dog did step on the trigger and the gun went off causing over 100 pellets to hit the man.

"James Harris, 37, was shot last Friday while out with a party shooting for pheasants in Poweshiek county in the midwest state. The Iowa natural resources department said the victim rested his gun on the ground while retrieving a shot pheasant. As he crossed a fence a dog trod on the trigger and shot him in the calf from just a metre away."

The moral of the story? Always have your safety on.

 

Fun New Activity For Fridays.

As we were sitting around here thinking about stuff to do on the blog, we came up with a new concept that might have some merit and stay with the theme. Every other Friday we are going to post a picture and a company from a seemingly unrelated market segment. It will be your job to come up with a tag line that could be used in the ad campaign.

For example... We post a picture of a basketball hoop and then we tell you that the company is a small proctology practice in central Idaho. As you post your entries in the comments section, you are challenged to come up with the ad concept and the company name. We will sift through all the entries and the winner will receive a shirt from the Big Pappa warehouse. The winner will be drawn on Thursday and announced in the next contest post. AND as an added bonus, if you blog about the contest and you win the shirt, we will even throw in a 6 pack of Big Pappa stickers. Make sure you let us know where the post is located.

See you on Friday.

 

"What I Found In My Email" Mondays. Vol.1 - Issue 3

Look at all those nice bucks under this guys trampoline. Evidently these deer found out that this guy quit hunting.

 

Top Posts For The Month

Just a quick note of thanks to our readers. Thanks to you, our traffic has, again, doubled this month. As always, if you would like to see anything on The Big Bald Blog just drop us a line at: the big bald blog at impact mt dot com.

Here is the list of top 5 posts from October.

1. Google is Reading Your Gmail
2. Radios Reign is Coming to a Close.
3. Big Pappa's Top 10 Road Trip Rules for Guys
4. I Got These Things in my Email
5. Bad Logos and the Mistakes that Made Them

Thanks again. Until Tomorrow.

 

Shoemoney vs. John Chow

I guess it's a contest and the real winners are going to be the 2 holding the contest. However I wouldn't mind the full Wordpress blog redesign package worth over $750.00.

I guess I am rooting for the Chow. So help John Chow beat Shoemoney in their RSS competition. John is offering some great prizes for people signing up to his full feed RSS. Shoe is offering nothing so go John!

 

Big Pappa’s Top 10 Road Trip Rules for Guys

Here is a little tid-bit to enhance your Friday fun. Ever been on a road trip with the guys and someone completely throws a wrench into the works? Well, here is a simple list that everyone can follow and can make a road trip more enjoyable for all.

1. Wrappers and other trash ALWAYS goes on the passenger side
2. A Pre-flatulent window cracking is not only courteous, IT’S REQUIRED
3. Urination stops will only be executed in 2 hour increments.
4. If you call “SHOTGUN”, you better know your responsibilities. (see duties listed on website)
5. Falling asleep during the road trip ensures hazing activities
6. If you decide to “moon”, make sure the window is rolled down. This will eliminate accidental stains on said window.
7. Driver has ultimate control over ALL audio selection and volume levels. Driver can Veto any music at any time.
8. PACK LIGHT. You’re not a girl. If you pack more than a medium sized bag, you may be left behind.
9. NAGGING will never take place. If we wanted to be nagged we could’ve stayed at home.
10. Incoming OR outgoing calls from girlfriends or wives is completely unacceptable and will not be tolerated

Get the shirt at BigPappaWorldWide.com.

 

Blogging And Disclosure

I got an email the other day from a company asking me to blog about a product they offered. In return they said they would link back to The Big Bald Blog. Of course I told them that I would do it; IF they would buy an ad on TBBB, send me samples of the product so I could write a proper product review. This made me thing of some things that I read a while ago regarding disclosure.

There is a split debate on whether or not you should disclose if you are blogging for cash. Some argue that it's no ones business but your own and you should keep your mouth shut. Other purists argue that if you don't disclose, it eventually chips away at your integrity as a blogger. If someone finds out that you are writing positively about a product because you got paid to do it, is that of any real value to your readers? I would say no.

