I don't try to find ways to pick on Microsoft's marketing techniques.

It's just that they make it so easy.

The folks at Bing have decided to buy pay per click ads on Google Adwords. Not a bad idea.

But they need to learn a bit about phrase and exact match, I think:

And my favorite:

OK, I'll stop. I'm supposed to be on vacation, after all...

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As he did in life, Michael Jackson continues to break records in his death…

The death of superstar Micheal Jackson is turning out to be one of the biggest phenomenons that is illustrating the power of online and mobile communication throughout the world and is really fascinating from an Internet marketing perspective.

On a personal note…

Let me say that I am truly saddened by this news. As my regular readers know, I came to this country from the former USSR in 1975 as a young child and Off The Wall was the first album I ever owned, yes in full on vinyl.

His music was my first introduction to American pop and dance culture and coming from the USSR with both of my parents being classical concert pianists this was certainly a change of pace.

That album and the many great songs that came after hold a lot of great memories for me and brought me lots of joy throughout the years.

It is truly amazing the kind of impact he had on people all over the world. I suspect that we will learn that his early death could have been avoided, as with the many celebrities who came before him and I really hope that he can find some peace in death that he could not find in life.

The unprecedented impact of Michael Jackson’s death on the Internet:

The news of Michael Jackson’s death had an incredible impact on the Internet with record breaking traffic and search volumes that actually shut down Google for about 26 minutes on Thursday afternoon because they thought they were being attacked.

Google Trends labeled Thursday’s searches for “michael jackson died” as “volcanic.”

Thursday was also a record-breaking day for Yahoo when their story, “Michael Jackson rushed to hospital,” received 800,000 clicks in 10 minutes, which made it its highest-clicked story ever.

Yahoo revealed that Yahoo News set an all-time record with 16.4 million visitors, beating the old record of 15.1 million set last election day. The four million visitors between 3-4 pm also set an hourly record.

Twitter reported 5,000 Jackson-related tweets per minute on Thursday afternoon.

Facebook reported status updates in triple numbers on Thursday afternoon.

AOL, whose AIM messaging service was knocked offline for 40 minutes Thursday, stated “Today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We’ve never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth.”

The massive search volumes also affected, Bing, as well as mobile communications which saw an unprecedented amount of text and communications volumes as well.

From an Internet marketing prespective this is quite fascinating and shows the power and speed of information distribution that is the Internet.

I was watching to see who had the story posted first, as thousands of bloggers, both in news and celebrity fields took to their keyboards to spread the news.

TMZ.com broke the story first, with CNN and local news channels following closely behind, but apparently Wikipedia still won out over everyone, including Twitter and poor Google (:-)) that struggled to revive after the massive search volumes.

Here is an interesting post by SEO Moz, that lists the exact time line of the developing news online:

A Bad Day for Search Engines: How News of Michael Jackson’s Death Traveled Across the Web

And Google’s official blog posted an explanation of their downtime and a search volume graph that really illustrates the spike in searches best at: Outpouring of Searches for the Late Micheal Jackson

On a lighter note…

Don’t we all wish to have at least 5% of that kind of traffic???? Incredible really.

If you love the content buy me a coffee.

Copyright 2009 JR's Internet Marketing Strategies. This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only, if you are reading this on a website other than your feed reader then the copyright has been violated. Visit JR's Internet Marketing Strategies for more great content.

I'm launching a new service called 1Thing.

The idea: Provide internet marketing advice, in small bites, at a low price.

I've designed a landing page, created the templates, etc..

And I hate it. The landing page is nasty. Horrible. It makes me cry.

I've gotten fantastic advice from other marketers. And I've used quite a bit of it. Problem is, they gave me advice from the perspective of super-experienced internet marketers.

I need advice from potential consumers. That's where you come in. If you read this blog looking for little nuggets of advice you can use to improve your site, then please, take a look at the 1Thing page.

Then, comment below: Do you understand the service? What would make you buy it or not buy it? What do I need to say to make the benefit clear as day?

In exchange, I'll send you 1 piece of 1Thing advice, for nuthin'.

I'm throwing this story out there to see if anyone else has had a similar experience.

Google's made a lot of noise recently about their newfound ability to crawl javascript and links that are built into a javascript.

Last week I saw a 500% increase in 'page not found' errors in one client's Google Webmaster Tools. The links all looked like this:

At first, I didn't make the connection between that and Google's improved javascript prowess.

After looking at the client's pages, though, the only place the guilty link appears is in a javascript:

In this context, the forward slash ('/') means 'www.investmentnews.com', so the text above gives you 'www.investmentnews.com/10020708'.

The only problem: That is not a link, Google!

It's just a javascript 'bug' for the client's analytics package, Hitbox. It tells Hitbox to record the pageview with a shorter URL. But it is not a link. No visiting browser would interpret it as one, either.

Anyone else seeing this kind of behavior?

Google folks, any chance of verifying and addressing this?

Thanks,

Your servant/slave/supplicant
Ian

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I'm going to be on a panel at the Seattle Online Marketing Summit (OMS) next week, July 1st.

The session is at 3:30 PM, and is titled "Integrating Email, Search, Social into the Entire Online Marketing Channel".

Never mind me, though. Other folks on the panel include Anne kennedy of Beyond Ink and joblr.net, Blake Cahill from Visible Technologies, Jason Gan from Cisco and Steve Gelen as the moderator.

I didn't write the description, so I don't have to suffer from whatever hubris-inspired revenge the gods would inflict for calling myself a "World's leading expert". Here's the whole description:

You can register for OMS Seattle here.