Corey Hammond Ramblings of Life, Sports, and Technology!

I’ve been neglecting my blog for awhile now and I didn’t realize how long it has been until I took a closer look. It feels like I just wrote on it yesterday! Since my last post there have been at least 2 SEO seminars I have spoken at, 2-3 breakfast bootcamps, and a handful of other things going on!

I am going to try and make a big push to keep the blog up going forward. I’ve been learning a lot and hope to share those ideas here. Some of the things I have been learning more and more about each day are programming, SEO/SEM, affiliate marketing, business, and more. It really has been crazy. I feel like the last 3 weeks have been all over the place but it will be for the best!

I’m pleased to announce that I will be speaking at the Karcher Group’s Akron SEO Seminar in September! I will be talking about social media and all the fun stuff involved. The conference is the 18th and 19th of September and there are still spots available to register! We will also be having Anita Campbell from Small Business Trends and Jake Baillie from STN Labs speaking at this seminar.

Some of the topics that will be covered besides social media are blogging, copy writing, PPC, and link building. I have heard Jake speak before and he is a really good speaker so I’m excited to be speaking along with him and all the others. If you are interesting in attending, you can click on the link below. My discount code is COREY and it will save you $100 which is an awesome discount!

Akron SEO Seminar

A buddy of mine, Kurt Krejny, wrote a really good article for Marketing Pilgrim on reputation management and how to pounce on negative search engine results that could hurt your or your companies reputation.

He gives a lot of great information especially on tracking reputation online. These strategies can be used for both personal and business reputations and brands.

Check out his article Sure-fire Strategies to Pounce On Negative Search Engine Results!

Wow… Can you hear me now Chad?

Finally! There has been speculation for years about the merger between Verizon and Alltel! I use to work for both companies, first Alltel (they stole my identity to make Chad, see below!) then Verizon. I really like both of them. I love the wireless industry, the phones, the constant change, etc.

I lost track of him over the years, but there was this guy I worked with at Alltel, Jay Ortman. He was a great guy. He was my area manager or whatever and his office wasn’t far from my store. He would come in and I’d plug him for the latest and greatest news and we’d have talks about the speculation. He said it wasn’t going to happen because of the cost per acquisition per subscriber. I saw some numbers and I think Verizon is paying upwards for $2100 per subscriber, which is steep. The article had said that the Sprint-Nextel disaster, I mean merger was in the ballpark of $2400 per subscriber.

All in all I think this is great. Verizon has made some big announcements like the acceptance of open source, LTE migration, and now the Alltel merger. I can’t wait to see how they handle this merger and especially the open source move!

Chad vs. Corey

My picture quality isn’t the greatest, but notice the similarities? Even more, he has the same personality that I do and I worked there before they ever launched “Chad”. Some genius in marketing must have met me and liked me that much

Today is CSS Naked Day. The goal is to help promote Web Standards like html and xhtml by getting rid of your style sheet. In support of this, it looks like Yahoo has gone naked in their search engine results!

Also baring it all is The Karcher Group!

Here is more information on CSS Naked Day.

Anyone have more examples of sites dropping their CSS and going naked?

So far, I’m not seeing a lot of love for a rumored Sprint and TMobile deal. Om Malik over at Gigaom says “Just say no…Now”. And thats pretty much the theme most bloggers are taking.

I think it could be a real powerful deal. Everyone knows Sprint really jacked up the Nextel deal. Walkie talkies are for children. On top of that, Thomas Edison had newer technology than iDEN! Push to talk is such a small part and niche of wireless. I think Sprint needs to take the technology and do something right with it. They launched these hybrid phones with cdma voice and data along with Nextel push to talk. The problem with that is, there are interference issues with the iDEN and cdma and the coverage area is restricting the phone to the 1800/1900 mhz network I think. This kills the service area. 1800/1900 mhz is a weaker signal than the 800 mhz network. Verizon and Alltel have a lot of 800 mhz I believe and thus eliminates these phones from roaming on those agreements. Action plan for Sprint: Drop the iDEN network completely.

