…don’t first present me with an image of three dirty great big hippos bathing, farting and pooing in my cereal bowl!

Kk thx.

Scott

Only one fifth believe that it works as an advert for one of the most watched sporting events across the globe.

David Thorpe, director of research and information at the CIM, remarks that the logo should convey what a “fantastic showcase” the Games will be for London and the UK.  However, he notes: “The logo should communicate clearly an appealing identity for the games, yet the UK’s marketers are deeply sceptical about its ability to do so.  With the public and marketing professionals set against it, those involved with the Olympic logo have a lot of work to do over the next four years to win them round.”

London 2012 organising committee chairman Seb Coe claimed in an interview with BBC Five Live that the widely criticised emblem was “not a logo” but a brand when it was unveiled last June.

The logo had initially attracted criticism at its launch because of fears that it could trigger epileptic seizures in its animated form, prompting its swift removal from the organisers website.

Looks like “Lisa Simpson getting down and dirty” may not have been the best way to go with the logo!

MG

I’ve chipped in my 2c from time to time on the recent discussions, but having read back even a week or two I see small businesses being advised to do some pretty ridiculous stuff.  Its nuts – people are being advised by “experts” to churn out thousands of pages (one per town) just to target different locations. 

I can see the logic from a marketing point of view – conducting local campaigns offline requires location specific targeting – fair enough.  But do we really need mom n’ pop sites creating what are essentially doorway pages to target local areas?  That’s just going to lead to a world of pain for them.

I wrote an article on optimising for local terms a while back and I generally point people to that – I think that’s a pretty good start for small businesses to begin with as it doesn’t directly lead the less savvy to the conclusion that they need to churn out loads of content to target loads of local terms.

That’s the key IMO – keeping the less savvy tamed so they don’t run off and do something silly (which is perhaps one of the most common causes of SEO problems for small businesses – DIY SEO gone awry)…

• Tell people they need keywords on the page – that can lead to keyword stuffing or hidden text.
• Tell people they need different pages to target different keywords – that can lead to doorway pages or crap content pages.

We need to educate our market – but we need to educate responsibly

The amount of rubbish that is being sold as “fact” around the SEO world is becoming ridiculous.  Just in the past week I’ve seen the following “facts” being posted on forums by people offering professional SEO services:

1. Big directories aren’t well optimised – they just rank well because of their homepage PR.
2. Directories are well optimised – you need to add more keywords to your page to compete.
3. Keyword domains rank better than non keyword domains.
4. Just get deep links to compete with larger sites targeting local areas.
5. The more pages you have the more keywords you can target.  I have thousands of pages for (mid competitive key term) one for each town in the UK.

OK, these aren’t necessarily bad statements – but taken in context they can be very dangerous for small businesses.

These statements are made by low experience SEOs probably based on some mild success they’ve had.  Fair enough – but in most cases the advice is grossly inappropriate for the situation – the SEOs simply don’t have a sufficient understanding of how search works to be able to give out solid advice…

1. Yeh, big directories may have a strong homepage PR – that doesn’t necessarily mean that all their local rankings are a consequence of that.  Sending out this message to a small business will only result on them embarking on a quest for PR which would be a fools errand and potentially risky (if they start messing with paid links, cross linking sites, hording PR and so on).
2. Yeh, some directories may be well optimised but telling a small business site to add more keywords to their page is plain stupid.  There’s a sweet spot to hit with on page optimisation and if you don’t make that clear to small businesses they WILL take it to extremes.
3. Yeh, keyword domains may rank better than non keyword domains – that’s just down to people linking to them using the site name (keywords).  Sending out this message will see small businesses sacrificing branding and reputation for keyword domains which is crazy talk.
4. Yeh, deep links can help certain campaigns but they aren’t a prerequisite for success and IMO are entirely unnecessary for UK local campaigns (with the exceptions being high population areas or high £££ markets).  Why send small businesses out looking for deep links when solid on page optimisation and decent homepage link building will suffice in most cases?  This one particularly annoys me as I see “deep linking” being presented as a solution for poor site architecture or on page SEO all the time.
5. Yeh, the more pages you have, the more terms you can target.  But do you really want to have 1000 pages conveying a single message?  How much variation in content can you really achieve?  I don’t care how superb your copy is – if you have 1000 pages saying the same thing it is spam.  The guy suggesting this had his SEO site targeting obscure towns – the pages (optimised for SEO + town terms) had decent copy – but it was all irrelevant (non SEO) information like the population and history of the town.  How is that a good result?  And same problem again – 9 out of 10 small businesses won’t go to the lengths of writing decent copy on this level – it will just be regurgitated crap which ends up as a crap result for searchers.  See my article on SEO agency copywriting sins too!

