Your Online Marketing Sucks

Once in a while, I see some less than awesome online marketing, and I’m just concerned that someone is getting paid to produce this crap.

So your client comes to you and says, I need a blog.  Always willing to please, you setup another random blog on Google’s Blogspot and tell them to write a 10,000 word intro post.  You don’t bother to think about integrated a blog into your website as a content management tool to make sure the website remains relevant and you’re not directing traffic away from your cause.  Brilliant.

Since you’re on a roll and your client can’t stop typing, you put a rambling note about your blog in your email newsletter.  That extra bit of wasted text really doesn’t do much to sell the blog, but it sure fills that prime, above the fold, email marketing real estate with something.  It’s definitely something.

Further on down the email newsletter, the client wants to plug every service they have available, because everyone is still reading on their 6th scroll of the page. 

So we plug a job board.  Most of the jobs are a little stale, but who cares, it’s content, and content is king on the internets.  Of course, as you work diligently for your client, you check, double check, and re-check the links in the email newsletter so you get the maximum impact.

Oops, you didn’t check that last link.  Unless that band is called Talent Engine, you’ve got the wrong website. 

Of course, it really just points out that not only did you not check the links on this client’s email, but you didn’t setup your server for www to work on that subdomain.  Is that three stikes yet?

Google’s 20% Incomplete Products

Google has always flaunted it’s 20% time idea, where engineers are encouraged to take some random ideas and come up with products any decent product marketing company would have already had on the roadmap.  Of course, maybe they like it that way, so until GOOG hits $200 they can continue to do that kind of thing.

The problem is that with that 20%, a lot of Google products could really be useful, such as:

- Google Reader:  The links in the start page work, so after you read the teaser, the link clicks through to the same page.  This was probably a 20% time project enhancement that ran out of time.

- Gmail: Great, you made it easy to manage multiple accounts, except when I send an email with on of them, it says send “on behalf of” my google account which I prefer to keep private.  Maybe Google could use some of that 20% time and realize that’s likely a fixable issue.

-  Google Search: Believe it or not, the answer to every question is not a blog.  Since you can’t tell an engineer what to do with their 20% time, let’s hope it comes to them in a vision.

You’re right, Google’s 20% time isn’t causing 80% of the problems.