A Goat Blazes the Trail at SES
NEW YORK -- A giant, inflated reindeer-looking animal drew attendees to a booth against the wall at last week's Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo at the New York Hilton.Even close up, it's hard to tell exactly what the light brown animal is -- with several of its stuffed counterparts lining the back wall of the booth of Trexy Ltd., London, a company whose technology lets users remember searches and Web pages they've visited by creating search "trails."
The animal is the company's mascot, Trexy the goat, representing how users can be "trailblazers" and create their own search, Trexy marketing assistant Jennifer Mitchell said.
The brother-sister team of Nigel and Megan Hamilton who formed the company "were looking for an animal that leaves trails. They went through snails, ants and found goats," Mitchell said. The big blow-up goat certainly drew attendees to the booth, where they could play a game, throwing rings on a wheel, to win a stuffed goat. "That's been really good for us."
This is the five-employee company's first time exhibiting at SES in an effort to get the word out about how Trexy functions: Working with 3,000 search engines including Google and Yahoo, visitors can create paths (trails of the searches and Web pages they have visited) for their own use or anonymously share their trails and follow the search trails of others.
Building trails saves time for users, reduces search effort and lets users find better results by following popular trails, Mitchell said.
Pay-per-click advertising also fits into Trexy's picture. Trexy's Turbo10 network handles 450 million searches a month, and two-thirds of that traffic comes from U.S. sources. Advertisers' sponsored links are displayed on Turbo10.com and Trexy.com.
Christine Blank covers online marketing and advertising, including e-mail marketing and paid search, for DM News and DMNews.com. To keep up with the latest developments in these areas, subscribe to our daily and weekly e-mail newsletters by visiting www.dmnews.com/newsletters
