Internet Marketing Blog

Super Bowl Search Activity

I turn again to our faithful friend Google Trends to take a look at the search engine queries people perform surrounding the single most popular annual event on the planet, the Super Bowl.

The Day Before The Super Bowl

On Saturday, February 2, the day before Super Bowl XLII, people are more interested in the weather than the game. And I don't mean the weather at the game; they are interested in a certain groundhog named Punxsutawney Phil. Four of the top 10 searches on that day are devoted to the rodent.

You have to scroll down to the 14th most popular search phrase before you find one related to football. Searches for Art Monk reveal an interest in the Washington Redskins wide receiver who was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame that day. Only 13 of the 100 most popular searches that day had to do with football, and of those 13 only 5 are related to the big game (superbowl time, super bowl time, superbowl schedule, superbowl kickoff, and what time does the superbowl start).

All the other football searches had to do with the Hall of Fame or this year's inductees:

• art monk
• nfl hall of fame
• andre tippett
• darrell green
• keith curtis
• pro football hall of fame
• emmitt thomas
• fred dean
• gary zimmerman

The day before the Super Bowl, then, people are researching the Hall of Fame inductees and preparing for Super Bowl Sunday.

Super Bowl Sunday Searches

By contrast, on February 3, Super Bowl Sunday, the top 100 searches are nearly all related to the game; there were either football related searches or searches for personalities, ads, or events having to do with the Super Bowl.

I laughed out loud when I saw the most popular search (how old is tom petty) because that was the first thing that popped into my head when he took the stage for the halftime show.

Of the top 100, only four searches were not related to the game:

• mira sorvino - who was to appear in the episode of House that followed the game,
• nick cokas - some guy who married an American Idol contestant
• ernie pyle - the famed WWII correspondent whose death photos had recently been published
• maria shriver - the Kennedy family figure who recently endorsed Barack Obama

Demonstrating just how much of a cultural event the Super Bowl has become, none of the top 10 searches are related to the actual game. Very few of the top 100 queries, in fact, are about the game itself.

Most of the queries are for personalities appearing at the event (tom petty & jordan sparks) or for Super Bowl ads.

Super Bowl Monday Searches

The day after the Super Bowl, people turn their attention elsewhere. As of 10:30 p.m. CST Monday, February 4, there are only eight Super Bowl related queries in the top 100. A Super Bowl related search does not occur until number 20, with giants parade. The rest were:

• super bowl commercials
• ticker tape parade
• new york giants parade
• superbowl commercials 08
• superbowl ads
• will ferrell superbowl commercial
• david tyree

Colts.com Internet Marketing

I've been meaning to write about this for a month but since the Super Bowl is today, I figured it's now or never.

Early last month a got a call from Dwight Adams, a reporter for the Indianapolis Star, who wanted my opinion for a story he was working on about the online marketing efforts of the Indianapolis Colts in particular and the NFL in general. He called me because of a two posts I did on the redesign of NFL.com.

When a reporter calls asking me to talk about my two favorite subjects--Internet marketing and football--I'm definitely game.

After taking a look at the Colts' online presence, it became quite clear quite quickly that the team is ahead of the curve compared to a lot of other teams' online marketing efforts.

That didn't really surprise me, though, because Indy's online presence is overseen by the Colts' Executive Director of Digital Business, Pat Coyle. I've been following Pat's excellent Sports Marketing 2.0 blog for a while now; it is the only blog that I know of that gives you a perspective of the Internet marketing issues being faced by professional sports franchise.

The Colt's maintain three web sites: The team's web site at Colts.com and the social networking sites MyColts.net and MyIndianaFootball.com. MyColts.net caters to the team's fans while MyIndianaFootball.com associates the Colts' brand with high school football. (There's even a team page for the high school I attended.)

The Colts are embracing social and embeddable media in a big way. The site features a podcast, a widget you can add to your blog or MySpace or Facebook page:

And embeddable video:

At MyColts.net, fans can discuss any and all things Colts on the site's forums or they can read Head Coach Tony Dungy's blog where he actually does post. Having your head coach maintain a blog is way ahead of the curve. Kudos for the Dungy and the Colts for having the courage and the insight to launch it.

