Lots of affiliates using Google Adwords were hit by Google permanently bannning their accounts in the 4th quarter of 2009.

Google as usual didn’t make it very clear why they were banning the accounts, apart from the fact that the users had violated their terms and conditions.  There’s an excellent summary here of the impacts of this and the way forward in 2010.

It’s not hard to know why the accounts were banned.  Thin affiliate sites promoting rebills like Acai pills would probably be high up on Google’s list of accounts to ban, that’s pretty obvious to anyone who knows the industry.

Adwords affiliates used to complain about the frequency of the ’slaps’ that Google would give them but it seems Google took more drastic action in the 4th quarter of 2009 and started banning the accounts outright.  Any affiliates that were promoting sites that Google saw as not adding value to the searchers experience would have been in the firing line.

Go on any PPC forum and you’ll hear the same old story of “How could Google do this to me, I was spending thousands a month with them”.  Google say they banned 30,000 accounts, which is a drop in the ocean to them and virtually has no impact on their revenue.  Google admitted that themselves in their 4th quarter Q&A revenue call.

SEO and PPC becoming very similar

I find it strange to hear affiliates wondering about what they need to do to make Google like them.  To me it’s fairly obvious.

SEO and PPC are converging.  It’s a few years since thin affiliate sites could rank well in Google’s natural search.  We know that you need good content which provides value to the user and is updated frequently.  The same is becoming true for PPC.

Yes you could hop over to Bing or Yahoo to run your thin affiliate PPC campaigns and many have.  But most affiliates crave volume, and for the foreseeable future Google is where the volume is.  So if you want to get into Google’s good books you need to create something worthwhile for people.

If you’re used to throwing up a quick site, making a bit of money, being Google slapped, buying another domain and repeating the process, this whole change in mentality is going to be annoying.  But you have to change your mentality if you want to make money with Google.

In the longer term this is a good thing.  By adding more value to your sites, you’re building a longer term, more sustainable business.  I think we can understand why Google is doing what they’re doing.  They want to clean up the search results and help give a better user experience for searchers.

In the Cold War of the biggest brands battling it out for market share in the US, Pepsi has decommissioned it’s old arsenal but sneakily gone underground.

Pepsi decided to invest it’s annual Super Bowl advertising budget in Social Media rather than TV advertising.  The Super Bowl adverts have been the place for major brands to advertise for a number of years.

This is a huge risk for Pepsi especially as Super Bowl 2010 was the most viewed television broadcast in American TV history with 106.5 million viewers.  Don’t think Pepsi wouldn’t have been aware of the possibility of this happening.  The audience for the Superbowl in 2009 was also high with 95.4 million people tuning in.

Television audiences are declining

The huge audience on Sunday night was a freak event.  Lot’s of people tuned in because they wanted New Orleans to win it’s first Championship in it’s 42 year history, and they did.

The fact is that television viewing figures have been falling as a whole every year and Pepsi undoubtedly thought that the money would be better invested in the rapidly growing Social Media sector.

Audiences now want to be able to interact with each other and the brand.  A company, and especially a large brand like Pepsi now more than ever need to monitor their online reputation.

If 85% of 18-35 year olds use Social Media to connect with people they know, and if they can also connect with brands that they know and like, then these brands need to get involved whilst they can still manage their coverage.

I always think it’s funny how PR can work offline.  A while back I was chatting to someone who worked for a PR agency and she was talking about how a celebrity client had some pretty bad publicity whilst she was working for him.

What interested me was that she told me that during the period of publicity in the media, this guy made the biggest book sales he had ever made.  His TV show ratings were higher than ever and he was receiving more job offers than ever before.

It seems that getting into the news, particularly the main stream media, raises awareness and gets people talking and thinking about a person or a brand.

Look at the death of Michael Jackson, his record sales have been phenomenal since he died.  Dying is great PR for a celebrity, would Elvis Presley and John Lennon be thought of as such legends if they weren’t dead?  There can certainly be plenty of debate around their lives.   I’m not even going to go there but it’s worth thinking about.

