Hotchkis & Jay Leno

We set client John Hotchkis up with Jay Leno for a segment on Leno's garage, and Jay had a great time showing off in the Hotchkis Challenger. Check it out:

New Land Speed Record!

Kahn Media client Spectre Performance has just done the near-impossible: finished an all-new racecar mere hours before it was set to debut, taken it to the famed Bonneville Salt Flats and set a new world record.

In this case the car average 330 mph over two runs, making it the World's Fastest Cadillac and the World's Fastest Blown Gasoline Streamliner. Quite a feat for a new team and new car. We not only provided PR for the effort, but also promoted it in advance with a newsletter and created a a dedicated blog page, where we liveblogged the entire four-day event with photos, videos and info posted real-time from the salt.

The PR story is spreading like wildfire on the web, including on the following sites:
Top Gear
Wired
Autoblog
Jalopnik
WebRidesTV

Kahn on Comm.

Wow, it's been nearly two months since my last blog post and I've barely posted anything on PR. I'm a bad, bad marcom blogger. Things have been very very busy lately: new office, expanding the Kahn Media team with several new hires, new business and more. All good stuff and I'll explain more soon.

In the meantime, SEMA News has a fantastic story in its latest issue about the importance of marketing to Gen Y, how to reach them and why manufacturing companies should care. Yours truly was quoted extensively in the story - even though I'm a few ticks too old to be in the actual demographic.

You can read more about it here.

Thanks to Alysha Webb for doing a great job on a much-needed story.

Autoblog & Performance Therapy

Speaking of racing videos, Jonny Lieberman at Autoblog posted a cool story about client Mark Hotchkis from Lifeline Fire & Safety Systems winning the Monterey Historics in his Porsche 962. If you like the sound of a 230mph Porsche racecar at 9,000rpm, check it out.

Also, the Performance Therapy Contest is up and running. Basically this is a social media car show concept developed in-house at Kahn Media for Hotchkis Performance as a means to drive brand awareness, promote the hobby, let gearheads know that even in this economy its ok to have fun with their car, and drive traffic/SEO to sponsor sites. Co-sponsors include Hot Wheels, Yokohama, Red Line Oil, Rushforth Wheels, Baer Brakes, Lifeline Fire & Safety Systems, Flowmaster and MSD.

All entrants have to do is submit a picture and a short caption explaining how they enjoy their car. Click a photo to vote, and feel free to promote yourself on Flickr or Facebook. Top vote getters will receive a T-Shirt or gift certificate. The Grand Prize winner (determined by a panel of sponsors and journalists) will receive nearly $40k in free parts from the sponsor companies. Autoblog, Motorator and several forums have already written up great pieces about it.

Time Flies...

Wow, I can't believe it's been nearly a month since my last post. I apologize if anyone out there reads this thing on a regular basis, but life has been a little crazy. Two new clients, several client events, a SEMA internet symposium and a NEW office all in the past three weeks. That's right, Kahn Media HQ is expanding.

I've got lots of info to share, including notes from a few of the more interested SEMA lectures on SEO and Video Production. In the meantime, here's a bit o'entertainment.

Wired Autopia just put up a fantastic list of their favorite car commercials.

My favorite of the list (and one I've never seen before) is this killer homage to Ferrari Grand Prix racing from Shell:

Do I need to worry about BING?

As anyone who watches prime time TV knows by now, Microsoft recently launched a new search engine called Bing. The site is still relatively small, but the official numbers vary. I've heard it's in third place behind Google and Yahoo (according to Microsoft), but I've also heard it's in 17th place according to Pew research.

Regardless, Microsoft is putting serious muscle behind the engine so some clients are asking if it's worth worrying about SEO for Bing. The answer is "sort of." After analyzing traffic data for client's sites and my own, I can tell you that we're all getting about a 5% referral rate from Bing. Not bad for a startup, but pretty lousy for a major project backed by the biggest company in the world with a $100 million ad campaign.

The reality is for the time being we really don't have to worry about Bing-specific SEO. Microsoft loves to tout all its new features, and even put up an SEO guide for web developers. You can download it here. But if you're even remotely prone to falling asleep at the computer, I'd avoid reading past page two. It's pretty dry. The gist is this: most of Bing is carried over from MSN Search. The main differences are in the way it categorizes results with tabs and the fact that it learns from repeated searches.

The same basic rules that apply to SEO for Google and Yahoo apply here: use page titles and tags to explain the contents of each page, caption and tag photos whenever possible, include as much useful and relevant information in HTML copy as possible, etc. One thing I have heard about Bing is that it tends to favor new and/or freshly updated sites over older static ones, so keep that in mind.

In the meantime, relax and keep pushing forward with a Google-centric SEO campaign, because unless Larry and Sergey make some radical missteps, Google will still be the 900 lb gorilla for many years to come.

Grassroots Marketing

This past weekend we had an open house at one of my client's offices. We promoted it to a very specific niche - Los Angeles based Chrysler owners - and pulled in nearly 100 cars. That's enough to max out the parking lot and the building. My client couldn't have been happier about the results. I promoted it using a combination of old-school tactics (calling all the local club presidents on the phone) and new-media strategy (posting flyers in major forums, asking blog moderators to write stories). Hopefully we influenced the influencers, and they'll spread the word for us.