The key problems:

• Inexperienced SEOs offering opinion as fact. 
• Inexperienced businesses taking SEO too far.

These are issues that really need to be addressed.  There was a time that almost 50% of my consultancy business came from fixing other peoples work – that is not a good state of affairs for our industry to be in.

The problem is that it is easy for anyone to build up credibility as a SEO on non SEO forums – there’s generally a similar level of SEO knowledge and experience on the forums and it’s not like the advice given out is bad – it’s more that the manner in which it’s given out is inappropriate.

Here’s my suggestion for a solution:

All you experienced SEOs out there – take the time every now and again to visit your preferred local / small business forums and help out answering a few questions.   It’s not like the noise factor on some SEO forums – small business owners are all usually very grateful and if we do it enough then perhaps we can undo some of the damage done by the less than reputable members of our industry.

And as for all you folks with less SEO experience - I’m not saying don’t help people out – all I’m saying is that we really do need to be careful how we give out advice.  Small businesses asking for advice are usually about to attempt some DIY SEO – the responsible thing to do is to ensure all the risks are outlined and that you really are confident that what you are saying is accurate (if not, just say so – that’s the right thing to do). 

Small business SEO advice is a very delicate process – it’s not like people are optimising a blog or Adsense site that they can chuck away if it goes wrong – in a lot of cases their business website is core to their living – you need to treat it with that level of respect, especially if you are selling yourself as an SEO professional.

Lastly, to all those non-SEOs-but-like-to-dish-out-advice-because-they-optimised-their-own-blog – stop it!  I don’t care if you got your poxy little site to number 1 for a competitive term – that doesn’t make you an SEO and it’s incredibly arrogant to assume you are qualified to hand out advice.  Yes, you!  The “SEO is easy” crowd.  I mean, seriously, I’ve seen professional printers advising small businesses reliant on their site to change their existing site to Wordpress because “they once optimised a blog and got some traffic”.  Just stop it.  Yes, you people who self-scored a 6 on the SEOmoz level of SEO professional test even though you’ve only ever optimised your own crappy little blog.  Stop it now!

Scott

I’ll kick off things with disclosing that I don’t have a very high opinion of BigMouthMedia.  I worked there Jan 2005 – Jan 2006 and left fairly disenchanted with the company having had more than one disagreement with the powers that be about various things and some blog posts which ultimately led to them threatening legal action!  Shame, would have been great link bait!

Matt (a former GlobalMedia employee who left around the time of the BigMouthMedia merger) wrote a post the other day about BigMouthMedia’s rankings on the back of a discussion about whether or not rankings = quality.  Go ahead and read that – not worth me spending much time on the back story here as it’s covered well over at SEOtunes (but read my SEO agency copywriting sins article as well!).

What I thought I would do here was look at some of the reasons that BigMouthMedia have succeeded and touch on some of issues that can come with it.

Experience, experience, experience

One of the key issues that BigMouthMedia faced growing over the past years is finding experienced staff.  I’d venture a question for you – was this intentional or just a consequence of their location / the state of the industry?

Probably a bit of both.

When i started in Jan 2005, BMM was only around 15 people – that was with quite a large client portfolio even back then (I don’t really recall, but guessing I’d say around 200 clients).  Basically the company was a load of Account Managers (of which I was one), supported by some sales and tech staff (the tech guys being the core of SEO experience within the company).  By the time I left in Jan 2006 the company was up to around 30 staff – the Account Management team had grown the most but the tech team hadn’t recruited any more experienced SEOs.

Not to take anything away from the people they did recruit who were all talented tech bods – they just didn’t have any SEO experience and needed to be trained.

During this time, the Account Management team had grown a lot but there was really only flirting attempts at serious training.  Keep in mind, these are the people who are completing strategy documents for clients who paid £x,xxx (or more) for the document.  I overheard some crazy stuff being told directly to clients in that time – just down to lack of training.  The most non liable example I can think of is someone advising a big brand over the phone to make full use of “RSS CSS feeds”…

So where is BigMouthMedia now?  Over 200 employees and probably over 500 clients I’d guess.  But how many experienced “SEO hours” is each client receiving each month on average? 