The team does not appear to have a presence at the most popular social media sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube & Flickr. That absence, I suspect, has a lot to do with the NFL's attitude toward those sites than anything else: The league routinely asks YouTube, for example, to delete game highlights that users have uploaded.

Nevertheless, the Colt's online presence points the way toward those social networking sites. I'm betting that before too long, the Colts model and outposts at YouTube, Facebook, et. al. will be standard operating procedure.

Roger Clemens Posts Steroids Denial On YouTube

Major League Baseball pitcher Roger Clemens has posted a video to YouTube denying the Mitchell Report allegations that he was a "juicer." This is a fascinating new tactic for online reputation management:

Battling Brands: Cable TV vs. The NFL

The issue has been percolating relatively quietly for months but became a topic of media coverage again last Thursday with the NFL Network airing it's first exclusive football game between the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys.

The marquee matchup between two teams who had thus far lost only a game each was the first time an NFL game was the first time an NFL game was broadcast exclusively on the league's own television network, leaving many fans who did not get the NFL Network at the mercy of friends or their local bars that did.

At issue is whether the NFL Network should be a part of the basic cable package just like ESPN is (the NFL's position) or whether the network should be a part of a for-fee sports "tier" of channels offered by cable companies to keep people who don't necessarily want the league's network from paying for it(the cable companies' position).

Both the NFL and the cable companies have been running a blame game advertising campaign hoping to pressure the other side to cry uncle:

This is an interesting case of brand dynamics, if you will, and how they play out online.

Let's start with the strength of the brands themselves.

I don't think there's much of an argument that the NFL has a much stronger brand than cable companies. People who love football almost inherently love the NFL because it provides them with the best of what they love. Cable companies, on the other hand, are rarely loved. For most people, they are a forced buy, the rates keep getting jacked up for no apparent reason, and it's a major hassle to switch providers so you just have to grin and bear it.  For this reason, the NFL starts with a huge advantage.

Now let's look at how people interact with these two brands online.

Football lovers interact with the NFL brand all the time online. By simply reading stories about their local team in their local newspaper or at team blogs, they are interacting with the NFL brand. When they visit the football sections of sports web sites like Yahoo! Sports or SI.com or ESPN.com, they are interacting with the NFL brand. When fans watch football highlights that have been uploaded to YouTube, or photos that have been posted to Flickr, they're interacting with the NFL brand.

And, as much as I've been critical of the site, the recently redesigned NFL.com delivers a ton of great content to football fans, including video highlights of all the games and historical data about former players. It's a playground for NFL fans.

All of these online interactions with the NFL are positive and pleasant experiences for fans.

Consumer interaction with their cable company's brand online is the polar opposite. Remembering that most people already have a negative feeling about their cable company, they come to the online interaction with a bad attitude already.

The interaction with cable company brands are one of three ways 1) when shopping for a cable company, 2) when paying your cable bill or looking at a statement, or 3) through their Internet portal.

One of the primary considerations for most people who are shopping for a cable company is price. And since the cable companies offer tiered pricing rather than a la cart--which is what most people prefer--they see that they'll have to pay for channels they don't want and will never watch. That's a reminder of how expensive cable is.

When they are interacting with a cable company brand through their e-payment process, people have a negative experience as they watch their bank accounts get that much poorer.

People who get Internet access through their cable company often have that cable companies' portal as their home page, so every time they go online, they interact with the cable brand. This is obviously a much more pleasant experience that the previous two, but it is still a reminder of your cable company, which may just make you think about how much you're paying, again.

Interacting with NFL content online carries no such risk.

It remains to be seen who wins as this battle continues to play out for the rest of the season, but my bet will be on the NFL.

And bar owners.

Yahoo Upgrades Search Engine, Blends Search Results

Yahoo! has just unveiled upgrades to their search results after Microsoft had done the same late last month for their search engine, Live.com.

