by Chris Silver Smith

Both Christine Churchill, President of KeyRelevance, and Chris Silver Smith, Director of Optimization Strategies for Key Relevance, will be speaking at this year’s SMX West in March at Santa Clara, California. Christine will also be moderating the Analytics Action Plans session.

• MAR 2 / 9:45am – Keyword Research Tools & Techniques (Christine Churchill)
• MAR 2 / 3:00pm – Ranking Tactics For Local Search (Chris Silver Smith)
• MAR 2 / 3:00pm – Keyword Research: Beyond The Ordinary (Christine Churchill)
• MAR 3 / 10:45am – Twitter Marketing Tactics (Chris Silver Smith)
• MAR 4 / 1:30pm – Analytics Action Plans For PPC & SEO (Christine Churchill)

Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to learn search marketing techniques directly from us, and from other pros in the industry!

Not only is SMX an excellent conference to learn techniques from some of the top minds in search marketing, but search engines frequently choose to announce major new changes here.

With valuable opportunities to learn marketing techniques, plus chances to hear information directly from the top search engineers themselves, and great professional networking opportunities, make it a point to pencil SMX West onto your calendar. Register today!

 
 
 
 
 


by Chris Silver Smith

I’ll be speaking at the Search Engine Marketers of Portland (SEMpdx) day conference, SearchFest, on March 9th.

I’ll be speaking on Local Search Optimization tactics, along with a couple of other marketers I’ve long respected (and enjoyed socializing with as well!): Matt McGee and Mary Bowling.

For those who may be debating between attending a couple of different West Coast conferences, I’ll be covering different material at SearchFest than what I’ll be covering at SMX West. At SearchFest, I’ll be some essentials for local search ranking factors – a somewhat intermediate level of content, as Local SEO goes.


Portland Skyline photo by Eric Baetscher. / CC BY-SA 2.0

by Chris Silver Smith

I just wrote an article which published at Search Engine Land yesterday on the subject of some innovative and occasionally guerrilla marketing tactics that might be used to display advertising promotion via Google Maps. (See: Six Odd Tactics For Getting Ads Into Google Maps)

One aspect the article touches upon is how some smaller towns and cities might find it attractive to sell the rights to their names in return for sponsor dollars. I find this concept interesting, particularly as many municipalities have begun considering flogging the rights to name all sorts of things from auditoriums to subway stations to city service departments.

In the article I mentioned “DISH, Texas” which sold its name a few years ago to a satellite dish company in return for free satellite TV service for all of its residents. While this is one of the more recent examples of “City Name Sponsorships”, it’s not the first. My coworker, Mike Churchill alerted me to the fact that the small town of “Truth or Consequences, New Mexico” actually changed its name from “Hot Springs” back in 1950 in order to win a radio contest.

The NBC radio program, “Truth or Consequences” offered to broadcast their show from the first town that renamed itself for the show.

In American history, quite a number of towns and cities went through various name transitions over time, but most of these monikers were inspired by people’s names or were descriptive in some way. These days, I suspect that most larger cities would find a lot of resistance to selling off their names — and for well-known cities they’d be losing a lot of “brand equity” if they dropped a well-known name. But, for small towns, there could potentially be a lot of places which might find large corporate investment attractive enough that they could overcome constituents’ resistance to name-change.

Selling a placename is bound to create controversy whenever it happens. Winnipeg’s plans to sell off naming rights on everything from parking meters to bus tickets and even city services has apparently gotten significant criticism.

Kalle Lasn, founder and editor-in-chief of Adbusters magazine, says selling off naming rights to city services is an example of backward and unimaginative thinking.

“It’s really depressing … They should learn how to be a little bit more innovative. There are ways of cutting back and ways of generating revenue that don’t include selling your soul to corporations.”

(Adbusters is famous for helping promote “Buy Nothing Day” and other anti-commercialism and anti-advertising philosophies.)

Regardless of the controversy, the prospect of abruptly having some saleable assets available is likely to prove too attractive to resist for many city managers during these cash-strapped times. I expect we’ll see some more instances of corporate-sponsored city names appearing in online mapping systems like Google Maps.