One from the archive, but still raises a smile when I read it…
Concerned about the amount of sea water in “Ocean Spray” Cranberry drinks, we got in touch for clarification…
____________________________________
—– Original Message —–
From: madeup@email.com
To: craninfobureau@fieldmcnallyleathes.co.uk
Sent: Saturday, April 12, 2003 11:15 AM
Subject: Cranberry juice
Sir,
I am considering whether or not to purchase a bottle of your advertised Ocean Spray Cranberry and Blackcurrant Drink from a local shop. I am perhaps a little cautious in trying new things, but I would like to clear up a few minor points before I rush out and spend my money.
Firstly, I would like to know what particular ocean spray is used in the manufacture of your drink, I am quite sensitive to high levels of sodium in my diet. Also, I wish to make sure, that the spindrift used is hygienically treated to remove normal seawater contaminants. Please confirm that it comes from a European Blue Flag certified source.
Secondly, your product claims to use American Cranberries, am I to assume that these are of the highest standard; and better than a British equivalent?
Third, and finally, on the bottle I examined in the supermarket, other products mentioned were “Cranberry Classic”, and “Cranberry and Raspberry”. In light of the above, I wish to know whether you produce any products made solely with British fruit, perhaps a refreshing Loganberry and redcurrant Spritz?
My Best regards
A Madeupname (Mr)
____________________________________
Their First response was not what we expected…
____________________________________
—– Original Message —–
From: kerry@******.co.uk
To: madeup@email.com
Sent: Monday, April 14, 2003 8:58 AM
Subject: RE: Cranberry juice
Ju
He sounds like he could be a tricky customer!!!!. One for you, Can you help?
Kerry
____________________________________
So we sent it back…
____________________________________
—– Original Message —–
From: madeup@email.com
To: kerry@******.co.uk
Sent: Monday, April 14, 2003 9:26 AM
Subject: RE: Cranberry juice
Dear Kerry,
Somehow I do not think that you meant to send this e-mail to me.
Regards
Mr Madeupname
____________________________________
And a couple of days later they gave us an answer…
____________________________________
—–Original Message—–
From: Judy B*****s [mailto:judy@******.co.uk]
Sent: 17 April 2003 14:35
To: madeup@email.com
Subject: Cranberry Juice
Dear Mr Madeupname
Thank you for your recent e-mail. Please rest assured that Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice Drinks is produced to the highest standards and all rigorous regulations laid down by legislation are adhered to.
Ocean Spray is made under license by a reputable major drinks manufacturer whose expertise and status make them one of the leading manufacturers of juice and juice drinks in the UK. They supply the majority of branded and unbranded products into UK retailers.
If you would like to send your address we will send you some further information and a free coupon for one of Ocean Spray’s Juice Drinks.
Best wishes
Judy B*****s
Judy B*****s
Account Director
Field McNally Leathes Ltd.
Field House
8 High Street
Hurstpierpoint
West Sussex
BN6 9TY
Tel: 01273 834716
Fax: 01273 834306
Website: www.******.co.uk
E-mail: judy@******.co.uk
____________________________________
So we said thanks and offered them some help…
____________________________________
—–Original Message—–
From: madeup@email.com
Sent: 19 April 2003 08:58
To: ‘Judy b*****s’
Subject: RE: Cranberry Juice
Dear Judy
Many thanks for your response to my enquiry.
When I received your e-mail, I rushed out, and bought the bottle of Cranberry and Blackcurrant juice I had promised myself. I was a little surprised that the drink had not been made from “Ocean Spray”, but I was delighted with the flavour and will most certainly be trying out the other flavours advertised with your money off voucher.
I was interested to read that your company also produces drinks under other labels. As you may remember from my original E-mail, I am a devotee of the loganberry and the redcurrant, and think that the marriage of the unique flavours of these most English of fruits would make a delightful addition to your range.
Please could you let me know whether this product is manufactured at the moment, and if not, when it will be. I currently make this drink myself from a recipe I inherited from my beloved Aunt Jessica (decd) and as a tribute to her, I would be delighted to share this family secret with you.
Kindest regards
A Madeupname (Mr)
____________________________________
and they continued to play along…
____________________________________
—– Original Message —–
From: judy@******.co.uk
To: madeup@email.com
Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2003 8:10 AM
Subject: RE: Cranberry Juice
Dear James
Thanks for getting back to us and I hope that you had a good Easter. At the moment Ocean Spray do not produce a redcurrant or loganberry blend of juice or juice drinks but should we hear of any launch plans we will let you know. Meanwhile you may be interested in trying Ocean Spray’s latest flavour - Cranberry & Mango - to the Light range.
