A New Pricing Structure for SEO Companies. One professional SEO, Barry Lloyd, has experimented with pricing structures for several years, and he’s arrived at a plan that works extremely well for him. Paid performance. [Search Engine Guide]

Journalists at war beat the DoD home with news.

Journalists covering the current war are able to use mobile technologies to speedily and inexpensively absorb, compile, and transmit information. This might lead to outspeeding military authorities, or outflanking their information control.


For example, a reporter from the Orange County Register snapped a picture of wounded US Marine Brent Gross, then beamed the image back home, where the Gross family pulled it from a fax... all before the Pentagon got to it.

(via the Austin American Statesman, and thanks to Jim Lai!)

[Smart Mobs]

Google VP of Sales Explains Success.

Reveries.com: Interview With Google's Tim Armstrong

Very interesting interview from the guy who has to be among the most successful ad sales people on the Internet these days, Google's VP of advertising, Tim Armstrong. Here's a favorite passage:

Reveries: But isn't it still a bit of a hurdle in that some people "just say no" to paid links of any kind?

Armstrong: We really haven't heard that issue very much because we try to make the advertising just as relevant as the search results. Google actually serves ads on fewer than 50 percent of our pages.

We don't accept pop-ups or do a lot of the things that are annoying to users and that ruin the objectivity of the Internet. As a result, our average click-through rates are more than five times the click-through rates of traditional banner ads.

[MarketingFix]

Appreciating the Power of Parody Marketing.

Media Guardian: Some bad news for Hoxton's finest

An entertaining article by Paul Carr, editor of The Friday Thing, discussing viral/subviral marketing, and in particular Puma's humourless reaction to the recent "kneeling girl lavishes oral affections on standing boyfriend while wearing Puma trainers" spoofs. The Nokia cat swinging clip was also given an honoury mention.

The embarrassing truth is that Puma, Nokia, MasterCard and countless others among the world's biggest brands still haven't got a clue about how to use the web as a word-of-mouth marketing tool. News and information sites have long understood the advantages of working closely with their audience to build loyalty, and it's about time Nokia et al realised that, when they uncover a brilliant piece of fanvertising, they should be reaching for their chequebooks, not their lawyers. It would only take the tiniest bit of encouragement - perhaps the promise of some free footwear or a camera-phone for the most creative ideas - to recruit a vast army of unofficial brand promoters spreading the word in ways that a company simply couldn't do (or get away with doing) on their own.

Whilst I get where he is coming from, I wish him luck trying to sell the client on that model :-) As much to the point the Nokia and Puma ads were probably done by retained agencies, potentially invalidating the whole pretence of his rant.

[MarketingFix]