Here is my bit of disclosure. Obviously we design websites for people as part of our marketing services. From time to time I WILL post about a customers website when we go live with it. This is just something I like to do and it gives them a little traffic to jump start the launch. They are not paying me to post on TBBB, I just enjoy it.

So what happened with the company that solicited me? I never heard back from them. Oh well I guess I won't have to be dealing with that disclosure issue.

What do you think a blogger should do? Should they disclose what articles they are getting paid to write?

 

Loving The Digg

So you've tried and tried to get your stuff dugg. You have submitted quality content but you always seem to get the hot goods to the submission table too late.

Well, BCM has an offer for you. Evidently there is organization where membership is only available by invitation called DiggBoss. If you are invited it sounds like it would be very beneficial to your site traffic.

Head on over to BCM and check out the offer.

 

Spoof Cards - Crazy Fun

One day I got a call on my cell phone and the call was coming from me and my number was showing up on screen. I answered the phone and it was a lady's voice. She was saying all kinds of crazy stuff about me meeting her at the bar last night. To make a long story short, I found out who it was. It was Chris, a friend of ours. I asked him what the heck he was doing and HOW the heck he did that. He told me he was using a "Spoof Card."

You can call someone, have any number come up on their caller ID and you can change your voice to anything you want. Above is the link to the company that sells them. Check them out, it's too much fun to pass on.

 

Page Rank - Can We Stop Relying On It Already?

Page rank, page rank, page rank. It is getting tiresome to keep hearing about it. Unfortunately we live under the umbrella of Google and we have to follow their rules. Andy Beard just wrote about an article called Digg Favorites Slapped By Google. It lists several websites that, evidently, got penalized by Google for some reason or another. Paid links missing the "no follow" attribute? Who know what's behind the "best" algo in the world. Most of the sites that Andy lists are very good sites with reliable content. I guess it's a big mystery.

After all the websites penalties have been dished out for whatever reason, the average decrease in page rank was 3 points. That is a pretty big jump for someone with a PR of 6. The least shocking was John Chow getting hit again. He has been on the outs will Google for some time now. I happen to love his blog and I know he has some serious links coming in. I don't think that his traffic will suffer due to his decrease in page rank. Want to know how I know? Uhh, 16,000 RSS subscriber and growing is a good indication.

Obviously, Google still has a page rank of 10 and I have seen a bunch of PR 8 sites and a few with a PR of 9. But I ask you, have you ever seen a PR 10 website other than Google? I don't ever remember seeing one.

Is this an unobtainable number? Are they reconfiguring the web? Is a revolt on the horizon? Conspiracy theorists unite?

Just kidding. Seriously though, has anyone ever seen a PR 10 site. If you have let me know.

 

Dude

Dude! Great commercial!

 

A New Look At Advertising

Hello gang, Just got back from God's Country - Wisconsin. Hung out at the cabin for a couple to days to unplug, unwind and recharge. The only advertising I am subject to up in the north woods is the occasional beer sign at the local tavern. So there you have it - the reason for no post on Friday.

I have been thinking about how advertising has taken on many new forms over the last few years. Vehicle wraps are all over the place and now you can see moving billboards driving around various cities. People have even gone to extremes by making their body an advertising space. Certain individuals like Kari Smith and "SundayBrew" Joe are tattooing themselves with logos or websites for certain financial considerations. Some of these dollar amounts are not that impressive. After all, you are going to have this tattoo the rest of your life. For me, it better be a life changing amount of money if I am going to do that. Good grief, Kari had an online poker website tattooed on her forehead for the paltry sum of $10K. I mean are you kidding me? To each his own I guess.

There are other forms of "on body" advertising out there that are much less permanent. I just ran across something called Handvertising. If I understand it correctly, you commit to buy a certain amount of impressions through "handvertising." You send your artwork to HandvertisingUSA and they will make a stamp with your logo or message. "We then give the stamp to our network and it will remain in use until the desired number of “impressions” (hand stamps) is reached" says Mike Brown, CEO of HandvertisingUSA. Apparently, the company has a large network of venues like clubs, bars, fairs, etc that the company has partnered with. Innovative for sure, I would hope the ink lasts longer and looks better than your standard bar stamp.

