Standing out with getting in the way

I was taking a break from work and playing some Yahtzee, when it loaded this came up
They owned this space and to their benefit I am not exactly the target market for this product but this game website definitely fits their target.

What is interesting is the fact that these big name brands are finding ways to interact with their audience that is outside the norm. I noticed it right away, well it was hard to avoid, but not annoying I could still play my game in peace.

So we as marketers need to come up with the unique and memorable things that stick out but not annoy. I like this example and wanted to share.

Skittles Ballsy Homepage Move - UPDATED

UPDATE: So Skittles has already moved away from the Twitter stream it was using as its homepage. Instead it opted for a safer homepage location... its own Facebook page where it can control what is said about its brand. According to Laurie Sullivan over at MediaPost they pulled the feed after pranksters started spamming the list with obscenities. So time of death appears to be sometime on Tuesday. The messages on the Facebook account seem much more product targeted thus I believe that Skittles is monitoring what is going to stay up on their wall and discussion groups. As a test I posted a question about the twitter feed idea to their discussion group. We will see how long that stays up and what response come from their "fan" base. I will keep you updated.


I will have to say this, it is a very risky maneuver by Skittles to have their homepage be a User Generated Content feed. They never know what will come on top. It will be very easy for someone to game the system for their own benefit.

One thing Skittles has going for them is the amount of attention both good and bad they are getting in the twitterverse. I do not follow that many people (currently in the low 100's) but there has been quite of bit of talk about this webpage already. It will be interesting to track how long this will stay up before being gamed. Any predictions, leave a comment with your guess and if you are right you will win my respect (sorry don't have much else to give here, you can have the honor of employing me :) )

Don't forget Yahoo!

I am not sure if Microsoft has pushed Yahoo! from their consciousness but as a search engine marketer I definitely should not. Yahoo! still holds the second place in the amount of searches out there in the webiverse. I am not saying that you should sacrifice your Google rankings to appear in Yahoo! SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). It is definitely a balancing act but if you have valuable content for your consumers you should be able to rank high in the results for both Google and Yahoo!.

There is some duplication of searches between these two giants of search, but Yahoo! has their loyal fan base just like Google does. Tapping into that fan base can extend your reach and thus your brand awareness.

So I advocate tracking not only your Google rankings but your Yahoo! rankings as well. You should know how people are finding you. If your analytics shows that you have no search traffic from Yahoo! then something is wrong and you are missing a good stream of potential customers to your website. Take a look it could very well be worth your while.

If you are not sure how to track where people are coming into your website and to see how your website ranks on the various search engines. Leave me a comment below or send me a message on Twitter and I will be glad to talk with you.

Video of my interview with Fox12

Someone over at Fox12 deleted the video from their servers. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Welcome KTRV Fox 12 Viewers and New and Old Visitors

Thanks for taking the time to visit my blog or visit again if you are returning. If you are here just by chance, welcome! If you are here due to the story on KTRV Fox 12 www.ktrv.com, double welcome.

As mentioned on the newscast; I am out on the job hunt but it has not yet produced a full time job offer. What my hunt has uncovered are some opportunities for me to assist businesses with;

-Their ongoing web presence on the search engines
-Marketing strategy (including media buying recommendations)
-Pay-per-click advertising setup and maintenance

I will be glad to talk to anyone interested in what my services may offer. Leave me a message below or direct message me at
www.twitter.com/kgamache. Sorry I do not post my email or phone number as sites often get scraped by spammers and I am lucky to thus far be pretty spam free.
By the way, if you are not yet on Twitter it is a great opportunity to start networking as well as researching direct consumer comments about products you are about to buy. This tool has helped immensely thus far.

Please review my resume and my other blog postings and discussions. Leave comments there as well and I will gladly further discuss my thoughts on the topics I have covered.

Thanks again for visiting hope to talk to you soon.

Kevin's Experience with Internet Explorer 8

Ok I know it is still in a somewhat beta format but since it is being released to the public I will give my experiences and the curious things I found:

1) On initial installation of IE8 the default Search Engine is Google. Is this Microsoft giving up on forcing people into their search engine? Is this Microsoft finally saying to their customers, "Ok we know that you use Google A LOT but please still use our browser to get there"?

2) For all the moves that Microsoft has made to purchase Yahoo they sure don't show that they are interested in their search engine. I had to manually, through several screens, add Yahoo as my preferred search engine whereas Google and Live were easy to access. I would have thought that since I had Yahoo as my default search engine it would have imported that in from the previous IE install. FAIL!

3) To their benefit it does seem to load things faster than IE6 did. So I can't complain about the speed.

4) Some of their embedded features still are a bit buggy. I expect these to be fixed as they release the final version.

5) Lots of similarities to Google Chrome in this release including: the favorites/bookmark icon and how they list those favorites/bookmarks; the tabbing system with recovering recently closed tabs; possibly more as I search more

6) I don't like that I have to click on a tab to enable the X in the tab to close it. Sometimes I search in another tab and find what I am looking for and just want to click the x to close it.


So my quick summary is that if you did not like Google Chrome you will probably not like Internet Explorer 8. A lot of the same functionality is resident in IE8 that was built into Google Chrome and IE7.

Microsoft's Presidential Search Failure

While watching the history making events of the 44th President's Inauguration, I wanted to see how the search engines performed for this ground breaking event.

I performed this search: "44th President"

Google and Yahoo searches returned a variety of sources: wikipedia, news sites, barackobama.com, and also one souvenir buying page on Yahoo.

MSN/Live returned predominantly souvenir buying sites, in fact 8 of the top 10 were souvenir buying sites. It will be interesting to track the evolution of these rankings on Live/MSN as time moves on. I find it curious that these sites were able to get top ranking over the top of reliable news sites and other "trusted" sources.

If someone else has done this search a few weeks ago on Live/MSN I would love to get some historical data as what the top 10 sites were before inauguration day. This will help to see how MSN/Live justifies their high ranking. See picture below