Would be very interested in seeing your Aunt’s recipe!
Thanks
Judy
____________________________________
I never sent Judy the recipe for my Loganberry and Redcurrant spritz - some family secrets are best kept!
____________________________________
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Tags: comedy, complaints, cranberry juice
Every year, children all over the world go to bed on Christmas Eve dreaming of presents in the morning. If they were getting a visit from one of these guys, there is no way they’d be getting any sleep.
Angry Claus
Left in the corner of the toyshop when January comes around, this Santa exudes sinister aggression. With a sideways glance, you get the impression that he could flip out at any moment.
Sharpened Claus
Look out behind you mom…
Smokin’ Claus
Here’s the Santa who put the evil in evil weed!
Sinister Claus
Santa: “Want to sit on my knee little boy?”
Child: “Waaaaaaaaaaaaaah”
Vagrant Claus
A classic example of leaving the decorations up too long. This Santa looks like he’d swap your presents for booze…
Santa Sprawls
… and this Santa looks like he already did
Santa Scares
There is just something very wrong about this one. I wouldn’t like it on my tree!
Santa-bal Lecter
Sleep well children.
Evil Santa
The look in his eyes, the smile, the terrible thoughts that his kindly face hides.
Tags: Christmas, funny, santa claus, scary
The idea of being in an exclusive club is appealing to everybody. But what are the chances of you getting in any of these clubs?
Ejection Tie Club
Membership = 5,607
The ejection tie club is a global club, open to fast jet pilots who have survived ejecting in a Martin Baker ejection seat.
Out of 7,195 recorded ejections, there are only 5,607 members. Probably because the other 1,588 are dead. If you are one of the lucky ones that survived ejecting at speed, and want a tie to show off in the pub, apply here.
Shuttlecock Club
Membership = 1300
The Shuttlecock club is a club for people who didn’t die when they bailed on the Cresta Run. Competitive riders go down the Cresta Run on a tray at speeds of close to 80mph.
Unsurprisingly, this results in carnage, including high speed accidental amputations and a number of deaths. Anyone who manages to survive crashing off at the lethal Shuttlecock corner gets membership of the Shuttlecock club, and probably some counselling. They also get a free go down the run once they’re back on their feet. There are some wince inducing videos of people earning their membership here
Masters of wine
Membership = 277
Like dark lords of the grape, this tiny group of drinkers are true masters of wine. Just 277 people around the world have gained the requisite amount of knowledge needed to join the club - although anyone is eligible provided they can complete the course.
If your liver is up to the challenge, you can apply to be member 278 here.
Order of the Garter
Membership = 26
You know that you’re getting into the upper echelons of exclusivity when you need an invitation from the queen (and the death of a member of the aristocracy) to get in. Membership of the Order of the Garter is limited to the British sovereign, the Price of Wales and another 24 members.
If you’re not on the list already, the chances are that you’re not going to get into this one’ although you can probably increase your chances by getting elected to parliament and then becoming prime minister. Otherwise, you’ll probably need to rely on reincarnation into the royal family. Either way, it’s not going to be easy!
Climbers that have climbed all 14 8000m+ mountains.
Membership = 14
So far, only 14 people can genuinely claim to have climbed all 14 of the 8000m+ mountains. It takes a while to complete this - the fastest was Carlos Carsolio who took 10 years, and is also the youngest member of this uber-exclusive club of adventurers. For added difficulty, you could emulate Alberto Inurrategui who did it without bottled oxygen.
Brilliantly, you don’t actually need any proof of actually completing the feat to join the club, although according to Adventure Stats
“The Explorer is believed to be telling the truth. It is considered a point of honor which most explorers hold higher than the success of the expedition.”
People who have walked on the moon
Membership = 12
Only 12 people have ever achieved this since Neil Armstrong in 1969, and no one has managed it in the last 36 years - although this could change in the next few years, with both the Americans and the Chinese planning a return to the moon before 2020.
There is even a subgroup for those lucky enough to have driven on the moon. This has just 6 members. The official lunar land speed record is a fairly pedestrian 8mph, though unfortunately, the holder’s name is not recorded. Should you want to join this group, and you don’t find yourself on the NASA waiting list, you could always fund your own attempt. It’s reckoned that a successful lunar mission could be staged for around $100 billion. Not cheap!