What have you seen that is new or upcoming forms of advertising? Let me know.

 

"What I Found In My Email" Mondays. Vol.1 - Issue 2

Country Preacher

As a young minister, I was asked by a funeral director to hold a graveside service for a homeless man, with no family or friends. The funeral was to be held at a cemetery way back in the country, and this man would be the first to be laid to rest there.

As I was not familiar with the backwoods area, I became lost, and being a typical man, did not stop for directions. I finally arrived an hour late. I saw the backhoe and the crew, who was eating lunch, but the hearse was nowhere in sight.

I apologized to the workers for my tardiness, and stepped to the side of the open grave, where I saw the vault lid already in place. I assured the workers I would not hold them up for long, but this was the proper thing to do.The workers gathered around, still eating their lunch. I poured out my heart and soul.

As I preached the workers began to say "Amen", "Praise the Lord", and "Glory"! I preached and I preached, like I'd never preached before--from Genesis all the way to Revelations.

I closed the lengthy service with a prayer and walked to my car.

As I was opening the door and taking off my coat, I overheard one of the workers saying to another, "I ain't ever seen anything like that before and I've been putting in septic tanks for twenty years."

 

Google AdSense is Gone

Since I use Firefox, sometimes I don't see what others are seeing in IE. Yesterday it was brought to my attention that an IE user was seeing a "page can not be found" in some of the AdSense locations. So I dusted off my IE and went in and looked. Yep, sure enough, there it was.

I know that Google will only allow 3 ads per page to display. I have 10 posts showing on the home page and since I had the AdSense code in the header above each post, only the first 3 ads would show. Up until now there has been no effect on the other 7 posts that show up on my home page. Evidently something has changed. The second three posts were showing up with the "page can not be found" error in the header.

So I decided to venture out and take a look at some of my other favorite blogs. I went on over to JohnCow's site and it was doing the same thing in IE. Obviously I am not getting a fraction of the traffic that the Cow is but nonetheless, it looks bad. And that, boys and girls, is why I decided to take the AdSense off. If they get it fixed I will put it back up. It's not like I was making any money from having them anyway. With over 36,000 page views in the last three and a half months, I had only made $5.63. I can't even think of anything clever to say that I would buy with that.

 

The Top Secret GPhone

Most of you have heard that Googe's stock has bulldozed it's way past the $600 mark. Obviously this is an effect of the widely anticipated and top secret GPhone that is building momentum.

Adding legitimacy to the whole upward trend of Google's stock, the search giant announced its acquisition of an obscure Finnish start-up, Jaiku, holder of key Short Message Service patents. SMS is text messaging, the technology that enables the exchange of short messages between billions of ordinary cellphones.

Obviously Google is not discussing anything about the GPhone, but USA Today reports; "Trip Chowdhry, analyst at Global Equities Research, says Google also has already begun designing an advanced GPhone model, equipped with a Google browser optimized to display Google services such as Gmail and YouTube.

Aimed at young users, a browser GPhone would probably sell at a fraction of the price of an iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm Treo or Microsoft Windows Mobile smart phone, Chowdhry says. One major hitch: Cellphone carriers are insisting on a cut of ad revenue. "The carriers want money any time the phones are turned on, especially if the call is to Google," Doherty says."

The hardware has already been developed. The only thing Google needs to do now is sign an agreement with a carrier. Once this is done, the phones could hit the market in a matter of weeks. When it happens, it going to happen fast.

It also sounds like it is going to be faster, cheaper and more powerful than the iPhone.

 

Finally - Spammers Get What They Deserve!

The Associated Press reports that, Jeffrey Kilbride, 41, of Venice California, and James Schaffer, also 41, of Paradise Alley, Arizona, were sentenced to 72 months and 63 months in prison, respectively, fined $100,000 and were ordered to pay $77,500 in restitution to AOL. They also were ordered to forfeit over $1.1 million in commissions they made spamming inboxes with pornographic emails.