Now, if Sprint sheds the troubled iDEN network but keeps the push to talk technology, they could be in a little better position.

Now enters TMobile! TMobile has a reputation for customer service and customer satisfaction. Sprint is probably the worst in the industry. I have worked with Alltel, Sprint, Att, Nextel, and Verizon. Sprint can take over 30 minutes to do an esn change(changing phones). 30 minutes?! What the heck are you doing for 30 minutes?! ESN changes should take no more than 5 minutes with system lag! I feel bad for Sprint customers because it takes this long to do everything and longer if you get an over seas call center! I think TMobile would help that DRAMATICALLY! Sprint could go from pissing every customer off to actually helping their customers!

Next big issue which I touched on with the Nextel problem is the network problem between Sprint and TMoblie. CDMA vs. GSM? Which one do you go with? Its a hard call. I’m a bigger fan of cdma in the US, especially with the roaming agreements Sprint has with carriers like Alltel and Verizon. Also, Sprint has an existing 3G network that TMobile currently lacks. TMobile can take their smaller than average GSM network and convert it to CDMA.

I know this isn’t the popular opinion but Sprint is hemoraging subscribers right now. They just wrote off more than they are worth! That is sick! Its like a mass exodus! I think TMobile has the financial backing and some other great assets that could help turn Sprint around into the carrier they could be. I mean, you have to admit, they have done some good things despite their recent track record!

I read Shoemoney’s post within this last week and I honesty didn’t get into the debate about 95% of SEO’s being “the used car salesmen” of search engine marketing (SEM). But then yesterday his podcast with Danny Sullivan about 95% of SEO’s being “shady” and it really got me thinking about the real definition of an SEO and what their value should be. Ultimately Danny and Shoe made really good point, and I understand Shoe position.

What value do we truly offer as SEO’s or SEM’s? Danny talked a lot about new things coming in and kind of branching off SEO like reputation management, social media, etc. and I think they are viable SEO activities but at the same time, I feel they shouldn’t be used to “razzle and dazzle” but rather compliment the basics such as the title tags, building out content, and link building. The more and more I learn about SEO, true link building is an art and not such an easy one. I mean, people are building out great content and getting links back, but I think there are some elements to link building that can be tougher than just content creation.

I think this podcast was awesome and more real discussions like this should take place between people in the industry! Thanks Shoe and Danny!

I have been trying some things out with my own reputation management for the last few months. Yesterday I was looking something up and I decided to see where I ranked. I went to Google as usual, typed in my name, Corey Hammond, and here is what I got:

I wasn’t expecting this to happen by any means and it was really cool that I caught it! My girlfriend Lisa and her parents got a good laugh at it too! I should probably try to trip it again, maybe work on getting my blog to come up or get some videos going!

I was updating my Facebook status this morning at noticed that I am no longer required to use the “is” in my status!! I have a screen shot. It looks like it auto defaults the “is” in the status, but it lets you edit it out! Its not a huge thing by any means, but nice that they finally have taken it out! Here is a screen shot of it when I click on it:

I was on Facebook today, just checking things out when I noticed this ad on the left side bar.

Since Facebook has been in the news lately for their advertising platform, I have been watching for any changes that I see. This ad had the picture and name for a friend of mine, kind of like a “referral” type ad or “your friend did it, you should too!” type of thing. It wasn’t for a product, rather an application. Either way, I’m sure they were paying for the space. I also had another one of these ads show up in my news feeds but it was for Blockbuster. I should have gotten the screen shot, but I didn’t.

It would be interesting to see if people like these ads more, or if they are getting better “clicks”. Depending on the application, I guess I would be more tempted to go along with it and at least check the application out. The one that was in my news feeds looked like it was using Facebook’s Beacon ad platform.

Anyone find any good examples of these?