If you can’t rank for your own name, send a nasty letter, and call me to tell me you’ll take me to court, because that is a great way to improve your online reputation. That’s what Budget Van Lines did.
If you arrived here unexpectedly because you were at Instameme.com I apologize that you aren’t getting a useful result, or maybe you are because I think this is more telling than the video from Youtube which was on the Instameme page. (included below)
Previously when you tried to view a topic page on Instameme.com for "BudgetVanLines" you would get back a single item, a YouTube Video of a somewhat unhappy Youtube content creator, (Rev. Drew Johnson) who wasn’t happy with his Budget Van Rental, or the packing of his items during his move.
Rather than Contacting the Reverend making things right with him and getting him to take down the offending Youtube Video, Budget Van Lines contacted me. Theodore Clapp called me to tell me wanted to email me a C&D.
The letter appears below, but let me sum it up for you. "Brandon, your site contains the words Budget Van And Lines" we have a trademark on these words, please remove the page, you probably are only making a few bucks on it, so if you could take that down, it would be great". To which my answers was "So you want me to gimp the functionality of my site, so your potential customers can’t find out about your shitty moving service?"
Anyone who has met me, read me, or casually Googled my name is probably aware that if you threaten me I don’t respond well, and tend to do something like this post. Which will likely be the top hit for "Shitty Moving Service" in a few days. After all I rank for most everything I write. So rather than having a page that featured a video from a disgruntled customer, which in all honesty didn’t paint Budget that badly in my opinion, and a few ads for random things provided by Google Adsense, BudgetVanLines resolves to this page which speaks to how Budget and Insterstate Moves does business.
Last thing before the letter I received… here are a few parting thoughts using the words Budget, Van, Lines, Interstate and Moves in ways which don’t violate trademarks.
Whenever I make an interstate move I use Uhaul, to be honest there may be better solutions out there for your budget, van lines do vary wildly from place to place, but Uhaul has locations everywhere so if anything goes wrong you aren’t far from a replacement van. They don’t do full service moving, but as you can see from the YouTube video on this page, that isn’t all it is cracked up to be.
Follows is the C&D Letter.
Household Goods Transportation Broker for Interstate Moves
Budget Van Lines Inc 244 Fifth Ave #2501
New York, NY 10001
(212) 380-1812
May 10, 2010
RE: TRADEMARK INFRINGEMENT—ACTION REQUIRED
To Whom It May Concern:
Please be advised that it has been recently brought to our attention that our trademark name of Budget Van Lines, USPTO number 438734, is being used on your website www.instameme.com. It brings visitors who are searching for our trademark name to your site and potentially presenting a trademark infringement issue when income is being generated by your site. Case law supports this theory and we have prevailed in court on this issue in the past. While that is definitely a concern of ours, what is more of concern are the negative reviews posted regarding Budget Van Lines. Based on the information on your site we currently have no way to locate the customer’s work order in our database. We value our customers’ opinion and intend to correct any issues regarding customer service.
We would ask that you either provide us with sufficient information so we can locate the customers in our database so we can resolve the issues or remove the postings as soon as possible as they are causing us significant economic damages on a daily basis. Furthermore, it should be noted that based on past experience we have found that many of such posting are actually placed by competitors.
We look forward to hearing from you and resolving these issues on an informal basis.
Very truly yours,
Theodore A. Clapp, J.D. VICE PRESIDENT, LEGAL DEPARTMENT
BlackWaterOps is proud to announce the Qanta Content Monetization Solution for Commission Junction / CJ.com Users.
The Qanta is not an AdNetwork, it is middle ware for your existing relationships with CJ.com. While you may have relationships with a lot of affiliates from CJ, often you can’t spend the time to hand promote every one, or update pages with the latest links, or take down links which are no longer active. Qanta solves this problem quickly easily and with minimal effort on your part.
The Beta version of Qanta works as a supplement to your existing ad programs, allowing you to better monetize traffic from search. Say for example you have written about Peyton Manning, when a user from Google, Yahoo, Bing, or most other search engines arrives at your site an ad will display based on the search phrase that they arrived by.