They sent millions of unsolicited e-mails, prosecutors said. During nine months in 2004, Kilbride, Schaffer and an associate transmitted more than 600,000 spam messages advertising pornographic Web sites, according to court documents. Even after Congress passed the law called the CAN-SPAM act, the 2 perps continued sending email via remote servers in Amsterdam. The authorities were able to track the spam back to the individuals in Phoenix.

To prove that there is no honor in spamming, 3 other individuals that were involved, turned on Kilbride and Schaffer and testified against them in court to in order to avoid prosecution themselves.

YES! I love to hear stories like this. Obviously there is some big money to be made in spam, I have always wondered how much people make spamming and why they do it. Now that those 2 are going to be in a prison cell for quite some time, someone needs to go to the door of their cell every 5 minutes and scream at the top of their lung, "Click here to see the hottest girls on the net."

 

The New Apple OS

Apple® today announced that Mac OS® X Leopard will go on sale Friday, October 26 at 6:00 p.m. at Apple's retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers, and that Apple's online store is now accepting pre-orders.

“Leopard, the sixth major release of Mac OS X, is the best upgrade we’ve ever released,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “And everyone gets the ‘Ultimate’ version, packed with all the new innovative features, for just $129.”

Yeah yeah yeah, OK. This is fine and dandy but have you guys seen the new keyboard from Apple? And yes it is just called "the keyboard." No fancy name like the iBoard or the iType. Just "keyboard."

I'm not a mac user but I am going to head out and grab one of them at my earliest convenience.

 

The Shoemoney Show.

Here's a video from Shoemoney's website asking a big question. "Does Yahoo Even Matter Anymore?"



What's your thoughts?

 

"What I Found In My Email" Mondays

For those of you who weren't here last Monday, I started something new. What ever I find in my email on Monday morning that qualifies as slightly amusing or mildly interesting I will toss it up to the pages of The Big Bald Blog.

Here are some pretty amazing pictures that someone emailed me. I see that the one has a copyright on it. I am not sure whether or not I am supposed to publish that one. I want to make sure that the photographer gets full credit for that and if I am told to take it down, I will.

















That's is for "What I Found In My Email" Mondays! Check back next Monday to see what pops up in my inbox.

 

What's Behind Your Brand?

Contributed by Guest Blogger
Clare Price. Clare is a branding
expert who owns a California based
company called BrandVantage

"It's inevitable. Whenever I speak on branding, someone brings up cattle ranches and branding irons. Ouch! That hurts! Everybody laughs. But there is more to this analogy than meets the eye.

It's a well known fact that we as consumers "brand" ourselves with products from our favorite companies--companies like Starbucks, Ralph Lauren Polo and Coach purses. But it's what's behind that logo that really counts.

Cattle branding had two purposes in the Old West. First, the brand on the cattle identified the owner. You knew at a glance which steers belonged to you. Secondly, it identified the ranch. The size, importance and power of the ranch came from the size and quantity of its herd. Big ranch equaled big important brand. Little ranch equaled little brand. The respect that the cattle ranching community gave the brand came not from the brand symbol on the steer but from the size and power of the ranch behind it.

So what's behind your brand? What is the true size and power of your "ranch." Today when we talk about brand power, we mean brand equity. Your brand is your company's most important asset. Your brand is not just a logo or image; it is a capital asset with real net worth and financial power you can bank on. Brands have equity.

Brand equity is created by your company's ability to change market and customer perception into profits. To tap this brand equity, you must first understand what those perceptions are and how to harness their power so you can use your equity as capital to build your business.

Brand equity is measurable across five dimensions: Value and perceived quality of your product or service; market and customer awareness of your company, product or service; customer loyalty to your brand; market positioning, and competitive advantage...

For now, take a few minutes to think about how your company, product or service stacks up in each of these areas. Rate the following from 1-10 (10 high) for your business today:

1. Quality—How good are your products/services compared to:
   - Your ideal
   - Your competitors
2. Perceived value—How well do your customers value your product or service?
3. Loyalty—How strong is your customer's connection to your product or service?
4. Market recognition—How well known are you known in your product/service category?
5. Visibility—How much of your target market knows about you?
6. Image—How well does the average customer think of you?
7. Leadership—How much of the available market share have you captured?"

Thanks for the article Clare!

