Q: You mention Henry Ford creating the assembly line: “Productivity was so astounding that Ford stopped measuring it. By 1914, other companies needed for five times as many workers to build the same hundreds of thousands of cars as Ford.” Henry Ford was also known for paying workers well. It seems the best way to improve standards of living is large productivity gains?

Jeffrey Hayzlett: That’s one way, I don’t know if it’s the only way or the best way.  It’s more of a philosophy, give people what they want and get the things you want.  Provide a great product or service, of high quality, and there will be consumers.  The same theory can be applied to anything you are advertising, marketing or promoting.  For example, use the workers in Henry Ford’s plant and productivity. In Ford’s plants they became so good they stopped measuring.  It was about not only paying workers a fair wage – a good wage – but about offering them other things, enticing them, so they could buy the product they made, have pride in ownership, pride in building the products they created.  There are lots of different ways to go about getting the things you want.  Money may not always be the greatest incentive when gaining productivity or motivation.  Again, find out what people want and then give it to them.  Motivating my salespeople isn’t always about making good money – it can be a way to keep “score” – but sometimes it can be offering incentives such as golf balls, trips, even cowboy boots to get the team excited to want to go out and do more on the company’s behalf.

Q: Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975 but didn’t launch it back then……why?

Jeffrey Hayzlett: Their success led to their own demise.  Because they were trying to protect the great margins film had – you had a product that was 70, 80 even as high as 90% in terms of profitability.  They were doing everything they could to keep that alive for as long as they could.  The problem became they forgot what type of company they were.  They started to believe they were a film company rather than a company that would help people make images and move information, a company focused on innovation, a company providing emotional technology.  They had the only product people would actually run into a burning building to save, yet they focused on being a film company rather than a company that can innovate and recreate itself again and again and again.  If we look at the most successful companies, whether it be IBM, Apple or a host of others it’s about being able to reinvent yourself as well as remembering at the core of it all who you really are.

Q: You suggest a fear of change and that this can inhibit healthy debate with those that disagree with us. What is the best way to create culture that can thrive on healthy debate, starting with how we pick a new breed of leaders?

Jeffrey Hayzlett: We all know that leadership starts at the top but is also reinforced and thrives at the bottom.  So across the organization if you don’t have leaders at the top of the org that are willing to not only to create tension but take it as well then you are not going to get the give and take that you want at an organization.  You won’t be able to encourage innovation, encourage change and encourage growth because everybody will be looking out after themselves because they are afraid of what they might say because the boss might have retribution.  So the key is to create an organization where people can stand up and question things.  By standing up and questioning things you create the tension in the system and you get something better than you first started with.  If I start with item A and someone starts with item Z and we start creating so much friction back and forth and this friction creates a fire of new ideas somehow we’ll go one way or the other to move the new idea to a better place.  I think that’s what great leaders try to do.

Q: When I worked at BlackRock(BLK) there was discipline around process, but it was flexible to allow breakthrough ideas. In Chapter 14 you wrote “Some people get caught up in the idea rather than the process, but I think the process leads to the idea.” Please elaborate on this concept…

Jeffrey Hayzlett: It’s a little bit of both in this particular case.  Certainly you can have a great idea but if you can’t get it out and get it through the process it will never see itself through fruition – it will never make it to market.  I can remember one time sitting in a meeting with a chief technology officer – one of the smartest guys in the world that I had ever met.  He said, “Jeff, you realize because I make this product, I create this software program – if it weren’t for me you wouldn’t have a job.”  I had to remind him that it could be the greatest product in the world but if it weren’t for me selling it and marketing it – getting it out through the process and to the customers’ hands that he wouldn’t have anything.  So that’s what I’m talking about the process leads to the idea.  By having great processes and great systems set up then you can try to push things through to allow things to be able to win. If you don’t have a great process, even the greatest ideas will lose before they begin.

Q: So when done right, this can allow a company to focus on the future more effectively?

Jeffrey Hayzlett: Absolutely, by having a great system, a great process, a great way of channeling greatness then you’re going to be able to look for more things to put through to your following.  Look at the greatest sports teams in the world, it is those that focus on the fundamentals of having great athletes – not just one great player or two and then try to build the team around them but yet having a great team made up of different people and that’s what process does for us.

Q: In the 1993 classic book, Reengineering the Corporation by Michael Hammer and John Champy they mention that executives are “frighteningly unfamiliar” with three forces, separately and in combination: Customers, Competition and Change. You actively did this in those retail stores. Given the popularity of that book almost two decades ago, why do you think companies are still so unable to focus on these basics?

Jeffrey Hayzlett: I think so many companies focus on the next big thing, the big peel, the magic peel.  I think especially in the US we look to that one big thing that will do it for us rather than again getting back to that process, getting back to good and hard work.  If it was easy anyone could do it – it’s not supposed to be easy.  Therefore, the focus on competition, the focus on customers, the focus on change are just as good today as they were decades before.  It’s important for us to be able to take a look at how we implement change, look at customer and competitors to be able to drive and channel the forces behind being successful.

Q: “Radical transparency is not a one-way street of engagement.” Why do people have such a hard time developing a 2-way mindset in search marketing and social media?

Jeffrey Hayzlett: Inherently, I think it’s because people are scared.  Most people don’t like to get feedback.  I was one time in a phase in my life where I wore all black all the time.  Someone asked me why and I said because it makes you look slimmer.  The person turned back to me and said, well it’s not working.  I think a lot of people are afraid to hear that feedback sometimes and it takes a very strong leader and a strong person to get into that 2-way mindset, that it’s ok to get feedback – both positive and negative.  By the way, look at the negatives as a gift because that’s a way for you to be able to change, to turn around that potential customer or that person who’s had a negative experience.  I’ve heard from brand leaders and internal departments (HR, Legal) where they want to try to control the situation but you can’t control the situation. When it comes to brands especially, you can’t control it because a brand is nothing but a promise delivered.  It’s about delivering a promise and when you deliver that promise or opportunity up to the customer it’s going to be interpreted in different ways.  Sometimes that’s positive and many times its also negative.  Yet you should be strong enough in your leadership abilities, strong enough in your offering to be able to understand that this will come with everything.  There’s going to be a good, a bad and an ugly but the good should always outweigh the other two.

For more information, please visit http://hayzlett.com/. Thank you!

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His lasted book is THE MACKAY MBA OF SELLING IN THE REAL WORLD (Portfolio, 2011). The wonderful publicity folks retained by Mr. Mackay were kind enough to grant me an email interview after I read the book. His answers below build on a great read and create the basis for a larger conversation that the world desperately needs to have. Harvey is part of an increasingly rare breed of business leader who understands that people, human capital and organizational transformation are vital to success. For our society to survive as we know it, we must rapidly work to reverse this trend and create a new generation of leaders with these all too rare skills. You feel the sense of urgency in his answers below. I can’t wait to spend another day with Harvey Mackay, the mutual learning would be overwhelming.

You stated “Fostering employee loyalty is the first step to creating customer loyalty” in Chapter 4. Over the past two decades, many companies have treated employees as disposable assets. How would you convince management to reverse this unfortunate trend?

Harvey Mackay: Our company mission statement is to be in business forever.  That means no compromising … not compromising your core principles and taking any shortcuts.  It is virtually impossible to stay in business over a long period of time if you treat your employees as disposable assets.  In 50-plus years in the business world, I know of no one who stayed in business with a revolving door of employees.  It’s sad to say, but in these difficult economic times there are still too many businesses that still don’t get it.

Chapter 15 states, “Your past is not your potential” and “Far too many people exist in a world of “what is” rather than applying their energies to “what can be”.” Today skills are dynamic and changing; this has implications for returning to the basics of recruiting naturally curious lifelong learners based with the vision to lead change. How can companies best stop the practice of picking leaders of the past?

Harvey Mackay: I have hired over 500 people in my career, and the single most important word in the dictionary that I look for and demand is trust.  Once I have established that, then I immediately look for capacity and willingness to learn.  I can’t begin to tell you how many people out there in the marketplace and disciples of the Peter Principle.  There has been a seismic shift in the business world.  The great classical business principles still hold true but they need to be fused with cutting edge internet technology.  That’s the kind of leaders that companies should be looking for.

