Recently I threw up a post on Tribble Ad Agency regarding a fairly severe problem showing up in Bing and how the problem will be magnified when Yahoo adopts Bing Results.

For URLs that include ampersands (typically used between sets of dynamic attributes), substitute the equivalent escape code & amp ; for the single ampersand character (&) to enable the page to pass HTML validation checks (as in http://www.mysite.com/default.aspx?var=1& amp ;var=2)

Microsoft published the above on the official Bing blog… meaning Microsoft doesn’t accept & by itself in the URL.

The problem stems (as noted on Tribble) with Microsoft’s refusal to accept web standards. They claimed that they are doing it to be compliant, but this is as compliant as IE6.

If you run a dynamically generated site, and see that you are using the & variable in the URL, the chances are that the reason none of your content is being indexed is due to Microsoft refusing to spider content with that url structure.

It’s a bad deal people, Microsoft should comply with web standards… not another round of IE6.

We at Yooter InterActive Marketing just wanted to thank Zagat ( http://www.zagat.com ) for allowing us to help with some search engine optimization issues.

Don’t forget, today is the last day you will be able to contact Yooter employees using the old e-mail syntax.

If you are a client, you received an e-mail notifying you of this change at the end of April. As of midnight tonight, you will need to have your address book updated with the new e-mail syntax. Messages sent to the old syntax will not be delivered.

In the coming days, there will be a form placed on this site that will allow you to contact Yooter employees individually. If you have any questions, please contact Yooter via phone: (610) 628-9263.

We just wanted to give a heartfelt welcome to Lehigh University as a new Yooter InterActive partner!

We at Yooter InterActive take pride in the fact that we were one of the first firms in the country to adopt social media as our primary route to online advertising. We have become experts in Twitter, Digg, Facebook and others.

With the record growth of Twitter for example, we have been able to service our clients to extreme levels that other advertising agencies have yet to adopt as a core method of advertising…. but doing well in Twitter is meaningless if not combined with other advertising aspects.

You need a robust blogging platform, you need a robust mobile plan (that includes Twitter), you need a presence on Digg, you need a robust website and you need all these working as a well oiled machine to make it happen.

It’s the online equal to a comprehensive integrated advertising program, and that’s just not one aspect of social media, it’s the whole farm that needs to be thrown at it.

In this recession, social media and SEO will deliver the highest ROI of all marketing forms, if done correctly. Correctly being the keyword.

A recession or what some term a depression encompasses a daunting unique challenge. When the unemployment rate started swinging up to quarter century highs it unleashed a new ugly problem.

In short, people that are on the unemployment line don’t buy anything. Granted they do buy some things, food, electric, generally they continue to pay their phone and internet bills so they can continue to e-mail the market with their resumes… but that is about it.

So when they stop buying, your advertising budget hits the floor within months. We have seen companies that had a ad budget of $100 million shoot down to $2 million when comparing 2008 to 2009.

There isn’t much you can do with $2 million using traditional methods… that would be what… 3-4 full page color ads in a magazine plus your ad agency creative fees… bingo there goes your budget, but $2 million for a SEO / SMO campaign would be mind boggling. You could raise havoc on the market place with a budget like that… in fact… you could raise havoc with a budget 10% of that, a $200,000 dollar ad campaign would be an extensive Social Media campaign.. generally complete with oodles of press leaving you with 1.8 million for a free spending “waste your money” print or TV campaign.

In essence the only valid marketing during this economic disaster is online. It’s the only one that your company could afford and measure. Online doesn’t mean forking over your company credit card to Adwords (though that can be used in some instances). Online advertising means blogs, social media and overall an extensive online PR campaign.

It’s hard work, not high cost, big… big diffrence between the two models. It’s generally the types of campaigns that the holding companies shield themselves from because in their eyes “there’s no money in it” … and that’s because of their mindset isn’t to generate an ROI for you.. it’s to generate an ROI for themselves.

You can’t get 20% over spend if the spend is zero.

A blogging campaign means having educated people work the keyboards… it’s not plugging your credit card into adwords and rolling the dice… it’s something that most likely your ad agency didn’t present to you for 2 main reasons. As noted above it’s that there is no “money” in it for them, and second because honestly they don’t know how to do it… and most likely would outsource it to a company like us to do it.

Amazing flip of events that have taken place over the past year… granted most advertising agencies have the contacts…but we have the ROI for the client… this economy will prove what works the most.

We wanted to let all the employees watch the Obama Inauguration Live, we heard that other agencies are paying to setup TV’s across the offices, whereas we decided to take the cost effective “High ROI” method, and considering they already have a computer on each desk, there is no need to setup TV’s across the offices, instead just watch the full stream below.

It’s the difference between paying to setup the infrastructure, or using your existing one.

Enjoy.

Amanda:

Cody and Aaron

This perhaps just put a big monkey wrench into our plans of world domination, it appears that Google will manually edit results moving forward..

Story is developing

I just wanted to say good job to everyone at Yooter InterActive Marketing! We had a record year, and in turn you will see a bonus in your Christmas / Hanukkah / Holiday paychecks as a thank you for all you have done for 2008!

I can’t stress enough how proud I am of you.

Preliminary figures show a high double digit growth rate from last year to this year, and much of it occurred AFTER the economic crisis, meaning that our business model is proving to be the choice firms are making for their advertising needs as it is lower cost and higher ROI for the clients.

I always knew we had the brightest individuals here, your hard work has proved it!

Best Regards,
Roger Wehbe
President, Yooter InterActive