EyeballFarm Invited to the Mothership...Google Bay Area (And other updates)

Has it really been over a month since I last posted? Sorry, but doers “do” and I have been doing a lot of "do" lately. (Perhaps too much frankly.)

Only this week returning from a great, but very brief, Barbados vacation, where I still managed three meetings with travel and tourism companies there, preaching the wonders of search marketing. One word of advice, find the funds to visit Sandy Lane and the Green Monkey golf course…OMG.)

Lesson to self…Just because there is a lot of low hanging fruit on the digital vine, it (still) doesn't make one wiser to try to collect all of it (I think I included that same lesson last year…)

However, we have done much this year that I feel incredibly proud of, especially given the size of our shop (yes, it matters).

Automotive Retail Marketing - The Good News: SearchEngineUps (SM) launched to provide local search engine marketing to the retail automotive dealers industry in March. With partner Intelligent Direct Marketing (IDM) we have been able to put more that 32 dealer-months of contracts on page-1 of Google for their local markets, producing well over 1 million, page-1 Google impressions for these dealers in just the first three months.

The Not so Good: Auto dealers are hitting troubled times, especially American. As a whole, the industry is fast to move on new promises of a fast(er) buck, but still slow to understand the values of long-time brand building – ROI tracking and true gap reporting and deep analytics, Impressions and interaction Vs. “leads”, web site coding that allows real communication with search engines to enable genuinely valuable organic placement, the list goes on, and on and on. A tough crowd to hold on to and to demonstrate convincing ROI to.

Whichever company can overcome the obstacle of the dealers themselves will certainly inherit a vast fortune, but the road will be combative and confrontational until a new breed of dealers begin to make decisions.

Local, Retail Home Furnishings - The Good News: Western Home Furnishing Association and I have been courting each other for over a year now resulting in my writing a cover story article on retail furniture marketing and search engines (http://www.whfa.org/displayindustryarticle.cfm?articlenbr=29938) and securing our second vertical trade group partner for searchengineups (SM) with our beta launch of Terri’s in November.

The Not so Good: Although local furniture remains one of the vast untapped markets for a company like ours, the retailers seem reluctant to engage. To be honest, our value proposition (Read: “pitch”) may not be simple enough.

We have a very small beta test live now, but I am afraid the particular advertiser is not the best test subject – going out of business, no name brand in the market, and a true hodge-podge of merchandise, and a sub-tiny test budget. Still, we have placed the retailer in front of more than 3,000 locally targeted shoppers and drawn over 500 into the sales site.

Upon final analysis, trade group sales in this market may not be the answer. Direct marketing may turn out to be a better choice.

Local Restaurant Search Engine Marketing - The Good News: Sysco Foods of Sacramento, California, looks to be our next vertical partner for this platform with the planned launch of ten Northern California restaurant marketing packages scheduled for Q1 of 2007.

The POSSIBLE Bad News: Restaurant owners are not the biggest spenders on the planet and with an estimated failure rate of 70% (from recall – not an exact number) they may also prove to be a credit challenge and collection nightmare. However, the demand for restaurant and dining information remains huge and if by partnering with a company as large and well managed as Sysco, we can get to the right trial companies, the model should prove itself out in such a way as to make its appeal much wider and its perception of risk, lower. (yeah, right. There I go again, selling my number one customer – me.)

Prosper Magazine – The Good News: I have just finished my first year of being a columnist with Prosper Magazine’s print version. “The New Marketing: Selling With Technology” column has opened a million dialogs and a million more opportunities. Writing a regular column, in print, has contributed credibility I underestimated. The power of pulp is still very real and seems to still carry with it more weight than that of online writing with certain audience sets.

The Not So Good: Nothing, really. It is fun and I learn so much about being succinct and self editing every time I am reminded of my 800 word limit.

Our Own Web Site & Blog – The Good News: We know it is not a good site. We know, we know. BUT – by practicing what we preach and using our own tools, we have managed to acquire some very enviable organic search engine rankings.

Some of the more competitive terms:

“local search engine marketing”
= Page 1, Yahoo
= Page 1, MSN

“Marketing Sacramento”
= Page 1, Google
= Page 1, Yahoo

Plus 14 additional page 1 results across Google, Yahoo and MSN, for some of the most important terms in our industry – local search engine and online marketing


Other Projects, Partners, Philanthropy and Potentials I’ll be covering here:

Projects:

PinYatta(SM)
What if newspapers and other offline pubs were able to connect with their readers in the same way ebay.com does, forming an instant marketplace between their local advertisers and local buyers, driven buy reader demand and request? Can you imagine the classified model turned upside down and inside out? We can. Would that be powerful? Would it be an overstatement to call this platform and business model an industry saver? (Probably, but it sounds cool.)

New Partners:

MeringCarson Advertising
MeringCarson Advertising: It has been my pleasure to work with perhaps our single largest client to date for over three months now, MeringCarson.com, resulting in a new partnership between our two companies – MeringCarson Interactive. As a result, we are now running the interactive and search marketing programs for some incredibly forward thinking companies, including;
Pebble Beach Resorts
Sutter Health
Raley’s
California Raisins
With at least 5 others set to go live Q1 2007


Philanthropy
http://www.LemonAIDEMakers.org Early this year, a young girl in our community was diagnosed with an aggressive form of Leukemia. She is only 2 years older than my oldest daughter. This struck home in a way that made me know I needed to do something to help. Our answer was a Virtual Lemon “Aide” stand. Although little and quiet, we have been able to raise many dollars in a very grassroots way – using what we know of local, online marketing to make a very small dent in one family’s very large and growing medical debt.
It is not to late to help Katie Cramer

Potential:

Gannet
Travidia
TeleDirect
Home Publishing LLC
Prosper Publishing

Huh-Oh… Out of time once again. Check back soon.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot – The reference to the “mother ship” in the headline refers to an invitation to visit Google next week. This is not a conference or other group or industry invite, it is an invite sent to me directly, presumably expressing interest in me/us due to the little dust clouds we’ve been kicking up these p[ast two years, and hopefully resulting in a partnership opportunity to participate in Google Radio and Google Print with Eyeballfarm and MeringCarson. (Frankly, if it were to empty the waste paper basket at the executive office or to scoop mashed potatoes at the employee cafeteria – I’d go. More later…)
Jim