Fred Smith got a “C” on his term paper for his idea for Federal Express. Mike Bloomberg was told his idea for what became the Bloomberg terminal would never work by his former employer. Why is it often so difficult for most executives to grasp paradigm changing business ideas?

Harvey Mackay: It’s way easier to stay in the comfort zone, especially when things are going good than to go out on a limb and take some risks.  My philosophy is exactly the opposite:  Sometimes it’s risky not to take a risk.  And remember, if you walk backwards, you will never stub your toe.  One of the most difficult things in life for any individual or business is to accept and adopt change.

So, as you like to say, “People don’t know what they don’t know?”

Harvey Mackay: The way I like to fine tune this statement that I made up in college is – I know that you don’t know, but you don’t know that you don’t know!  By that I mean there are three reasons why individuals and businesses fail:

1.    Arrogance

2.    Arrogance

3.    Arrogance

There has been a consistent, gradual decline in ethical business practices in the United States for about 50 years, and it reached new extremes in the “daisy chain” of the sub-prime mortgage industry in the period of 2002-2008.  This was caused by executives getting chapped lips from kissing the mirror too much, which is a perfect example of how arrogance set in.

You discuss the importance of listening, what is the best way for a salesperson to use the obtained information to create a successful sales?

Harvey Mackay: First of all you can’t learn anything if you are doing all the talking.  Sales people should always be developing their earQ, not their IQ.  The only way to create a successful sale is to understand that knowledge (from listening) does not become power until it is used.  And ideas without action are worthless.

You talked about enthusiasm, what is the best way to maintain it in the face of adversity?

Harvey Mackay: First of all, I have never yet met a successful person who hasn’t had to overcome either a little or a lot of adversity in his or her life.  If life there is a lot of lumps and bumps … a lot of throttling up and a lot of throttling down.  Failure is not falling down, but staying down.  Therefore, you have to ignite your own enthusiasm.  The ten most powerful two-letter words in the English language are:  If it is to be, it is up to me.  Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and you will accomplish your object.  I agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”

In chapter 67 you cut the world-famous Mackay 66 to the Mackay 25, Please share more about why you changed it…

Harvey Mackay: The Mackay 25 does not replace the Mackay 66.  Rather it is a streamlined version, which gets you to an instant snapshot of the prospect or buyer’s attitude and expectations.  It gets to the heart of what is commonly known today as relationship selling.

In a recent blog post you stated that you are always surprised when you ask who their customers are and they say everyone. Rob La Gesse (@kr8tr) asks who is your customer?  Have you decided who is not?  If so, you have already self-limited your ability to affect change?

Harvey Mackay: You can’t be all things to all people.  In most businesses the company will have what I refer to as nitch-picking.  In short, virtually everyone has their own niche within an industry.

I had the distinct pleasure of spending the day with you during your Chicago media tour in 2010. I was amazed by the way you prepared for each interview. You were seeking to learn about each interviewer and worked to bring that into the on air conversation. What can aspiring radio and TV guests learn from your techniques?

Harvey Mackay: I call this humanize your selling strategy.  I attempt to do a Mackay 66 Question Customer Profile on everyone I meet throughout my life.  That means customers, employees, suppliers, competitors, audiences, radio and TV talk-show hosts and journalists.  This is what I teach our sales force and the people I mentor, and that is that every single person I encounter I have a deep-down burning desire to learn what turns that person on and what he or she is most interested in.  In any relationship, you must find a common denominator.

———————————————————————————————————————————–

Thank you Harvey! Every CEO, board of directors member and business leader should read this interview and distribute it (and his book) to their teams and then talk about these meaty issues! I welcome the world changing conversation.

Learn more about Harvey at http://www.harveymackay.com/

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Bestselling Author Alan Weiss

Alan Weiss has written over 45 books. Absorb that for a minute. That is a heck of alot of books.

His latest is Million Dollar Referrals (McGraw- Hill). A timely title about one of the most unique marketing art forms, referrals. Why timely? With constant changes in media and the rise of new channels such as social media, referrals can make or break many kinds of businesses. It is certainly an under-managed areas of marketing strategy in most organizations that has potential to improve business results. Like most marketing it requires your value proposition to be crystal clear as you are asking someone else to explain it to someone else. I can say from experience that many people skip this step.

Million Dollar Referrals is a clearly written, thought provoking read. The kind folks at McGraw-Hill were kind enough to set up an interview with Alan Weiss, the conversation is below….

The opening chapter discusses “Business Relationships are a Process, Not an Event”. You could replace the word relationships with many other concepts. Making that switch requires changing personal habits and or corporate culture. What is the best way to create this behavior change?

Alan Weiss: It merely requires educating your buyer and client. Culture change is a rubric, signifying less than nothing these days. Demonstrate to the client the nature of the relationship and partnership in terms of ongoing interaction and support.

What are the typical issues that can lead to a consulting provider being replaced? Can referrals be used effectively to ignite that need for a change in provider?

Alan Weiss: Trust that is violated. It’s very difficult to replace a highly respected consultant in a client. You can use referrals to become an additional resource as opposed to a replacement.

If you were starting a new consulting company from scratch today what areas would you take extra care to distinguish unique value in today’s highly competitive and global landscape?

Alan Weiss: Responsiveness; intellectual property; testimonials; global applicability; thought leadership; contrarianism.

You discuss that for referrals to be successful, clear communication of both targets and mutual benefit need to be present. What is the hardest part about consistently achieving this?

Alan Weiss: Being afraid to ask, failing to follow up, taking “no” too readily, not adequately demonstrating the win/win/win nature.

The are many new areas of strategic consulting involving technology convergence, search marketing, mobile, etc. What is the best way to convey certain value for new services where the price is not well established?

Alan Weiss: Price has nothing to do with it. The key is to show the value in terms of the buyer personal needs as well as the organizational need. Every client knows what he wants; few know what the need. Consultants should identify the needs.

Is there any way to create referrals when you are working with a client under a non-disclosure agreement?

Alan Weiss: Sure. You can be referred outside the industry, or without regard to the nature of the work, and without revealing that the source was a client.

Is there any major issues you think people over look with referrals?

Alan Weiss: They don’t prepare their clients or the environment, and fail to consistently ask because they are embarrassed.

I understand you occasionally put on some unique seminars? Is anything upcoming?

Alan Weiss: Just finished Thought Leadership at The Breakers in Palm Beach. Million Collar Consulting® College next week. Australia speaking tour after that. The Art of the Referral Workshop in Newport on Nov. 30. http://www.summitconsulting.com/

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The article brings something in the bright, bright light that had been hidden in the darkness, the TIME article states, “…Newt’s numbers are way out of the ordinary – even for a politician. While about 8% of his followers are real, other politicians were deemed to have anywhere 20% to 30% of “real” followers. In comparison, the average Twitter user, like you and me, have anywhere from 35% to 60% real people following them.”

It makes one wonder where all these non-real followers are coming from and more than a few CEOs are likely reading this article and asking the question, “Is all this investment in social media justified and an activity that will grow my business and improve the bottom line or are there wiser marketing investments to be made?” The answer is not one that will immediately be answerable completely. Before we get into that, a little history is required. Twitter has API’s that allow people to interact with their data to build other tools. For reasons that are completely unclear, the API allowed people to automate certain actions like posting, retweeting, even creation of new accounts via automated programmatic methods.  This appears to have helped Twitter grow users to create user adoption rates that were shown to venture capitalists. Some have suggested that certain due diligence steps were missed, I don’t know whether it is true or not. Time will tell.

What this incident has a potential to do is bring this conversation into the boardroom and have serious questions asked like are these 80,000+ Twitter follower social media experts really experts at anything at all? Are all of these investments in social media justified? Shouldn’t I be focused on a well diversified portfolio of relevant marketing activities? What does Klout’s influencer score of 72 for @NewtGingrich say about fake retweets being counted as real and will Klout eventually become the solution with verified users and replace Twitter altogether (if Twitter doesn’t buy it someday soon)? How many reports of social media ROI are sitting in executive boardrooms right now that are not true representations of actual real world reality? How many marketers departments will have new and different leadership 90 days from now due to questions raised due to this incident? Will people across the globe stop looking at the number of Twitter followers as the Holy Grail of social media efforts?

