Neiman Marcus InSite Blog

Neiman Marcus launched a blog that appears congruent with their brand proposition.

The blog has an RSS feed, appears to be created in TypePad, and the RSS feed is burned using Feedburner, so that they can measure subscriber stats.

Blog URL: http://insite.neimanmarcus.com/

Subscribe to the RSS Feed Here.

Folks can nitpick various elements of their approach. I look forward to seeing how they plan on building a sense of community, how they choose to give customers an inside look at their business. I subscribed to the feed.

Victoria's Secret, Free Shipping, and Google

I am Kevin Hillstrom, host of The MineThatData Blog. I average 135 daily visitors, and have about 300 RSS subscribers. That yields about 158,000 visits a year. In the history of my blog, I only recall writing about Victoria's Secret once.

Victoria's Secret is a gigantic multichannel mega-brand that runs free shipping promotions from time to time.

So when a customer uses Google to search for "Victoria's Secret Free Shipping", why doesn't Victoria's Secret appear in the top ten results, but The MineThatData Blog appears in the top five?

Does the customer who conducted this search want to know about the actual free shipping promotion, or my opinion about a free shipping promotion?

Multichannel CEOs and CMOs: Stop arguing about the USPS and proposed postage increases. Start challenging Google to provide relevant search results. Is Google your friend? Is Google actually a competitor of yours, one that is blocking traffic that should be going to your site? Or does Google make a lot of innocent mistakes, like the rest of us? I'd put my money on the latter --- I would also challenge you to start challenging Google the way you challenge the rest of your trusted vendors, folks you've worked with for decades.


UPDATE 2007.03.18: Here's a couple of searches that produce similar results:

Nordstrom Marketing

Neiman Marcus Blog