The Microsoft Mobile Advertising Farce

Taken from @AccuraCast on Twitter

Started by calling adCenter to discuss 3 new mobile marketing campaigns.

adCenter account manager sounds shocked anyone would want to advertise on Microsoft Mobile

adCenter Act. Manager tells me to call Microsoft Advertising - 0800 456 700 option 1

I call 0800 456 700 x1 - the phone rings 2.5 times, then goes to message saying "No one is availab." beeps & cuts off

Microsoft Advertising answering system cuts me off 3 times. I finally call operator, who transfers me to same message

Now i'm getting pissed off at the farce that is Microsoft Mobile Advertising

So I try Microsoft Advertising operator again (tell her don't transfer to msg that cuts off. She says no other option!

I now call Microsoft @adCenter support (not our act. manager) They sound surprised at Mobile Ads again!

adCenter Rep gives me a new number - this one for Microsoft UK, totally useless, as I don't need to activate Windows!!

I am now beyond furious

Fortunately, the #MicrosoftMobileFarce doesn't end here. I call back an @adcenterRep and get told to fill in the MS Advertising online form

As I fill in the @MSAdvertising form the @adcenterrep asked me to, I realise its not geared for Mobile ad inquiries

adCenter rep is totally helpless now. Sounds like he's given up on MS advertising on mobile before i have

So now, here I am asking Microsoft Advertising: Does mobile mean anything to you? If you aren't serious about mobile, don't pretend to do it!

And adCenter rep please clue in all your reps on mobile advertising if it is something you guys are serious about

Because really, there is nothing now that makes me not just want to dump Microsoft Advertising and go right back to Google Mobile ads!!!

And yes, if you think I'm ranting, I have damn well earned the right to!
in reference to: Mobile internet advertising: new MSN mobile advertising channel Going Mobile (view on Google Sidewiki)

Update: MSAdvertising responded to my rant on Twitter and offered to call us instead. Waiting to hear what they have to say.

Google Public DNS a.k.a. Google Wants To Own The Internet

By configuring your network settings to use Google Public DNS as your domain name servers, instead of the standard domain lookup performed by your Internet Service Provider, you might speed up your browsing and improve your security.

However, what you most definitely will do is let Google know absolutely EVERYTHING about your life on the Internet - what sites you visit, when you visit them, how often you visit, what you do on those sites and more!

Here are some interesting excerpts from the Privacy statement for Google Public DNS:

"The temporary logs store the full IP address of the machine you're using ... We delete these temporary logs within 24 to 48 hours."

"In the permanent logs ... We do keep some location information, request domain name, request type, whether the request hit our frontend cache, absolute arrival time in seconds, user's geolocation information"

Interesting or just plain scarey?

in reference to: Google Public DNS (view on Google Sidewiki)

Regional Tags in SERPs Very Useful in the UK

A lot of bloggers and tweeter have been complaining recently about the insurgence of US websites in UK search engine results pages. This new feature should assuage those complainers.

It should also help consumers as most shoppers don't want to buy from US websites (and pay higher shipping / import duty charges), and the indication of a UK versus non-UK location of a .com or .net site will prevent users from wasting time clicking on geographically irrelevant results.

in reference to: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Region Tags in Google Search Results (view on Google Sidewiki)

Who Has Marked Your Tweets As A Favourite?

Favstar allows users to find out who marked their tweets as favourites.

The site also shows recent tweets with 100 or more favourites.

Overall quite a handy app, and different from the usual retweet count widgets that are currently so popular.

Note: Being marked as a favourite is quite useful from an SEO point of view because the Favourites page on a profile is much more static than a regular tweet stream, has more content than an individual tweet and the link has more PR typically.

in reference to: Recent tweets with 100 favs or more (view on Google Sidewiki)

Twitter Counter is a paid mix of Twitterholic & Twitin

Twitter Counter displays a graph of the number of followers for any account over time, lists the top 100 (or 1000?) most popular twitter accounts and allows users to compare their follower growth with that of other users.

The site includes an "Add Followers" service which you pay for - $249 for 50k new followers. Not sure how ethical this is or how good the results are.

in reference to: Twitter follow stats, graphs and widgets | Twitter Counter (view on Google Sidewiki)

TweetStats - Pretty. Useless.

TweetStats analyses any Twitter account and then graphs that account's Twitter usage by displaying tweets per hour, per month, reply statistics, interfaces used and most frequent users retweeted, all in a series of pretty graphs.

The stats are lovely to look at, but pretty useless.

in reference to: TweetStats :: Graphin' Your Stats (view on Google Sidewiki)

Hashtags Started A Trend And Then Faded

Hashtags started the trend of aligning tweets to topics by adding #topic-name within the tweets. The site then grouped Tweets by topic and displayed most popular topics.