The answers to these questions aren’t fully clear yet, but I wanted to raise some of the most important ones. I can confidently say that the goal should always be one of diversified marketing strategies that reach relevant demographics and real, actual target customers.

It’s time for CEOs to rewrite the job spec of the CMO to the creation of relevant business results instead of hype, buzz and hocus pocus. This needed migration is just an idea in most boardrooms today, it needs to one day become reality. It’s time for businesses to adapt their organizations to perform in this environment which is something that must be customized for each company in solutions provided based on the markets that they serve.

How big is this marketplace? According to Google’s Keyword External tool over 3,361,550 queries on Google occurred on the term Twitter Followers. This quantifies 1) the amount of people researching how to improve their Twitter followers is large and 2) it means that social media people seeking Twitter followers are not talking to their friends via Social Media about this, they are using a search engine called Google, which is the primary tool that most people use for this research as well as what the majority of the population uses at the moment they are seeking highly relevant information.

Keyword    Global Monthly Searches
how to get twitter followers    90500
top twitter followers    4400
get more twitter followers    40500
get twitter followers    90500
twitter followers free    27100
increase twitter followers    8100
get twitter followers fast    4400
how to increase twitter followers    8100
most twitter followers    27100
find twitter followers    60500
pay for twitter followers    390
twitter followers tool    1900
twitter follower    246000
get more twitter followers fast    1000
free twitter followers    27100
twitter follow    301000
get more twitter followers free    6600
getting more twitter followers    880
get twitter followers free    14800
get free twitter followers instantly    480
build twitter followers    1300
targeted twitter followers    2400
who has the most twitter followers    12100
grow twitter followers    720
get thousands of twitter followers    480
more twitter followers    49500
get targeted twitter followers    320
twitter followers fast    5400
get more twitter followers instantly    320
buy more twitter followers    590
more twitter followers fast    1300
get instant twitter followers    390
increase your twitter followers    880
get free twitter followers    14800
how to buy twitter followers    33100
twitter followers for free    27100
more twitter followers without following    390
twitter follower software    1000
how to get more twitter followers    40500
add twitter followers    3600
get lots of twitter followers    4400
download twitter followers    880
more twitter followers free    8100
how to use twitter    135000
add more twitter followers    320
get more followers on twitter    40500
fast twitter followers    5400
buy twitter followers    33100
increase twitter followers free    720
twitter follower adder    720
get twitter followers instantly    880
automatic twitter follower    1600
buy twitter followers without following    590
how to get twitter followers fast    4400
buy guaranteed twitter followers    1600
get twitter followers for free    14800
free instant twitter followers    390
twitter for business    60500
twitter advertising    14800
twitter follow back    12100
best twitter to follow    14800
get alot of twitter followers    2400
twitter software    49500
twitter adder    12100
twitter who to follow    301000
twitter more followers    49500
purchase twitter followers    14800
getting twitter followers    14800
get more twitter follower    40500
best twitters to follow    880
get twitter follower    74000
get twitter followers without following    1000
buy youtube views    18100
guaranteed twitter followers    2400
get more followers on twitter free    6600
free twitter followers instantly    880
twitter increase followers    8100
auto twitter follower    1900
how do i get more twitter followers    49500
who has most twitter followers    12100
get followers    165000
buy real twitter followers    110
twitter followers following    9900
automatic twitter followers    1600
instant twitter followers    1000
buying twitter followers    12100
generate twitter followers    260
how do you get twitter followers    301000
free twitter follower    22200
increase twitter follower    6600
how do i get twitter followers    301000
get free followers on twitter    14800
twitter follow Friday    1600
how to get twitter followers without following back    480
how to get more twitter followers fast    1000
highest twitter followers    14800
how to get a lot of twitter followers    4400
get followers on twitter free    14800
remove twitter followers    6600
twitters to follow    8100
twitter followers    301000
Total monthly Google queries for the term Twitter Followers on Google Keyword External Tool    3361550

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Congratulations to my blogging counterparts in Boston! The Boston Bruins Stanley Cup parade user generated content bonanza is underway!

As you know last year the Chicago Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup and they had a parade. I went downtown for the spectacle of madness. I was overwhelmed not only by the emotion of my beloved Chicago Blackhawks winning the Stanley Cup, but also by the quantities of user generated content being created by two million people! I was in a sea of people taking pictures of other people taking pictures! I made a mental note of this and a few days later, on Youtube, I found this total gem:

The video shows a birds eye view of the parade right next to the confetti throwers!  I’m one of the specs you see on the north side of Washington Street. What absolutely amazes me about this video is this that while I was at the same event, this viewpoint is such a completely different experience that it feels like a different event.  While it’s not new that different people have different experiences at an event, the ability to go back and see these events from other perspectives with ease is new. I urge people to consider the possibilities of engaging with user generated content that they did not create around events they  experience:

Witnessing Other Perspectives Broadens Experience – We all experience things through our point of view, yet seeing for other points of view can allow positive reinforcement or alterations of our point of view to occur. What we experienced is only one tiny element of what took place.

Relax and Enjoy the Moment – Ever since the parade last year, if I’m going to an event that will get tons of coverage, I leave the camera in my pocket and just enjoy and soak in the moment. It can allow you to see details you might miss  if you are obsessed with taking pictures and/or video.

Benefits of 100% Focus – When you are not distracted in multiple ways, you will walk away with greater retention of the experience. Think about ways you can reduce distractions and maximize your learning and enjoyment.

All in all, there is great potential to enrich one’s experience through the lens of others. After all, it’s not about you. We all forget this from time to time, I know I have.

Diversity of experience is learning. Learning is the lifeblood of all things great in life. Live it. Enjoy it! have fun.

I hope that my Boston blogging counterparts (Dan Schawbel, Chris Brogan, David Meerman Scott and Mike Volpe) wait a few days for the slow uploaders and then enjoy the feast and talk about it. They will likely find gems they didn’t see from their vantage point at the time to experience the joy anew. I hope each year folks discuss these issues as they change our lives as my perspective on these issues changes. Embracing ways to see multiple points of view of experience is critical to understanding how to use it effectively in business.

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The book starts with an amazingly positive story about his childhood with his grandmother, then migrates to a dark memoir about a portion of Tim’s life before migrating back to how that first positive story can demonstrate a framework for a positive life filled with happiness, purpose and accomplishment. The book is a highly emotional and personal journey about Tim’s relationship with his grandmother Billye and the lessons that he learned from her, one that I personally found highly enjoyable and thought provoking. The following is my interview with Tim Sanders about Today We Are Rich.

————————————————————————————————————————————-

The opening heartwarming story of your now 95 year old grandmother Billye giving a stranger in need a needed chance that taught you important life lessons. Due to economic disruptions over the past decade, many people could appreciate such a chance. Is this one of the reasons you wrote this book now?

TIM SANDERS: I wrote the book in response to the fear I saw in people’s eyes in the Fall of 2008.  Everywhere I went, it was like 1991 or 2001 all over again: Boom, crash, uncertainty, scarcity-think.  I said to myself, “write your book on Abundance, tell Billye’s story!.”  Much like Napoleon Hill did in the 1930’s I felt compelled to write about how we must cultivate confidence from the inside so when things fall apart, we can be the Phoenix and not the fodder.

You discuss the subconscious mind as being larger than the conscious mind and how leveraging this can have positive impacts on our lives.  I see similar patterns in my research on leadership. Could you please explain your research and why the conscious mind has limited room to operate?

TIM SANDERS: As the to why, I’m sure one could say it’s God’s design while most would say is species specialization – we’d lose our minds if we were conscious of everything we’ve ever experienced all the time.  The research on the subconscious is vast, and stretches all the way back to the great William James.  We have limited person RAM (what you can hold in your active mind at one time), but much great drive space (our filed memories, which researchers say occupies the same space as the director of our central nervous system.)  If you read Claude Bristol or Maxwell Maltz, you get a much richer explanation.  If you’ve ever been stuck for a word, then recovered it later, you felt a rush of relief – that’s the connection between your ‘two minds.’