Marianas Trench Explorers
Membership = 2
There are plenty of people who are the only one to have done something, but their exploits don’t really count as a club - the meetings at the pub would be like a gathering of survivors of the Crimean war.
The title of most exclusive club in the world must surely go to the group of divers who have managed to reach the deepest point in the Earth’s oceans, the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
There are two members, Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard who sank dived the almost 11KM to the bottom in the Bathyscaphe Trieste in 1960. They saw some mud, a shrimp, and what may have been a flounder.
There are no plans to repeat this feat. Ever.
Tags: climbing, clubs, exclusive, explorers
Sorry for the old story, but WTF, I can’t believe this one at all, Google are now going to allow other people to bid on my trademark protected brand.
icture the scene in boardrooms up and down the country where the owners of some of the most respected businesses have spent years of hard work and millions of pounds to build up a world class brand they have investing in quality throughout their operations to boost conversion rates, and develop a prestigious brand that has core values, and ensures a high conversion rate from potential customers.
Then Google shift the goal posts, and after years of recognising the value of brands and protecting them, they stop all this, and allow anyone including lazy affiliate marketers to perform the lowest value campaign possible and piggy back on a brand, while forcing the original brand owner to pay more for every click through to their website.
While Google claim that this change will not affect businesses to a great extent - after all, if I want Nike, I’ll buy Nike, even if there is an Adidas advert appearing in Google - it will.
Take British Airways as an example, they have spent years developing their brand, and people searching for it will more than likely be looking to book a flight. This means that all the travel companies in the world can bid on the term BA, which is a trademark, and get a customer that is statistically likely to convert. All the investment in the brand that encourages a customer to choose a product from that brand is subverted by the affiliates and agents who simply pay 3p or whatever to get a customer.
Now to a certain extent, I can understand where Google is coming from, after all, this is the age of the Internet, the age where everyone is a publisher and there are a million shops with a market of one, and to these small businesses, brand is not important. The temporary nature of the web means that there is no need for some companies to build long term relationships with their clients, and no value to them in having a brand.
Google could so easily have been one of these companies, and to a certain extent they are, I use them for email and to search for things, they are also the basis of my career, but if Live Search started offering better results, or HotMail was opened up so I could integrate it into more things, then I would switch. I have no loyalty to Google, like they have no loyalty to the advertisers like BA who spend literally millions with them each year. Its a sad state of affairs, but for me, the thing that takes the p!ss most about this somewhat casual attitude to the value of other brands is that Google have recently been super protective of their own brand - claiming that no-one should use the Brand name Google as a verb, as in to Google for something.
There is always a danger in double standards.
I’ve been reading a lot of people bleating about how they’ve been banned from Google AdSense lately. They all seem to have exactly the same story about how their account was closed for no reason just after they had reached that magic $100 dollar mark, and all of them are complaining.
The fact is, no-one gets banned without a reason. Google have very strict guidelines about what you can and can’t do when using the system, and most of the people who have been banned have breached these guidelines in some way.
There is one main reason why people are getting banned by Google, and that is Fraud. Clicking on your own ads - even if you only do it once - is stealing. You are stealing from the people who pay to advertise, and you are stealing from other publishers, because money that they should have earned is being paid out to a thief. No-one “Accidentally” clicks on the adverts, they do it on purpose, and they do it for personal gain. This is theft, and quite qimply, anyone who engages in it should be prosecuted. The only reason that Google aren’t chasing the fraudsters through the courts in addition to banning their accounts is because this would cost them more in the long run, and undermine trust in the system.
Another reason why people are getting banned is because they don’t bother to read the terms and conditions of serving the ads. FFS. I have a job, I read the contract before I started, anyone who enters into a programme that involves the exchange of services for cash should read the contract before they start. But they don’t.
There are a whole list of terms that Google impose on publishers, and they do it for a reason. The advertisers who are using their services are doing so for a reason, to promote a product, and contrary to what you, with your blogspot blog and stolen content might think, they do not want their adverts associated with you. They do not want their advert to appear next to profane content or badly written and designed layouts that trick users into clicking on an advert that doesn’t really interest them.
This brings me onto the fact that there is about to be an explosion of bans at the end of May.
You remember those additional terms that you agreed to recently, the ones you didn’t bother to read because you were so desperate to click through to find out how much money you’d earned from your network of 5000 one page websites that are published using RSS and promoted through traffic share programmes?
