Japan Quake, Tsunami and PR Disasters

The massive quake that shook Japan, along with the tsunami it generated, and the potential nuclear meltdown, has both devastated a significant portion of Land of the Rising Sun and worried neighbors who sit in the Pacific Ring of Fire. While the whole situation clearly reveals the mortality of the whole human race, not everyone seems to describe it this way. There are cases when companies, well-known or obscure embrace the spotlight for wrong reasons.

Singapore’s MediaCorp made a sales push for advertisers during its extended coverage of the Japan earthquake, barely two hours after the initial tremor was recorded.

“Book your spots in the Weekday Evening News Bundle as the channel brings viewers comprehensive coverage reports on the disaster with extended versions of news bulletins tonight.”

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Google Oil Spill Aid: BP’s Expensive AdWords Campaign

In its effort to save itself from further trouble, BP is employing search engine marketing as a PR tool. Yes, search engine marketing can be used as a reputation management device, even if it’s not sustainable or long term solution. I posted an entry about the benefits of having multiple pages appearing on the same search query results citing that by trying to own the page for a certain keyword query, the information search engine users see is the one you want them to see. That’s probably in the mind of BP, which is now spending up to US$10,000 per day to maintain its ads at the most prominent ranking. Hopefully, to those who use the query to find more news (and probably more degrading to BP) they’ll be able to find an alternative tone, essentially a positive message in spite of the huge tragedy the spill has caused. All searches on Google for ‘BP oil spill’, ‘BP oil spill lawsuit’ and ‘BP suit’ show a sponsored listing from BP as the first result.

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CNN’s Version of Contextual Ads Gone Wrong

Contextual advertising is a form of advertising where ads are displayed on a website based on its content. These ads are served by automated systems which try to display them on relevant pages.

Google AdSense is one example, where ads are related to the words found within the content of a page. This type of advertisement is praised by publishers because having relevant ads placed next to a piece of content, the click-through rate is high. But this also attracted controversy, just like how people thought that the placement of ads related to messages in Gmail is a breach of privacy. The issue has been settled already but it’s not the only one related to contextual ads. When publishing news content, ads served by automated systems instead of humans can become subject of controversy. The recent death of Dennis Hopper on the news was an example.

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Benefit of Having Multiple Domain Names With Similar Content

Question: Is it okay to launch multiple websites of the same content?

Answer: Yes, if it serves your objective(s). Some sites have specific reasons to setup multiple domains with identical content. But there is only one reason that will convince me of their necessity. In case two domains representing the same content appear on search results, they tend to push competing search results to the bottom of the first page or even further. For example, look at Xinhua Finance, a website that provides financial information. There are at least two websites that exist and each resembles the other.

www.xinhuafinance.com/en

www.xfn.com/en

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Opinion for Sale: Trust in Social Media Eroding?

It seems that while many businesses are pinching traditional marketing budget to accommodate social media, consumers have started showing lack of trust on messages carried by the medium. In recent years, social media phenomenon exploded, riding high with the trustworthiness of friends. The holy grail of marketing appears to be found in the minds of friends rather than advertisers; with such information it’s now possible to deliver more targeted ads and less irrelevant ones. If I like somebody’s post about a Rickenbacker or Epiphone guitars on Facebook, I might see more ads about the same brands of guitar, or amplifiers, CDs or tuners later on.

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