One of the primary upgrades is Yahoo!'s Search Assist function that tries to anticipate what you want as you type your search query by offering related alternative search phrases in a similar but more comprehensive way than Google's preceding service, Google Suggest.

Here's a screencast of Yahoo!'s Search Assist in action:

Search Dominance With Blended Results

Search Engine Land provides a good rundown of Yahoo!'s new search features but for our purposes, the one I'm most interested in is that they've added blended search results. That means they are including within the search results page links to  audio, video and photos as well as web pages. For video, they are actually including an in-line player, so you can watch the video directly on the search results page.

Google, of course, has been doing just that for some time. The following screenshot shows Google's in-line video player for the search results for "joe mauer batting tips." (Click on the graphic for more detail):

That same search, "joe mauer batting tips," is going to help me demonstrate the importance of not just search engine optimizing your own web sites, but also uploading and optimizing your own content to other online centers of gravity where large audiences congregate and share such as YouTube and Flickr.

We uploaded and optimized a 14 minute training video that comes with the Mauer's Quickswing batting training product at many of the popular video sharing sites such as YouTube, Google Video and iFILM. We also opened a Flickr account and uploaded and optimized photos of the Mauer's Quickswing. We did this long before Google rolled out their blended search results feature.

But when they did, the result of that work was that the preponderance of the links on the first page of results for "joe mauer batting tips" lead to content that we provided, either through optimized web sites or optimized content on other sites.

Now that the other two major search engines offer blended search, the same dominance of the search results holds true for both Microsoft's Live.com for "joe mauer batting tips":

...as well as at Yahoo! for "joe mauer batting tips":

The happy end result was that the vast majority of the links went to either the client's site directly, or to essentially product placements, with either photographic or video demonstrations of the Quickswing product.

That's search saturation.

ESPN Does Viral Video

ESPN has gone embeddable. Their ESPN Video Beta section provides users with YouTube like functionality, particularly the ability to embed video clips of their programming:

See also:

• MTV's Online Music Video Marketing Strategy
• NFL.com Redesign - Web 1.5
• NBC's Botched Response To Natalie Portman Online Video

Micromarketing Strategy - 3 Words

Fred Smoot Tackles Steve Smith
Originally uploaded by bpatton

A friend of mine told me yesterday that Washington Redskins' and former Minnesota Vikings' cornerback Fred Smoot had been cut.  I was skeptical. As a football nut, I follow NFL news quite closely, so had Smoot been cut it would have caught my eye and I surely would've known about it.

Turns out Smoot wasn't cut, at least not during this round of roster moves. But he had been cut previously and that is why my friend thought Smoot was out on the street. He'd read a headline from a blog aggregator that had not been updated in some time. The headline was an old one and the headline was all that my friend had read of the story; it read "Fred Smoot Cut."

Three words.

My friend got the message; it's just that it was wrong. His mistake is understandable. It happens to me all the time. I read only the headline of a vast amount of content because there's far too much for me to consume. Even if the headline is current and accurate, I've got absolutely no context or depth to the story that goes with it.

I constantly preach that you must be able to boil your message down to three words.

As information distribution channels proliferate through RSS and as more and more people consume information through an increasing array of mediums and devices such as RSS readers and smart phones, the importance of developing a micromarketing strategy only increases.

The reason your message must be boiled down to three words is that it has to fit in an email subject line if you're doing an email marketing campaign, it must be easily scannable when read on a smart phone if you're doing a mobile marketing campaign, and it must be easy to digest when read in a list such as a in a blog reader or when you're doing online PR when using an Internet wire service.

But it's not just the logistics of where your message will be displayed and how to make it fit that you have to think about. As the aforementioned Fred Smoot story illustrates, you have to think about what knowledge your three-word message will convey to the recipient now and in the future.

NFL.com Redesign - Web 1.5

I was a bit critical in my last post about the NFL.com website redesign, and the failure to account for existing incoming links to the site from pro football bloggers and elsewhere.

Pat Coyle, the Digital Business Director for the Indianapolis Colts, points out at his Sports Marketing 2.0 blog, "how hard it is to relaunch a site for one nfl team. I can only imagine how hard it was to get this league site back up off the ground!!"