I don’t want to be too critical about the BigMouthMedia service as I am biased but I think a more general point can be made here.  Despite an extensive client list I’d guess that *some* clients may be better off pound for pound working with a small agency or consultant.  What do you think?

Does size matter?

I believe it does but I also believe there’s a point of diminishing returns (aka “growing pains”).  Finding experienced staff isn’t easy, particularly in a field where someone with a couple years experience can go it alone and make more money than an agency would pay (well, BigMouthMedia weren’t helped along with the crap salaries they paid though!).

So with very strong marketing efforts, good rankings (resulting in good leads), big brands on the client list and a strong sales force led up by Steve Leach and the other company directors, BigMouthMedia found it easy to get clients.  Well, not easy – just easier in comparison with other agencies – all the right boxes were ticked to get the sales process started and BMM had the key staff to close the deals.

But with growth comes more problems.  I heard ’round the campfire that a year after I left the staff count had doubled yet no more experienced SEOs had been hired.  Worse still, only a few had even made it to the interview process! 

This could have been a critical point for BigMouthMedia – bad PR or an exodus of staff could have seriously crippled the business.  And getting banned from Google around this time couldn’t have helped lol!

Merger to the rescue!

Along came the deal with GlobalMedia which probably changed the fate of BigMouthMedia.  As I said before, BMM weren’t exactly forthcoming with liberal salaries (of course, it could have just been for me given I wasn’t exactly employee of the month much! ) – some people familiar with the business speculated that budgets were kept tight in order to make the company look more lucrative to investors – I’m not certain if this was the case or not. 

There had been an awful lot of graduate / entry level career people recruited throughout my time (and the salaries matched the experience levels) and I reckon the GlobalMedia deal brought a more mature company model to what BigMouthMedia had become (which was essentially a small inexperienced company being held together by key members of staff).  BigMouthMedia didn’t grow up well – the time between 12 employees and 50 employees didn’t have much structure.  Everyone had “Manager” in their job title, and there wasn’t much in the way of formal training.

I have likened it to a glorified call centre before – I’m not certain if that is entirely fair or not though.  I think I’ll leave you to judge that one.

GlobalMedia brought international offices (and not just shared offices used once a week *cough*) and the structure of a larger company to BigMouthMedia – I think more than anything that was the injection of life the company needed.

Big is best?

Well if you believe BigMouthMedia’s press releases, then big is best.  But then again, there are so many press releases each day you might miss it.

Going back to the topic of Matt’s original article on SEOtunes, how does quality relate to success?

Do good industry rankings equate to SEO talent?  To some extent I believe so, and I also believe good rankings also equate to good marketing efforts (which usually go unsung in this industry).  Certainly I wouldn’t question BigMouthMedia’s top end SEO skills, led by Head of SEO, Andrew Girdwood who has been around for years and is very knowledgeable when it comes to SEO (as is JZ – dunno if he has a blog / public profile to link to though).

But in the same breath – I wouldn’t equate the experience of the rest of the company to that of these two people.  There is a level of dilution of skills when you rely on key members of staff to carry a lot of others.  While new or inexperienced members of staff could competently review some sites for SEO purposes, that’s no substitute for a high level of experience looking at the site.  That for me is a problem if you are selling yourself based on the experience your staff have.

It’s back to that “do rankings = quality?” question again.  They suggest quality (or at least skill / knowledge), just like big brands on the client list do. I don’t think they equal quality though.

Sales…sales…sales!

The key to the success of BigMouthMedia has been the strength of their sales team and in my opinion one of the areas many SEO agencies undervalue.  There are many other areas that they have failed on in the past (or continue to fail on by some estimations) – but sales isn’t one of them.

I know that could sound like a nippy remark (given the negative conations associated with “sales guys” sometimes) – it isn’t intended as such.  Sales is a vastly important area of business and BigMouthMedia serve as a good example of how much benefit it can be.

Whether or not BMM “deserve” their success is another question.  I’m *mostly* in the camp of “if they achieved it, then they deserve it”, which I feel is a fair assessment to a certain extent.  On the other hand, some would argue that it’s not the destination that’s important – it’s the journey, and certainly BigMouthMedia have made some questionable decisions over the years.

Open your Big Mouth!

Spill the beans.  What do you think?