You talk about practicing your speaking in your hotel room looking at the mirror to activate your subconscious mind. You stated that this helps your performance. Please elaborate on how and why this works for you…

TIM SANDERS: When you face yourself, making eye to eye contact, the active mind connects with your below-the-surface consciousness – like two people staring each other down.  Try it next time you rehearse a talk or a pitch, you’ll see what I mean.  By combining a rehearsal with direct eye contact, I face my greatest critic: Me.  If I can convince myself, then I have more confidence to project to others when it’s go-time.

A few years ago I canceled my cable TV and became an Internet only household, learning new things reading books and spending more time with friends. It’s been a positive experience. You talk about removing negativity and seeking positive nutrients in the book, please explain why and how…

TIM SANDERS: First of all, good for you – that explains why your outlook is constructive and upbeat.  You feed your mind good stuff.  For your readers, I suggest they download the chapter and read it too – it’s really the foundation of my entire psyche (http://twar.com/free).  The idea is simple: You should be as judicious about what you put into your mind as what you put into your mouth.  Watch a bunch of cable, read gossip mags and hang out with negative people – and you’ll end up depressed and negative.  You cannot avoid it any more than you can successful multi-task complex creative projects.  You are only human.  Here’s the takeaway: Positive thinking is not a prescription, it’s an outcome.  You think positive because you load your mind up with good stuff.

Your son Anthony went through a phase where he considered quitting his job as a “Genius” at the Apple store where he gets to sell the Macbook, iPad, iPhone to celebrities in Los Angeles. You helped him rediscover his gratitude, how can we all best rekindle our gratitude muscle?

TIM SANDERS: It really depends on what you need to be grateful about.  For Anthony, he needed some perspective on Apple, removed from the grit and mire of his present experience.  So I took him to Staples, Home Depot and the DMV in a Scrooge like jobs of past, present and future.  Rocked his world and he’s still at Apple.  For some, it’s a daily requirement.  I suggest that when you first wake up, instead of jumping on line and letting the world punch you with data, you should spend a few minutes itemizing what people have recently done for you and why.  It’s a workout for your soul.

In one portion of the book you state that “Book readers are leaders. Many of the most successful executives that I know are voracious readers of books.” Is it the books or is it more the personal attribute of being a naturally curious lifelong learner that is the primary driver of your opinion?

TIM SANDERS: Book readers dive in deeper to subjects than article or headline munchers.  There’s a high barrier to entry, though, as most non-fiction and business books are quite dry in comparison to other media or entertainment options.  Those that read six to ten relevant books a year are much more future-proof than the grazers of the world.  They talk about more interesting things and riff more than people that only know what everyone else knows.

You discussed eighteenth century philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, the author of The Social Contract,  who stated “Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it.” You then discussed how promises should deliver results just like a business. Are you suggesting that not enough people are taking their promises as seriously as they should?

TIM SANDERS: Yes, we have little or no discipline about our promise making.  If we spent our money like we issued promises, we’d likely go broke!  I’ve learned to always measure my ability to deliver before I make the promise and not later, when it’s time to make excuses or apologies.  This is important, though, because research we did for the Likeability Factor revealed that you are judged as a person of integrity by the little promises you keep or don’t keep.  So protect your integrity, when you lose that in the eyes of others, you’ll lose it on the inside to.

One thing that fascinated me while reading Today We Are Rich is how you so clearly told stories that were decades old! How in the world did you do recall them so vividly?

TIM SANDERS: That’s one gift I’ve had all along – I can recollect experiences though meditation, reflection and discussions with families and friends.  And I also think I was blessed too during this writing process with some much needed flow and inspiration.

The book closes with a story of you making an extra effort to complete a task and how your schoolmates showed appreciation – even when you weren’t expecting it! What should we learn from this event?

TIM SANDERS: When you finish what you start, especially when it’s hard or fruitless, you’ll turn your scoffers into supporters.  I believe people are inherently loving, kind and generous.  You can trigger that with grit and determination.

The January, 1984, Annual of Psychoanalysis, vol. XII/XIII, Jerome A. Winer, Thomas Jobe, and Carlton Ferrono, “Toward a psychoanalytic theory of the charismatic relationship.” It discusses how great struggle builds foundations for charismatic leaders to emerge. Please discuss why you think this might be true and how people can best leverage that using Today We Are Rich?

TIM SANDERS: Great struggles provide a foundation for a strong contrast in your narrative – like a great song posses the ‘whisper to a scream’ dynamic.  If you’ve never had low lows, how can you truly illustrate soaring highs?

If Carol Bartz was removed as Yahoo! CEO and the board of directors called you to explore having you be the next CEO, what would you think about replying to the gesture and what would your first action be?

TIM SANDERS: A decade ago, I wanted that job.  Loved Yahoo! so much I thought I could-must-should do it.  But today, I know that I’m not the person for that job.  It’s really hard, the P&L is massive and Google is quite a foe to catch up with or overtake.

Be sure to go out and buy Tim Sanders new book Today We Are Rich, it was  joy to experience and has opens thinking about

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This month, one of the largest earthquakes in the modern history of the world took place in Japan. As you may know, Japan is one of the highest penetration rates of digital camera and digital phones in the world. Since most of the areas affected by the earthquake are without power and without Internet and mobile connections this content is going to ever so slowly trickle out instead of hitting instantly. It will likely become a torrent of video over time. This amazing video of the tsunami was obtained by Russia Today:

Many more of these videos will show the massive magnitude of this event in Japan and the insignificance of our species when compared to the forces of nature.

OK, what does this have to do with digital marketing strategy? Everything.

- Marketing Department Organizational Structures Are Still Aligned to the Pre-Internet Era – budgets, the position spec of the CMO, marketing channel management, lack of understanding of the need to change communication formats. Embrace UGC, rather than resisting it.

- Executive Leadership Teams Are Not Actively Managing Marketing Budgets – The commoditization of content and creative due to globalization, Apple computers, digital cameras and the creation of sites like 99designs.com create opportunities for management teams to significantly change business results. The portfolio of marketing channels is not naturally efficient. It requires highly specialized skills to optimize properly. These opportunities can only be realized when these assets are managed to the the proper business result objectives instead of branding measurement objectives that were appropriate in the 20th century.

My your preferred higher power bless the people of Japan during this difficult time. I only wish that the great coverage that the Los Angeles Times was doing about the earthquake and tsunami right now was just as focused, just as strong on the tsunami of change affecting the world of business gradually everyday across the world. The majority of the world has yet to see the drivers of the damage and are not properly responding to realign to new realities.

The time to act is now!

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In the introduction, you discuss how many have a love and hate relationship with Google – at the same time. What it is about Google that allows these emotions to exist mutually at the same time?

Aaron Goldman: Well, I wouldn’t call it a love/hate so much as a love/fear.

I love using Google as a searcher and as marketer. As a searcher, Google helps me find what I’m looking for. And, as a marketer, Google helps me get new customers.

But I’m definitely afraid of Google too. As a searcher, I’m afraid it of what it could do with my data. And as a marketer, I’m also afraid of what it could do with my data but even more afraid that it may one day change its algorithm and leave me out in the cold.

I think it’s general human nature to fear the things we love the most. Once we become reliant on something or someone, we fear that it one day may be taken away.

You discussed relevancy and intent in the book at a few junctures. How do you like to explain these issues to people and why are these concepts challenging for people to understand?

Aaron Goldman: It’s difficult because, by its very definition, relevancy is relative. What’s relevant to you may not be to me. Too many marketers make the mistake of thinking that what matters to them also matters to their target customers.

From a Google perspective, relevancy is the key to search. If Google’s search results aren’t relevant to each individual searcher, he or she will stop using it. That’s why Google looks to collect and keep so much data. It needs to personalize the results to make them more relevant.

