You say you want to work in politics? It is 9:30 PM on the Jewish New Year and I'm still working. I'm loading up new ads and optimizing our search campaigns. My kids are falling asleep around me while I'm also watching a TiVo of Bizarre Foods, but instead of relaxing I have a much longer night ahead of me. Enjoy your corporate jobs LOL
At least I get to make some new Biden and Obama text ads tonight. Always have fun doing that ;-)
I was at a birthday party Saturday night and I ran into Carolyn Monday who owns a company on Schooly's Mountain in Hackettstown, NJ called Laser Works Treatment Center. The company uses laser therapy to treat smoking habits and since I've never smoked a legitimate cigarette in my life (more on that below) I really wasn't interested in whether it works or not. I was more interested in whether Carolyn should have her own static website or not to promote her services. So, let's take a look at:
Old School Facelift #9 - Laser Works Treatment Center by Carolyn Monday
Natural Search Dilemma - Carolyn needs to start here. She needs to figure out which 10 keywords she'd like to appear on. Searching for laser works, hackettstown NJ pulls up her nice Google Local listing but that type of search predisposes that people are already looking for her. "quit smoking laser nj" brings up quite a lot of listings but it doesn't appear that any of the top 20 results have a strategic advantage. Unfortunately her own name doesn't bring up any results (until this post). When I browse the list of results none of them appear to be blogs which means Carolyn could have some nice natural search results by constantly updating the site.
Getting a Good URL - Going back to the natural search results there appears to mostly static websites and unfortunately for Carolyn laserworks.com seems to be taken as well as laserworksinc.com. Laserworkstreatmentcenter.com is a long URL but is available as is carolynmonday.com and carolynmondaylaser.com. stopsmokingbylaser.com also works. Personally I'd grabbed quite a few of them, but depending on how Carolyn wants to market her company would mean I'd either go carolynmonday.com or some version of stopsmokingbylaser.com. Me, I'd go stopsmokingbylaser.com because I bet people that are hearing radio ads or reading articles are probably more likely to type that keyword in. If you Google "stop smoking by laser" you'll see that nobody is using that URL and it seems extremely popular with the paid search advertisers.
Blog Content of StopSmokingbyLaser.com - I'd avoid the typical static website and opt for the blog site. Revisiting my old board of education campaign site which now points to longvalleymath.com you can see how you can have a combination site with static pages but one that is powered by a blog. So, I'd recommend wordpress as the blog platform because it is a) free b) easy c) has many different templates to choose from and d) has easy to use add-ons. As I recall for about $15 she can purchase her URL via wordpress and have a blog site up in running in a manner of minutes. Plus, the blog content will enable her to update her site a few times a week, hit the blogosphere running where there doesn't appear to be any competition, and make some headway in the natural search.
Video Content - Ok, now I'm not writing that her product doesn't work or it isn't believable. It does seem a little far out, but then again I've never smoked. The best thing Carolyn can do to prove it works is to use video. So, I'd hop over to YouTube and grab the page YouTube.com/stopsmokingbylaser. Now she has a page that will host her own video (read commercials) for free. All she needs to do is have a decent video with a tripod and some free, easy to use video editing software (or not) and she can film her office, materials, procedures, and even do a video series. Wordpress also makes it very easy to host the video on the blog.
Customer Testimonials - Does anyone every believe the infamous "this product is great by John from Kalamazoo, MI" quote? Of course not, but if Carolyn actually filmed satisfied customers and put it up on her YouTube page, how much more powerful would that be?
You'll notice one thing missing that has been consistent in most of my Old School posts is I never mentioned paid search. My experience tells me that the majority of her keywords would be very expensive judging by the competition that is already there. I think Carolyn should eventually use paid search instead of say a newspaper ad, but she'd have to be very smart about how much she pays and which words she buys. First priority for her business is to take care of the free, social networking opportunities and then branch out into paid advertising.
