Social Software Explored

Yesterday one of our inside sales associates noticed an amazing trend in the referals he was receiving. A lot of them were talking about Joomla, an open source CMS which we _rarely_ come up against. CommonSpot plays more in the enterprise space where as Joomla is good for the lower end market since it is an open source solution. So, our sales associate did some digging and discovered this interesting ad on the “Request a demo” portion of the Joomla site:

The text right above the ad reads:

To register for the Backend Adminstrative area you will need to “Register” from the link on the left and follow directions.

Of course, the “link” on the left is an ad for “Register for demo” – except it is our Demo.

Clicking the ad brings you to our Demo registration form. So, one would have to expect that either the user thought that the links in the middle of the page (the ad is right in the middle of the paragraph on the page) were for Joomla’s registration or, they actually found our web site during their hunt for a CMS and decided to sign up for our Demo as well (or maybe instead).

This is all made possible by Google being intelligent enough to know that the content of the Joomla page is that of Web based content management. Since Joomla placed the adsense ad on the page it did what it was supposed to – and in this case – displays ads for competitors.

Thank you Google (and Joomla). Full Page Joomla ad