For marketers, it’s critical to give off signals of relevancy if you want high rankings on Google. This includes content geared towards specific search queries as well as links from relevant websites.

As for intent. I really think it’s the reason search marketing works so well. People come to Google with the intent of finding something. And, often, that’s something to buy. It’s one of the few places in media where people raise their hands and specifically ask for products, services, etc. It’s the whole pull vs. push thing.

You mentioned how AOL values content differently than most organizations and how Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation, owner of The Wall Street Journal or Fox News accuses Google of stealing content. As content channels become infinite, isn’t media monopoly power also changing and/or even declining?

Aaron Goldman: The point I was making with content is that there are certain topics that are highly commercial and others that are not. What I mean by commercial is that the people consuming the content are in a commercial mindset — they’re thinking about buying something.

For publishers, commercial content is the easiest to monetize. Advertisers want to be wherever there are people thinking about buying stuff. AOL has done a good job of creating content on highly commercial topics — think travel or financial services — that it can sell ads against.

The Wall Street Journal and Fox News are too busy covering the “news.” And news is tough to monetize. People consuming news are not in a commercial mindset and are not open to advertising messages.

All that said, you make a good point that it’s tougher to wield monopoly power as channels become infinite and distribution is spread across the long tail. These days anybody can start a blog or Twitter account and “report” news. And people tend to trust their friends more than the media.

You interlaced a bunch of URLs in the book. This is an interesting experiment. What is your hope for it?

Aaron Goldman: I wanted to make the experience of reading the book more dynamic. Rather than just read cover to cover, my hope is that people will read a chapter and then go to the web to learn more about specific topics covered and interact with other people reading that same part of the book.

With static print, it’s tough to keep content fresh — especially in the world of marketing and Google when changes are happening every day. By including the URLs, I have a way to share new developments.

The URLs also helped keep me from going off on tangents or going too deep on topics that many readers may not care about. For example, rather than recap an entire thesis that David Berkowitz wrote about “Jewhavioral Targeting” in my chapter about “Letting the Data Decide,” I just cover it in a sentence or two and include a link.

There’s a few people in the book that were mentioned considerably more than others, how did you pick the contributors, quotes and subtopics?

Aaron Goldman: Along the same lines as the URLs, I knew it was important to include a wide variety of perspectives on the lessons learned from Google. No-one wants to read 300+ pages of what Aaron Goldman thinks about marketing. But people do (I hope) want to read 300+ pages of what some of the brightest minds in the industry learned from Google as curated by Aaron Goldman.

I interviewed over 100 marketing big wigs in the course of preparing my manuscript ranging from agency types to Google employees to researchers to university professors. The ones who are mentioned more frequently are the ones that gave me insights that were the most compelling, controversial, quotable or all of the above.

The book is part history, part teacher and part tour guide…who is the intended audience?

Aaron Goldman: This book was written for anyone who has a stake in marketing. It covers all areas of marketing — advertising, PR, promotions, media, product development, etc.

And it’s written for people like me who have very short attention spans. The copy is quick and punchy. And there’s lots of fun wordplay. I put the “pun” in punchy.

It doesn’t matter if you work for a small business or Fortune 500 company, the lessons in my book are applicable to your business. In each of my 20 chapters, I share a lesson, discuss how Google puts it into play, cover mini-case studies of marketers that exemplify it, and then walk through an exercise for the reader to relate the lesson to his or her business.

This book will also make great fodder for search engine marketing pros looking to broaden their horizons or understand how their skills can be leveraged across other channels.

What knowledge do you want people to take away from the book?

Aaron Goldman: First and foremost, I want people to take away specific tactics that they can apply to their business immediately. If you read the entire book and don’t find a single thing you can do to grow your business right away, then I will personally refund your money.

That said, I also want to give people a framework for thinking about the future of marketing. I spend quite a bit of time throughout the book — and especially in the last chapter on “future-proofing” — discussing what the marketing world will look like 10 years from now and what Google’s role might be within it.

If nothing else, I hope people will find my book entertaining and enjoy getting a peek under the hood of one of the most fascinating (and profitable) companies in the modern era.
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I wish Aaron the best of luck with his book and look forward to learning from his experiences as I continue to explore my book author aspirations in the future. The constant mutual learning from all of the wonderful people I meet in the digital marketing space as I speak and consult around the world is special and hard to fully describe! Looking forward to seeing the other scheduled stops on the GoogleyLessons blog tour!

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In association with Brian Halligan, David now releases Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead (Wiley 2010). The book gives a refreshing look at concepts you’ve seen in his previous books, explaining how David believes using the techniques of the Grateful Dead companies can learn to market, engage and build passionate fan bases. The book interlaces ideas from the offline world and show how to use them online today. Yet this vast opportunity remains hidden to most. They talk about the book in this video:

How did you conceive of the Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead’s concept and map the chapters to effortlessly flow to the reader?

David Meerman Scott: The book’s concept was really conceived out of our love for the Grateful Dead and their music. We were fans and at the same time were eager to write about the Grateful Dead because we identified many lessons in what the band has been doing over more than 40 years that are applicable today. These lessons are an important tool for helping to understand the new marketing environments in a language and with examples that are familiar to all.

You showed several examples of how the Grateful Dead treated their customers with care and respect (page 82). It seems like a simple concept. Why is treating customers with care and respect so hard to do in most companies?

David Meerman Scott: I think doing it involves more work and some companies mistakenly think there is an advantage to new customer churn instead of building a loyal fan base. Companies need to understand there really isn’t any difference between a B2B or B2C company, at the end of the day you are still selling to people.  The more people feel valued by companies and personally connected to them, the more the company’s fan base will grow and the bottom line will prosper as well.

Read more: http://socialmediab2b.com/2010/03/b2b-roi-david-meerman-scott-sxsw/#ixzz0wTALaTed

You discuss bootleg recordings and the freemium model extensively in the book. What are your views on how this is emerging in the corporate world and the potential future paths?

David Meerman Scott:   The idea of giving away something for free to anybody who wants it and then providing a paid upgrade to a premium version is becoming increasingly common with products and services that have no distribution costs. The challenge in the upgrade model is to give away something that is considered valuable and something that people will use regularly and become familiar with.

This strategy won’t work when you provides something for free that only has limited value. So for example a free software application with a feature set that is so crippled as to be of limited use will not sell more software.

Back when I had a music site, it was amazing to see that the artists that were heavily involved in defining the direction of the promotion of the band almost always outperformed the ones done by handlers promoting exclusively by the old rules and channels. How can companies best adapt and capture the opportunities this presents?

David Meerman Scott: If we look at this in terms of promotion the best things companies can do is make it easy to spread their content. And let the marketplace spread your content for you. The goal is to spread the word about your product or service in the marketplace. If you have a remarkable idea, you will attract bloggers and social media users in your marketplace that will help you propel your idea without spending lots of money on PR and advertising. The Grateful Dead lesson is that making it easy for our audience to spread our content makes our product “known” in the marketplace.

When you met the senior bond trader at Madison Square Garden in the 1980’s, the book states (page 76) “It’s sort of like a secret society, a shared interest in something that others in the office don’t know about.” Why didn’t everyone in that office become Deadheads? What can be done to make sure search marketing, social media and the new rules of marketing don’t get limited to “secret society” status?

David Meerman Scott: The Grateful Dead was never mainstream. They only had one top ten song in 45 years. As in every niche market, I wouldn’t expect everyone to be a fan.

However, search marketing, social media, new rules of marketing have no way of being limited to a “secret society” status, because every major media outlet, online blogs and sites all use these tools ubiquitously. The real question companies need to be asking is “Are we using these tools to benefit our customers, grow fans and engage in real dialogue,” if the answer is no, the company or its product is the one that will stay secret.

Really enjoyed your discussion of the strategy shift at Dropbox(page 40). Your discussion of how some tactics that work in an existing market can utterly fail in new markets is a highly misunderstood area for both entrepreneurs and existing companies alike. Why is this concept so challenging to understand?