Does it matter how you are talked about online as long as you are talked about?

It’s different online.  Bad publicity is bad publicity.  I’m going to take a Politician as an example here, Mark Oaten the Liberal Democrat MP for Winchester.

Mark has been in the news in recent years after an alleged affair with a male prostitute.  The initial publicity led Mr Oaten to step down as the party’s home affairs spokesman and as the newspapers suggested- tore his family life apart.

It’s now exactly four years since Oaten resigned.  Today’s news is tomorrow’s chip paper in the offline press but unfortunately for Mr Oaten and so many others in a similar position, Google doesn’t forget.

Let’s look at the search engine results pages in Google when we type in Mark Oaten’s name.  It’s very clear immediately that Mark’s name is heavily associated with the scandal in 2006.

The very first result on Wikipedia reads in the description “Shamed Lib-Dem Mark Oaten ‘dumped by wife’”.  That is possibly the first thing you will see.  As you look down the first page at nearly every listing you can see the words “shamed MP”, “dark days”, and even another negative story about how he made an £82,000 profit on a second home, financed by the tax payer.  You don’t even need to click on any of the stories to get a very bad picture immediately.

Unfortunately for Mark Oaten this is a prime example of how negative news can stick around for a long time online unless you do something about it.

The same goes for a company or a brand.  There are so many ways for people to express their opinion and discuss businesses online.  Negative news and reviews or opinion can soon gather momentum and create a strong association with a business or brand.  A business needs to constantly monitor what is being said about it and act to counter it before the association is formed.

Online Reputation Management

Here at Search Perfect we’ve seen a strong interest in Reputation Management services which is why for the last few months we’ve been planning the implementation of our new Online Reputation Management Service.  It was created to address the needs of businesses, brands and individuals.  We now even run an Online Reputation Management for Politicans service.

First and foremost we monitor what’s being said about a company or a business and then if needed, take action to place positive news in the place of the negative news.  On the other hand if a positive news story comes out about a business or brand we will take advantage of it and help spread it.

People love to research online

Bad publicity isn’t good publicity on the internet because of the nature of what we use the internet for.  It’s so easy to research a product, a company, a brand, or a person nowadays online that most people do it.  If there’s a lot of negativity around that search it’s going to put people off as well as create the negative association I mentioned earlier.

Making sure you at least monitor your online publicity is a very good start to getting ahead of the game.

It always amazes me how some businesses somehow lose their common sense when it comes to Twitter.  I’ve looked lots of company’s that have a blog and a Twitter account and the two often don’t match up.

Their blog will be great, it’ll have a lot of subscribers, some really interesting articles and some links to other interesting sites.  Then I look at their Twitter profile and it’s a complete contrast.

Their Twitter updates will only link to their own blog, or pages on their own site, or the latest promotion they are doing.  Their Twitter account will only have a few followers compared to a large number of subscribers to their blog.  They are missing out on so much potential by working this way.

Be at least as interesting in your Twitter updates as you are in your blog

I know you only get 140 characters in your Twitter updates and a lot more than that in your blog but that’s no excuse.  Just as you would do in your blog, link out to interesting things around the web, your links don’t always have to be related to your industry, just make them interesting.

Get over yourself

Don’t just promote your own content.  If you gain any followers they will soon get bored of your constant self promotion and soon stop following you.

Make your Tweets funny, catchy, informative, have the latest news, or a funny or intelligent quote.  It really doesn’t take that long, it’s only 140 characters.

Become regular

Become regular with your Tweets too.  If you regularly Tweet good content you will be surprised when you go a day or two without Tweeting and have followers messaging you saying “what’s happened to you? where’s your regular Tweet?”.

If you follow these rules, people will get to know you and your business, they will get to like you and they will re-tweet your updates.  They’ll tell other people about you, they’ll link to you from their blogs, you’ll get followed by more followers.

More followers means a larger audience for you when you do tell people about your latest special offer.