An update on Eskom’s Online Marketing

A quick update on my previous post about Eskom’s Meatball Sundae… It seems that the beleaguered power utility has been paying a bit more attention to its online reputation management and marketing (perhaps someone read my post and approached them ).

First, a Google link search on Powering South Africa now returns 116 results; whereas, before, it only had two inward links over and above one or two internal links.

Second, whereas a search on ‘Eskom’ returned a lot of highly ranked negative results a month ago, Eskom’s own sites (main and subsidiary) dominate the first page of the search results; and the first truly negative link is only halfway down page 2.

It may be partly explained by the fact that there was much less load shedding in March, and that they haven’t been getting flamed as much lately, but they definitely seem to have been doing some work on their online presence too.

Never under-estimate the power of humour in marketing

Never under-estimate the power of humour in marketing. Last week, I started receiving Eskom jokes and cartoons by email. It happens like clockwork, doesn’t it.

After consulting with one of our spokespersons, I decided to include a “Lighter side of load shedding” on our new blog. I created a Humour category, and posted a couple of humorous pics on Friday.

WordPress and search engine terms

WordPress has an almost very useful feature on its Blog Stats page: It gives search engine terms that people have used to find your blog.

But it doesn’t tell you which search engine they were using, how high in the search engine ranking your blog was, or which post/page it referred them to. I picked this up yesterday when I noticed that someone had found my site via the search engine term “Project manager analogies”. Pretty obscure, don’t you think? (I had another one today: “websites that are cell phone easy” – quite specific )

It piqued my curiosity, so I went to my default search engine, and Googled it.

Update on “SEO – Living the link-love”

Last week, I wrote about using link-love as part of an exercise to improve our blogs’ search engine rankings. I thought I’d go back today and do the same searches to see if it had any impact. It has.

SEO – Living the Link-Love

We did a session on search engine optimisation (SEO) for our blogs in our seminar today. Besides using and highlighting keywords in titles, tags and content (sensibly and intelligibly of course), a key element – of course – is link-love.

To try and demonstrate this (although we’ll probably only see the results of this after a few days, when the googlebots have visited all our blogs), we’re linking to each other. Of course, most of our blogs are really new, so there’s not too much power behind the links at this stage. However, it’s all relative. We did searches before doing the optimisation.