David Meerman Scott: I think it’s not all that challenging to understand, the challenge lies in companies being willing to experiment and step outside of the channels that have been too long traversed and no longer work. Too often companies get comfortable with how they have always done something. So even when it’s no longer working, it’s hard to stop doing it. The key to changing this is to be open-minded about how to market your products and be willing to experiment in your market.  You’ll never know what might succeed if you’re not willing to try new things.

What techniques do you like use to convert raving fans of new marketing tactics that often conflict with previous belief systems?

David Meerman Scott: My job is to write these books and speak about all the successes that companies have when they put these new marketing tactics to use. I’m a journalist as well as a marketing strategist and I spend a lot of time blogging about all the right things and some not so great things that companies are doing with these tools. The best way to convert people to using them is to reveal to them how the can successfully apply them and what benefit will come from that application.

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Jim has written many books and is the founder of the eMetrics conference, the leading web analytics conference. Recently, Jim released the book “Social Media Metrics” with a foreword written by David Meerman Scott. The book provides a useful framework for considering how one should consider measuring social media and other forms of emerging media. Jim graciously agreed to do an interview with me and what resulted is below!

How did your extensive history in metrics and measurement influence your approach to this book on this new medium?

Jim Sterne: Like my previous books, I wanted this one to be for people in the trenches, doing the work as well as the executives they work for. A bit of theory, a healthy dose of strategy and a lot of practical tid bits on how to tell if this stuff is working. I wanted to avoid being one of those experts who is full of sounds and furry delivering thought-provoking sound bites, but no practical knowledge. So all of what I know about measuring online success is included in “Social Media Metrics” as the background. The basics are all there and the rest is delivered almost parenthetically.

What are the biggest hurdles to effective creation and usage of social media metrics?

Jim Sterne: Buy in. Not just upper management comprehension and dedication and not just troop level activity, but actual investment. This stuff requires new jobs with new jobs descriptions to be populated. “What? You mean I have to hire people to do things I’ve never had to hire people to do before??” Yes. That’s a major commitment and faces the same hurdles as when we tried to hire a webmaster, an email manager and a web analyst.

In a recent article, I discussed the tendency for people to lock onto the hot metric – Technorati link counts, RSS subscribers or most currently Twitter followers. How can marketing leaders and web analysts change this dynamic?

Jim Sterne: Once you understand that hard and fast numbers are not hard and fast, you begin to look for the trends and the meaning inside the numbers. That’s great that you got a million people following you an Twitter, but does it make any difference to the bottom line? It’s great that you advertised your shop floor cleaning solution to tens millions of Oprah fan on TV but do any of those viewers have any connection to buying your product? Are your Twitter followers more likely to buy your goods or services? The latest hot metric about the latest, shiniest new tech may be fun, but is it actionable??

If you were asked by a CMO to quickly define social media metrics for a company, what are the questions you’d want to ask and issues you’d want to address?

Jim Sterne: What are your business goals?

What processes and people do you have in place to oversee and manage those goals?

How are they compensated?

What does social media marketing success look like to you?

How much detail do you need to monitor the social media conversation?

What percent of your decision makers know what social media is and why it’s important?

And so forth.

Will mobile social media complicate all of this, simplify it or too early to tell?

Jim Sterne: It will complicate things while we’re getting a handle on it and then simplify things as we come out the other end. We may end up with standards and benchmarks before we’re done. Then, these public, attitudinal metrics can be correlated with direct attitudinal metrics (surveys) and behavioral data and we end up with a really rich, actionable dataset.

Did your views of social media change as you wrote the book and researched the topic? If so, how?

Jim Sterne: My views about how far along we are were established during the research for the book. My optimism that tools and techniques will get better and that there actually are companies that get it out there improved. There are some really bright people who are doing some really impressive things. It’s a joy to learn from them.

After the last emtrics you wrote “I believe the message we have been beaming at the C-Suite is getting a hearing and the resources are about to be significant rather than symbolic.” Could you eloborate on this more please…

Jim Sterne: I’m seeing more and more senior executives dedicating more and more budget and resources to marketing accountability. I’m seeing more top level managers asking better questions about trends rather than numbers and looking for insights rather than benchmarks. That gives me hope.

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This concludes the interview with Jim Sterne and I hope you found the strategic information valuable. What else does it make you wish to discuss about this topic?

Here are some other recent interviews and thoughts about (and by) Jim Sterne:

Mixpanel – Analytics for Startup

Book Review

Jim on  why you should not buy this book!

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For those of you who don’t know Pat LaPointe, his bio on his website states the following:

Pat LaPointe – Managing Partner

At MarketingNPV, Pat LaPointe directs the development of client solutions for CMOs in the areas of skills, structure, processes, and tools to improve marketing measurement through greater alignment and accountability. His book Marketing by the Dashboard Light: How to Get More Insight, Foresight, and Accountability from Your Marketing Investments is a pioneering work on the topic of marketing dashboard development.

Prior to launching MarketingNPV in 2003, Pat was an equity partner and senior vice president at Frequency Marketing Inc., a consulting and software company known for design and operation of large-scale customer retention and loyalty programs. Pat also directed the operation of a marketing department at Bell Atlantic (now Verizon), creating and implementing customer acquisition and development programs for both B2B and consumer markets. He started his career in advertising in the Y&R network and at Ketchum, where he managed large client portfolios in all aspects of marketing strategy and communications.

Pat is an MBA graduate of Stern School at NYU and holds a B.Comm. from McGill University in Montreal.

Gary Slack introduced Pat as someone who helps CMOs and CFOs in the Fortune 100 better measure their marketing. Pat started his talk by telling a funny and likely inappropriate joke. Happy to retell it privately.

So how do you measure engagement?
Some engagement methods have more traction and have better acceptance.

Traditional Problems In Measuring Engagement:
See a stimulus > Think/Feel Differently (Research) > Buy Something (Pray for correlation)

Behaviorist’s View of Engagement – Referrals lead people towards purchase funnel:
Challenges#1: Engagement is not Linear – these things do not follow an order. Awareness, Consideration, Preference, Purchase, Retention, Repurchase
Challenge #2: Interaction Effects are Very Real – there is a basket mix effect – last touch versus complex reality
Challenge #3: Value isn’t always transactional (Me: more and more I’m not sure this is the case)
Forrester’s 4 I’s Engagement Model: Involvement, Interaction, Intimacy, Influence

Eric Peterson’s engagement calculator provides brand impression, engagement metrics.

New definition – Pre-transaction, then purchase
Pre-transaction screening – the scores are linked to what we think will create value
Pre-transactions can be either positive or negative and scoring models can be created to create useful measurement of marketing activities across multiple channels.

Marketing Effectiveness = change (direction * velocity) t+1 vs expectations (Me: What if the expectations are highly flawed?)

Measuring engagement in 4 simple steps
1) What does your business objectives (hint: awareness is not an objective)
- What are your hypothesis about the behavioral pathways?
- How are you attempting to influence them?
- Ask “So what?”

2) Create a methodical testing process:
- Break the big problems down into smaller component parts
- Use experiments to test your hypothesis

3) Look for leading indicators of eventual purchase behavior
- Use analytics to verify how these audiences drive customer behavior
- Important Protect and Defend the Credibility Chain

4) Develop and refine drivers to leverage drivers

If you follow these actions you can make a credibility chain!

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Personalized Search – Times they are a Changing…Yeah, but when?Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all appear to be experimenting with “personalized search”, an algorithm for serving up search results that considers an individual’s interests, search history and browsing patterns. In this session, SEM experts will discuss the impact of personalized search today and tomorrow on both paid and organic website visibility results.
I’ll be moderating this session with Shari Thurow and Rob Garner doing the primary presentations. Look forward to creating a conversation around t

Is personalized search really about a better user experience? Why do I see results for Wheeling, West Virginia when I’m searching for Wheeling, Illinois a few short miles away with a term like Wheeling pizza? Or is it just a scheme to obfusgate SEO communication to maximize paid search revenue at Google? Time will tell, but early evidence hasn’t favored the user experience question.

torontohotels.ca, a discount Toronto hotels site was helpful in booking my trip. I’ll be staying at the Best Western Primrose, a downtown Toronto hotel a few blocks down the street from the SMX venue, it appears to be the best combination of free wifi, location and features for the price

I’d like to thank Andrea Hadley, Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman for this invitation to speak at SMX, I really appreciate participating in Search Marketing Expo! Should be great fun and mutual learning as always.

