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Perhaps old news in the blogosphere at this stage, but I wanted to give Perlico a mention for their recent viral marketing campaign involving a duck quacking on their IVR (Interactive Voice Response) telephone system. Yes a duck quacking, you read it correctly. Ring 1890 88 66 07 and wait to hear option three. Before any of the options are read out you do of course have to listen to their marketing lines about how much cheaper than Eircom they are.

The marketing team at Perlico obviously knew that people would talk (and write) about this because it’s a bit off the wall however I’m not sure they were expecting over 70,000 calls to their sales number in just over three days. The 70,000 figure comes from Mark Cleary, Perlicos COO. Cleary says “Since this launch, based on the volumes of calls, the campaign has been a phenomenal success. In just over 3 days we have received over 70,000 calls and added a significant number of new customers as a result which make this one of the most successful viral campaigns in Ireland.”

Cleary also says “This campaign started off entirely by word of mouth which helps to demonstrate the power of the Internet and Email as a viral marketing approach. The duck quacking IVR has now been featured on several radio stations across the country and the call volumes continue to increase by the hour”

Of course we all knew the power of the Internet and Email as viral marketing approaches, right? right? Fair play to Perlico, their marketing team deserve a raise for this.

Since I’m still suffering from last nights work social to get drunk with my now ex boss one last time before he left our ICT team and since I’m off to the fight tomorrow (no not in the Swiss Cottage - in the point depot!) and hopefully the big Dublin & Kerry game in Croker on Sunday I’m just going to take it ham & cheesy tonight and relax with a few beats and update my blog.

For this update and in true Richard Hearne style (see Unison & Continuum) I’m going to ‘out’ someone for not playing by the rules. The unfortunate ’so and so’ on this occasion is popular Dublin based radio station Spin 103.8 who appears to be conducting some good old fashioned meta jacking on their offical website located at http://www.spin1038.com/. Meta Jacking is the process of putting your competitors names in your meta keywords and or meta description tags in the hope that if someone searches for your competitors name your website would come up in the results too. Spin have done this by including the names of rival radio stations such as 98FM, FM104, Today FM and some others in their meta keywords tag, similar stuff is being done with their meta description tag too. Although I’m not a lawyer I believe I’m right when I say that this is a form of trademark infringement and could potentially result in a day in court for the Spin 103.8 legal eagles. The meta keywords tag as lifted directly from their home page is below:

I’m wondering who does their search engine optimisation because even putting aside the legal issues this sort of technique doesn’t even work. It may have worked somewhat years ago but these days meta tags aren’t given much value at all by the search engines so it’s actually a complete waste of time. Your thoughts are welcome, additionally I wouldn’t mind a couple of trackbacks :-)…

Everyone knows the benefits of using a blog and blogging for marketing reasons. Blogging is simply one of the best ways to get yourself or your company known as an expert in your industry and perhaps more importantly to get in touch with potential clients. Blogging as a recruitment tool though? This is something I’m currently pondering the merits of. I suppose it like other things has pros and cons, I’ve noticed that the iQ Content guys seem to be giving it a bash anyhow. They’re looking for a project manager and have already got some ’press’ from many of Ireland’s leading bloggers. The following URLs show this:

http://www.mneylon.com/blog/archives/2007/08/14/project-manager-required-chez-iq-content/
http://www.mulley.net/2007/08/20/fluffy-links-monday-august-20th-2007/
http://www.redcardinal.ie/general/14-08-2007/iqcontent-project-manager/

I’m going to keep an eye on this to see how they get on but seemingly they already have had applications from people who learnt about the job on other peoples blogs. It’s an interesting approach and sure as hell beats paying sites like Monster & IrishJobs to advertise vacant positions. Good job from iQ Content - pun intended. Your thoughts are as always welcome.

Was doing a search earlier today for a Dublin based company called Sureskills who provide a variety of IT Services & Training. Logically my first step was to search for ‘sureskills‘ on Google as I wasn’t sure of the exact URL. Google being Google returned their site #1, however I noticed that one of Sureskills competitors namely New Horizons Ireland was running an Adword ad triggered by the keyword ’sureskills’. This is obviously an attempt by New Horizons Ireland at taking business directly from their competitors and is completely allowed under the terms and conditions of Google Adwords. If however a competitor of Sureskills tried to plug the term ’sureskills’ into their actual ad text well that’s something that can find its way into court quite quickly.

I found another example when I searched for ’Webtrade‘. Webtrade are a web dev/design company (who I actually interviewed for a couple of years ago) based in Rathfarnham, Dublin. In this case however not one but two competitors are bidding on Webtrades’ name. Not quite sure where I stand in regards to the question of ethics in relation to bidding on competitors names, the more striking question for me however would be the value (or lack of value) of bidding on competitors names. If someone is searching for a specific company, for example Sureskills, is it likely that they will click through to a website that isn’t that of Sureskills? Perhaps it’s useful for a competitor to simply get their URL/ad seen anyhow just in case the searcher might visit them after being on the Sureskills website?

