The blog is quite messy right now. I’m working on it. (nobody cares but hey… you never know who might come by…)

]]> http://www.gaetanbertin.com/web-marketing/site-under-maintenance/feed/ 0 http://www.gaetanbertin.com/web-marketing/microsoft-vs-google-who-will-be-king-of-the-mail-hill/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=microsoft-vs-google-who-will-be-king-of-the-mail-hill http://www.gaetanbertin.com/web-marketing/microsoft-vs-google-who-will-be-king-of-the-mail-hill/#comments Fri, 29 Jul 2011 09:52:59 +0000 Gaetan Bertin http://www.gaetanbertin.com/?p=520

Microsoft and Google are fighting for the email territory.
Some days ago, Google started a campaign to promote GMail.
2 videos have been released by Google.
The first one recommends to make the switch from the “email address you got when you first started using the Internet”to a GMail address.

The second one to help existing Gmail users launch an email intervention to make their friends switch to GMail.

Today, a Microsoft sales video from the Microsoft Global Exchange Sales Conference leaked.
In the video, Microsoft presents the GMail Man, reading everyone’s email to serve them irrelevant ads based on keywords found in their correspondance.

Did the Microsoft video really “leak” or is this some kind of undercover viral campaign?
In any case, the war is not over.

Here are the story I’ve read today (since I wasn’t at the royal Wedding) and that you might find interesting:

Twitter app permissions
ReadWriteWeb has a story about the new, more detailed login screen for Twitter apps that gives more details about what the app can do with your account but also explains that “a few key permissions are omitted from this screen”

Serious game
James Fallows writes about the return of Clippy for The Atlantic. Microsoft’s annoying paperclip is back to teach you how to use Microsoft Office through a game called Ribbon Hero 2. I haven’t been able to test it yet since we’re still using Office 2003 at work =) Anyway, this might be a good example of a “serious game” that I might try if I can find some time at home.

Creating content for SEO
Search Engine Land tells us more about creating true great and unique content to improve ranking in SERPs. It’s always been difficult for most companies to understand that what web users find interesting is not exactly what their marketing or communication teams find interesting.
The related entries at the end of the article are well worth a look too.

F-Commerce
Social Commerce Today confronts two articles about F-Commerce. The articles are from Econsultancy and Computing Magazine and have a different point of view on Facebook ‘s possibilities for e-commerce.

SEO & Social Media
And finally, a video you could watch, SEOMoz’s Whiteboard friday about Correlation Data for SEO and Social Media Analysis. Rand Fishkin explains the correlation between high rankings in SERPs and the number of incoming links and Facebook shares your pages get.

The cost of QR Codes (and Data Matrix, Microsoft Tags…) is close to nothing for advertisers. Close, because you still need to pay someone (be it an intern or even yourself) to generate it.

That’s why we see more and more QR Codes everywhere in France. On billboards, in magazines, on book covers, in bus stops…
It is easy to use for advertisers and makes them feel like they are doing something new, something mobile, something trendy. There’s a “WOW effect” involved there.

But there are 2 problems.
First, the cost of QR Codes for users is too high. When facing a QR Code in a magazine, the user:

• does not know what this is and needs to read the “how to” next to the QR Code, if there’s one (some advertisers think everybody knows what it is)
• If he knows or understand how it works, he must know install an app on its phone if he doesn’t have one. Some Android, Nokia and Blackberry phones now come with a built-in reader but I guess the share of those is still small
• Once he has the app installed, he must launch it, stay in front of the ad (easy if it’s in a magazine but different if you’re in the street facing a billboard), scan it… without knowing what will happen next! Will it download something? Try to make a call? Open a web page? Send private information like my contact details to the advertiser?
• Last and not least, he needs to have access to the internet when he scans a QR Code, which is most of the time not the case if he’s in the subway, where there’s a lot of QR Codes to scan (yes, this is stupid).

The second problem is that QR Codes exist since the mid-90′s. It made sense then because mobile phones had 12 keys and it was difficult to tap a complete URL on such a thing.
But now, most of the mobile phones come with a complete AZERTY/QWERTY keyboard and URL shorteners make it easy to display short, fast to enter URLs on ads.

In my opinion, QR Codes are obsolete.

Great surprise this morning when I launched Xiti (yes, everyone still calls it Xiti) on a different browser than I usually do.
There’s an ad for their iPhone app on the login page.
Looks like it’s been out for a while but since I’m automatically logged in with my other browser I had never seen the news.

The app looks great so far.
You can only access websites with an Analyzer NX subscription but if you don’t have one, I guess you don’t need to access your stats on your mobile.

An iPhone app was definitely a feature that was missing. I’ve used apps for Webtrends (official) & Google analytics (not official).
I’ve checked and there’s also one for SiteCatalyst and one for coremetrics.
It seems most of the web analytics platform have an iPhone app now.

As far as the iPad is concerned, the Analyzer NX app does not have a specific iPad version but you can use the normal version in Safari on your iPad, I’ve never encountered any problems.

I had a talk this morning with a fellow Search Marketer.
She told me every consultant in her agency was speciliazed either in Paid Search or SEO.
The main objective behind that is to ensure each consultant is the best in his domain.
I agree with that and have to admit that, when I was managing a team of Search Marketers, I asked them to specialize for that exact purpose.

But, you still need people who are experts in both area to work on the overall search strategy.
The power of SEO & Paid Search together in a single strategy is far more efficient than tactics applied by experts in each domain.

There’s a need for specialists and all-around search marketers.

I feel the need to write, once again.
And, as you can see, I feel the need to write in english.
Same player, slightly different topics (more topics in fact, wait & see), and a new design for the blog coming soon.

Maybe I’ll manage to blog for more than 2 months this time.

Isn’t that funny?
Well, I will not exactly complain about the Internet but more about the way some companies, advertisers and agencies see and use the web.
I’ve been working on SEM, SIM, Traffic building, performance and web analytics in different agencies for the past 8 years and have seen lots of websites. Some were good, some were excellent but some were just pure marketing crap, nonsense for users… And that bothered me like hell.

Anyway, what I’ll try to do here (besides writing in a correct English) is talking about my experience, past and present/future.
I guess my present/future experience will be slightly different since I’m now joining the advertiser side of the web.
Maybe I’ll understand why most advertisers have so much difficulties getting it. Maybe I’ll be able to help my new employee getting it faster.
That’s what I’ll try to do.

Hope you’ll enjoy reading my blog.

PS: I know I need to work on the theme but don’t have any idea at the moment.