I read a lot of blogs, sites, twitter feeds, and a hell of a lot more!  Separating good blogs from bad blogs ain’t easy.  It takes a lot of time.  Sometimes you’ll come across a GREAT post, only to find out you’ve been tricked.  Tricked you say?  Yes tricked, because though there was that one great gem, it takes weeks and multiple posts for another gem to show up.  With that in mind, here’s my favorite blogs.  These are blogs that I visit frequently, recommend to friends, and hold in high regard.  Hopefully, you’ll find them useful as well.

1. Matt Dickman’s Techno//Marketer blog – Matt’s smart.  His content is solid.  There’s always value.  He takes on tough tasks too, like putting together one of the BEST overviews on Facebook out there.
2. Jason Falls’ Social Media Explorer site – Wow, this is such a GREAT site.  If it’s happening in social media this is the place to be.
3. Seth Godin’s blog – You can be guaranteed to get 1 post just about every day.  The posts are fun, though provoking, and interesting.
4. The Die Line – I’m a lover of package design.  You can spend hours going through their archive of great, new, and bad packaging.
5. Steve Rubel’s Micro Peruasion blog – Steve doesn’t always time for long posts, but he does make time to list out links that interest him.  It’s one of the things I really enjoy about his blog.
6. Avinash Kaushik’s Occam’s Razor site – If you love metrics, this is the blog to read.  Who better to learn web analytics from than the guy who literally wrote the book.
7. Ogilvy’s PR Blog – They team at Ogilvy do  GREAT job of providing interesting points of view.  By having multiple contributors you get some variety that’s often lacking on other blogs.
8. Michael Arrington’s Techcrunch blog – I enjoy his blog more than I do his tweets.  The blog covers startups, technology, and everything in between.  You’ll really enjoy the witty and sometimes scathing comments.  For the most part he’s brutally honest.  I just wish he’d be a little more willing to call his “friends” out when they’re wrong.
9. Zeus Jones’ Blog – I worked with Rob White, when I was at Fallon.  I thought he was smart then and he’s even smarter now.  The Zeus Jones blog has multiple contributors from different backgrounds who offer unique points of view.
10. David Armano’s Logic+Emotion blog – Sometimes a bit to preachy and at times hypocritical, but you can’t dismiss how smart he is.  I find his graphics to be much better than the copy.  You’ll find yourself using them often because of how simple and relevant they are.  The blog is MUCH better than the twitter stream.

Awesome video that’s jam-packed with tasty tidbits like the first text message was sent in 1992.

Many of you, no doubt, are familiar with the Whopper Virgins work by CP+B for Burger King.  Even I openly admit to liking the concept, the ads, and the site.  The campaign relies on TV awareness to drive people to a web site.  Simple enough.  But, there are two giant flaws in the campaign and AdAge covers it really well here.

Flaw #1: The didn’t invest in any paid search engine marketing.
Flaw #2: They didn’t optimize the site to index against Whopper Virgins AND Whopper Virgin (sans S)

So why are these flaws?

Answer
Because nearly 50% of the searches are for Whopper Virigin (no S).  And when you type that into Google (because no one really types in the URL) you don’t see any paid search ads driving you to the right site nor do you see Whoppervirgins.com appear on the first page.

Paid search should be part of EVERY TV driven campaign.  It has to be.  People may not remember the URL, the brand, or the product, but they generally remember the story.  My favorite example of this was how GM outsmarted Ford during the 2006 Super Bowl.  You can read the full story here.  The short version is the following:

• Ford paid a boat load of money to run a Super Bowl spot touting their Ford Escape hybrid
• In the spot they had Kermit The Frog sing, “It’s Not Easy Being Green”
• GM didn’t run an ad, but they did buy a lot of paid search around the concept of the Ford ads; keep in mind they can’t legally buy “Ford” or any other branded/trademarked name
• Ford didn’t buy any paid search
• So when people were looking for that ad that featured Kermit, guess who came up in the results? GM, not Ford.

Again, purchasing is such a basic and simple part of a campaign.  Next time we think about vanity URLs, like WhopperVirgins.com we should always try to get the misspelled versions, invest in some paid search, and optimize the site to cover a wide range of terms.