This was the joke banded around yesterday after the terrible decision of disallowing England’s second goal even though it was a foot over the line. There was uproar for about 20 minutes, until German scored their third and fourth goal to finish England off.

After 90 minutes, when all was said and done, it was the poor performance people we’re talking about. Not the fact that the goal line technology should be upgraded and they should allow the referee to watch replays.

No amount of technology would have helped England win.

This brings me (get ready for the shoehorn) into something we’ve been thinking about the last few months:

Technology is Useless…

.. if you’re overall business performance let’s you down.

As you know we deliver SEO services for our clients.

It works well and they get more traffic to their websites and subsequently receive more leads and potential business. People searching for what they do find

their site over their competitors. At that point, we’ve done our job well.

But I want to be real with you for a moment and I have to confess…

SEO is Useless…

.. if you’re overall business performance let’s you down.

There, I said it.

Let’s face the truth, not everyone can turn prospects into clients every time.

Also, what about ‘if’ they become a client? Does everyone keep their clients for life or do they often wonder off 6 months down the line and start working with another company.

Do they give you referrals?

Maybe there’s an even more fundamental question. Do you REALLY know who you want to be doing business in the first place?

Do you know what type of client gives you the best return when you invest your time chasing after them?

Now is the time!

Now you haven’t got any more England matches to watch, it may be a good time to take a fresh look at your overall strategy.

I imagine you’re on this blog because you want to know more about marketing yourself online. Which is great. But if you want more than that, we have organised a special one off event on August the 11th 2010 in Birmingham.

We’ve teamed up with a top business coach to deliver this workshop aimed at business owners, marketeers and really anyone that wants to grow their business.

Places are limited and demand will be high!

Chris Green

P.S Even if you’ve been to one of our seminars before, you’ll get a TON of value from this.

Anyway, many billions of ‘tweets’ as they’re called are sent through the system every day from the inane to the ridiculous and sometimes being mildly amusing every now and then. Indeed sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’ll happen across one that is even quite interesting and maybe even useful.

Yes, what I’m trying to say is that most of what goes on in Twitter is nonsense. Now this leads some people into a false sense of security and they believe that maybe nobody is really reading their tweets so they say something a little bit…incendiary?

One such tweet sent out in January from Paul Chambers from Yorkshire got him into a whole load of trouble when he said the following:

Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!

Oh how is followers laughed!! All except for an off-duty manager at the airport who read it and reported it to the police.

Once criminal conviction later and Paul was fired from his job and fined £1000 for his trouble. This little rant has had a profound effect on this poor fella’s life as he was found guilty of an offence against the Communications Act 2003.

Now I have a particular problem with this because I feel it was a waste of tax-payers money in the first instance to even bring the trial. If some people were to pick up on some of the things I say over Twitter or in Facebook I’m sure they could take umbrage and decide to call the fuzz, but really, is a few words on a networking site that dangerous and should it really be perceived as such?

This case is a big deal because we have certain rights in this country and even though we believe we have the freedom to say what we like; this case shows us that in reality we do not. Freedom is a very important part of our lives and technology now gives us the means to express it in many different ways. But when what we say can ruin our careers just because our judicial system doesn’t understand technology then we are going to have to either button our lips or fight until they do understand.

My advice? Unless you’re after a titanic amount of publicity for your company and you are willing to fight your corner if challenged, I’d be careful what you say in any public forum. Certainly don’t threaten to bomb any airports, they seem particularly tetchy at the moment.

Slowly but surely, more and more people have started to understand how Facebook can be an integral part of your marketing. The question we hear now is ‘how do I get more fans onto my fanpage’.

So we created the following video with 5 really easy ways to get more fans:

If you have anything you’d like us to create a video on, please leave a comment below.

We’ve had some great times at the last few events in Wolverhampton, so now we thought we’d take the show on the road and see how we get on in Birmingham. As soon as I sent an email out we had 10 people book over the following days, so it’s looking like this one will be a full house like the rest.

Here’s the link to book: http://www.callowaygreen.com/seo-birmingham-event/

BUT WE HAVE A SURPRISE!!

If you’re a Midlander (or even if you’re not), you’ll no doubt have heard of the BOSTIN t-shirts created by Donato Esposito.

Well, Donato will be doing a guest post on Social Media for us on the 12th!!

Donato is a social media expert and a special adviser to Digital Birmingham, a Birmingham City Council Initiative which ensures the benefits of digital technologies can be available to all in the city

He started Bostin Group as a way of communicating an optimism and positivity for our local area and has include products including T-shirts, a Blog, online games and also an online Comic which is now in print. His main experience was in using his skills of Social Media and Crowdsourcing to develop Bostin Group with MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and now Twitter.

One of his projects has included an online campaign in Facebook to have a Black Country version and has so far amassed a membership of  over 30,000.

So join us and meet Donato on the 12th at SEO Birmingham!!

(UPDATE.. ONLY 9 PLACES LEFT)

I’d wager it would be something like “Louts beat up man looking for new car”, or “Attack in Park Lane leaves man in hospital”. I doubt you’d actually expect to see the Express and Star mentioned. But if that advert was on one of these new evil websites then that’s a different matter.

The BBC News headline states “Gumtee Buyer Stabbed in Heart”. First of all, I’m thinking that a director from Ebay, the owner of the site, has been stabbed on the way to a board meeting. Bad English, BBC news, sort it out.

But then I look deeper and find that someone responding to an advert on the online classifieds site was stabbed when they went to see the car. The car wasn’t even up for sale, it was a ruse, but nevertheless the headline gives the impression that using the Gumtree site is inherently dangerous.

I can see it now “oooh, I won’t buy anything off teh interwebs, it’s got murderers on it”. Just because of a simple headline. Annoying to say the least.

Sheesh.

Take a leaf out of ITNs bucket of headlines and check out possibly the best headline of the year.

“George Michael Whams Trucker in  Rear”

Now that’s a headline, there ‘aint an ounce of fat on that matey: a double entendre, a pun and it tells you exactly what happened, genius.