Internet Marketing Howlers

At the International Search Marketing Conference last week, held at The British Library, I was asked to represent Receptional and join two other leading European marketing firms in that twilight period just after lunch, to show the audience some of the worst observations of bad internet marketing tactics that Receptional had seen over it's long history.

There is a tendency on the internet for webmasters, individuals and companies to grasp one internet marketing concept and try to run with it for as far as they can, thinking "that is all there is to it".  Internet marketing isn't rocket science, but then rocket science is pretty straightforward in theory, but you wouldn't want amateurs designing your spacecraft would you!  Here are a few of the examples that we came up with.

Boo.com marked the first internet bubble crash, a moment that I remember well because I launched my first major press release on the back of our observations.  Just before the Boo.com website closed down, we had the opportunity to look at the source code on the site.  We found that the developers (presumably whilst building the site) had used what's called a "robots exclusion tag" to tell all the search engines NOT to put the site into the search engines.  Nobody had removed the tag until the day they crashed.  Not that it would have helped anyway.…we spidered the site and found the word "sex" appeared 41 time in the source code!

The move into virtual reality sites like "Second Life" has also produced less than satisfactory results for some brands.  Banks, in particular, had a bad experience as they tried to set up "virtual branches".  Two things happened.  Many banks set up the shop, but forgot to resource it with actual virtual people… resulting in banks getting defaced and vandalised.  Others soldiered on, only to find the "cash machine" facility on Second Life become disabled due to "abuse" with Second Life investors supposedly losing hundreds of thousands of dollars and the banks losing much of their flimsy virtual business model.

Then there is the now famous BMW debacle, where BMW chose a web agency which said they could optimise for search engines without changing the core website... something that Germans like the sound of as it made them feel safe.  The search company built doorway pages resulting in BMW getting a "death penalty" from Google for a short while until it was fixed.  But still to this day, the "Death Penalty" story remains on the front page of Google for the term "BMW". (Screenshot taken 28th May 2008).

There were many other tales to be told in the short session at the conference - but the unwritten moral of the tale was clear.  Either tread with care on the internet, or work with an agency who will explain the subtleties and consequences of online marketing initiatives.

Dixon Jones

Back 29.05.2008.