It's a point very well taken and something I should have mentioned previously. The depth of content that the NFL has to deal with for their site is simply astounding. NFL.com is not just a site for news stories of all things National Football League, it is a trove of data on individual games, teams, players--and now historical data on all of the above--as well as video and photographs. The list goes on.

The programming and logistics of bringing all of that together into a coherent and usable whole is pretty staggering when you think about it.

So, yes, I second Pat's sentiments, however belatedly.

But I do write about Internet marketing and after further review of the site, I've found something else lacking from an Internet marketing point of view.

NFL.com's New Features

The graphic design and layout of the new NFL.com is great. You can see at a glance where to find the different types of information, and that's no easy feat for a site as rich in content as this one is:

I won't go into great detail about NFL.com's new features (for that see BizOfFootball.com and Rotanation.com via Pat Coyle and DigiSpo). I will, however, share a few of my favorites.

• NFL Video: The site has a ton of video, including player highlights, game previews and recaps, and NFL Network programming.
• NFL Photos: Complete photo galleries for each game and more.
• NFL Statistics: In addition to all statistics you'd expect from a professional sports site, the new site offers splits, and, best of all, historical data that is even game-specific. As an Old Skooler, I can look at how Vikings Hall of Fame quarterback Fran Tarkenton performed for each game of the 1974 season right up to Super Bowl IX, when the Vikings lost to the Steelers.

It's all very cool and there is a lot of content to make football fans happy.

Content Is King...And Embeddable

If you want to market online, content is definitely king these days. As I've said before, content needs to be embeddable because, as Steve Rubel points out, traffic happens elsewhere.

This is especially true for professional sports. I'd be willing to bet that there is a far higher proportion of sports and political bloggers than there is for any other content category. Both love to talk about their passion online. And people like to read them.

I love to blog about sports and I'd love to be able to cut and paste some video highlights of the last Vikings game, for example, to highlight my points without requiring my readers to go offsite. But doing an iffy proposition because clips of NFL games on YouTube are constantly being taken down, so, instead of broken links, I'd have broken videos on my site.

Professional sports teams are notorious for clamping down on their content and there used to be good reasons for that. But now I think their just swimming upstream and failing to exploit an opportunity at the same time.

The new NFL.com site goes right up to the door of the sharing Web but refuses to cross the threshold.

The site is completely RSS-enabled; I can subscribe to a feed of just Vikings news or videos, so I am alerted when there's new content. I can email and link to but not embed Vikings game highlights. I can only email photos, and even then not to specific ones but to photo sets.

All of the "sharing" features are designed to drive traffic to the site rather than marketing to people where they are at.

It would be simple to include a pre-roll ad in the embedded videos. You could allow people to only embed small photos and require a link back to the high quality, large photos at NFL.com.

Sports bloggers wouldn't mind that. In fact they'd love it, reasoning that it's the price they pay for the content. Bloggers are trying to build an audience, too, by creating their own quality content, so they're not inclined to send their readers elsewhere when they don't have to.

But they're perfectly happy to share their audience, on site, and even host advertising without charging for it, as long as they can embed the content they want to embed.

Embedable content is, indeed, a win-win situation for both the content provider and those who are embedding their content. But sadly for both parties, pro sports seem loath to fully embrace the spirit of Web 2.0.

NFL.com Redesign & Search Engine Marketing Blunder

Darren Sharper Tackles Cedric Benson 
Originally uploaded by NicelySighted

The fundamentals in football are how to block, how to tackle, how to catch and how to pass. One of the fundamentals of redesigning a web site is to preserve, or at least account for, existing inbound links to the site.

So it was odd to discover after the redesign of NFL.com was unveiled amid much fanfare, that they changed the URL structure of the pages of individual football player's profiles but failed to account for all the links that pointed to the old player profiles.

Pro Football Bloggers' Links To NFL.com

According to Google, there are 22,800 inbound links to the root NFL.com domain. As of this writing, Technorati lists more than 67,000 blog posts linking to NFL.com. That's a lot of links representing a lot of traffic and a major marketing blunder.

