What is a brand’s greatest asset? Its image. A company’s greatest responsibility is to protect its online brand image. With the speed of today’s information sharing, it’s imperative to keep an ear to the online world in successfully managing an online campaign. More and more CGM’s (Consumer Generated Media) blossom every day, and these can quickly spread both good and ill will for your brand.

CGM’s can include blogs, message boards and other user driven platforms. The sharing of information can happen nearly instantaneously in this environment. A recent example was the lead scare in Chinese produced consumer products, including toys.

Successful marketers were ahead of the curve, immediately making changes to their keyword buys as well as editing ad copy on the major search engines. This gave consumers piece of mind in knowing what products were lead free and safe for their children and their families.

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This is my first blog post, so let me introduce myself. My name is Dave Gaetano, Director of Business Development at The JAR Group. I am a Syracuse University graduate majoring in Finance, minor in Economics. I am also a graduate of the University of Connecticut School of Law, and a licensed Connecticut attorney.

Besides the benefits of being able to cheer for two major athletic programs, I bring a vast background to The JAR Group. I have been with The JAR group one year, and look forward to introducing our services and capabilities to you.

My first exposure ever to the wonders of computers talking to each other came in 1989 at Syracuse University. I was taught how to ping the Syracuse airport for a weather report by an engineering friend. Being a weather nerd in a Snow Belt city, I found this entirely entertaining, but useless to the outside world.

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Use your name in your SEM ad copy and searchers will click (and even buy) more.

Between Managing countless paid media campaigns over the years, and our team’s ongoing research on search behavior has led to certain similarities between SEM campaigns creeping up. These similarities, and how you react to them, end up becoming the tactics that allow brands to truly grow their opportunity.

As many of you know, Google’s AdWords algorithm is getting tougher, even for legitimate advertisers. Your click through rates and how quickly your ad copy can achieve success is paramount in keeping an old campaign profitable and in some cases, a new campaign live. One of the many strategies that seem to work in most cases is including your brand and/or site within your copy.

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If you’ve visited our blog in the past, you probably know about my narcissistic quest to own the top 10 results in Google for my name. On October 9th I noticed I had gone above and beyond my goal and actually ranked for my name across the big four search engines, Google, Yahoo!, MSN and ASK, having owned the front pages of each. I refer to this as “Search Ego Optimization.” As of today I only rank for 38 of the top 40 results. Bummer.

Stroking your search ego with some minor link building may seem completely self-serving, but, it does have a greater purpose. It helps executive recruiters actually find you! Well, I guess this is still self-serving and you probably don’t want those phone calls anyways. Since stroking my own ego, the number of emails and calls I’ve received from executive recruiters has increased ten fold. I guess if I’m ever unemployed this will help!

You can read more on the value and importance of search ego optimization in my previous post, “Controlling Your Search Engine Resume.”

Do you need Search Ego Optimization services? Does your Search Ego need a boost? We can help. Call us at 646-290-8659

I recently read an article in the New York Times that asked the question, “Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?” The author, Duncan Watts, states that cumulative advantage occurs “if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still.” He says that if in fact people do not make decisions independently, but are rather socially influenced, then predicting hits is impossible no matter how much you know about individual tastes.

Duncan writes, “As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors.”

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