It was supposed to be a nice little tap, but I think Greg Boser dope virtually slapped me. He’s too bad ass to tag somebody gently, and I have no choice but to obey.

* FYI- the 6th thing you didn’t know about Boser: In the 4th grade he used to pick his nose and make the little kid at school eat it.

* that statement might not be true.

5 Things You Didn’t Know About Chris Hooley

• I am a unich.
• As a matter of fact, my shit doesn’t stink.
• I am wearing a pretty pink teddy right now.
• I’m NOT in denial.
• I did not have relations with that woman.

OOOOk. I felt obligated to be funny [thanks greg... I CAN'T HANDLE THE PRESSURE!!!!] I am as glad as you are that it is over. Now for the real stuff.

5 Real Things You Didn’t Know About Chris Hooley

• I was adopted, and found my birth family on the web – no shit. My totally awesome, kick ass family [Hooleys Rule!] adopted me from an orphanage as a baby. I grew up #2 of 4 brothers, and my older bro is adopted too. Here’s the kicker… I found out later in life I had 3 full blood brothers and a full blood sister too. I met them (not in person yet), and they are on my MySpace page. Crazy, crazy web! My name was almost Dustin Mykal Ansbergs.
• I played saxophone for a few weeks in the 6th grade - My parents saw that I taught myself to play Axel F on the casio keyboard and next thing you know, I was picking an instrument for band practice. I rebelled against that one!
• I used to be able to dunk – But I sucked at basketball. That didn’t stop be from playing every day tho. All I cared about was yoking it hard with two hands and hanging on the rim and being a bad ass, so I worked on my legs like a maniac and basically worshipped Sawn Kemp, MJ, and Dominique Wilkins. Embarrassingly enough, I was that white guy with hops who everybody picked first when they saw me warming up, but regretted it the second the game started.
• In a prior life I produced albums and songs for joke bands – Crack Money Records even performed shows with some known bands… Body Count was the biggest band we opened for. Even Ice-T loves the drinkbait!
• I technically had plastic surgery last month- Seriously. I have multiple lipomas, and many of them were concentrated around my midsection and back. My doctors said don’t bother to remove them, but I did, and NO I am not “that guy“.

w0rd!

Ok, now it’s time to tag a few more folks to keep this virus spreading. Let’s see how many people actually do this.

• Peter Wailes, come on in buddy. You have been tagged.
• Kris, I almost didn’t tag you because it would make your angle ring true, but shit man you rock and I can’t resist.
• Fuhgeddabowdit – Donald Trump, say hello to my little friend Mr. Tag!
• SEO Thursday’s Nathaniel Broughton for giving me a reason to be an icey hot stunta.
• And finally, Josh Strebel because his Luke Skywalker ass keeps begging me to link to him. I’m Darth Vader bitch. I tag with force.

Sorry guys, rules are rules and now you need to do it too.

As a side note, Happy Hanukka to the Jewish SEOs out there.

In Liana’s defense, what I perceived to be an outright injustice was probably more about poor communication. She did attempt to tell me about her stunt before it happened. I didn’t know the exact specifics (maybe because we didn’t discuss them in detail enough) but I practically sorta kinda gave her a go ahead (remind you -I didn’t know it would be practically the same stunt, poorly duplicated).

Liana is a smart person who is more seasoned in the conference circuit than I. I do not think her intentions were bad. Regardless of fault, opinion, who was first, who’s was best, etc. I don’t wish Liana any harm or negativity. Liana, I apologize for any negativity that this has probably caused you. It got out there, and got blown out of proportion. That was not the intent.

To the members of SEO / SEM community who don’t appreciate linkstunting, offline linkbaiting, buzz linking, buzz marketing stunts or whatever you want to call it: I apologize to you as well. I never intended to disrespect anyone and I certainly hope nobody takes any of my campaigns or stunts that way.

I owe our community a lot. I came from this community, and because of it I have a successful career and a great life for me and my family. I don’t want to be burning bridges or hurting others, I just want to have fun and experience success with / like the rest of you.

SEOs and marketers, here’s a good takeaway. This is a lesson on how a good idea in theory can cause problems in the execution. Just like any form of SEO, offline buzz marketing / link baiting is new and will likely rub at least some subset of SEOs the wrong way. We all need to grow with it and push it in the right direction we would like to see it go in the future. It is OUR responsibility to respect others’ dignity if / when we decide to implement these tactics that involve others.

The Premise

At PubCon 2006, a tall thin guy named Kris and I were chatting about how funny it is that SEOs are treated like they’re in a boyband at these conferences. We joked about how we should be throwing our underwear on stage while they are speaking, and they should be signing our boobs.

Both of us apparently took a lot away from that conversation. Kris went on to write one of the funniest blogs ever, and I went on to do that DrinkBait stuff. We both had great success with our campaigns, which kept me thinking. I should do more fun stunts to attract attention and invoke a positive reaction. I mainly was looking to entertain and get a laugh, and of course, create a buzz.