As someone who blogs quite a bit about pro football, the league's failure to account for existing links to their site is especially annoying because all of the links I have to player profiles prior to the redesign are now broken.  This is obviously lost traffic to NFL.com, but, more importantly to me, the broken links create a horrible user experience for the readers of my blog posts. They get is an error page rather than the player profile they were expecting.

The extremely frustrating thing for me is that long ago I made it policy to link to a player's NFL profile under the reasonable assumption that the links wouldn't change. The problem of linking to team profiles is that players change teams though trades, free agency, and cuts and that results in broken links. It's reasonable to assume that many other football bloggers came to the same conclusion.

Perhaps I should only link to Wikipedia player bios from now on.

But it is not just links from blogs that have been broken, the links from the search engines are broken, too, and that's a user experience and branding problem for the NFL.

NFL.com's Search Engine Optimization

I'll use Minnesota Vikings safety Darren Sharper to illustrate NFL.com's previous URL structure for player profiles. The URL for Sharper's profile on NFL.com was http://www.nfl.com/players/4249.htm. The new URL is http://www.nfl.com/players/darrensharper/profile?id=SHA500479. Note that they've included the player's name in the URL itself, while the old URL only used an ID number.

As of this writing, this is what the Google search results look like for "Darren Sharper":

You'll notice from the screenshot above that the link for Sharper's old profile reads "NFL.com #42 Darren Sharper." That text is taken from the HTML TITLE Tag of the page. The new player profile pages use only the player's name in the TITLE Tag. Couple that with the inclusion of the player's name in the URL and it becomes obvious that the redesigned site is intended to be search optimized in order to boost the page's rankings on the search engine results pages.

If the NFL knew enough to optimize the redesigned site for search engines, wouldn't they know enough to account for existing inbound links? Apparently not.

When you click on the link to Sharper's profile from the search results, you get an error page. That creates a frustrating user experience for NFL.com and that frustration hurts the NFL brand.

Site Redesign Fundamentals

The fundamentals for dealing with an issue that many site's must deal with are well known and relatively painless: 1) permanent 301 redirects to seamlessly point an old page to a new one in a "search engine friendly" manner so that you do not lose your search ranking, and 2) using an XML sitemap to tell the search engines about your new pages. NFL.com does neither.

The NFL certainly doesn't need search engines to drive traffic to NFL.com. They've got television to do that. But the fact remains that NFL.com is listed in the search engines and accounting for broken links should have been done with the redesign. It's obvious the NFL has a pretty sizable Internet marketing budget, so you'd think their Internet marketing team would have planned for that.

Blogger Liaisons

Any organization with mass popular appeal that is likely to have a lot of people blogging about them--which is especially applicable to professional sports leagues--should think seriously of creating a blogger liaison. This person would have a blog themselves and reach out to bloggers, solicit their feedback, inform them of issues that may affect them and answer questions, etc.

An obvious example that will immediately spring to mind for those in the search marketing industry, is Matt Cutts who performs that very function for Google's relations with the search engine marketing community.

If the NFL had a blogger liaison and informed pro football bloggers about an upcoming site redesign, I'm absolutely certain those bloggers would have worried about broken links and the NFL would have become aware of the issue prior to the launch of their redesigned site.

Barry Bonds & The Flickr Effect - The End Of Iconography

As I was reading the coverage of Barry Bonds surpassing Hank Aaron as Major League Baseball's Home Run King, it became to me that there was not one single defining photograph of him that captured his historic achievement. From our two local papers here in the Twin Cities, the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press, to Major League Baseball, ESPN, Fox Sports, Sports Illustrated, and The Sporting News, they all used a variety of photos of Bonds to illustrate the story. Check out the Newseum's Today's Papers section and you'll find the same.

When I think of Hank Aaron surpassing Babe Ruth as the career home runs leader with his 715th bomb, I think of one image and one image only:

Since the invention of photography, every era in our history has had certain iconic images associated with it that helped define, in a glance, that era. The same holds true for many of our most significant historic events or moments.