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“Small local furniture retailers who sold mid-range to higher priced furniture already were challenged before the recession because of competition from lower-priced Chinese imports.”

“Porters of Racine, one of the oldest surviving high-end furniture retailers in Wisconsin, soon will close after struggling for several years with declining sales.” Reaction: Notice that phrase “several years”, it’ll become vitally important in a minute.

“Through November, retail furniture sales in the U.S. dropped by 12.1%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The decline followed an 8% slide in 2008.” Reaction: Yes, after the housing bubble which created unnatural demand for furniture in 2005, 2006 and 2007, this would be natural.

The story states that Porters of Racine “will close after several years with declining sales”. Yet the story mentioned sales figures that only showed declines for 2008 and the first 11 months of 2009. dictionary.com defines several as “being more than two but fewer than many in number or kind”. This seems to indicate a period of two to possibly up to seven years. A previous 2007 story mentioned Porters of Racine being in a challenging business situation, before the housing bust took place indicating a clear issue about the business had formed earlier than 2007.  What could possibly explain several years of declining sales that included a four year boom in housing that correlated with increased buying of correlated household goods? That is a really good question.  It would seem to indicate that there was an agonizingly long, slow drop in quantity of qualified store floor traffic.  Let’s examine Porters online marketing channel usage, obviously without the help of the actual marketing plan in my hands.

The following branded terms for Porters of Racine had the following monthly query volume:
porters of racine outlet    36
porters of racine    1000
porters of racine furniture    91

According to my post, Local Search Marketing Keyword Allocation: Porters of Racine, there were about 48,948 qualified queries for the term Wisconsin furniture, 38,971 for Milwaukee furniture and 3,110 for Kenosha furniture for a total of 91,020 queries. Give that the standard 1/3 Google keyword haircut and we’ll call it 60,000. However, if you include the other communities in southeast Wisconsin and northeast Illinois, you’d probably have between 40,000 and 60,000 long tail queries for places like Lake Forest, Wilmette, Winnetka, Kenilworth, Highland Park, Glenview, Northbrook, Deerfield, Buffalo Grove, Lincolnshire, Mettewa, Libertyville, Schaumburg, Kildeer, Lake Bluff, Barrington and Riverwoods. In Wisconsin, there is places like Madison, Green Bay, Appleton and other cities within a drivable distance of Porters. To be conservative, we’ll even leave the high query volume term Chicago furniture completely out of the equation. So let’s call it 100,000 monthly queries in the regional furniture query market.

A look at website of Porters of Racine, shows a classic flat small web site with “Porters of Racine” on every title tag. And while the site had several more pictures on it before the going out of business sale banner was added, this was the case before the change. A further look back at the Internet wayback machine, indicates a series of websites built over the years that did not venture far from the current web sites theme. The word Milwaukee does appear on the site during a year 2000 version. Well you are getting my point, Porters of Racine appears to have never created an effective content strategy that would attract the types of searchers that would be looking for high end fine furniture and lived in the region. In fact it only ranks for the non-branded attribute term – Racine furniture. In my opinion, the shift in how companies engage customers has been shifting from many traditional forms of media to effective content and relevant paid search marketing strategies that can create engagement with potential customers. I’m making an assumption about content only as I see no evidence of an active paid search marketing campaign.

One might assert that many of those 100,000 queries aren’t qualified customers of a high end furniture store like Porters of Racine. Alright I’ll grant you this. But before we write them off, let’s talk about their potential benefits for a minute. Thousands of people wanting the best and aspiring to buy furniture from Porters of Racine! The amount of word of mouth, the number of people who visit the store and tell stories about it. All great things!  Not to mention we likely all know someone in our lives whose significant other caused them to buy something more expensive than they should be buying right? I do! OK, so let’s drop 90% of those queries as completely unqualified customers. This leaves us with around 10,000 queries a month.

10,000 queries a month for how long? Let’s say 7 years from 2003 (once Google had mainstream traction) through 2009. 10,000 queries times 7 years times 12 months per year yields us = 840,000 queries over the past 7 years! During a time period where customers were deluged with tons and tons of new content in news ways and forms. Not to mention that all of these queries were people putting in the word furniture with a regionally local qualifier – so they were relevant prospects! If done right, much more effective than traditional brand marketing spend that wastefully sends outbound messaging to many unqualified and uninterested customers.

So would 840,000 queries from relevant prospects have made a difference in Porters of Racine viability as a profitable and thriving business concern I think so.

Not fully convinced? Consider this. Doris Hajewski’s next “Shop Talk” entry was about Steinhafels opening a new mattress store. Who ranks #1 for the terms – Wisconsin furniture and Milwaukee furniture? You guessed it, Steinhafels!

Back in Chicago, I performed business content strategy and seo services on Weber Furniture Service, a fine furniture and refinishing and restoration provider, at the end of 2008, in the 1st quarter of 2009 versus the 1st quarter of 2008, a very different economic period, unique site visitors were up 45%!!! The company was able to cut traditional media spending as an added benefit which improved profit margin!

To be perfectly clear, my goal here is not to rip on Porters of Racine. Quite the opposite. By profiling a business which is going out of business, it is my hope that tens of thousands of other businesses can learn about the importance of effective SEO, SEM and content marketing practices from this event, which in my personal opinion is one of missed opportunity.

Let’s summarize what we’ve observed here in this post.

1) Effective search rankings can contribute to business success (Steinhafel’s) or business failure. Do you want to learn about Gen X CMO management techniques so you can prevent other businesses from this fate.

2) With the emerging changes in operational risk liability laws is your Board of Directors receiving qualified advice from someone who understands seo and web analytics as well as traditional executive level business techniques? Are they keeping current with these items are transforming the world of business strategy and customer distribution? If your Board of Directors  is not yet receiving this advice, it should be. Shareholders should be demanding it!

3) Are you aware of the trend of how search marketing is allowing product attributes to be electronically stored and retrieved from non-branded search queries allow you focus on the customers needs instead of your product push? As volume of content increases there is an ever increasing lack of mental band with to absorb additional information. You may wish review the appendix to this post.

4) Are you aware of the microeconomics of your marketing channels and successfully migrating organizational resources to align yourself with the customer and lead this change management initiative?

5) We are living in a time that is similar to the industrial revolution.  Marketing is changing from a purely outbound medium to a medium via search that is creating inbound marketing. This is a 180 degree process change that has large process ramifications. We are in a recession, but there are structural changes happening to the economy as a result of search and most businesses are not properly adjusting.

6) In the new normal economy, one needs to utilize the power of the Internet to lower marketing and sales costs to create competitive advantages over their competition. It’s actually not that hard to do once you understand it, but one has to understand that revenue and profitability improvements are possible. This is why the change management is so difficult, many don’t understand what is possible and are not aware of the far reaching organizational issues. One further needs to understand that SEO content strategy is not instant, but rather a long term process.

7) Newspapers, online news sites, TV and cable news need to cover more than just the facts. The reality is yes businesses are closing and jobs are being lost, but that is a symptom, not a root cause of these complex business issues. But these are things that happen well after the damage that is caused by not migrating your marketing channels to an ideal search marketing strategy.

If you’d like to learn how to become aware of these issues so that you can migrate the structural changes in our economy, please consider attending Think Tank Live in Waukesha on February 23, 2010, code WI50 gets you a $50 discount. Chris Campbell of Lakeshore Branding and WordPress Expert Lisa Sabin-Wilson wrote blog posts about the upcoming event where you will learn things such as “How Breaking Business News Stories Migrate to Mainstream Mass Media“. We hope to see you there!

