Cameron Olthuis

All you business and website owners listen up and listen well. Avante Gardens, an Anaheim Florist, is going to school you on building loyal customers, links, and positive buzz all in one shot….

So how many of you remember my story about FTD Sucks and how they screwed me over on Valentine’s Day? If you don’t the click over and read it really quick so you can be up to speed.

So, there is this super bad-ass floral shop up in Anaheim that took notice of my post and decided they’d use my bad experience to their advantage to win over a new customer, me. Shortly after I checked into my hotel for SMX I got a knock on my door. It was a room service dude that had a bouquet of flowers for me. At first I thought maybe I had a secret admirer that wanted some lovin’ or maybe the SMX crew was just going the extra mile for their speakers. Nope, I was wrong. The following note was included in the flowers…

Dear Cameron, After reading your plight with FTD during Valentine’s Day, I just want to put in a plug for local florists. I’m looking forward to your presentation.

Wow! My heart melted. I was in love. I thought this was one of the coolest things ever and couldn’t believe someone remembered and cared about little ol’ me.

I just snapped that pic of me with the flowers. The ladies tell me that’s a super nice bouquet. Huge thank you to Avante, you effin rock and I love you.

Hope you all learned something. This would have been a great opportunity for FTD to step to the plate and make good with me… they didn’t and now they can kiss my badonkadonk. I will never order from that piece of crap company again and have told as many people as possible not to as well. They obviously don’t care about their customers. Now, on the flip-side - you all know a good florist.

There’s a lot of drama going down about some FM advertising campaign from Microsoft called ‘People Ready‘. Basically what happened is a bunch of well known bloggers talked about how their businesses became people ready and Microsoft took those quotes, put them on banner ads, and is now running those ads on those same blogs. Apparently this has upset some folks.

I don’t want to get involved in the ethics behind this as there are already plenty of valid arguments from both sides being made. But while the blogosphere bitches back and forth like a couple of newlyweds, Microsoft is laughing all the way to the bank. This campaign has already created more mindshare, discussion and buzz then they ever could of hoped for.

The only real winner here is Microsoft. This is also a huge opportunity for them to take this campaign to the next level. Are they smart enough to figure it out and take the ball and run with it?

Chris, from 97th Floor did some nice research on the Google results for Fortune 100 companies. He found that 29 of these 100 companies have at least one negative result that shows up on the first page of Google when you search the brand name.

That’s a pretty pathetic statistic if you are one of these companies. There’s really no excuse for any of these guys not to have a perfect 10 on their results. Like Chris, I’m surprised more companies aren’t doing something to fix this.

I spoke at OMMA last week on a panel about social media sites affecting search results. One of the points I really tried to get across was that brands need to be doing more reputation management to control their search results. My point was that social media sites have a lot of authority in the SERPs so all that user generated content has a better chance on making it’s way to the top.

I used Comcast for an example because the night before when I googled their name two negative results showed up, both from social media. Coincedently those results are now gone from the first page, maybe someone from Comcast was in the audience.

** BTW - Serph is out of beta so you now you can catch your Google top 10 before it’s a problem.

Last week there was a big uproar when the National Pork Board threatened Jennifer Laycock with a cease & desist letter for the use of “The Other White Milk” on one of her shirts. They felt that she was infringing on their trademark for “The Other White Meat”. Hundreds of people blogged about the story and several others sent angry letters to the National Pork Board letting them know how ridiculous they were acting.

Just a week later I am happy to see that the National Pork Board has not only apologized to Jennifer but their employees are also conducting a fund raiser on behalf of Mother’s Milk Bank. Kudos to the NPB for stepping up the plate, admitting their mistake, and taking it one step further by helping a related non-profit organization. Kudos to those who supported Jennifer as well. Bacon for breakfast sounds good tomorrow.

We took the wraps off Serph yesterday which means we gone from private beta to a more open beta. You still need to signup but once you do we’ll send the invite shortly after.

Serph is a web application we built to help people track buzz across the web as it’s happening. The full writeup is over at Pronet so check it out. Now lets go Serphing!