The slide show below features iconic photographs from our nation's history

Flickr Slide Show Of Iconic Photography

(See below for links to full-sized photos)

As I was scrolling through Barry Bonds Flickr photos today, it occurred to me that Flickr has pounded the last nail in iconography's coffin. The Flickr Effect obliterates mass appeal through the volume and the dissolution of attention its RSS distribution system enables.

From here on out, I think it will be rare that a single image will become iconic by defining an event or era.

The environment for icons was much more friendly when we had three television networks, a couple of national newspapers, and a handful of weekly news magazines.

The death of iconic images has been coming for some time. It started with the expansion of news media outlets by the introduction of cable television and it continued when the avenues through which people consumed news expanded dramatically with the popularity of the Web. But it exploded with the rise of blogs, low cost digital cameras, citizen journalism, and the distribution platforms of Flickr and other photo sharing sites.

Mass media is dead. Because we get our news through such a vast array of sources, it is virtually impossible for one news organization to capture a large enough percentage of public for an iconic image to emerge.

It is certainly possible for an image to gain enough popular appeal to become an icon; it's just not likely.

Take 9/11. Surely the burning of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center was an iconic image. Everyone can close their eyes and see that image in their mind's eye. But there is not one single photograph that is the icon. There was so much coverage from so many different sources that the photographic library of the attack was too voluminous, photos of the buildings were taken from so many different angles, that no single image ever had a chance to emerge as an icon.

The death of the icon is due to too much. Too much volume and too many sources.

Links to the Full-Size Photos Featured in the Slide Show:

The first photo is, of course, Abraham Lincoln, the iconic figure of the Civil War era. The Jesse James Gang and other outlaw photographs are emblematic of the post Civil War Wild West era. Wilbur and Orville Wright's first flight represent the 1900s.  The Roaring Twenties and Jazz Age are captured by the famous photo of jazz singer Josephine Baker. The photo of a migrant mother captures the Great Depression of the 1930s in all its anguish, desperation, and poverty. The Hindenburg disaster marked one of the most indelible word wide media events of the modern age. A photo of a lynching captures a national sin. The St. Valentines Day Massacre dramatically illustrates the gangsterism of the prohibition era. In the 1940s, we fought and won World War II and we re-elected a president, though some were not quite sure.  The 1950s are captured by Marilyn Monroe holding down her skirt in The Seven Year Itch. The turbulence of the sixties included the assassination of a president, controversy, sorrow, a new president, the struggle for civil rights, cultural change, the conquering of space, and a long and unpopular war. The student pro-democracy protesters in China's Tiananmen Square marked a turning point in world history. The famine in Sudan was dramatically illustrated by a vulture hovering over a dying child.

See also:

• Barry B*nds Supplants Hank Aaron As Home Run King
• Barry Bonds Breaks Hank Aaron's Career Home Run Record
• Barry Bonds Passes Babe Ruth

Google's Problem With Paid Links

I've been meaning to write about this but, you know, hey, whaddya gonna do? Things get in the way.  But the topic came up again when reviewing a potential client's web site that looked like it was at risk of being penalized by Google because of paid links. So, though the topic may be a bit dated, it's still relevant.

In April, Matt Cutts, Google's search engine marketing liaison, explained the company's attitude toward paid links and clarified in May. In short, the search engine does not like them because some search engine marketers use them to try and improve the ranking of their site in Google's search results.  As such, Google considers them Web spam.

You need not worry if you've been buying links from reputable, legitimate sites and not link brokers. Google won't penalize you for that but, if the site linking to you is viewed very favorably by Google, you will incur no benefit from that site linking to you. That's often the reason people buy links, to get Google to think of your site favorably because of a link from a site the search engine already views as very favorably.

Google's Paid Link Policy

Google's paid link policy is an eminently reasonable practice to keep Web spam from its search results. Google wants its search results to be as relevant and precise as possible because that keeps people using the service and the search engine's user base is what drives ad sales.