The need for hashtags faded once Twitter Search grew in popularity and ability and other, more versatile tools were made.

The final nail in Hashtags' coffin came when Twitter started displaying trending topics on their own homepage, eliminating most users' need to even bother visiting hashtags.org

in reference to: Hashtags — 503 (view on Google Sidewiki)

Ironically Not The First Nor The Best Twitter Search Engine

Twitter Search is the easiest to access, but not necessarily the best quality Twitter search engine.

Their mere chronological listing of tweets is quite useless as the large chunk of tweets brought up can be spam, retweets or ramblings from unpopular users.

in reference to: Twitter Search (view on Google Sidewiki)

Who Is The Most Popula Twitter User?

Twitterholic ranks Twitter users by popularity.

The homepage lists the 100 most popular users at any given time.

You can also check your own Twitterholic ranking by entering your user id in the search box.

in reference to: Top Twitter User Rankings & Stats | Twitterholic.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

TWITin by Buzzom is Great

The 3 main Twitter serrvices offered through Buzzom's app, Twitin are all extremely useful and easy to use.

'Flush' unfollows people who are not following you back.
'Grow' identifies people you could follow, who are most likely to follow you back.
'Reciprocate' follows people who are already following you.

The only problem with the service is how slow it can be at times.

in reference to: Welcome to Buzzom | Social Profile Management (view on Google Sidewiki)

TweetMeme Is the ReTweet king

The retweet button that is now almost omnipresent on all major blogs was brought to us by Tweetmeme.

The core website is useful to track the number of links and retweets for a user account or a single tweet.

Retweet counts are now a way for popular blogs to boast about the number of social conversations seeded from their posts.

in reference to: TweetMeme - Search and Retweet the Hottest Stories on Twitter (view on Google Sidewiki)

Backtweets.com Is Great For Twitter Link Counts

The backtweets online app, and their WordPress plugin are absolutely priceless for blog owners who wish to bring their social conversations to their website.

Considering the number of comments and conversations that happen on Twitter now, instead of on the content owner's site itself, the WordPress plugin is a great way to show the true buzz surrounding a particular article.

in reference to: BackTweets (view on Google Sidewiki)

Ask.com Doing More Q&A but still getting nowhere

Ask.com gained popularity in the pre-Google days because people could type in real questions and the search engine would provide potential replies.

They changed all that, and their branding, and now have come right back to where they began, unfortunately just a bit too late.

Whether it's 400 million or billion answers they have there's hardly anyone asking them any questions!

in reference to: The Ask.com Blog: The Next Frontier in Search: Questions & Answers (view on Google Sidewiki)

Yet Another Image SERP Trial - Image Swirls

This doesn't look very different from the Wonder Wheel, and will probably end up being one of those "cool" but absolutely useless projects done by Google.

in reference to: Official Google Blog: Explore images with Google Image Swirl, now in Labs (view on Google Sidewiki)

Yahoo's Search Business Is Toast

Graph built on data from comScore shows what we all know - Yahoo!'s search business is dying, rapidly

in reference to:

"Yahoo's Search Business Is Toast"
- CHART OF THE DAY: Yahoo's Search Business Is Toast (YHOO, GOOG, MSFT) (view on Google Sidewiki)

CoTweet - The Best Collaborative Twitter Solution

Multiple user access, multiple account management, tweet assignments and on-duty notifications make CoTweet the best Twitter platform for businesses available on the market at present.

in reference to: CoTweet™ - How business does Twitter (view on Google Sidewiki)

Zoho - Our Favourite Online Office Solution

Zoho started off as an online replacement for Microsoft Office, but has since grown to become so much more.

The reliability and feature set of everything from Zoho Sheet to Zoho CRM makes it a much better choice than Google Office and much more suitable for collaborative, online work than Microsoft Office

in reference to: Email Hosting, CRM, Project Management, Office Suite, Document Management, Remote Support, Intranet, Customer Support Forums (view on Google Sidewiki)

Business Exchange - BusinessWeek's Social Network

A real quality network of professionals sharing information on a business-specific platform.

in reference to: Business Exchange (view on Google Sidewiki)

Business Exchange - Search Engine Marketing

Social network of professionals interested in SEM sharing latest news, blogs reference materials and job postings.

Tightly monitored social medium with much higher quality content than many of the mainstream social news / media sites.

in reference to: Search Engine Marketing - Business Exchange (view on Google Sidewiki)

WordPress Is By Far The Best CMS & Blog Platform

Yes, WordPress is not just a blog platform. It is by far the most versatile content management system available, and the best thing is that it is completely open source.

The wide community of developers that use and contribute to the platform make it possible to create almost any type of site based on the WordPress platform and the huge selection of Plugins available to enhance it.

in reference to: WordPress › Blog Tool and Publishing Platform (view on Google Sidewiki)