 

Web Designer Needed In Iowa.

IMT Inc. is hiring an additional web designer.

Qualified candidates must have a background working in a dynamic, interactive, and fast paced team environment.

Responsibilities: Design and develop custom web applications for a diverse client base. Analyze and troubleshoot technical problems, convert business objectives into a creative, functional and professional web presence.

Requirements: 2 Years development/design experience in a professional capacity. Must be detail oriented. Applicants must demonstrate a comprehensive working knowledge with some or all of the following: PHP or ASP, JavaScript, MySQL or SQL, HTML, CSS, XHTML, and Dreamweaver. Candidates must comprehend the basic fundamentals like cross platform browser compatibility, web graphic optimization, website to search engine relationships and the like.

Other Desired Skills: Working knowledge of WordPress, Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator, and InDesign. Flash and 3D Studio experience is a huge plus. The ability to work in Windows and Linux server environments.

Salary commensurate with qualifications and experience. Please send resume and samples of work to: IMT Inc. 110 Fletcher Ave. Waterloo, IA 50701. Attn: Andy Mullinex or via email to andy2 at impactmt dot com.

 

I Am Jack's Raging Sense Of Design

As I was making my daily blog rounds, a headline on Seth's blog caught my eye. How to create a great website is what lured me over. I took particular interest in #8, #7 and #1.

"If you hire a professional: hire a great one. The best one. Let her do her job. 10 mediocre website consultants working in perfect harmony can’t do the work of one rock star." How hard are these rock stars to find? This is one area that is particularly difficult right now. But, once you get this person make sure you hang on to them.

"Fire the committee. No great website in history has been conceived of by more than three people. Not one. This is a deal breaker." Design by committee has never worked. One person needs to make the decisions and live with them. Just like when you are designing a logo - there is only one person that needs to be making a decision. If you have 15 people on a design committee, you are going to have 15 different opinions and nothing will ever get accomplished.

Insight is good, clever is bad. Many websites say, “look at me.” Your goal ought to be to say, “here’s what you were looking for.” I couldn't have said it better. After all, isn't this the goal of any website. Properly constructing a site to give searchers the answers to their questions and the information that they are looking for is the key to success. So often this gets overlooked in the rush to make a site look good.

Great Post Seth!

 

Google Is Reading Your Gmail?!

I was perusing Webpronews website this morning and read a article by Doug Caverly called, "Microsoft CEO Says Google Reads Your Mail."

The article says that Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, accused Google of reading email that is housed in their Gmail system. Why would he make this accusation? Maybe he was playing some dirty pool to promote their Windows Live Hotmail system especially after the fact the that they had just re-done the monetization.

Looking a little deeper the article on Webpronews references a write up on CRN.com by Ed Moltzen. This article says that, "...Google reads customer email as part of a failed bid to drive ad-based revenue. Ballmer isn't the first to fire salvos at Google's Gmail privacy policy. Privacy advocates have been critical over the policy almost since the beginning, but the popularity of the service has skyrocketed nonetheless."

To date, the big G has not come forward to defend themselves against these accusations. Google does publicly admit that they "processes personal information" on their servers but they never come out and explicitly say that they are reading your email. They haven't said that they aren't reading your email either.

So what do you do? Just like any other email system, whether its a free service or a hosted email service, don't send anything that would need to be kept private or secure. I am not real convinced that if you are exchanging recipes via email with a buddy, Google will step up and start spamming you with Pampered Chef and recipe oriented direct emails.

This whole thing is interesting nonetheless.

What say you?

 

Faster Internet For All - The Fiber Way

I was going to title this post, "More Fiber For Regular Traffic" but I didn't think that would catch someones attention if they were only an RSS subscriber. Anyway, back to the news at hand.

According to the Fiber to Home Council, in 2006, 1 million U.S. homes had direct access to the Internet from their homes with fiber. NOW, just a year later, 2.14 million homes have the fiber to home access. With the number over doubling in the last year it is apparent that "...American consumers want what only fiber can deliver – and that is a pipe big enough to handle the high-bandwidth Internet and video applications of the future,” said Joe Savage, President of the FTTH Council."