BTW - I made this post at 9:01 AM and the keyword search {"carolyn monday", hackettstown, nj} had no search results. By 9:45 this post appeared in the results proving how quick Google is and how quickly a blog post can influence results. Also, this post is #1 in the "Carolyn Monday" keyword.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
P.S. I never smoked cigarettes because when I was growing up my father smoked a ton of Parliment cigarettes especially in the little Toyota he owned. I can still smell that smoke blowing around that car and that pretty much ruined any chance I had to ever pick up a cigarette and put it in my mouth. Plus, if you actually lit up a Parliment around me I'll actually ask you to put it out or go somewhere else. Yes - any other cigarette but those vile Parliments.
I usually don't make political commentary on the site and this is my own opinion, but I have to be honest I'm really impressed with Gov. Sarah Palin's interviews with Katie Couric. I know that some people may not like the answers and even folks that I normally like to read like Marc Ambinder might ridicule her, but I thought she did great. I really don't get his commentary on disagreeing with Kissinger. She restated the McCain policy of not negotiating with leaders of "bad" countries until pre-conditions have been met including upfront diplomacy.
Watch the video yourself. I do think Couric was trying to twist her words around a little bit and try to get a gotcha moment, but Gov. Palin handled it quite well.
Worked a lot today, but took a break to attend a Washington Township Board of Education meeting where Everyday Math - Connected Math caused quite a commotion. I got back from the meeting and went to work again. Have I ever told you how much fun it is to design a search campaign around Joe Biden? Remind me to tell you after the election, but the campaign I just put up are awesome.
Hey, I love it when a well known and sometimes described as all-knowing political reporter comments on our paid search marketing for John McCain, the RNC, and other Republican clients. It is quite a little feather in the Connell Donatelli cap. Marc Ambinder from The Atlantic made a small post that got a lot of us fired up today. Titled Scoring the Tech Innovation, Marc wrote this
"Seems that the Republicans can lay claim to first mastering a total of
two: using Google ads to drive traffic to John McCain's website. "
While that little sentance doesn't seem that big of a deal to you non-outside the beltway folks it is a huge deal. Marc is widely read by political types, especially within both campaigns. Even though there has been a ton of articles written about McCain's paid search going way back to before the primary season, I can't help but believe this article in the Wall Street
Journal is what got people paying attention. The McCain campaign has ALWAYS been a big believer in paid search activity and even though the media liked to pay attention to competitor's display ads and social marketing we quietly began kicking people's butts in paid search a long time ago. Now because of this we are working on a ton of search campaigns and Connell Donatelli dominates political paid search. It just seemed to take a little while for the media to catch up with us.
Oh the stories I will be able to tell after we win the election.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
(P.S. - that's a picture of my two good friends Cyrus Krohn eCampaign director/internet guru and Peter Greenberger ace political director for Google outside McCain HQ at the Xcel Center.
It is Sunday morning and I usually play World of Warcraft with my son, but he is upstairs playing a PC game. So, I'm making several changes to our search campaign thanks to some newly approved landing pages. I love it when the whole team pulls together especially over a weekend. Also had to visit Google Trends to see what the world is searching on. You say you want to work in politics?
You know it is getting down to the wire when at 12:30AM I'm making a few large changes to our online campaign just to combat something that someone decided to run. They are not going to know what hit them and they will watch their paid search go into the toilet.
Going to sleep now. I have a 10AM meeting with the campaign,
I'm glad people are finally taking notice of the truly remarkable work we are doing and have been doing for the Senator's Campaign from Day 1. We really have been working together - the entire agency, the senior staff, and the eCampaign team. Sure I make the ads, the keywords, and handle the organization and optimization, but there are tons of people involved and the highest levels of the campaign get what we've been doing and what paid search can do for a political campaign.