But the policy calls into question how Google will treat paid links that are not necessarily intended to game their search results or links that are intended to boost the linked-to site's search ranking yet are topically relevant.

Let me explain.

Buying Topical Links

Let's say I have a baseball blog that I've been posting to for a while but haven't really marketed in anyway. The traffic to it is low and I've finally decided I want to grow my readership. But I want to do it relatively quickly because the post-season is approaching and readership for baseball blogs in general is going to rise and my team, the Minnesota Twins, will likely make the playoffs. (Hey, they did it last year!) This will be my prime opportunity of the year to tap into a large audience.

So, I plan on buying some links from Twins blogs and I'll buy links from a few blogs that cover Major League Baseball in general but are not devote to a specific team. In both cases, the topics of the sites I'm going to buy links from and my own blog are the same: The Minnesota Twins and baseball.

Boosting Search Engine Ranking Through Link Popularity

My purpose for buying these links is to grow my own audience, so I obviously want those sites' visitors to visit and read my blog and become part of my readership. But I'd also like to try and get some search engine traffic, so I'm going to use relevant keywords in my link text. My link text will read "Visit my Minnesota Twins blog" to try and rank well in the search engines for the phrase "Minnesota Twins Blog."

Why should should Google disapprove of my links, much less penalize me for them?

As I said, Google needs quality search results to make money from advertising. But my link buying campaign is doing nothing to affect the quality of the search engine's results.

Let's say that I post daily, sometimes more, that I'm a brilliant baseball mind and a superb writer, so the content of my blog is of the highest quality. If my site ranks highly because of my link campaign, I'm improving the quality of Google's results for the phrase "Minnesota Twins blog" because my blog is as good as if not better than the rest that are listed. And a link to my blog precisely matches what the searcher wants.

Though they don't say specifically, it would make no sense for Google to penalize this type of Internet marketing because it only helps Google improve their results. It's a win-win for both my blog and Google's quality. So I have to think Google will not frown on such paid links.

That's the approach I take to search engine marketing: Help Google improve their search engine results by including my clients' high-quality, relevant content in their results. Such an approach is in everyone's long-term interests: Mine, my clients' and Google's.

The Numbers Behind Joe Mauer's Rising Star

Minnesota Twins starting catcher Joe Mauer currently sits atop Major League Baseball's hitting leaderboard with a .392 batting average. A former Twin, Hall of Famer Rod Carew flirted with a .400 batting average toward the end of his amazing 1977 season when he ended with a .388 average, which is the closest anyone has come to Ted Williams' record season average of .406 in 1941.

That's how hot Joe Mauer and his .392 average is right now. There's every reason to believe he could maintain that type of production in the second half of the season, considering that he's been a steady rather than streaky hitter.

We've been charting the online buzz Joe Mauer is creating for our client, Quickswing, and the data gives an interesting glimpse into how search traffic and Internet buzz surges and wanes with events.

Joe Mauer Search Queries

As a small market team in a division that has been dominated by the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers the past few seasons, the Twins don't garner a lot of attention. Joe Mauer's national awareness suffers as a result. Couple that with the fact that he was injured for much of his rookie season and had a good but not astounding full season last year, and it should come as no surprise that the volume of "Joe Mauer" related searches should be relatively modest. The following Google Trends chart shows Joe Mauer searches from 2003 to 2006:

You can see that the Joe Mauer search history has thus far been one of spikes and flatlines. That first spike was no media coverage of the Twins picking him first overall in the MLB draft. But, as you can tell from the 2006 data, he's starting to garner a lot of attention. During the past 90 days, there were 364 Joe Mauer-related searches, according to Wordtracker data. The following Google Trends chart shows Joe Mauer searches for January through June, 2006:

Though Joe Mauer related search volume is gaining, the real buzz is happening in the blogosphere and it has really taken off during the past few days as Mauer's batting average approaches .400. The following Technorati chart shows "Joe Mauer" blog mentions from May 31 to June 29, 2006:

Mauer's Quickswing Relaunch

I'm pleased to announce that we've just relaunched the Mauer Quickswing Web site on behalf of our new client, Quickswing, Inc.