Qanta By BlackWaterOps
Ugly ad by Chitika.com
In this example you would get an ad similar to the ad on the Left. (Chitika.com ad provided to show the difference between us and your alternative)
If the user had arrived by a search for "Dating Peyton Manning" they might instead get an ad for a dating site if you have an active relationship via CJ.com for a dating site.
In all cases the user will get an ad from a partner in your network, that is relevant to their search.
Because these ads are not contextual ads, they are compatible with Adsense, Microsoft Pubcenter and other contextual ads. These ads only show to your search traffic so they don’t appear to visitors who visit your site as a destination site, arrive by twitter, or facebook.
Qanta simply build ads for you on the fly, so you don’t have to set up any bank accounts, 1099s or provide us with much information at all. Simply provide your CJ.com DeveloperKey, and your WebSite ID. We will run our CJ ads 10% of the time picked at random as our "Commission".
Qanta is built on the Google AppEngine infrastructure, and as a result ads are served amazingly fast after an ad is built for the first time.
Integration with your site is easy requiring only a short 1 line of JavaScript to be added anywhere on your page.
Today we only offer a 300×250 ad block but more ad sizes are on the way shortly, for now we are verifying scalability, and tuning the relevance of products and want to provide a great experience on one offering before creating too many options to debug.
Features Coming in the very near future:
Use your own CSS to customize the look of Ads
Standard Ad Sizes (728×90, 160×600, 120×600, 250×250, 125×125)
In Text Ads matching part numbers and manufacturer names on your web page to CJ affiliate Links for that product.
Flash Ads
Interactive ads
Support for different products in each ad block on a page
Synced Ad Blocks to allow all ad blocks of different sizes to show ads from the same provider
Customer Relationship Management has long been the task of sales, and technical support. Pre-sales would sometimes fall in to that category, but we didn’t track the 100′s of thousands of prospects that saw our ad campaigns, or read about us in blogs or newspapers.
In the days of CRM you only tracked those who met the definition of customer, or lead, not those who were part of the faceless masses who might have heard of you. The change to using social media has created a new type of prospect who has a face, and has shared a lot of information about themselves. This is your audience. The people who follow you on twitter, friend you on Facebook and Myspace, or place your widget on their blog.
How are you tracking them? What do you know about them, and how are you moving them along the sales path from friend of a fan to, fan, to customer to evangelist? This is a new thing, something not quite CRM. We call it Audience Relationship Management.
ARM is the art, science and statistics of converting customers to evangelists, and fans to customers.
A 10 year old can be a fan of Ford, or Chevy, but isn’t likely a customer. But a picture of this ten year old shared on Facebook in a Halloween costume as Big Foot, his favorite Monster Truck, emblazoned with "Built Ford Tuff" inspires other people to wonder why this kid loves Ford so much.
That mini-story told by a 10 year old gets amplified by your Pro-Twitter Evangelist who makes a note to send the kid a BigFoot hat, Hot Wheels or what ever. Kid’s mom is in the market for a new car in 6 months, and while dad was always a Ford man, mom has always driven a Lexus, but this small act of sending a nice letter, and a token of appreciation has turned her in to an evangelist, she tells all the other mom’s in car pool, how great Ford is, and is ready to at least look at replacing her Lexus with the new Taurus.
ARM software tracks this, allowing you to track at least a portion of your total ROI from your Social Media Campaigns. Where ARM really comes in to play is in that you can merge your online and offline interactions. Sending a user a tweet to ask how they liked the thing they ordered when you get the confirmation it arrived, creates a reason for the customer to tweet about you. Their followers see that they bought your product and are more likely to ask them about it. A single simple process what could be automated has turned something that used to be a survey by e-mail that got ignored has been transformed in to a method to advance your customers in to evangelists, and your customers fans, friends, and followers in to prospects.
BlackWaterOps will work with you to integrate your existing CRM with the API’s we have for tracking users, and friends of users, so that you can automate some of this process, and have a human element around to respond to any responses to your automated tweets.
ZillionTV sent me what wouldn’t qualify as a cease and desist, but more like a “please leave my client alone they have enough self esteem issues with out you disparaging them” letter.
I should disclose that for a brief period of time I worked at ZillionTV. I was lured there by false promises of their technology, the state of their contracts with the studios, and the pedigree of the “Managerial Staff.”