Does BigMouthMedia deserve the success they had or do you hate them with a passion?  Give your reasons – keep it clean (or email me the dirty secrets)!  Are their rankings the secret of their success or a consequence of them?

I find myself in a weird position of knowing many negative accounts, and being weary of anything positive said.  Help me free my mind!

Scott

And the winner of the “Branding Screw Up of 2007 Award” is….

The London Olympic 2012 logo is also finding itself being rebranded by the media and members of the public…

“Broken Swastika”, “resembles a toileting monkey” and some references to fellatio are just a few of the comments that people are making!  In additon, an animated version of the logo has reportedly been removed from the official website after causing 8 cases of epiletic seizures, contravening OFCOM guidelines.

Money well spent, huh?

I mean, who pays £400k for a logo design the first place – at some point they surely thought – “Hmm, let’s run this by some members of the public to test reactions…”?

I’m thinking that the brand consultancy they used may be hurting a little this week (although with a £400k pay cheque to soften the blow, they might not be so bothered)!

Anyone actually like it? After someone pointed out the “fellatio association” I can’t see anything but that now!  Maybe they should scrap it and use it for Amsterdam 2016?

MG

No doubt the likes of Slashdot have already dealt with and got over the impact the SEO industry may or may not have on the operation of their site – having implemented procedures to deal with comment spam, crap submissions and the like, Slashdot is still doing fine.  So why are newer community driven big brand sites so anti-SEO?

There has been loads of drama surrounding Digg’s approach to the SEO industry, which has been driven largely by its user base that seems to be largely anti-SEO despite many top Diggers being SEOs themselves.  A notable example was Danny’s recent article being buried.

And now, MyBlogLog is getting in on the SEO witch hunt as well, after banning SEO Shoemoney for “publishing other people’s data on the site and urging readers to spoof them”.  OK, a fair argument, but ill-timed given that the SEO industry is still fist-shaking after the recent Digg drama.

Regardless of the specifics of each situation, what annoys me is that these large and popular sites are so inadequately handling the nature and reality of the web.  Both Digg and MyBlogLog offer a system where websites can promote themselves (submitting an article to Digg; making use of MBL widgets, profiles, etc), yet they seem to be handling the Internet Marketing industry so badly.

We’re not working in a new industry – SEO has been around for years now and it really unbelievably amateurish for such large brands to emerge offering services that are obviously attractive to the marketing industry, yet are unable to manage their online PR with any level of competence.

After burying Danny’s article, the Digg user base now finds itself having lost an insightful and informative article written by one of the industry’s most respected individuals.  How does this reflect on Digg?

Eric Marcoullier from MyBlogLog talks about “staying ahead of SEO-types who try to game the system” – no offence Eric, but you (well your company) created the system and it was blatantly obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that this was the inevitable outcome on the back of the system’s success.  You created a marketing tool and now are complaining because marketing professionals are using it.

That’s like Google complaining because small businesses who self manage their PPC campaign don’t get as good an ROI or exposure as professionally managed campaigns.

Natural selection anyone?

Here’s an idea for Digg.  Realise that a community based on anonymous voting by a predominately tech geek crowd is an inherently flawed model that will reach a critical mass and then simply fail.  Either take your community and refocus it to serve niche markets which would make good use your users’ professional knowledge – or – adapt your system’s model to accommodate mass market use to avoid one social group dominating the results.

Otherwise your site is simply going to become (or stay as) a bitching ground for geeks.  We’re all adults here (mostly) – I think it’s time we moved on from the “majority rules and the rest gets binned” philosophy.

How about creating specialist areas for your users so their votes carry more or less weight where their own specialism and past voting history is appropriate?

Here’s an idea for MyBlogLog.  Profiles, stats, networking – regardless of how your corporate strategy defines your site, it is in fact a marketing tool for bloggers – within this market, SEO plays a very significant role.  To avoid this, ignore it, or even fight against it is an unnatural way to approach the issues you are facing.  Embrace the “problems” and reassess your strategy to incorporate new ways to turn them into positives.

Don’t like half naked chicks as avatars?  Then implement a review process. PokerStars.com does this for gamer avatars – you need to wait a few days for a review and you can only change your avatar 1 time after this, but there are no offensive images at the tables.  And I bet they got way more users than you do!

Don’t like comment spam?  It’s not 2002 – there are plenty of ways you can implement self moderation / community moderation features to kill it off.

