Mr. Spangler sells cool science experiments on the internet. Turns out blog posts lead to sales spikes. This is excerpted from the article:

In June 2004, his [Spangler’s] site experienced “an incredible spike in sales” because of one particular product called Instant Snow.

Netconcepts [Spangler’s eCommerce provider] told Mr. Spangler that the spike was due to a post about the product on a blog.

“We launched our blog in July 2004,” [Spangler] said.

Mr. Spangler estimates that 15% of his sales come from his blog.

Thanks to Conrad Fink in New York for spotting this info.

The issue here, of course, is knowing your audience. Best not to pander to the people of Bedford Stuyvesant. This ad is so off-the-mark that we have to quote it in it’s entirety as a cautionary tale:

When people close their eyes and think of Brooklyn, your legendary brownstones come to mind. That’s because everyone from rappers to directors have used you as the backdrop for stories about life in the neighborhood that has everything. Do or Die is more than a moniker. It speaks to the fact that you don’t take crap from anyone. Especially newcomers who want to change Bed-Stuy into some sort of yuppie strip mall. With us you only make changes if you want. That’s the beauty of our cell phone plans without annual contracts. Because Bed-Stuy, we know you call your own shots.

Oh boy. The ad was picked up in Brownstone, a blogsite that bills itself as “Brooklyn Inside & Out.” Their post has generated over 100 comments since May 30. Here are a few:

I’m going to throw up.

That’s all the neighborhood needs, corporate sponsors to exacerbate racial and class tensions. What 15-year-old thought up this ad campaign? I bet you anything they’ve never even set foot in Bed-Stuy.

Posted by: sylvia at May 30, 2007 10:38 AM

I love the smell of corporate paternalism in the morning…Thanks Virgin Mobile for keeping it real

Posted by: anon at May 30, 2007 10:39 AM

Really weird– most of Virgin’s marketing is pitch-perfect and clever. This is really bad. (New agency, maybe?) Nothing worse in advertising/PR than a campaign that tries too hard to be hip, down-with-the-kids, in-sync with a neighborhood.

Posted by: bob999 at May 30, 2007 10:47 AM

What’s a yuppie strip mall? Isn’t that where you go to buy a Virgin Phone?

Posted by: Anonymous at May 30, 2007 10:48 AM

It’s also generated a few viscious parodies. All the comments here.

I suspect we could all do a better job of knowing our audience. McKinney is just getting the smack-down cause it was Bed Stuy.

The wrong buzz - this ad illustrates how powerful advertising is in our culture. Because you’re either generating good buzz, bad buzz or no buzz at all.

They’ve worked for Calvin Klein, the Musee D’Art Moderne and Bjork. And it’s well-beyond just graphic design, typography and inventing fonts - they’ve done magazine covers (Paris Vogue), stage sets and music videos.

One wonders how and when M/M’s ideas will work their way into the mainstream. Is there some way we can use their thinking in web design? Email campaigns? Inspiring stuff.

To get a better feel for their work, go to the Times article and watch the multimedia presentation.

Google and other purveyors of search are notoriously secretive about how they crawl the web. But the basic parameters are well known.

1. When you first post your website, you can expect the search engines to find and index you within 4-6 weeks.
2. At the time of your initial indexing, the search engine tells itself to crawl your site again, say in another six weeks.
3. If nothing has changed, the ‘bot may instruct itself not to revisit your site for a greater period of time, say 12 weeks.

Static (unchanging) websites invite a self-fulfilling decline in search ranking.

If nothing’s changed in 12 weeks, when will the ‘bots return? 20 weeks? 24?

We offer no examples here, but one needn’t look far.

Dynamic websites (call them evolutionary or organic if you like) change and grow over time. In the B2B space, look at OR-Live, a web portal for physicians. In the B2C market, look at Gayout, an international travel & leisure site by Andre Gayout (he coined the term “nouvelle cuisine” back in the early 1970’s).

Thanks again to our friend Gary for hipping us to one more reason why all small-to-medium enterprises need to have a dynamic, Web 2.0 site.