Campaign Specifics

Just creating a post and buying the domain for SEO BoyBand isn’t enough to warrant props for outside the box thinking. I needed to make this good. After pondering it for a few days, I finally had a game plan.

• Register SEOBoyBand.com
• Write story about major SEOs forming a BoyBand
• Hire Skorp to photoshop a few hilarious pics of the band in action
• Here’s the kicker: Max bid on Google Adwords for the phrases SEO, Search Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, etc. the day the Chicago SES Conference begins, and leave campaign running for a few days.

I figured most SEOs search for that phrase rather frequently, and if I owned that phrase during the convention, somebody would notice and I would have created a word of mouth marketing monster. It didn’t quite turn out that way.

Why The Heck Run Adwords? Was it Expensive?

Because I’ve never seen a LinkBait idea marketed that way. I wanted originality points, and something interesting to talk about after the fact.

And yes, it was expensive. I spent well over a grand in less than 2 days on marketing a joke.

Let’s Explore That Adwords Campaign

Pictures speak a thousand words. Just check out this insanity.

Almost 14k impressions. 98 clicks. $13.78 Avg. CPC. $1350.38 ad spend. 4k daily budget. $99.00 default max bid.

A little nutts eh? I was breaking through and placing $99.00 bids to force bonus. I let Google’s ad serving algo keep my click costs in the highest end of the general range that current advertisers are running now.

Here are the phrases I was running:
NOTE: this provides some great insight as to which SEO related phrases people are searching for

The best part of the campaign however, was the ad copy. They were mind numbingly dumb, and I though t they were funny as all get out. Check these ads out

Man, I love that. I thought it would be like playing a harmless prank on the SEO world for a bit.

Why Did it Fail?

There’s probably a ton of reasons, but here are a couple I can think of.

• I overestimated the percentage of people at SES Chicago who would search for the phrases I advertised
• SEO people are probably blind to the PPC ads on their vanity searches
• I didn’t put much effort behind making a splash with it
• Maybe it wasn’t as funny as I thought?
• There was nothing in the post that called for action or interaction of any sort
• People were too busy at SES to be searching for stuff… bad timing
• I didn’t properly seed the joke by telling key people that this was going to be posted
• I didn’t submit it to any social bookmarking type sites (and neither did anybody else lol)
• I didn’t write the story well

What did we learn here?

I don’t know, you tell me! I would still love to see www.SEOBoyBand.com turn into a pop culture phenom. (*note, that was obviously tongue in cheek sentence, and a purposefully gross overstatement) I was even going to make a series out of it by incorporating industry news and the rest of the mainstream SEO celebrities with a reality show type feel… but if the people don’t like it, I won’t serve it!

With such pop stars as Matt Cutts, Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan, Greg Boser, and me (again, joking… those dudes don’t have pull like me yet, but they are working on it) how could it possibly fail? Any ideas?

Search Engine Journal is hosting the 2006 Search Blog Awards. Awesome idea. Just by visiting that thread alone I found about a dozen new blogs for my feed reader.

DrinkBait might win for this category, but I need your help! It has a bunch of nominations so far. Hook a brother up and tell the world that DrinkBait was the Best LinkBait of 2006!

• Joe Morin has me asking Will You? You should ask on your site too. Who cares, it’s a great idea.  Especiallly if the lady is a Sex Goddess.
• Gray Wolf kinda called out Jason Calacanis and Ted Leonsis for being lamers. People bettah reckanize!
• HaitBait sounds too close to DrinkBait. I aint mad. I already registered CrapBait.com. Man, the originator of Buzz 2.0 must be proud!
• Rae is a baller. She only rolls in limos lately.
• The big revealing of SEO Fan Girl has us buzzing. Both good enough for some link love fo sho’
• SEO Loser still has the best post I’ve read in a long time… that is, until I created and SEO BoyBand. (I just linked to and bragged about myself which doesn’t mean crap, but it still felt cool.)
• Bill Slawski sizes up Yahoo! and their ability to determine buzz. Hint to Yahoo! – just drink more. You’ll find the buzz eventually.
• Boser’s back. The guerilla and the terrorist. Whoa, digg it baby.
• Something’s wrong with buying links? No, say it aint so. Does this mean I can’t buy Adwords, YPN, AdSonar, Pulse 360, CJ, and other stuff like that? Serioulsy… aren’t we all buying and selling links in one way or another?
• Chris Hooley interviewed on WebProWorld? Wow. Seriously guys, Wow. I look like a dumb guy trying to sound smart because that was DrinkBait day and I accidentally baited myself like 4 times. Ok not accidentally, but still.
• Naylor gets Nailed. One! Two! Three! Four! Getting ranked for Viagra? Score!
• Which reminds me, Matt Cutts and Yahoo! sports. Done. It’s all complex, really.
• I love people who love me, and that’s final.
• That was fun!

If I forgot anything awesome or funny or bait worthy, make sure to point it out in the comments. I’ll probably do something about it!