Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

Went to see Seth talk about his new book, The Dip this afternoon. Seth appears to have a nice following here in the Salt Lake City area. The guy has got some incredibly simple, yet powerful ideas about marketing. I'll read the Dip tonight--it's short (only 70 tiny pages), but based on Seth's presentation today, I'm sure it will be good stuff.

Great job, Phil and all the rest of the WordMob gang. I don't know if we hit the numbers we were hoping for, but it seemed like a great turnout.

Seth gave a lot of good little nuggets of information, but I didn't bother taking notes since I saw a few people blogging at the event (like Phil Windley and I figured Chris would come through with a good overview. Seth's speech was great and I really liked the q&a -- probably my favorite question/answer was the high school marketing teacher who asked what three things he would teach his students. The answer: Get over yourself--no one cares about you, go sell stuff on ebay, and learn to tell a story. I think those are some good things for 17 yr old kids to learn (or 37 yr olds for that matter).

Also, most of the people I can think of to give my extra copies of the book were at the event, so if anyone's reading this and wants one of my 4 extra copies, drop me a line.

Labels: seth godin, utah

Hmmm. Well, I guess it's not a done deal that Seth Godin is coming to visit us here in SLC. He posted it on his blog and is taking bookings, so if he cancels, that's pretty lame.

Update: apparently Seth is now confirmed to be coming. So get your butt over to this signup page if you're going to be in the Salt Lake City area on May 24. You won't want to miss this one.

Labels: salt lake city, seth godin, utah

I'm surprised this hasn't shown up in the news before now, but apparently, the governor of my good state of Utah just signed a Utah law last month that makes it illegal for search advertisers to bid on their competitors' trademarked keywords. (here's the law) There are obviously two sides to the argument--most advertisers want to bid on their competitors' keywords while not allowing competitors to do the same to them--but that's not the point of this post. The point is, it is a complete waste of the legislature's time (and my tax dollars) to create this law. It's a pointless law that won't ever hold up--it's an issue that has been rehashed so many times and will continue to be for as long as the search engines offer keyword advertising. My personal feeling is that there should be no restrictions on trademark bidding at all, but the search engines actually have somewhat strict and I think very fair guidelines as to how advertisers can bid on trademarked terms. What's the point of having a law that's only valid in Utah to disallow trademark bids? It's a law to fix something that isn't broken! It's stupid! What a joke.

In fact, it's going to cause a lot more problems and cost the Utah tax payers a lot of money as they go through legal battles to try to defend their stupid law, which is very annoying. Besides being annoying, it's getting more than a little embarrassing how clueless our legislature is when it comes to enacting lame Internet laws...as pointed out by Eric Goldman.

Unfortunately, we're living up the reputation we have as clueless hicks here in Utah.

Oh, yeah, it was slashdotted and I'm sure will be all over the news (at least the news/blogs I read) by tomorrow.

Labels: duh, keywords, laws, ppc, trademark, utah