Don’t like BS communities / profiles that don’t deserve to be there?  See above re: community moderation / review process.

——————————–

The main problem Digg and MBL have is that both sites are based on a LAZY business model.  They simply setup free and easy ways for people to contribute the content and have next to no internal review processes in place.  And now the sites have reached a critical mass of users that laziness has come back to bite them on the ass – and instead of doing something about it they are pointing fingers.

Change, innovate or be remembered in Friday Foo “what ever happened to” posts.

MG

1/ What do I know about?

2/ What am I passionate about?

3/ What subject am I prepared to research and produce original content for that is more thorough than the 9 other people (some of which may be online super brands) fighting for recognition on Google’s 1st page of search results?

Don’t look for the quick fix – namely as it is unlikely to yield long-term results and credibility. We are in a media industry that is less that is not much more than 10 years old -invest in the long-term success of your internet business.

Apologies to publishers who feel condescended by this piece (but I’m sure you’ve stumbled across this sites I’m referring to) and apologies to any black-hat SEO gurus who make a decent living staying 1 step ahead of algorithms. For the rest of us mere mortals – my advice is to engage www2 for what it is and research with gusto and write with passion – This is what builds eye-balled websites and businesses thereafter.

For more guidance on defining content strategy see digitalAim – Online Marketing Consultants

I’ve never believed this old adage – I think it’s an arrogant dismissal by incompetent marketers who can’t manage their public relations properly.  Until recently it has never really been a big concern in the online world, but with an explosion of online communities over the past few years and the more recent increase in link baiting and brand protection services, perhaps online marketing professionals should be taking their branding more seriously?

If I could be bothered hunting down “how to” link bait articles, you’d see that most recommend undertaking some kind of negative efforts in order to spark off some link love to your site.  A war with another blogger.  A campaign against a well known brand.  Posting inaccurate information to tempt righteous bloggers to correct you.  Etc.  I’m sure most people who read this blog have already seen such articles, so no need to rehash them here.

Let’s consider some examples.

A while back, Brett Tabke banned all bots from WebmasterWorld.  While this wasn’t intended link bait as such (it had a technical justification), it did serve as link bait for WmW.  Did they get more links and coverage?  Yes.  Did they suffer any negative impact?  No.

They didn’t lose any traffic (that they didn’t want to get rid of).  They didn’t lose any users over the experiment.  The site and business hasn’t suffered from it – in fact, a lot of people had a little more respect for Brett & WmW at the time for having the balls to ditch all search traffic as an experiment.

While this isn’t a great example (it wasn’t an intentional link bait exercise), it does show how positive link bait can lead to positive results.

On the other hand, 2006 saw countless cases of companies screwing up their branding online by handling their online PR badly.  While not all of these are because of stupid link baiting, the end results are the same.  Perhaps the companies have received more exposure because of it, but what is the long term impact of this?

Zipatoni launched a splog for the Sony PSP and ended up getting slated by pretty much everyone over it.  What’s worse is that their response was grossly inadequate for the scale of their screw up and ended up compounding their failure.  Now search for “Zipatoni” and you find a great deal of negative results in the top 20.

Another example from 2006 is Big Mouth Media’s ban from Google.  While this is an embarrassing slip up in itself (which was rectified pretty quickly), their response to critics in the SEO community was arrogant and badly presented and made the whole affair much worse for them when Matt Cutts told the SEO world that they were in fact penalised from Google (and it wasn’t a mistake as BMM claimed).  Again, search for “Big Mouth Media” and you find negative results (this from a company that offers online brand protection services…).

In both these examples it was entirely within the control of the companies to manage these negative situations properly, but in both cases they failed to do so and it resulted in much more negative publicity. 

Was any publicity, good publicity in these cases?

Well, there is the SEO argument that says “yes”.  After all, they did get a lot of link love from various sources so perhaps it will help them in the long term in terms of improved rankings and traffic.  Notice I haven’t linked out to them just now – I’m not a link scrooge – I just do see any point in rewarding stupidity.  If I thought for a second that these were well planned link bait campaigns and not simple screw ups I’d probably have more respect for them!

However, what happens when clients carry out due diligence before they sign up for services provided by these marketing agencies?  While a Google search might not be the first thing they do, it is fairly likely it will be part of the research.   Will a client want the services of an agency that has caused an international uproar for a major brand client or an agency that have themselves been unable to assure the service they are offering?