Most Minnesotans will quickly recognize the name Mauer as belonging to one Joe Mauer, the Minnesota Twins' starting catcher and the first overall draft choice in the 2001 Major League draft.

The Mauer Quickswing is an absolutely ingenious device created by Joe's father, Jake, to allow his sons to practice their swings indoors during Minnesota's cold Winter months. It was designed to help develop a short, compact, quick swing--the kind you'll see if you watch Joe Mauer at the plate.

Quickswing wasn't getting the search engine traffic they wanted, so we conducted keyword research to determine what phrases people were using to find similar products and then search engine optimized their site to incorporate those phrases.

We also tweaked the site to make it easier to use for visitors and hilghlighted product links throughout the site.

Quickswing sells a variety of baseball training aids in addition to the Quickswing product itself.

Joe Mauer Plays Off Joe Green In New Twins Ads

The Minnesota Twins just released two spots for their new television advertising campaign and they're available at their web site. One features Torri Hunter at a kid's birthday party and the other features Joe Mauer in a take off of the 1979 Coke commerical featuring Pittsburg Steelers defensive end Mean Joe Green.

Sites such as Google Video and iFilm have got the viral marketing aspect of online video figured out. Those sites provide code for many of the videos they offer so site owners and bloggers can easily paste the video into their site. This is another indication of the explosion of what I'm calling the Sharing Web. As more and more people begin to blog and use such social networking tools as del.iciou.us and Flickr, the viral component of online marketing becomes more important than ever.

Unfortunately, the Twins don't offer code for their commercials but iFilm does, so you can compare the Joe Mauer spot with its predecessor, the Coke ad:

Mean Joe Green Coke Commerical:

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Super Bowl Searches

While advertisers seem to have finally figured out that it makes eminent sense to put your television ads--especially your Super Bowl commercials--online, reprisemedia is making the case that many Super Bowl advertisers did not fully leverage their TV spots by extending their ad campaigns online. Their 2005 Super Bowl Search Marketing Scorecard [PDF] is a fascinating look at how some Super Bowl advertisers capitalized on Super Bowl related searches to extend their ad campaigns online.

Reprisemedia reports which Super Bowl advertisers bought what search keyword ads and sponsorships on the three major search engines, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.com. Considering that they only address paid search advertising and not the natural search results, I don't know how fair it is for them to label "winners" and "losers", but it's interesting nonetheless.

For example, people often search using well-known brand names. If someone looking for the Pepsi Super Bowl ad searches using the word "Pepsi," they'll find a link in the natural results to Pepsi.com and when they go to the site, there is a link on the front page for TV commercials. But Pepsi hasn't bought any search engine advertising for the keyword "Pepsi"--nor should they have--so is that considered poor search marketing? I say not at all; that's smart.

Relatedly, Yahoo!'s Buzz Index provides fascinating insight into search behavior in the wake of a singularly unique popular culture touchstone event. On the Saturday before the Super Bowl, Buzz Index posted a review of pre-Super Bowl searches and yesterday they posted a review of food-related searches performed on Super Bowl weekend. Take a look at today's top searches in Yahoo! Buzz to see overall Super Bowl related searches; then go to the TV searches and NFL searches to see the leaders and movers in those categories.

Finally, Search Engine Watch has posted an article detailing some of the spikes in Super Bowl related search traffic.

Super Bowl Commercials

Hundreds of searches have been performed already in the past three months for Super Bowl commercials. That number should spike phenomenally after the Super Bowl as people go online to watch their favorite commericals from the Super Bowl again. Super Bowl ads have become nearly as much a spectator sport as the game itself.

You'd think posting them online would be a no-brainer, but, amazingly, this is the first year that people will be easily able to find all of the Super Bowl commericals online.

The online venues where you'll be able to find all the commercials are Yahoo! Video, which also features banned Super Bowl ads and other related video; AOL Sports will host all the Super Bowl advertisements; SuperBowlAds.us features ads from past Super Bowls as well as banned and cancelled commericals; as does Superbowl-Ads.com; and