Having your lawyer send a note to someone who has said less than flattering things about you is roughly the equivalent of taking the kick me sign off of your back and pinning it to your teeth instead. I’ll demonstrate why.
Step One: The party you sent the note to posts it to his or her website. (see below)
Step Two: The party then makes fun of you, and your law firm. ShawValenza didn’t even care enough about the tone, and accuracy of this letter to grab a template of LexusNexus so that they wouldn’t sound like idiots.
If you are going to send a letter to a party who has said something untrue about you, as opposed to simply pointed out publicly documented facts about your goings on, you are not looking for defamation, but libel. I can defame you all I want as long as the statements are true. It is only false defamatory statements that are illegal. The absolute defense to defamation is truth.
While many of my blog posts may not be of the highest standard of eloquence, because I am a firm believer in the first amendment I do my best to verify, and fact check anything I publish.
Step Three: The party then tells the world about the injustice of being sent a certified letter telling you to stop “prattling on the internet”. See the nice thing about having a site in the top 100k of Alexa, and having the ear of several rags in the IPTV and Hollywood space is that even things I casually post to my blog, are news. Which is why I don’t “Casually post” things to my blog.
Which brings me to the rules about using C&D for SEO.
Rule 1: Don’t.
Rule 2: Don’t.
Rule 3: If rule 1 and 2 have to be broken, don’t send a warning letter, send a court order, include in it that the party you are serving is given a gag order so that they can’t talk about you or post the court order.
Rule 4: Know your enemy. Don’t send a C&D letter to someone who has a bigger hammer than you. The general rule is don’t send a C&D to anyone with a better Alexa rank than you, or someone with more press mentions in the past year than you.
Rule 5: Be right. The last thing you want is to stick your foot in your mouth, a recent prospect sent a C&D to a competitor only to have the competitor serve them an even bigger C&D.
Sometimes called "SEO via Legal" or C&D SEO, this to me is the scum-baggiest way to do SEO. And if you send a letter like this to one of my clients, I’ll make sure that everyone knows what a scumbag you (Snap-On) are.
C&D SEO works by eliminating pages that compete with you for a given keyword. Rather than Snap-On Tools ranking for its own name legitimately through good press about their company, and what great tools they make, they instead look for everyone who has said anything about them and send them a C&D. This doesn’t work well for SEO, because anyone with half a brain knows that you can’t use Trademark laws to force the removal of your name, unless they are attempting to use your name as their own. I can say "I drank a Coke and it was good" and Coke can’t stop me. Snap-On already has issues with a weak trademark because it is only a trade mark in certain contexts. "Let me Snap on my coat and I’ll be ready to go skiing" or
Like in this photo:
"Dudes, that turtle really has his Snap on. Tools don’t let him bite you"
So here is the C&D Letter from SnapOn.com’s Goons.
Dear Registrant,
Snap-on Incorporated is the owner of the well-known trademark and trade name Snap-on. As you are no doubt aware, Snap-on is a trademark used to identify products, services, activities and events related to Snap-on Incorporated.
It has come to our attention that our trademark Snap-on appears as a metatag, keyword, visible or hidden text on the web site(s) located at:
Multiple Addresses Removed
without having obtained prior written authorization from Snap-on Incorporated.
In view of Snap-on Incorporated’s rights to the trademark Snap-on, we ask that you immediately remove all metatags, keywords, visible or hidden texts including trademark presently appearing on the above-cited web site(s) and any other web site(s).
Should you require additional information or wish to further discuss this issue, please do not hesitate to contact the undersigned.
Technically we are complying because the pages are coming down so that they end up here. Which I’m certain will be much better for Snap-On than the situation before they hired the corporate tools. (watched Dr. Horrible last night and couldn’t resist).
(Gee look at Dr. Horrible he has a Snap On his lab coat, as he get’s beat up by Captain Hammer Corporate Tool)
The Moral of the story. Do good SEO through good PR and good will. Using Legal to do your SEO for you will almost always end up damaging your brand, and creating more problems for you than you had in the first place, like being on the front page for the search "ScumBag". And then you have to hire a reputation management company, and it becomes a downward spiral of expense that finally escalates to having to order a mob hit on the guys who have better lawyers, bigger brains, or more search authority than you do.