Paid search marketing is the great equalizer between budgets. As long as you are smart, have experience, understand how to optimize your campaign, track back to goals, and have a great understanding on how the search engines work you can out market your opponent even when the opponent has more marketing dollars. Then when you add marketing dollars to an already proven model, the your opponents won't even know what hit them.
I always wondered what took people so long to actually track this. We've been running paid search ads since Day 0 for the Senator's campaign but I guess people finally decided to take a look at reality instead of just believing the hype. The campaign has been a big believer in search engine marketing from the very beginning and not just recently. Finally, when you think we should be doing something but don't see it there is probably a political reason for it or a budget reason for it; believe me we know how to run a modern search engine program.
I thought my post from the other day
would be enough for me, but with my kids asking questions while we are
watching the football game I feel like making a post. Instead of the
normal paragraph form, I'm just going to list out random thoughts that
I'm having...
No I never worked in the WTC and in fact the first time I even ventured into the Path Station was probably in the mid-90s
No I didn't know anyone that was there that day
When I joined CSFBdirect and had my office "downsized" I chose a
cube by the window because at least when my AT&T friends called me
I could say I had the greatest view in the world
WTC became my beacon when I finally came out of the covered roadway after being stuck in traffic on my way to the Holland Tunnel
I absolutely loved heading over to WTC during lunch to browse the Border's Book Store
For some reason, I still carry a Hale and Hearty Soup frequent buyer card in my wallet, punched last on 9/7 at the kiosk that used to be in front of the Path
I was supposed to have a meeting the morning of 9/11 in AOL's lower
Manhattan offices that was canceled the day before - I still keep the
copy of my calendar from that week
We used to go for drinks in Moran's some times after work even though it had over priced drinks
My last time through (9/7) I was in a hurry and didn't stop by the
Warner Brother's Store to pick my son up a stuffed Bugs Bunny; 5 years
later I don't let time get in the way any more
My wife had a doctor's visit to determine whether she was pregnant
(which she was); that still creeps me out when you hear about all of
the people that didn't know they were pregnant that day and lost someone
My last normal time in NYC was watching the ladies US Open Final
between the Williams sisters on 9/9; I haven't watched tennis live
since then
It helped me to write down what little things changed that day so I could remember what it was like before 9/11
As I wrote the other day, how good of a time you had at the convention is directly tied to
where your seats are, where your hotel is, and who you know. And knowing special people on the 3rd day of the convention definitely made that Wednesday one of those unforgettable days.
Wednesday started like a lot of the days with handing out that night's credentials to the NJ delegation, but by 11:30 that morning we were off to the Metrodome for a special event. You see the Wilf family invited the NJ Delegation over for a tailgate and a tour of the Metrodome. Plus, they had former
Vikings Head Coach Bud Grant there to greet us and tell some stories. It was really a great day and the good news was the McCain campaign really didn't have any pressing needs so I was able to steal away some time.
After a few hours it was back to the hotel and then a quick change into my suit and then I was off early to the convention. Once the NJ delegation arrived I did my favorite
job which was to pull people down from the 200 sections to the 100 section. I literally emptied out the entire section and then I met my friend and fellow Connell Donatelli teammate Jackie Huelbig who had one of the more coveted assets - the all important escort badge.
I met Jackie at Becki and Frank Donatelli's suite for some yummy snacks and this photo opportunity with Becki and Jackie. We watched Michael Steele give a great speech (I don't think it was televised on the networks) and then we went down to the floor. However before we arrived at the floor Jackie remembered that we had to make sure a certain search campaign was running so we stopped by Google's booth and logged into our AdWords account. Yes - in Google's booth and when somebody tried to take a picture of us I had to chase them away (not too hard when Westerners think everyone from NJ is related to Tony Soprano).
After turning an ad campaign live we pushed ourselves up to the rope line by the stage right below the New Mexico sign with a warning from one of the campaign staff who told me that I had to let media in front of me because we didn't have media credentials. Needless to say I was very nice to the photographers and reporters in my section.
