BING.Com MTV Movie Awards 2008??

With all the hype in the last 24 hours regarding Microsoft's new Decision Search Engine, I decided to stay up late and try it out before most of the world woke up to it in the morning. Within minutes of the announcement, I realized I wasn't the only one up late for it. In fact, Google's own Matt Cutts was already engaged with Bing on Twitter about it. 

In their exchange, @Bing asked Matt to type "mtv movie awards 2009" so he did......and what populated was a 2008 search result: 

Matt then pointed out that Google correctly populates a 2009 result. This exchange was of course a little humorous to me since I witnessed Bing inviting Matt to the experiment,  which immediately went sour. But it got me thinking, if it is inferior here, it's probably inferior in a lot of other searches.

To add insult to injury, as of this writing, "MTV Movie Awards" is trending in real-time on Twitter.

PageRank Update May 27th 2009

There has been a Google PageRank update that just happened 7:45pm. Check all your websites!! 

The Future of FlowerComplaint.com: SEO & Twitter

My little side project with flowercomplaint.com is working out better than expected. Google's year long aging factor has had minimal effect on its web-presence due to the lack of competition regarding its focus. Currently flowercomplaint.com ranks on the 1st page of Google for all the following searches:

1800flowers complaints

Proflowers complaints

FTD complaints

Teleflora complaints

Justflowers complaints

Wesley Berry flowers complaints

In an effort to build user content for the website while the domain ages in authority, I've utilized the social media outlet Twitter and have created a flower complaint account. In the past 4 days, I've uploaded 55 complaints that have come through both Google and Twitter.

As time moves forward I'm going to take all the holiday complaints and upload them on to their own page. The idea behind that is to rank the holiday page for that particular holiday. For instance, next year for Mother's Day you can expect to see flowercomplaint.com in the top 10 for "Mother's Day flowers" searches (unfortunately, I don't believe that flowercomplaint.com will have harnessed enough domain authority in time to rank for Thanksgiving or Christmas, but maybe for Valentines Day searches).

A couple of days ago 1800flowers criticized my effort to build user content for my own gains, but let me state for the record that I make nothing from flowercomplaint.com. In fact, it costs me money. Perhaps some day that may change, but right now it is 100% percent expense out of my own pocket. The gain is not my own, rather the gain is in giving some of the real paying customers of 1800flowers/Proflowers/Justflowers/Teleflora/WesleyBerry a platform of high visibility.

The complaints posted on flowercomplaint.com are real-customer experiences.....and there is a demand for a place to go and tell of their experience. Flowercomplaint.com provides that platform within a positive outlook for our industry: "Tell others of your experience - Only you can shape and refine the future of the floral industry!"

I think Teleflora and 1800flowers now see that there is a demand for such a website, as they have both asked for me to help them connect with some of the posters. In that regard, I've recently added text in red font to their complaint pages requesting that the poster add their order number to the complaint.

I'll work with these major floral companies the best I can, but their future hangs in the balance of their past customers who want to connect with potential future customers. 

I'm just the middleman :-)

Mother's Day Aftermath

I hope all you local florists had a successful Mother's Day!! Special shout going out to my favorite florist in Saint Louis! It's going to take me a while to recover so I'm probably only going to be able to tweet posts for the next few days.

I've been on the design table for 5 days with little sleep. I'm sure many of you florists can identify with that.

Sleep well.

P.S. Of interest, I've got a list of emails to upload to my Flower Complaint website (too tired to post them now). I'm sure that list is going to build over the next few days.