Many CEO’s and CFO’s look at outsourcing anything that is ongoing as a bad thing. If someone is going to pay a guy to work 40 hours a week on a task it might as well be your company, rather than a company that is going to mark that guy up. This would be true, if you only needed A GUY, but in many cases you need tools, software, and relationships which might not come with an employee.
In most cases you will want to outsource SEO, make a decision on SEM, and insource most of your social media interaction. SEO is the hardest of the three to insource. SEO is not just a skill set it is a collection of tools. Much like your doctor is a guy, and he can do a lot when he is in your home to treat small things, it is unlikely that he will diagnose your cancer at your bedside.
A good SEO brings tools like a Google Search Engine Appliance for assessing page quality scores; analytics software for tracking not only your site but your competitors; relationships with hundreds if not thousands of sites; account reps at search engines to expedite questions problems and complaints; and monitoring tools to give early detection to problems with rank, reputation or uptime. A good SEO is also benefitting from working with multiple sites so they can see trends across sites.
These are difficult to insource. A Google Search Appliance approaches $100,000 the first year, competitive analytics software is expensive to build and require constant tweaks to maintain accuracy. Working with a smaller set of sites changes in search engine behavior may be detected too late to make changes to prevent lower rankings. SEO has almost no insourcing advantages. The few that you have are that by having an onsite SEO you can include them in more decisions and embed SEO in the corporate culture. Even this can be done with an outsourced SEO who benefits from the tools of their company.
SEM can go either way with equal success and is often more a function of who is going to have more buying power and how many hours a week do you need. SEMs success or failure is most dependent on the copy used, the landing pages created, and the cost of the ads. Insourced or outsource the first two will likely be the same if you hire the right person. The cost of the ads through Google and Microsoft are likely going to be the same unless your ad budget exceeds $500k a year. If your SEM brings buying power to the table, either through bulk, or through relationships with websites where your ads could run, then outsourcing makes sense. If you hire the right person who can bring those relationships, then insourcing makes sense.
NEVER Trust interacting with your customers to a contractor. For this reason you should insource at least that portion of your social media. Event planning, site building, social network infrastructure planning, and seeding, however you can in or outsource. Likely there will be portions of this that you need help with from time to time which makes it worthwhile to partially outsource this. Even as a consultant I routinely subcontract to event planners for many of the logistics of my social events. Building a FaceBook Apps, integrating with twitter, are all social media marketing tasks, that are likely not aligned with your core business, and make a lot of sense to outsource.
Social Media consultants are often very friendly, eager to please, people. You have to be to be popular with everyone. This type of individual tends to not be enthusiastic about hard metrics, instead they will often prefer to report soft metrics. Unlike all other statistics and metrics many social media consultants are calling these cold metrics and warm metrics. Cold metrics being the “unfeeling” raw numbers and warm metrics being the “tough to quantify” measure of good will.
As the manager of a campaign you will often have to translate between the qualitative and quantitative metrics provided by your consultants. It is also your responsibility to make sure that your marketing spend is in the demographics that make sense. Not all demographics are represented in all social mediums. Very few body building enthusiasts are on Twitter, and Oprah fans aren’t on MySpace.
Social media metrics should always include the following hard metrics:
· Fan/Follower Count
· Active Fan Percentage
· Friend of a Fan Growth
· Traffic from Social Media
· Product/Services Conversion from Social Media
· Percent of Network(s) Engaged
· Cost Per Fan
Social media metrics should always include the following soft metrics:
· Positive to Negative Feedback Ratio
· Support to Marketing Interaction Ratio
· Press/Blogger/Media Response
Be prepared to be told that your Social Media Consultant can’t, won’t, or doesn’t need to provide these metrics. There are a lot of Social Media “Experts” who feel that Social Media is about “building good karma” and that has “incalculable value”. These consultants will often talk in terms or ROI as Return on Influence rather than Return on Investment. Much like the section on avoiding SEO/SEM scams, if you hear anything that indicates that you can’t calculate hard statistics RUN!
Social Media is EXPENSIVE for the ROI in the short term. That isn’t to say you shouldn’t do it, just have realistic expectations. Building those expectations requires the metrics.
