The Buzz
It's All About Personality

We are all very familiar with the importance of a solid brand. You know the power of a concrete image that personifies your company's standards, ethics and product. Above all,  it is very important for a brand to have personality. It's best if the brand is conveyed as though it were a person.

We all would rather do business with those we like and trust. When dealing with companies that have personable brands, we feel more like we are working with a friend or partner instead of paying money to a corporate entity. A good example of this is the Geek Squad from Best Buy.


So the next time you look at your brand, take a moment to ask yourself whether your brand has a personality. Is your personality approachable? Would you want to be friends with your brand? Would you trust your brand? Would you count on your brand?

 

A series of my clients over the last year have dealt with the dilemma of ad words.  Which search engines do they buy? Should they buy pay-per-click or pay-per-view? How much is enough to pay for an ad word campaign?

I consider Google to be the most important search engine to dominate. It does constitute 72% of all search engine usage. But that leaves over a quarter of the web surfing population out in the cold. And what of the search engines that are up and coming? For example, Bing.com went fully online only six months ago and already owns 9% of the market share. So with the volatile nature of the search engine battle, how do you know your positioning is going to last?

I say stop investing in ad words all together. I would suggest focusing your efforts on the actual results of people's searches. These are called organic search results.

Some sources say that organic search results out perform sponsored links 2 to 1. Even better, what works for Google, more or less, works for Yahoo, Bing, Ask and all other search engines. So one effort gets you results everywhere in the search engine world. The kicker to it all is that when you stop spending money with any particular ad word campaign, your pretense disappears immediately. In the organic realm, your efforts have staying power. I have seen single efforts stick for months without any follow-up. That to me is better time and money spent when it comes to search engine optimization.

Make 2010 the year you start being seen where your potential clients are looking when searching for your specific product or service. Start seeing your efforts reflect on all search engines. Being that the basic science of search engine optimization won't change any time soon; today's efforts will still work tomorrow regardless of what search engine the majority is using at any given moment.