Using cartoons can help brand your marketing and drive home important messages. Although surprisingly inexpensive to acquire, humor can be one of your most powerful marketing tools.

Humor puts your readers at ease. Readers appreciate a touch of humor in an otherwise overly serious world.

Humor operates on an emotional level, driving home your message in a far more memorable way than words alone. Humor makes sensitive topics more approachable while summarizing and reinforcing points that would otherwise be lost.

Different types of humor work best in different contexts. Many speakers begin with a joke to put audience at ease, or a story about ‘a funny thing that happened on way to meeting.’

But jokes and stories are less appropriate for written communications. Jokes can be misinterpreted and depend on delivery and timing for their effectiveness. Stories can take too long to tell.

Cartoons are perfect for print communications. Readers who typically check them out before reading adjacent articles appreciate cartoons.

More important, cartoons communicate at a glance. A cartoon can attract your reader’s attention and drive home an important point in a memorable way.

The editorial page of any newspaper shows how effective humor can be in simplifying complex subjects and driving home a point of view.

Humor also adds a visual dimension to your marketing, differentiating your message from your competitor’s. Cartoons encourage readers to look at topics they might otherwise skip.

Where do you get cartoons? One of best sources is Cartoon Bank, www.cartoonbank.com. Here, you can license reproduction rights to cartoons that originally appeared in New Yorker Magazine.

MARKETING: Microsoft's New Search Engine by Robert K. McCourty

I tried out Microsoft's new search engine (beta version) other day. They have been working on it quite secretly now for almost a year. It has been rumored to be a Google killer once in full public release. They say its accuracy and ability to return relevant results will far surpass any other search engine on Internet. That remains to be seen. I tried various combinations of single, double, and triple word/phrased searches to inspect results.

To casual observer I suppose a certain percentage of results would seem to be accurate, but upon closer inspection and with a trained eye, results for most part ranged from poor to outright terrible.

I then attempted a series of searches on same combination of words. "custom designed screen printed t-shirts" I was attempting to determine how much results and rankings changed (or did not change) within same set of query words. I searched with a variety of spellings on a particular keyword In this case, I selected word "T shirts" then t-shirts (with a dash) and finally "tshirts" (no dash, all one word)

One web site had very consistent results across all three spelling methods. This intrigued me so I clicked on link to analyze site. i.e. Why was this one so well optimized or more specifically why did this new Microsoft beta search engine find this web site so tasty.

The site was completely broken. None of graphics loaded properly. (in Internet Explorer) It was devoid of any contextual content on home page and scarcely little throughout rest of pages. Some scrolling Java script overlapped button for a drop down menu. No outside links. Nothing. Excuse pun but this was not a pretty site. How then could Microsoft possibly rank this site one, two and three for completely different keyword phrasings and spellings on a soon to be major release for a search engine?

The answer revealed itself as soon as I took a look at web site's HTML source code.

Guess what folks, meta tags are back! At least as far as Beta version of Microsoft's new search engine is concerned, especially keyword Meta Tag. Above all, this tag seemed to account for heaviest weight in determining aforementioned rankings. I will err on side of caution here and assume that Microsoft has not finalized all their algorithm parameters yet, but keyword tag was definitely what their spider had been eating.