Hillary Clinton, Rocky Balboa and Barak Obama

Today Hillary Clinton compared herself to Rocky Balboa in that classic movie “ROCKY”. Addressing a meeting of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO Tuesday, the former first lady and New York senator said she, like Rocky, wasn’t a quitter. She said “When it comes to finishing a fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common. I never quit.”

Two things really came home. Hilary Clinton knows at last that she is against the ropes and she is finally realigning the Hillary Clinton brand. It may be to late for brand alignment. But good luck Hillary. You know you are the underdog by comparing herself to Rocky Balboa. Here is my advice Hilary come out swinging but don’t go toe to  toe  as Rocky did . Thats a losing strategy. Be aggressive, align yourself quickly , set a new agenda and command the media.

This ding dong battle between Hilary Clinton and Barak Obama is a study in branding, Public Relations and marketing. Barak Obama has done very well. It seems Hillary Clinton has misread her audience and will potentially lose the race.

My advice rise up above the underdog and swing as a victor. Drop this underdog stuff.

SEO Optimization And Higher Profits

Yesterday I had a conversation with a pure play online store. They were struggling with balancing the costs of their SEM and SEO mix. PPC can be wickedly expensive if you want your brand, product or service to be in a 1-6 page ranking. The only way to win the war is by selecting your battles and aligning your resources wisely.

They had not prepared the battlefield and were burning through Adword buys at great cost.

The first step of battle is making sure your site is ready for a campaign. And that means getting the usability optimized, and making sure the site is search engine friendly. If your site is friendly and aligned with the search engines your organic listing will rocket as will your sales. When one of my clients started to fine tune their site to convert leads from AdWords I saw a leap in sales conversions between 30-45% . The other side benefit was by combining a well-structured site with an accomplished AdWords campaign they saw the cost per acquisition decline by over 55%.

When you do your SEO preparations have in mind which search engines you want to optimize for. Google, Yahoo and MSN all have different approaches. In a surprising study Covario showed that “Certain search engine optimization (SEO) techniques may have very different organic search ranking results depending on the search engine used” The study, based on data from 300 brand Web sites, took place from March 1 through October 15 of last year. Data was collected from Covario’s Organic Search Insight software which tracked Covario’s clients’ SEO practices and their resulting improvements in organic search rankings on Google, Yahoo and MSN. During the study, the software crawled each of the brands’ Web sites two times per month.

According to the study, Google was 15 times as sensitive to technical issues when compared to Yahoo and twice as sensitive when compared to MSN, Macdonald said. In addition, Google was about 25% less sensitive to content issues than the other engines. Google was 50% more sensitive to quality links than MSN, while Yahoo wasn’t sensitive to links “at all,”

My recommendation is take SEO very seriously. Give it time and allocate 10-15% of your online spend to it. It’s a hidden asset that costs little to deploy and has great results – over time.

Great Story Great Design Great Execution

Over the weekend  I got myself down to to a theater to see Persepolis. (Click here and watch the all trailers – I recommend watching the third) Right there is a classic in the making. The production values are so human and it shows. Persepolis is a movie with a great story and production techniques that hearken back to the glory days of early Disney. Except the new Disney probably would not have the courage to produce it. Sony was the financier. Its a revealing movie about Iran and very well told. Everything is seen from the point of view of the main character who brings forth her memories as a little girl in Iran, as a teenager in exile and as a married woman back in Iran. The story is always interesting, heart-felt, funny, sarcastic at times, nostalgic, cruel and absurd at some points but very very convincing. I highly recommend it.

I love stories and that speak from the heart and show character.

Check it out the movie and check out the website. That website is so bang on to the topic. Well done to whoever produced it.

The biggest asset of the Persepolis is that it doesn’t preach, it leaves everything to the viewer’s judgment, and this is something to be appreciated because we all know that cartoons can be very effective propaganda devices.

RUSH OFF AND SEE IT.