When you agreed to those terms, you agreed that you would put a disclosure paragraph on your website about how any users visiting the site would have cookies added to their browser by the adverts that you were publishing. But of course, you didn’t bother to read that did you, because that would be too much effort, to actually think about what your responsibilities to your users were.
The fact is that Google cares jack about micro publishers, and when they get the opportunity in 6 weeks to clear out a vast amount of dross from their inventory, they’re going to do it.
To my mind, its fairly brave of Google to actually take a stand to protect users from shady people who build hundreds of crappy content free websites that serve one purpose - to get in the way of finding information. With their source of income gone, a lot of these sites will pack up and move on.
Of course there will be the usual weeping and gnashing of teeth about how evil Google has become, but what the people doing the complaining will have forgotten is that Google’s responsibility is to their users, shareholders and employees, and by enriching the user experience by eradicating the poor quality sites from the Adsense programme, they will be benefiting all of these groups.
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One of the central tenets of the Google Webmaster Guidelines was that “there is almost nothing that your competitors can do to harm your rankings”. Well not any more it seems. I was searching for that very phrase in the webmaster tools as part of an induction for a new junior, and it is conspicuous in its absence.
Google have been a bit ban happy lately, with a number of high profile companies falling victim to a penalty for paid linking, and the fact is that your competitors are able to do something to harm your rankings.
They can report you for paid linking via the web master tools console.
My suspicion is that Google have had to remove the clause for legal reasons to cover themselves in the event that a site gets banned because of malicious activity from a competitor. (ie their competitor buys a shedload of crappy links from PPP or Review Me, and then reports them for it).
If this happened, it would be an unfair restriction of trade against a company due to activities they had no control over, and with that phrase left in the webmaster tools, Google may well have ended up being liable for a substantial compensation package.
In light of the recent penalties that have been handed out, I wonder how long it is before the old “my competitor did it to me” excuse gets trotted out, and by the same token, I wonder how long it is before someone actually gets a payout to cover loss of earnings due to a ban.
Holistic search is not a new concept in internet marketing, however as the SERPS get more competitive and other agencies get more intelligent in their marketing, it is going to become even more important to leverage the full benefit of all the different areas of data that you can get. In a year or two the web is going to be so competitive that any edge you can get will be essential.
Intelligent targeting of keywords through SEO will be able to give you a competitive advantage because you can concentrate fully on targeting the PPC campaign at the search terms with the lowest cost per sale or cost per acquisition, and your SEO efforts, which will deliver the “free traffic” can be dedicated entirely to these sales. There are also many other ways in which the data from analytics can be shared to develop the best possible campaign for clients (or your own business). This is the first in a series of posts about ways in which a holistic approach to SEM can be used to boost business.
There is a lot more than your ranking to consider when compiling and completing your SEO campaign.
I’ve always focused my optimisation efforts on an ROI model. By this I mean that the campaign is built around the value that it is able to deliver to the client. With this in mind, it is essential to be able to squeeze the maximum value from every appearance.
While a lot of my work is still built around the idea of getting the rankings:
- link building
- content analysis
- site structure work
I am also now very focused on the idea of traditional marketing and its impact on click through rates. Digging right into the data provided by my analytics solution gives me a great deal of vital information that can help to improve the site. I’m lucky in many respects because I also have access to paid search data for many clients, and I can build the various testing information that this gives in order to improve the natural search.
Using Multivariant testing of different creatives through the PPC campaign lets me get an indication of what will encourage users to click through to the website, and I can then build these learnings into the descriptions that I write for each page.
I read recently that Google do not place much weight on the description in terms of its value to their ranking algorithm, so I can use this more creatively. Things that work well in this include using the brand of the company I’m working with, building in a particular special offer to encourage users to click through, and adding an explicit call to action.
For me, the most successful format for a title and Meta Description in terms of boosting click through rates is as follows:
Buy [PRODUCT] online | [WEBSITE NAME]
Buy [PRODUCT] online from [WEBSITE NAME] from just £[PRICE]. Visit the website now for the best deals on cheap [PRODUCT].
In circumstances where the brand is really recognisable - such as with a major retailer, I will use the website name before the product name. My research has shown that a well known brand appearing at the front of the title and close to the beginning of the description can boost the click through by as much as 5%.
When you are competing for every click and need to be able to demonstrate high quality traffic and better conversions as part of your SEO Campaign, it is vitally important to get the most out of every potential users.