"Now in its seventh year, the Fiber-to-the-Home Council is a non-profit organization established to help its members plan, market, implement and manage FTTH solutions. Council membership includes municipalities, utilities, developers, and traditional and non-traditional service providers, creating a cohesive group to share knowledge and build industry consensus on key issues surrounding fiber to the home. Communities and organizations interested in exploring FTTH options may find information on the FTTH Council web site at www.ftthcouncil.org."

This is a great thing they are doing. It's too bad that we had to leave it up to a non-profit to further the interests of the U.S. people. After all the BIG Telcos did get a HUGE take break to the tune of 200 million that was supposed to be earmarked for this very thing. Where did that money go? Oh yeah, in their pockets. I think that those same companies that realized the tax breaks should have to give a certain percent of their sales to organizations like the FTTH council.

 

Chinese Censorship V2

Reported by Ars Technica, the Chinese Government has started blocking certain sites like Blogspot and Word press. For "the Great Firewall of China, there are certainly many interpretations of what is and isn't allowed through the country's cyber connection."

" Savvy Internet fans in the people's republic have known for a long time, however, that there have been simple ways to get forbidden information. One of those ways was the magical gift of Real Simple Syndication, or RSS. The Great Firewall can block specific web sites all it wants, but as long as there's an RSS feed, many Chinese surfers can use feeds to access otherwise forbidden information."

The Chinese Government eventually got wise to this and started banning all forms of RSS feeds. Any URL that started with "feeds", "rss", and "blog" are now on the blacklist. Basically with the blanket RSS ban in effect, they have eliminated all, approve and non-approved, site syndication.

This is just like when the "Great Firewall" came in and shut down an entire data center because it was hosting one blog that contained some "non-approved" information.

China - HA. They must be doing something right. We buy so much product from them through their official intermediary - WalMart.

 

Things In My Email

Every Monday morning I come in and have to sort through my huge amount of email messages. There's even more if I took Friday off. So on Mondays, in addition to the normal post, I am going to throw up one or two interesting things I find in my email. Don't worry, it won't be anything about Viagra, Cialis, online poker or anything like that.

The first thing was this really cool 3-D environment experiment. It takes a while to load but it's worth taking a look at.

http://mrdoob.com/lab/pv3d/dof/05/

This is the other thing I got in my email. The rough life of the 80's generation.

"When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious stories about how hard things were when they were growing up; What with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning ... Uphill BOTH ways. Yadda, yadda, yadda and I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it.

But now that I'm over the ripe old age of thirty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy. I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia. When I was a kid we didn't have the Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog. And it never failed - the book or magazine you needed was already checked out.

There was no email. We had to actually write somebody a letter...with a pen. Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there. There were no MP3's or Napster. You wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself. Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ's usually talk over the beginning and mess it all up.

We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting. If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a Busy signal, that's it. And we didn't have fancy Caller ID Boxes either. When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was. It could be your school, your mom, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you just didn't know... You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister. We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics. We had the Atari 2600. With games like 'Space Invaders' and 'Asteroids' and the graphics sucked. Your guy was a little square. You actually had to use your imagination. And there were no multiple levels or screens; it was just one screen forever. And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died. Just like LIFE. When you went to the movie theater there was no such thing as stadium seating. All the seats were the same height. If a tall guy or some old broad with a hat sat in front of you and you couldn't see, you were just screwed.

Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 15 channels and there was no onscreen menu and no remote control. You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on. You were screwed when it came to channel surfing. You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel and there was no Cartoon Network either. You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning. Do you hear what I'm saying? We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little bastards. And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up we had to use the stove or go build a frigging fire ... imagine that. If we wanted popcorn, we had to use that stupid Jiffy Pop thing and shake it over the stove forever like an idiot.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled.......You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980.

So there you have it - A little tech and a little humor for you Monday Morning.

 

Fun Little Test

I ran across this on Dawud Miracle's site the other day. For you bloggers out there, here a fun little test to measure your bloginess. OK, fine, I made that word up. According to my score, I am 74% addicted to blogging. I don't know what that means but high numbers are usually good right?

