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We are all thrown headlong into this bizarre world of self promotion and marketing, be it digital, offline or as it is simply known these days - marketing.

Unless you are fortunate enough to start out with a marketing person at your side, or you have experience in marketing, then like most of us, your initial foray into marketing will leave you bruised and battle scarred.

So why not learn from others mistakes and see if we can all save a few quid, as well as tease out a few confessions of marketing blunders 

So I'll start the ball rolling...

Back in 2006 we had the genius idea of livering up a taxi into for a bit of mobile promotion. We had a good marketing budget, but not a shred of marketing expertise between us 

So we agreed on a colour scheme and launched our taxi on the peoples of Warwick and Leamington.

Now I think it looked the part and after much back slapping someone asked us how successful it was, as they were thinking of doing the same.

It was at this point we realised we had no idea! There was no plan in place to measure performance such as a dedicated phone number, or web URL. 

Then things got worse. At the time we were operating from my house while we looked around for an office. Then the phone calls started: "can I have a taxi to the airport" "can I have a taxi back from town "

Maybe putting the number on the side wasn't the best plan 

Then soon after we found an office, not far away but a different local area code so we couldn't keep the same number...

Marketing fail 

On the plus side, after 12 months we were asked to renew our cab for some daft sum of money which we said no thanks. 3 years later, albeit starting to look faded and worse for wear, our yellow taxi was still trundling around Warwickshire

Lessons learned?

• If you use liveried taxis/buses etc, make sure you can track any enquires so you can gauge the effectiveness. 
• Be careful of any number you do use, do you intend to move in the near future, and will the number be mistaken for a taxi company?
• If a marketing company gives you the pressure sell into renewing your taxi and tells you the livery will be removed within days, don't believe them

So can anyone beat that?

Oh dear, and the hits keep on rolling!

"The Advertising Standards Authority has banned a TV advert by payday lender Wonga, after a complaint by a charity.

Citizens Advice argued the advert - in which a man jotted down figures on a napkin before checking on his phone calculator - breached regulations by not revealing the loan's interest rate."

BBC News - full story

I think 2014 will be a year it wants to forget

Is the Wonga brand now too badly tarnished? There have been rumours a re-brand is on the cards now they have a new chairman. Maybe a new name and fresh image for 2015?

You heard it here first 

Most of us have spent some time on aggressive forums or online communities where there is the inevitable abuse or "trolling".

Here's how to spot one  

This graphic was made by David Amerland, semantic search and social media guru who kindly gave me permission to reproduce it here.

£4k making the garden cat proof! Be cheaper to build them their own extension

I actually watched the BBC Cat Watch on iplayer last night and it was pretty interesting. If anyone remembers, it built on the experiment done last year where they fitted collars to loads of cats and plotted where they went.

This time they are doing the same again, but comparing farm and country cats to town and inner city cats. With farm cats being nocturnal and house cats following their owners routine, although they are better suited to being nocturnal.

Didn't realise they had whiskers on the bottom of their legs, and combined with the mouth and eyelash whiskers, these are all basically parking sensors which is what makes them so agile, plus in very close range, they are pretty much blind as bats and rely on whiskers to track prey.

Mind you, like Clive, would appreciate if any prey was left outside and not set free in the lounge!

So from the silence, it appears I'm not in line for a Poet Laureate position? 

To be fair, there's no real secret that traditional keywords are in decline and content meaning is gaining more importance. It's simply semantic search.

It seems each month Google rolls out another semantic feature.

I did a post about Semantic Search & Structured Data over 12 months ago, Googles come a long way since. Keywords are hanging in there, but are certainly losing power, especially since the hummingbird update.

As for virtual intelligence system, really you are referring to their knowledge base which has been hoovering up structured data, wikipedia and freebase which provides answers to search queries.

Google have long been moving from a search engine to a content destination. Maybe good news for end users, but not so good for us webmasters... Guess time will tell

Wow, quite a claim Syed!

Erm have you been to Bristol? Don't get me wrong, lovely city, the SS Great Britain is well worth a visit, but it's not the number 1 holiday destination on our family calendar

I'm afraid Syed when writing content for a UK audience, we are a bit cynical. Especially when you are based in India 

Finally, at last and a royal huzzah, page rank is dead!

Or at least the Page Rank us mere mortals can see, the one that shows up in every SEO toolbar beloved by every SEO peddler on the planet.

Matt Cutts said last year it was all over for PageRank, then confused us all when Google apparently accidentally updated the public PageRank last December.

But John Mueller, a senior Google search engineer spells it out on a Google hangout.