'trust' Category

• Managing Media Reputation: Apple, iPad, Suicides

  Apple is caught in the headlights with the release of the iPad in the UK tomorrow, with reports of 11 suicide attempts at their main Chinese factory. Western media have a theme running about inhuman working conditions in China, so the pairing of a major brand with this theme, a product release and a tragedy, [...]

  May 27th, 2010

• UK Election: Deceptive Government Savings?

  I’ve just been listening to the UK Election debate between prime ministerial candidates as I start writing this. I think I’ve just heard, yet again, a deceptive statement about public finances. David Cameron keeps having business leaders sign up to a program saying they decry an increase of 1% from higher paid employees using an [...]

  April 27th, 2010

• Google, Transparency, Social Media and PR

  Google has a major strength and a major weakness, and they are the same. It is an engineering-lead business. That gives it some unique capabilities and some weaknesses. Before you make too many assumptions about me, let’s disabuse some of them:

  I used to be a Top Contributor in the AdWords Help Forum (that’s a designation [...]

  March 3rd, 2010

• Duplicate Content, And Blog Spammers

  Around half the people I talk to, about Search Engine Optimisation, are terrified of duplicate content on their own websites. But 80% or more of the spam that I see, is massively duplicated. Why do real site owners, with valuable content but multiple paths to it, fear duplicate penalties from Google, but spammers who endlessly [...]

  February 28th, 2010

• Google Product Search, Ciao, Foundem and the right to make a buck in search results

  The Telegraph gives some details about the cases being brought against Google in Europe, about product search results. Who’s complaining, and about what, makes for some interesting speculation.
  Let’s have a look at what Google Product Search is, and does, first… so we’ve got some context.
  Google Product Search
  It’s free. Anyone can sign up, and feed products. [...]

  February 24th, 2010

• Search Engine Optimisation – Site Submission Solicitations

  The incubator that we work in, has a bunch of small businesses, with varying degrees of proficiency with the web. Every so often, we run a seminar for them on building web presence. One of the questions that is likely to come up at the end, will be about search engine submission. Our neighbouring businesses [...]

  February 16th, 2010

• Google Help Forums, Customer Service, SEO and Stupidity

  Not quite a Jane Austen title, but “Help Forums and Helplessness” involved far too many terminal sibilants. The recent launch of Google’s Nexus One, the Google branded Android phone, highlights Google’s fledgling incompetence with mass market customer service, already demonstrated in abundance in many of Google’s own help forums.
  Harsh criticism, you might think, but I’ve [...]

  January 14th, 2010

• Making Money With Google AdWords

  Good summary article from Google specifying all the ways that you can’t make money online, and some of the ways that you can safely make money with an outline of the techniques that should work. On the AdWords Help Forum, users asking about various scams are a common feature. More common since the credit crunch [...]

  July 10th, 2009

• Search Engine Optimisers, Spam and Reputation Management

  I detest spam. I don’t like it in my email. I don’t like it on websites and reading the spam dropped into blog comments leaves me feeling tainted. I’m also involved in online reputation management for a few clients, and spam that involves the clients’ name can be very hard to work with. This issue [...]

  June 17th, 2009

• Privacy and AdWords Extended Search Query Reports

  Good news – Google is allowing more insight to be gathered from AdWords Search Query Reports, by exposing more search queries to scrutiny. This reduces the need to use third party click redirectors or web analytics tools to extract search queries. However, there’s strangely spurious logic – or I’ve failed to grasp a fundamental point [...]

  May 23rd, 2009