74%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

 

Marketing Something Controversial

I was watching the show Mad Men last night, which is a fantastic show by the way. Anyway one of the accounts that Sterling-Cooper (the show's ad agency) services is Lucky Strike Cigarettes. Set in the 1960's, the stigma associated with smoking isn't nearly as bad as it is today. However, there is increasing pressure on the cigarette industry from consumer interest groups. The ad execs at Sterling-Cooper are always challenged to show smoking in a favorable light despite public and government pressure.

This type of scenario plays itself out in the real world as well. Often times you are challenged with marketing something that may be unpopular or controversial according to public opinion. However since society has moved toward an accepting and liberal view point, public opinion says that just about everything is acceptable. Given this shift, it's not hard to find someone to market for you. In a post a couple of days ago, I kind of went off the deep end and vented a little bit, but what transpired resulting in that post is exactly what I am talking about. In the 60's if you wanted to promote tobacco it was OK, but to promote an alternate lifestyle, that would be unheard of. Today, if you are on board with the crowd like those that would attend the Folsom Street Fair, it is almost seen as fashionable, but you better not smoke. As a marketer the choices you make about who you represent can effect others.

It's up to you to decide whether or not you want to represent something controversial and how your other clients are going to react. I personally, will always error on the conservative side. On several occasions I have turned down work, that would be extremely profitable, due to it's controversial nature but I am convicted in that way.

What's your thoughts? All money is green and make it how you can or are you selective on the work that you choose to do?

 

Guest Bloggers

Over the past 6 months, I have had a few guest bloggers on here and truly appreciate the break. Not that I don't like writing, it's just refreshing to get some new material. That's why I would like to put it out there again. If you have an interesting article that you would like me to put up, let me know. Guest blogging in mind, Chris Garrett over at chrisg.com is running a contest where he will guest blog on your site. If you're like me, and are looking for contributors, you might want to head on over and check out the details.

 

Sick Day!

I am going to take a sick day. I have the flu so bad that I can barely type. I will see "yall" tomorrow.

 

Questions About Blogging?

I have had a lot of questions about The Big Bald Blog in the last couple of days. Most of them revolved around the frequency of posts. I tell everyone the same thing, "If you are going to start a blog then you need to be committed to it." Before I started TBBB, I made a personal commitment that I would post 5 times per week. This wasn't necessary but I think that it has contributed the the dramatic increase in unique visitors since the inception.

If you're a beginner or a salty blogging veteran, Pro-Blogger is running a contest that you might be interested in. Running contests, by the way, is also another great way to increase traffic. TBBB is going to be running a contest next month so keep checking back to see when the prize will be announced.

 

Halo 3: The Review

After playing it for the first time the other night, I just have to say something about it. Halo 3 is simply awesome. If it weren't for the XBox 360 crashing all the time I could waste even more countless hours playing the stupid thing.

OK, here's the Skinny. The game play is fantastic. New weapons, new vehicles, and even better maps for the player vs. payer mode. The story line is well thought out and the cinematic interludes are a welcome break. Your character has some new abilities. You are now able to carry special extras like bubble shields, flare, deflectors, power-drains and all kinds of other things.

There are all kinds of new vehicles. A 4-wheeler "ATV" type thing, a new "chopper", a new flyer for the good guys and a new tank. This is what Broadsideonline had to say. "Halo 3 is unique in that almost anyone can easily pick up and play. The control scheme is straightforward and solid, making even the most First Person Shooter-inept players feel right at home, while instantly enjoying taking out the monstrous hordes of alien Covenant forces and the disgustingly zombie-like Flood. Players run through the campaign or story mode as Master Chief, the last surviving member of the elite Spartan military group. Able to run faster and jump higher with abnormal human strength, players can be all they can be while running the gauntlet of enemy forces as Master Chief. The campaign mode offers a wide variety of locations to go through, each extremely detailed and beautiful to look at."

If you have a 360, I would highly recommend checking picking up a copy. You won't be disappointed.

