Online Marketing

The second advert of Microsoft was released the Friday 12th of September 08.

It remained confused, as the first one, barely citing anything from the tech world. Both discussing why to connect to real people and said that Microsoft had already connected with over a billion people.

Just leaves us to think that they are to prepare a launch to a better product or something to make “real people’s” life easier. Guessing what would that be? Me too, I recon that’s the point of the mind game Microsoft is playing ’til now. For sure, there will be a surprise, the question is, will it be surprising enough?

And please, do not take too long on those “funny” adverts, people may get a bit bored.

With today’s HP announcement and the recent MSN toolbar release, I want to discuss our recent moves in the toolbar space. Overall, these distribution deals come down to three things:

1. Live Search is ready for primetime

These types of deals require a search engine that can stand on its own, as we all know how easy it is to switch to another search engine. Sure, Live Search has room to improve, but we’re confident that when consumers now try Live Search they’ll get relevant results, differentiated experiences, and a unique value proposition (see cashback).

2. Distribution can help with awareness and preference

We’re building a stronger consumer connection that starts with awareness and ends with preference. To be successful, we not only need to care about traditional consumer marketing campaigns to drive awareness. We also need to care about how other channels can help spread the word. We recognize that awareness for Live Search is low and that to crack into the consumer’s consciousness we need to be in front of them in more ways than one. Case in point: check out our new Search Share Facebook app.

3. Enabling partners is good for everyone

We need to provide publishers and our partners, like HP, with great tools and platforms to help them distribute content and reach their customers in new ways. The toolbar platform we have created exemplifies how we’re looking to extend customer service, brands, and content through great new experiences. With this platform we will be able to quickly build a branded feature and content-rich toolbar for HP’s entire line of US-based consumer PCs with just a few easy customizations. When the toolbar is released, HP will offer easy access to their online services like Snapfish and customer support, and bring their brand to life through Silverlight. Now imagine that type of customization for anyone and everyone on the Internet.

The HP toolbar highlights our excitement about the new developments we’re working on. Let us know what you think of the new toolbars.

Remember the Microsoft’s Live Search Cashback rewards program that we told you about not so long ago? It is now working on a direct-to-merchant system with eBay’s “Buy It Now” program. That means, you’ll start seeing more cashback ads when searching for jewelries to electronics.

Whereas previously, the CashBack rewards program works only on indirect cashback system wherein a user clicks on a Live Search cashback ad and they will be directed to the cashback page before proceeding to the advertiser’s site. But now with the recent tie up between Microsoft and eBay, users will be brought directly to the advertiser’s page. The cashback gleam will follow you as you fulfill a sales transaction and then rewards you with a corresponding rebate.

More information about this new program can be found at the eBay’s Terms and Conditions page for the cashback offer:

Extracted from the Search Engine Journal, written by Arnold Zafra

Today, Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft have come together to post details of how each of them support robots.txt and the robots meta tag. While their posts use terms like “collaboration” and “working together”, they haven’t joined together to implement a new standard (as they did with sitemaps.org). Rather, they are simply making a joint stand in messaging that robots.txt is the standard way of blocking search engine robot access to web sites. They have identified a core set of robots.txt and robots meta tag directives that all three engines support:

Google and Yahoo! already supported and documented each of the core directives and Microsoft supported most of them before this announcement. In their posts, they also list the directives they support that may not be supported by the other engines.

For robots.txt, they all support:

• Disallow
• Allow
• Use of wildcards
• Sitemap location

For robots meta tags, they all support:

• noindex
• nofollow
• noarchive
• nosnippet
• noodpt

With this announcement, Microsoft appears to be adding support for the use of * wildcards (which will go live later this month) and the Allow directive. The biggest discrepancy is with the crawl-delay directive. Yahoo! and Microsoft support it, while Google does not (although Google does support control of crawl speed via Webmaster Tools ).

This isn’t the first time the major search engines have come together for an announcement regarding how they support publishers. In late 2006, all three joined together to support XML Sitemaps and launched sitemaps.org, followed in April 2007 with support for Sitemaps autodiscovery in robots.txt and in February 2008 with more support for more flexible storage locations of Sitemap files. In early 2005, the engines declared support for the nofollow attribute on links (in an effort to combat comment spam).

Extracted from Search Engine Land, written by Vanessa Fox, 3 June 2008

“This morning during his keynote at SMX Advanced, Kevin Johnson, President, Microsoft Platform & Services Division, mentioned a new adCenter tool we’re piloting called the adCenter Desktop Beta. The adCenter Desktop Beta is a free tool that enables advertisers and agencies to bulk manage their adCenter accounts from a desktop application which can be uploaded to an adCenter account. This is the first time we’ve offered offline campaign management for adCenter customers.”

With the adCenter Desktop you can:

• Quickly navigate through multiple accounts
• Copy and paste keywords, negative keywords, match types and bid amounts from the adCenter Add-in for Excel into the Desktop application
• Bulk edit multiple items at once (bid prices, destination URLs, ad group targeting, etc.) —within or across groups of items
• Create text ads
• Scan campaigns for editorial issues before uploading to adCenter
• Receive alerts on performance changes
• Upload changes to the adCenter user interface instantly with one click
• Save full-text Search results to a ‘favorites’ tab in adCenter desktop for future use

“We developed adCenter Desktop in response to customer requests to have the ability to bulk manage their adCenter accounts quickly and easily with an offline tool. It also complements our other Paid Search offerings, including the adCenter Add-in for Excel tool we introduced last winter, by utilizing keyword research functionality to provide advertisers and agencies with maximum transparency into historical keyword performance in adCenter. And unlike other desktop management applications, adCenter Desktop includes the Creation Wizard, a tool that provides a step-by-step guide to create online advertising campaigns – from the selection of specific ad features to previewing the final ad copy.”

The adCenter Desktop is currently in beta. To be considered for participation in the adCenter Desktop pilot program, please fill out our interest form. When registering, be sure to click on “adCenter Desktop Beta” and “yes” to sharing your feedback with Microsoft.

“Microsoft’s live search will be the default search engine on all PCs made by Hewlett Packard for the US and Canadian markets from January 2009.”

Under pressure after calling off its bid to buy search engine Yahoo, Microsoft hopes the deal will attract more people to live search. The toolbar will also have links to HP’s online services.

Google dominates the internet search engine market, handling 10 times more traffic than Microsoft’s live search. Yahoo attracts more than twice as much traffic as live search.

“This is the most significant distribution deal for live search that Microsoft has ever done,” said Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft’s platforms and services division.

Microsoft has a similar but smaller arrangement with China’s Lenovo Group, while Google has a distribution deal with Dell and Mozilla’s Firefox web browser.