Public relations consultant /blog

As self appointed curator of the Museum of Spam, I tend to pause for a moment over the all the spam emails I receive, as I look for something worth preserving (to be honest, little of what is in the museum is worth preserving). The Museum is not part of the fight against spam. Instead it preserves spam e-mail for posterity, so I’m looking for unusual items (few and far between).

The outstanding exhibit so far is Psycheocracy: elect constituency loyal MPs, a spam email at the forefront of a one man political campaign to overthrow both the Conservative and Labour party hierarchies. In a similar category is The Great White Tabernacle, which appears to be pushing some kind of theocracy. (The latter’s author didn’t realise inclusion in the Museum of Spam is not an endorsement of his message and was surprisingly pleased to find himself there.)

Anyway. What caught my eye regarding psycheocracy was the boast: ‘The web page may be accessed by searching for the word “psycheocracy”, the first return will be the web page.’ And so it is.

It turns out that author, John A. Newell, hadn’t just been spamming people’s inboxes. He’d been copying and pasting his weird theory into all sorts of places where psycheocracy might be of a passing interest. John was creating links back to his own psycheocracy page which search engines would find and effectively treat as endorsements of his work.

I’ve made a hobby of search engine optimisation (SEO) – the practice of pushing a webpage up search results for a particular search term – and have fun optimising reader offers on my blogs. This one for Adjustamatic adjustable beds is a good example. Some you win, some you lose.

Psycheocracy is actually quite a good search term on which to optimise a webpage. It has the benefit of being a made up word, so nobody else is likely to use it. That means there’s little competition.

Just for fun, I decided to take a crack at knocking John A. Newell off Google’s top spot for psycheocracy. Perhaps because I wasn’t prepared to plaster the web with spurious links to the Museum of Spam, I failed. But I came damn close. I worked it into Gordon Brown & ‘Psycheocracy’ a blog on the Labour Party succession and that’s riding high at number two. Meanwhile the museum exhibit page, Psycheocracy: Elect Constituency Loyal MPs, is at number three. Perhaps a little push from ‘Psycheocracy’ & search engine friendly brand names will just do the trick… we’ll see.

This isn’t as frivolous as it seems. There are lessons to be learned. If you’re developing a new brand and you want people to find you first, pick a made up name, like Adjustamatic, ONSPEED… or psycheocracy.
Contact Stephen Newton

Posted at : August 7th, 2006 - 11:54 am
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