I know, I know - this doesn't have anything to do with marketing, but then a gain maybe it does. There was so much hype about Halo 3, game store literally had tens of millions of dollars in pre-launch deposits. There were excellent pre-release trailers on TV, and the gaming magazines were giving Halo 3 their full attention. The Canadian press reports, "...over $170 million in sales on day one and calling it the biggest entertainment launch in history... $170 million works out to, at most, 2.83 million copies of "Halo 3" - a fraction of the 8.3 million "Harry Potter" books that sold in the United States on their respective premiere days."

The Halo 3 buying frenzy had an unpredicted side effect. The week that the game launched, Microsoft enjoyed a doubling of the previous week's sales to the highest level yet for 2007.
And in addition, the return of Master Chief meant the system outsold the Nintendo Wii for the first time in 26 weeks.

 

Disney-Pixar Has Done It Again With Wall E

OK, so the title is linkbait, but I really am a fan of what Pixar does. Following a tradition of amazing animated movies, Pixar just released a trailer for their new movie called Wall E.

The Plot: Taking place in the year 2700, a robot spends every day doing what he was made for until he evolves and begins to discover what he was "meant" for. Hmm, of course there is a deeper meaning as in all the Pixar productions.

I can't think of a Pixar movie that I didn't like. I guess I would have to say "The Incredibles" was my favorite one.

Scheduled to hit the big screen on June, 27th 2008, the movie will attract audiences young and old. Given the history, I'm sure we won't be disappointed.

 

Google Makes The Rules And You Better "NoFollow"

If you own a site or blog with a high page rank and you have links or paid advertisements going to another site, be careful. You might wake up one day and Google will no longer include your site in their index.

Here's the very abridged version of it so pay attention. By no means is this information new, but for quite some time now Google has been cracking down on links (especially paid links) that don't follow their rules. You can have paid links, sponsors or advertisers on your site but you need to have the, Google mandated, "rel=nofollow" tag in the link. The Reason? This prevents the passage of page rank to the receiving site.

Why does the big G pitch such a fit about this? Simple, they want to try and keep the searches as pure as possible(remember this statemement for later). Google is even encouraging people to turn in offending paid links. The coveted Pagerank is calculated by a number of factors, including the amount of incoming links. Google's problem is not with making money by selling links on your site, their problem is with people gaming the algorithm and selling non-relevant links on a big PR site.

To over simplify it, if you have a high ranking website in Google's index and you sell links on your site, you will pass along a certain amount of your page rank to the recipient's site even if it is not relevant to your site. This is the primary reason for the "NoFollow" tag. It tells the search engines NOT to follow that link and will require physical clicks for the link to get visited.

There have been many people that have been beat down by Google for not following the rules. The infamous John Chow is a prime example. Even if you search for his name, "John Chow" he doesn't come up in the top 50 results.

There is much more information out on the net that will answer the questions you may have. This brings a whole new dimension to paid link advertising. Even though it shouldn't, this forces site owners to rethink the relevance of links. After all, if you have gaming site, you want to send people to gaming related sites and not pharmaceuticals, right? If you have a website or a blog, you should want people to go to a site that would interest them. Google thinks this type of linking is better for the Internet as a whole. Proper or "white hat" SEO is a longer process but in the end will achieve better results. Keep on Google's good side, provide relevant useful links. You'll be much better off.

But wait - What about keeping the results pure from above? I have a question. Is banning someone from the SERPs because you violated their policy really a pure thing to do? If someone searching for John Chow and can't find John Chow, is that a pure result? John Chow has 100's of thousands of visitors to his site per month, and he writes about making money online and do you think that you can find him for those keywords? Nope. So if you mess with Google who currently has about 63% of the searches in the US, you can get kicked from their pure listings. Someone once said that if you "do a Google on Google" you don't get any of disparaging comments. Kind of reminds me of moderating comments on a blog. :) This leads me to the question; How much power can one entity have?

The other side of the coin is that Google is a business. A very large and profitable business. If you want to play in their yard, you should have to follow their rules, right? I read somewhere that some people think Google is just some free software that comes with the computer. I don't know what side I am on yet. The "anti-Google, ALT Search engine" crowd or the "let them do what they want" group.

All that being said, I think that it may get worse before it gets better. As shown historically, Absolute power, corrupts absolutely. Your thoughts?