The overall impact is debatable and obviously there are many other factors in the client decision making process, but the point is do we really want to throw some negative factors into the mix?

Link baiting is a short term exercise that can potentially have long term positive results, but I think that all too often people neglect to consider the long term negative results as well.

Credit to those who do link bait well – it can be a useful tool, just as SEO can be.  But as with SEO, many take the basic concepts and run with them without looking too deeply into the strategic implications they can have on their site, business or brand.

MG

Most SERPs relating to areas that Google have a business interest already display Adwords for the service, but this is one of the first times I’ve seen an additional snippet advertising the service.  Plus it’s also unusual for Google to include branding (blogger logo) in otherwise text based SERPs.

An interesting change – perhaps just a test, but could lead on to more commercial Google properties being advertised in SERPs outwith the Adwords model.

What strikes me is that with the recent debates about the Pay Per Post model of link building (let’s not mince about – it is link building, regardless of how the facilitating companies choose to position themselves!), and FTC requirements for disclosure, surely Google should be under some kind of requirement to disclose the fact that they own Blogger.

Keep in mind, although we (in the SEO industry) are more than aware of Google’s various acquisitions over the years, the average user may not be.  So advertising a “tip” on ALL “blog” and “weblog” related searches may seem like more of a recommendation than a promotion.  Certainly a dive into a very grey area.

What do you think?  I know a few people I chat to about these things (that aren’t instantly bored my choice of profession!) don’t really look at SERPs in the way that I do.  Most will look at the results and perceive them to be in some order or relevance and importance (and not simply as an easily manipulated set of data as I personally view them).  And as such, I would assume that these type of users would perceive any information outside normal and sponsored results as being a message from Google (or any search engine they are using).

If Windows pops up a “tip” for me, I know (as does the average user) that it is for usability purposes.  I would suspect a lot of people apply the same logic to stuff they read on websites, and I would go on to assume that for strong brands such as Google, small details such as this can and will be taken very literally.

That said, the statement, “Tip: Want to share your life online with a blog? Try Blogger” is a very common way to plus sell products and many websites use this technique.  Amazon for example will use the same offhand recommendation style to pitch related products, so why shouldn’t Google?

But then, why can’t a blogger be paid to make a post about a product?  Google, it seems, doesn’t need to label their promotions as “sponsored results” anymore.

Should Google have to disclose their relationship with Blogger?  At face value, Blogger is a free service, so technically Google aren’t selling anything – but Blogger is a huge network that allows Google to plus sell Adsense and therefore expand their product offering to Adwords advertisers, so they do profit from it.

It doesn’t really bother me – I think anyone should be able to do whatever they please with their website, regardless if you are Google or Ma n’ Pa’s e-shop.  But I do think this approach by Google is somewhat borderline grey area territory.  Considering Google’s historically “do no evil” approach to marketing and the current climate for the need for disclosure with business relationships, this otherwise innocent addition to Google SERPs could raise a few eyebrows.

MG

The site has since been taken down – I originally thought it might be a server crash due to the traffic being sent from the blogsphere and social media sites such as Digg, etc, but it seems that the site is down permanently.

I did manage to find this article though that claims to have had a brief statement from both Sony and Zipatoni on the matter:

Next-Gen contacted SCEA PR boss David Karraker who answered a couple quick questions. When asked about the magnitude of this PR mishap, he replied, “Buzz and viral marketing is a common practice across the industry.  In this instance, SCEA hired an outside agency to create a humorous ‘underground’ PSP site for the holidays.  The tongue-in-cheek nature of the site didn’t come across as intended and we have since altered it.”

Sooo…we got it wrong.  Zipatoni didn’t create an insanely bad viral site – it was just meant to be tongue-in-cheek and we all just missed the point.

Next Gen go on…

When confronted about accusations that Sony underestimated gamers’ intelligence with the campaign, he stated, “Sony just released the most advanced console ever developed, so I doubt seriously that anyone would think we are underestimating our consumers’ intelligence.  This was simply a marketing idea that was poorly executed.”

Lol Sony – way to make a bad situation worse.  I think they may be overestimating their consumers’ loyatly if they seriously think that the power of their brand is going to blind people to crap like this and a very late market entry for the PS3.

Next Gen contacted Zipatoni about the flog and subsequent backlash, but they said they weren’t prepared to comment [at this time].  Probably a good idea!

MG