If you live in the Raleigh/Durham DMA, you may have seen television ads for WorkTriangle.com. This is the most recent attempt for a local employment site gain market share.

Normally, I don’t pay these any mind, but I noticed a similarity that was uncanny.

I don’t condone plagiarism, but I probably would have less of a problem with this if WorkTriangle was run by a small business with someone who doesn’t know any better. Not the case. They are owned by WorkMetro...not to mention a relationship with Time Warner Cable.

It’s certainly not blatant. In fact, Archive shows that 2005 version of WorkMetro's logo is similar to today’s. Since YouTube really didn’t go mainstream until last year, it’s safe to say that this is probably not intentional. Still, it would make sense for someone to rebrand a logo.

Andy has an interesting post on Marketing Pilgrim examining the question of whether or not print is dead. I’ve been on both the media and ad agency side of this equation, and I think I can say that if print isn’t dead, then most newspaper companies are on life support.

IMO, newspapers’ problems start and end with the fact that they are primarily paper. Maybe they need to change their overall name from “newspaper” to “newsportal” or maybe just “news.” Most newspapers and magazines have an online format, but few have really embraced the ability to make money from the electronic versions.

Specifically:

• Usability remains an issue with cluttered layout and sub-par navigation and internal search functionality
• Advertising is positioned in counter-intuitive fashions, without regard to recent eye-tracking studies
• Newspapers have not accepted the fact that users have different expectations when reading online than they do when reading paper

It’s almost as if reading a newspaper is a hobby. Print is slower to navigate and more importantly, it’s dated. What happened at press check is rarely what happened 5 minutes ago. Who wants to be the last to know after they’ve read the article?

Average Circulation of U.S. Daily Newspapers

Weekday and Sunday editions, 1990 to 2003

The vultures are circling.

Fantastic post from Stoney deGeyter on Search Engine Land on what it takes for a top SERP ranking.

I can’t tell you how many previous client conversations have gone something like this:

Jeremy: Let’s talk a little about your goals.
Client: I want to be number one on Google for my core search terms.
Jeremy: That’s not exactly what I was looking for, but okay. Why should you be number 1 on Google for your core terms.
Client: Because you put me there!
Jeremy: [Sound of a gun blowing my brains out.]
Client: I just put some metatags up 2 minutes ago, and I’m not number 1 yet.
Jeremy: ……………………………………………

Position 1 sites generally provide OUTSTANDING user experiences and offer value for their customers and visitors. So if you “wanna be number 1,” think about what you do best (this does not include free shipping, great customer service, and/or competitive prices—YOU and everyone else) and focus your branded message on it.

Then you can begin thinking about an SEO strategy.

I read an interesting post from Seth Godin today about how Reed Elsevier keeps sending him solicitations.

Over the last few weeks, I've received several [emails], all the same, all from real people at Reed. They baldly (and boldly) ask me to swap links with them as part of a scheme to move up the Google rankings…

The point of his story was how this company is large and callous enough to continue to send him spam, regardless of his several attempts to get off their email list. And that’s certainly a problem in itself. However, what I found more interesting (and troublesome) is that this multi-million dollar global company still believes that they will increase rankings on Google with a reciprocal linking campaign.

Who are these idiots? I don’t think I’ve talked with a client about a reciprocal link since 2005. And even then, it was to tell them it was a waste of time.

So my question is: how many companies out there are still this behind the times for organic search?