Fan/Follower Count is an easy metric to gather. This is simply the number of Fans, Followers, or Friends you have on each social network you have engaged in. Typically you want to break this down by network, but having an aggregate is also useful, and is easy to calculate.
Active Fan Percentage is sometimes difficult to gather, but it is the percentage of your fans/followers who logon to the service at least once a week. Where this metric is most useful is in preventing consultants from using nefarious practices to gain followers/fans.
Friend of a Fan growth is the number of users acquired through word of mouth rather than direct engagement. This is an important indicator, as the purpose of Social Media is to have word of mouth advertising spread your brand “virally”.
Traffic from Social Media is easy to gather from your web analytics. Checking how many people are landing at your website from FaceBook, Twitter, and via your URL shortening service allows you to track how many of the people you are engaging are actually following through to your site.
Product/Services Conversion from Social Media uses the Traffic from Social Media along with the conversion rate from links posted to your fans to track how much you are earning from the engagement of your followers.
Percent of Network Engaged is similar to Alexa’s Percent Reach. This is your fan/follower count divided by the total number of users of the service. As FaceBook has over 300 Million users this will be a very small number, but a very useful one. Your growth should match if not exceed the growth of the network. This will be easy getting started. Growing from 5 fans to 6 yeilds 20% growth in a week, but as you start to hit the middle of your growth you will plateau for a bit. If you have a well built network of followers when you hit critical mass your growth should nearly exactly match that of the network.
Cost Per Fan is another scary number, or possibly THE scary number. Building your first 1000 fans will cost a lot, and maintaining them will be expensive on a cost per user basis, but if you can get to the economy of scale the returns can be worth it.
The Soft Metrics require a lot of time to monitor, but as you are evaluating your success you should be mindful of them. The soft metrics are really a measure of how good your evangelists are. If they are combative with people who say bad things about your brand your positive to negative feedback ratio will tank.
Support to marketing engagement is easier to track if you are using a Customer Relationship Management Solution, but the very short version is, are you answering questions in response to products presales, post sales, or in response to product operation. This is my favorite of the soft metrics, because it really is about answering “what does your customer need” and “why did they use that medium to get it.” If you are getting technical support questions via FaceBook, you may need to ask why didn’t they call? Or use one of the official mechanisms for support? This type of engagement is hard to calculate the ROI on but can help your other customer engagement methodologies improve which can often increase your revenue and lower support costs.
Press/Blog/Media Response is not always relevant, but ideally your social media campaign is going to allow you to monitor bloggers, press, and other media personalities questions before they write articles or immediately following them, this gives you the best chance to add additional good press to articles and have a heads up on bad press.
Several fake stories attempting to capitalize on the bad economy with an almost plausible story about Google offering thousands of work from home jobs to anyone who fills out a form and gets their $2 adpack.
While many of the details are false, the program wasn’t set up by Google, and Google doesn’t have a “Google Adwork” program, but Google doesn’t seem to be doing much to stop the scam either. Normally Google is amazingly tenacious about the use of their trademark, I know several Gadget related sites that got some fairly harsh cease and desists sent to them for the use of the word gadget in ways that Google thought was too close to GoogleGadgets. But after several of our sites were plagued with ads reading “Work from home SEO” and “Earn money with Search Engine Ads” we attempted to get a hold of Google to notify them that scam ads were plaguing our sites.
No response. We have our suspicions why. While Google may enforce their brand pretty heavily they look the other way when something is good for the bottom line. The work from home scams are buying 100’s of thousands of keyword phrases through a lot of accounts and buying all of the penny click ad inventory. This drives the ad price up on all of the legitimate ads.
Our Client’s’ Adwords spends that were also capitalizing on cheap penny clicks are getting undercut, which many of our clients were willing to up from a penny to two cents. While this sounds like an insignificant amount of money, if you are buying 100k ads a day at 1 cent per click and you change to 2 cents you doubled your spend. Google does hundreds of thousands of dollars a day on these ads at less than 5 cents a click and so much like penny trader stocks small increases can be big money for them.
Blocking too many advertisers in your Adsense account that Google doesn’t think are competitors to your content can get you kicked out of the Adsense program. Putting verbiage on your site not to click work from home ads can also get you kicked out of the program. Since Google provides no method to report ads which are inappropriate, fraudulent, or violate their trademarks on their landing page as a publisher you are “stuck” with them.
