You gotta start somewhere...

I really never wanted to blog, but now that I have to maybe I will learn to love it! This is my hope.

I guess I will start with a little story about Internet Marketing and Ethics. I am currently employed by a search engine marketing agency, and have been for over a year. I have learned to be more aware of best practices for search marketing and I have been paying more and more attention to the advertisements that are served to me when I am on a search engine, or even on any website that has affiliate or content driven advertisements.

Story begins now: When my roommates and I heard of the cheerleader beaten and videotaped we were appalled decided to search MSN to find news articles about this tragedy. Article. I will not mention the girls name because I want to try to avoid using a tragedy to direct traffic to my blog. Interestingly enough, this is exactly what I found when I entered the girls name into the search engine. A large retailer, with a great reputation for outfitting women, bidding on this poor girls name. I would like to hope this happened by accident, and because one of their terms was broad matching (Definition) to the term. I contacted their media contact via email immediately and the ad was down in a matter of hours. Can you imagine what the consequences to the brand could have been if the news would have gotten out? I would have liked a thank you for saving their PR team a lot of stress...but alas I am still waiting. I am sure if I put their name in my blog I would be contacted immediately, yet I don't need a thank you that badly! Just a little lesson for those of you trying search marketing, make sure you aren't trying to profit on tragedy through online advertisement. In my mind, that is a big No No!

More to come (that was kind of fun)!
-Ryanne