Incidentally you may also notice a lot of companies actually bid on their own names. Examples of companies which I’ve spotted doing this recently include Vodafone, PaddyPower & Clearscape. These companies are doing this perhaps as a counter-measure to anyone else bidding on their name. Whatever the reason the technique of bidding on your own name is advocated by one of Irelands leading PPC experts and thus may be worth some consideration.

Ever get that? When you really want to do something which you feel you would be great at but when the opportunity comes around the timing just ain’t right? What am I waffling on about you may ask? Well during the week I turned down pretty much my dream job which was offered to me on a plate. The chap that offered me the job (over the phone) was the managing director of a small company specialising in SEO and Internet marketing services with an Irish (obviously) and a UK presense. I had meet him before and we had talked over the phone about various issues on a couple of different occasions. I had mentioned to him that I noticed his company was advertising for a vacant position (which he told me had actually been filled), it was definitely more ‘banter’ than a formal application but anyhow he obviously had remembered what I had said when the position became free again.

The job itself was essentially a combined web development and SEO/Internet marketing role, which is basically the perfect job for me as I have a strong passion for both (SEO/Internet marketing more so though). My understanding of the role was that it would have involved developing APIs, tools and applications for use inhouse and on client websites as well as performing organic search engine optimisation, PPC based search engine marketing, conversion improvement etc. for the company itself and for their clients too of course. The direct salary that was on offer was a bit better than what I’m on now I must admit but the overall package wasn’t close. For example my current employer pays an amount equivalent to 8% of my wages into my pension fund every week, I also have a semi defined (I roughly know what I’ll be getting each year) bonus written into my contract, additionally I get approximately 50% of my electricity bill paid all as part of the overall package included by my current employer, none of this (or similar) was on offer for this new job.

I would of course want to be rewarded well to change jobs, but in saying that the ‘package’ wasn’t the main reason I didn’t accept the offer. I probabely would have taken a ‘hit’ (compared to my current job) on any overall package due to the increased job satisfaction I most likely would have gotten from the actual role itself. Additionally I liked the idea of being able to play a big part in helping a small company grow, rather than just being another face in a large company as is the case with my current job setup.

Infact the main reason I turned the offer down was due to bad timing, perhaps if the offer had come 3/4 months later I would have at least furthered my interest and possibly tried to bargin for more benefits (not necessarily monetary) before finally accepting or rejecting, but due to the fact that my yearly XMAS bonus (which you don’t get if your leaving) was on the way, I was due a raise in January and also the fact that I have just rejoined the gym (paying for a year upfront) close to my current job meant that the timing was just not right for such a big change. Some people of course will say that the timing is always right for your dream job. Oh well I’ve made my bed and now I’m lying in it.

Folks I recently deleted two threads from my forums, these threads were about a year old and thus were spidered and indexed by the ‘big three’. If I had have spotted these threads at the time they were posted I would have deleted them straight away as they were simply threads going on about how great a certain company is, I believe SPAM is the word you kids are using these days, yes SPAM plain and simple.

Anyhow the threads got through the forum moderation team (me) for whatever reason I don’t know, perhaps it was a busy week so I didn’t even know these threads existed. That was until about two months ago when I started getting emails asking me to remove them because they were ‘inaccurate’.. whatever that means. When I didn’t ‘jump’ when they asked me to ‘jump’ they started asking me for my solictors number so legal action could begin.

Can you believe that? They spam my site and then about a year later when one of the threads appears in Google and I refuse to remove it (at least for the time being) because I don’t like being told what to do be spammers (as it kind of means they ‘win) they threaten legal action. I asked them what possible grounds would they have for legal action against me and my site, there was no response. That was the end of the email ‘correspondence’ (or threats), however this week the voicemails and phonecalls from Manhattan in New York started coming in, about three or four in total, asking me in a not so pleasent tone to ‘cease and desist’ and remove the threads as they were ‘inaccurate’.

I toyed with the idea for a couple of days, not actually knowing if this went further (and I continued to refuse to remove the threads) could it put the future of the site at risk. I came to the decision to just remove the threads and forget about them just in case any ill effects could come my direction by way of any legal action this company may opt to take.

I have to admit that I didn’t feel good about it afterwards, I felt I was right (morally at least) to refuse to remove these spam threads (which by this stage were ’buried’ and not detracting from the quality of topics) from my forums so removing them certainly felt like handing a victory to the spammers. What do you guys think? What would you have done? Was I indeed breaking some ‘law’ which could have resulted in legal action being taken against me? Have I let the ’side’ down? Should I have made it more frustrating for them?