Google is currently plagued with ads which hurt publishers, but Google looks the other way on because they’d rather have the money. Some of the most famous being for Evony, an online game which runs ads from multiple domains featuring a barely clad woman with a knife at her throat, which is entirely unrelated to the game, and not likely appropriate in most workplace environments.
BlackWater Clients have seen anti-competitive practices happening via adsense as well. A competitor creates an image ad which is very unlikely to get clicked, something ugly with poor syntax and grammar selling something unrelated to the keywords it is bought against. These ads drive the target sites income way down, but also makes the quality of the site look low, as the lack of quality ads implies a lower quality of content. Again all a site can do is block the ads, but we were running in to 2-3 new domains being used a day making it a task clients had to perform 2-3 times a day, and because the sites would use Geo filtering often the bay area would not be included in the ad targets nor would the home state of the target site, making them all but impossible to track down.
And again with no means to report this behavior. We came to a conclusion, Microsoft PubCenter. Our headaches are far less and we can get someone on the phone in minutes to answer our questions, complain about an ad, or get something explained, or even get answers to questions like, why does your code not show any ads to this guy on the other side of the Bay, but does for me. The best part, the earnings are competitive, running neck and neck with Google on Google’s good days, but the ads look nicer, and the reports are more detailed. The only “down side” Microsoft has a higher standard for the quality of site they will accept so a few of our online stores don’t meet that thresh hold. One might say even that was a win for Microsoft.
My soon to be released book “Online Marketing Strategies Volume 1:Analytics, Strategies, and Terminology for Site Managers” is now available for pre-order at 50% off the cover price, or even better it is temporarily free to members of the BlackWaterOps “Professional Marketers” listserve.
This book is targeted towards anyone who manage online marketing campaigns. This is not limited to SEO, and SEM, but deals with Reputation Management, Site construction, Affiliate Marketing and more. Whether you are managing an online store, political campaign, charitable organization, online journalism site, or blog there are strategies for keeping on top of online marketing.
Clear explanations of common terms, tricks for finding the right people to work with you, and how to measure your success are included in this first Volume of Online Marketing Strategies. This book won’t teach you how to be an SEO, or SEM but it will teach you the necessary metrics for measuring their success, and verifying that the analytics they are providing you are accurate.
Just the Book: $34.95
“Professional Marketers” is a community which offers feedback, advice, and potential insight to online marketing. Professional Marketers focuses on Optimizing your online marketing. As a community member you get the benefit of being able to find out about industry trends, experiences and traps before the rest of the world. Being part of a discussion in real time rather than when it is reported. And you can do so in a small close knit group of like minded professional.
There are a TON of free Short URL services out there, Bit.LY, Is.GD, Tr.IM and it is nice that they provide integration with Tweet Deck and other software, and offer you some statistics, but they are a BAD idea. Why? One day a change in the Terms of Service makes them go from Forwarding service to being a “Link Bar” (like Digg did).
Trying to focus on the positives. Having your own URL Shortening allows your own branding. If you run a website called Daves Discount Emporium you might register DDE.IN or Daves.GS. This lets users know that they aren’t about to get “Rick Rolled” by the link they have been sent. Having your own URL Service lets you do useful things. Forwarding URLs when you change where you want them to go. For example you might have a the latest version of your software download be Daves.GS/Download.
If those aren’t enough reasons, how about some of the negatives.
Short URL services can link to anything, as a result many of them trip Spam Filters in eMail, are often filtered by proxies. While “Reputable” services are unlikely to do it, you also risk that the service will forward only 90% of your traffic, or will present a different URL to Google’s bots when they ask where the link goes.
Short URL’s don’t always use a 301 redirect, which means they don’t pass authority, this means that you aren’t gaining authority from all the discussion around your URL
Because a Short URL can link to anywhere many of them actually can cause negative effects in search engines. There is what is called a “Bad Neighborhood” penalty for having 301s from a domain that has linked to Spam, Illegal Material, or sites that broke Google’s rules.
So how do you set up a Short URL? There are a lot of ways ranging from a few lines of code, to a commercial product that runs about $100. It all depends on your needs and how you are going to use it. And if you are a client, of course BlackwaterOps can help.
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