Thanks to Jackie and her pass we had front row seats for Huckabee, Giuliani (the hardest name to type) and of course the Sarah Palin acceptance speech and later John McCain. I had a blast teaching those New Mexico delegates
how to scream Ruuuudddyyy and the only part of the evening that was a little rough was taking pictures around the security guard on the other side of the rope (that's his arm in the Rudy photo). Really being there that close for Palin's entrance was truly a memorable moment and without my friend Jackie I wouldn't have enjoyed the evening half as much as I did. Plus how was I supposed to take great videos like this....
Wednesday was the best day of the Convention trip for me. The NJ Delegation invited to the Metrodome, the Donatelli Suite, and floor passes right on the rope line by the stage for awesome speeches - it didn't get any better than that. Well the kobe beef sliders at the Google party the next day was pretty close....
This was my first trip to a Republican Convention so I thought it would be cool to give my own perspective. Most people ask me right off the bat how it was and my answer is always 3 hours of boredom followed by 2 hours of excitement. Most convention nights I helped move people
down from the 200 sections that NJ had down to the 100 section. A fellow aide to the NJ Delegation would move people from the 100 section down to the floor in the NJ delegation section so this allowed me to move people down from the nose bleeds. It usually took me about an hour to do this and thanks to the lack of elevators in the Xcel Center it meant walking down several flights of stairs multiple times. However, while this was going on there of course were the speakers who had the early slots and unfortunately for them very few people actually paid attention, even when it was someone good like Tim Pawlenty or Meg Whitman. Most people just talked and had their own conversation which for me was very rude.
I was lucky enough to go with NJ not as an alternate delegate but as an aide to the
delegation. I didn't have too much in the way of responsibility other than handing out credentials and moving people around; I especially liked moving people around because they were very grateful. However, one of the things that irked me a little was that the convention was like attending High School. Everyone compared credentials, where your seats were, where was your hotel, who did you see, who do you know, and what parties did you attend. Needless to say being reminded of high school was not a pleasant
experience for me.
NJ and quite a number of other delegations were housed out by the airport and while the accommodations were fine, we were away from the action. If you were located in Minneapolis you had a night life and if you were in St. Paul you were near the Xcel Center. The hotel locations of course played into the who had the better credentials scenario. On Monday I had an urgent request from the McCain team and had to take a $45 cab ride to their hotel in Minneapolis. However, NJ did a great job making sure the delegation had a fun time including a boat cruise, parties, and a trip to the Metrodome. ...
The first night in the convention was just a taste of what we were to expect. Jackie and I
went to The Heartland which was an awesome restaurant that only served food grown locally in a gourmet setting. The second night was good with Fred Thompson giving a great speech and of course Joe Lieberman's speech was historic. I had a floor pass that night and stayed in the NJ Delegation section for most of the night except when I moved up to Nevada to get better pictures of Senator Lieberman. I was able to snap some great photos while I was on the floor.
All and all the first two nights were good. I know that not everyone can be in close hotels or close to the stage, but it definitely contributes to your overall experience as you'll see in my second post tomorrow.
I grabbed (friends on the campaign told me to stop using the word "shot" or "shoot") this video of Sarah Palin's entrance into the convention. Thanks to my friend Jackie, I was on the rope line.
It is 3AM EST so I'm tired but what a night/day I had. First the NJ delegation was invited by the Wilf family to the Metrodome and then it was off to the convention. I helped move a lot of guests down to the alternate delegate section and then I went to the Donatelli Suite to see Becki, Frank, and Jackie. After some tasty snacks and beer, Jackie and I had to comadere a laptop in Google's booth to do some work quickly. Then Jackie escorted me down to the floor where I pushed up to the rope line at the right hand corner of the stage. Mike Huckabee and of course Rudy wowed us but the star of the night was Sarah Palin. However, since I'm tired I can't type any more I figured you could just cast your eyes at this crisp photo I took about 25 feet from her. Enjoy and good night.