July marked the end of an era of sorts.  After a decade, Chrysler announced it was ceasing production of its once wildly popular PT Cruisers.  When it made its debut in 2000, its old school design made the Cruiser a massive hit with car buyers, with over a million of them sold during the model’s lifetime.

What led to the PT Cruiser’s downfall is a problem that wise brands need to keep in mind when considering their own websites.  The Cruiser fell from grace because after its auspicious start, the car never kept pace with innovations happening elsewhere in the automotive industry.  Its design aged, its engine lacked the power of its competition, and its reputation suffered.

This kind of fall from the good graces of consumers can also happen, and at a much faster rate, to a brand’s website.  Even if a site makes a great impression when it launches by providing a unique user experience, a brand can’t rest on these laurels.  You must constantly build on this success, evolving and improving your site to stay in sync with the needs and wants of your target audience as well as to keep up with or stay ahead of your competition.  Chrysler failed to do this with the PT Cruiser, and now 10 years later the Cruiser is so out of style that its days are done.

This isn’t to say that every website needs to be reinvented from the ground up on a regular basis.  Such a broad stroke might become necessary at some point, but at the very least a site’s content needs to be kept fresh and its design kept current with any innovations in website design.  You need to keep your site an online destination worth returning to, so stay focused on providing ways to make the user experience more satisfying—-whether it’s easier navigation, new or better ways for visitors to interact with the site and with your brand, or some feature that fulfills a need or want of your consumer base.

Success has to be maintained and nurtured or like a flower, it will wilt away.  Don’t let your site suffer the unfortunate fate of the PT Cruiser.  Never stop looking for ways to make it a better place to visit and you’ll be better able to keep consumers coming back.

In 2010, the paid search world is changing just as fast as the organic search world. Google has made an update to location extensions to allow more functionality with multiple business locations showing up in PPC ads.

Location extensions allow a business owner to attach an address to a paid search campaign. The address is attached either by manually entering your address into your AdWords account or dynamically linking AdWords to your Google Places account. The business location will be delivered within the ad based on the user’s location or their search terms.

With the new location extension enhancement, you can show multiple business addresses—up to four locations—for your business within your PPC ad. However, this option is currently only available for those accounts that are dynamically linked to Google Places.

As the location wars wage on, Google is definitely making an impact by improving a company’s ability to showcase their locations.

The merger of Bing and Yahoo, dubbed currently as the Search Alliance, is slated to occur in Q4 of this year. In what we can only assume as preparation for the Search Alliance, Microsoft has made several changes to their search features:

Over the next several months, Bing will likely make more changes to their decision engine.  Stay tuned!

You can’t just sit down and create a viral video as easily as you might a blog ad or a website.  You can create a video that could potentially go viral but there’s no magic formula that guarantees that it will.

Going viral can mean something entirely different for a small company than for a larger one.  A small brand could consider a video viral with 2,000 views a month, while a larger brand might consider 200,000 views in a month to be its high water mark.  Viral is all relative.

The chief goal of viral videos, however, is exposure.  This exposure works almost like earned media or PR.  The fact that the video is viral and that people are pushing it around themselves is what makes it so powerful.  The target audience is spreading the word.  That’s the true power behind a viral video for a brand. (more…)

I just completed both the Google Advertising Fundamentals Exam and the Search Advertising Advanced Exam.  I passed both parts of these renewal exams and have received my Individually Qualified certificate.

The certification exam is more intense than the previous exam and definitely requires a good amount of preparation. Below are a couple of takeaways from the exam:

I wish everyone success on the exam and it is good to know I have gotten it out of the way– until next year!