Creative Marketing Entertains Me

Swagger Wagon

Moms need a laugh and the internet is giving us more to laugh about…load of entertainment.  But that mom in the video isn’t me anymore … or not much longer.  With only one teen at home, I have become a long-distance “boo boo kisser”.

Night before last, my son cut his hand opening some plastic packaging.  He’s 5 hours away … a trip to the E.R. and 12 stitches later, he’ll survive.  It’s not easy for a mom “kissin’ boo boos” from a distance.  But if you are a little saavy in your digital life, you can still nurse their ailments, across the miles. 

This morning, halfway across the country, my daughter woke up with an eye infection.  My digital life to the rescue.  She called to ask what she should do; she had to be to work in an hour.  As she got dressed for work, I went online to run the search:  I need a ‘doc in the box’ near her apartment or her workplace. 

This is where  the rubber meets the road.  I had the AOL up and plugged the search there first.  It went like this:  “Urgent care near [address], New York, NY”

AOL returns were so off-base, they need to go out of the search business.  The returns were AOL advertisers & not necessarily related to what I need.  Some of them were not even medical in nature. 

Next, bing.  Bing is Microsoft’s competitor product to ’google’, the search behemoth. I put in my search and it gave me a visually pleasing but limited result.  It had a difficult time with the ‘urgent medical’ portion of the query, more focused on the location.  I tried to adjust my query.  The site crashed.  It said it was working to get back for me.  But the clock was ticking and I needed to move on.

Next, ‘google‘ which is already tracking everything about every site I visit and every interest I express so they can sell to more advertisers.  They understood my query and had a fairly good selection of choices.  But it put more focus on location than subject.  Search results included a drug rehab clinic and a wound care specialist.   They need to stop adjusting their algorhythms in reaction to ‘bing’.  They’re the leader!   With another call to my daughter, we decided to change the query to her work address and found a quick clinic inside a drug store, at her subway stop.  I called and they could take her right away and she’d be to work on time with the prescription, getting it filled, and hardly missing a beat.

With her settled, I tried my original query at ‘ask.com’ .  This one of my favorite search sites.  I consider it intuative.  But I don’t always trust it when I’m in a hurry.  Not its fault.  It doesn’t get the ‘buzz’ of the other sites.  And its not as fancy with the maps.  When I plugged in my query:  the top return on the first try; DrWalkin [the one I ultimately found on google].  So, they’re a winner, in my book.  But the #1 piece of advice I have for you is:

• Don’t Always Use the Same Search Engine.  Here’s an article with a list of different search engines for specific searches.    
• Be As Specific As Possible in Choosing Keywords.  If ‘coffee’ is good, ‘La Casa Del Caffe Tazza D’Oro’ will get you right to the site that sells that great coffee your niece brought back from Italy for you.
• Symbols Help You Get Specific.  ‘Doctor – Chiropractor’ the minus sign excludes certain results. The plus sign is inclusive ‘Doctor+Chiropractor’.  Putting a phrase in quotation marks will return results with the phrase exactly.  And I’m told an asterisk * adds a wild card and extends your search results.  It’s never really worked for me [which usually means operator error]. 
• Try it different ways.  Search engines are not intuitive, though it often seems that way.  They generally work of of what they already know about you and put those results first.  And many keep track of where your computer is and give results nearest you.  This can be very helpful.  But if you are looking out of your area, you’d better be specific about that.   
• Finally, if you are looking for a word or phrase that is included in the URL [name of the site], search like this:  ‘inurl: spinach’.  This can be really helpful, or it can limit your results.  Did I suggest you try it more than one way.

Happy Hunting!  If you are a good searcher, you’re winning at parenthood….Meet the Parents with the Swagger Wagon.