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The first thing one notices is as the geographic search qualifier term covers a larger geographic area the quantity of searches in the head containing a branded term fell for these furniture terms.
Wisconsin Furniture Monthly Search Queries
Attribute 38119 95.4%
Branded 1818 4.6%

Milwaukee Furniture Monthly Search Queries
Attribute 14014 83.6%
Branded 2757 16.4%

Kenosha Furniture Monthly Search Queries
Attribute 2070 78.7%
Branded 560 21.3%

Does anyone know of anyone who has studied this issue on a larger basis across many geographies and industries? It makes sense to me I don’t yet have enough data to elaborate on it further at this time. It would make sense though as when you are looking to travel farther you are less clear of the path and that when you are doing a hyper-local search you could be influenced by such queues as seeing the physical location and word of mouth marketing factors. If you’ve noticed similar trends, please let me know about it with via a follow on post or private email.

The following is the keyword data I used in the analysis so you can see how I classified the attribute versus branded data:
Wisconsin Furniture Keywords Monthly Searches Attribute/Branded
wisconsin furniture 22200 Attribute
wisconsin furniture stores 3600 Attribute
furniture in wisconsin 3600 Attribute
wisconsin furniture store 1600 Attribute
wisconsin amish furniture 1600 Attribute
furniture stores in wisconsin 1300 Attribute
ashley furniture wisconsin 1000 Branded
wisconsin office furniture 1000 Attribute
wisconsin wood furniture 590 Attribute
wisconsin furniture company 480 Attribute
american furniture wisconsin 480 Branded
wisconsin furniture outlet 390 Attribute
furniture store in wisconsin 390 Attribute
amish furniture in wisconsin 390 Attribute
wisconsin furniture manufacturers 210 Attribute
oak furniture wisconsin 170 Attribute
rustic furniture wisconsin 170 Attribute
colders furniture wisconsin 170 Branded
furniture manufacturer wisconsin 140 Attribute
unfinished furniture wisconsin 140 Attribute
ashley furniture in wisconsin 110 Branded
amish furniture stores in wisconsin 91 Attribute
best craft furniture wisconsin 58 Attribute
american furniture store wisconsin 58 Branded
Total Wisconsin Furniture 39937

Milwaukee Furniture Keywords Monthly Searches Attributes/Brand
milwaukee furniture 22200 Attribute
milwaukee furniture stores 2900 Attribute
furniture in milwaukee 2900 Attribute
milwaukee furniture store 1300 Attribute
furniture sale milwaukee 1300 Attribute
milwaukee office furniture 1300 Attribute
furniture stores in milwaukee 1000 Attribute
milwaukee furniture outlet 480 Attribute
milwaukee bedroom furniture 480 Attribute
ashley furniture milwaukee 480 Branded
american furniture milwaukee 480 Branded
colders furniture milwaukee 480 Branded
furniture store in milwaukee 210 Attribute
boston store furniture milwaukee 210 Attribute
rubins furniture milwaukee 210 Branded
rubin’s furniture milwaukee 170 Branded
furniture stores milwaukee area 170 Attribute
steinhafels furniture milwaukee 170 Branded
contemporary furniture milwaukee 170 Attribute
baby furniture milwaukee 170 Attribute
wood furniture milwaukee 170 Attribute
antique furniture milwaukee 170 Attribute
home furniture milwaukee 140 Attribute
office furniture resources milwaukee 140 Attribute
bachman furniture milwaukee 110 Branded
leather furniture milwaukee 110 Attribute
wayside furniture milwaukee 110 Branded
biltrite furniture milwaukee 110 Attribute
unfinished furniture milwaukee 110 Attribute
national business furniture milwaukee 110 Attribute
rubens furniture milwaukee 91 Branded
milwaukee furniture company 91 Attribute
amish furniture milwaukee 91 Attribute
furniture stores in milwaukee area 91 Attribute
colder’s furniture milwaukee 91 Branded
scandinavian furniture milwaukee 91 Attribute
colders furniture store milwaukee 73 Branded
built rite furniture milwaukee 73 Branded
american furniture store milwaukee 73 Branded
milwaukee furniture dolly 73 Branded
boston store furniture gallery milwaukee 73 Branded
Total Milwaukee Furniture 38971

Kenosha Furniture Keywords Monthly Searches Attribute/Branded
kenosha furniture 1900 Attribute
kenosha furniture stores 480 Attribute
total furniture kenosha 390 Branded
furniture stores in kenosha 170 Attribute
ashley furniture kenosha 170 Branded
Total Kenosha Furniture 3110

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Home Page Title Tag – Hot or Not?

Moderators: David Dalka and either Mike Grehan, Greg Jarboe or Stewart Quealy

The first thing one learns about search engine optimization is about the importance of title tags, especially the home page title tag. Yet when an experienced SEO surfs the web they often must stop and scratch their head at certain home page title tags! It certainly indicates a lack of understanding by senior management teams out there.

In this session everyone is the expert! We will share 30 title tags and URLs in 30 minutes. Everyone gets to tweet their impressions of the title tag for with the Twitter hashtag #sestitle!!! Then we’ll do Q&A and figure out what it all means. The benefits of this session are certain to include venting of pent up frustration, bonding with your fellow search marketers, extreme laughter and far reaching communication of the session to people far and wide not even at the Search Engine Strategies conference! Spread the gospel. Change the world. See you there.

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Obviously one must consider that without true reform of advertising models away from CPM driven page view models how display in 2010 can do nothing to further the goal of lowering costs of marketing and sales for companies and improving our standard of living. CPM can only maximize revenue of an ad network with some residual benefits to publishers. A few days ago I considered writing something about this, but thought this was part of something larger than just Google and their display initiatives in 2010.

Surely, less than 48 hours later, Jason Calacanis started a discussion about comScore that has the Blogoshpere abuzz. Michael Arrington also chimed in (as did a bunch of other people) in his post, Jason Calacanis Punches Comscore In The Face. Comscore Punches Back. Fred Wilson Drags Us Into It. $SCOR” rel=”bookmark” href=”http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/24/comscore-calcanis-wilson-punch-face/”>Jason Calacanis Punches Comscore In The Face. Comscore Punches Back. Fred Wilson Drags Us Into It. $SCOR.The buzz around Jason and his conversation is ultimately about symptoms of the current ecosystem, not the root causes of the future end game.  While the conversation about the current state is certainly an interesting conversation to observe, it’s not the conversation I wish to take to the next level. We need to have a different conversation. There is so much more to achieve and limited marketing resources of companies need to be put to work effectively. There are advertising models of the future to consider where offline, mobile and Internet will collide and will someday make this entire conversation look primitive.

Sure enough reading this post brought me back to the conversation about Google and the worthlessness of poorly targeted and untimely display banner ads. You see there was not one but two large banners on TechCrunch that stood out as irrelevantly served by Google. What were they? They were display banners for a company I had interviewed with to be the CMO of in Spring of 2009 that I would have likely have increased the revenue significantly by now.  Unfortunately most CEOs don’t yet fully understand the magnitude of the amount of change  that is necessary to transform a company successfully for marketing on the web while improving customer satisfaction and the corporation’s profitability. I had researched them and their competitors back then. I was never a potential customer of the service. So now, a full nine months later, here I am looking at this completely irrelevant ad on TechCrunch of all places (which is completely unrelated to the vertical). Wasteful. Pathetic. Sad. Not something a rational business leader following the rules of being a Gen X CMO where search marketing becomes the top of the strategic process.  The first decade of the Internet got us to the batters box to start the game of corporate business strategy transformation, I look forward leading that conversation into the first inning during the next few years. The magnitude of the change and the amount of transformation needed is massive, whether it is a small company or a member of the Fortune 500.

You should read those comments in Michael Arrington’s post and think about their motivations – extremely carefully. You’ll also find a link to Jason’s original post there if you wish to read the full details. The future of not only the Internet, but also the future of business organizational structures and marketing strategy budget direction hangs in the balance.

So my question for Jason Calacanis, Fred Wilson, Michael Arrington and EVERYONE ELSE is the following, “Is it time to stop pretending that offline branding models simply converted online is the future of the advertising? If a world migrated budgets from CPM banner ads to CPA/CPL and other emerging forms, who would really care about unique visitors besides site owners seeking an ego boost? ”

Bonus question for Fred Wilson: Wouldn’t your energy be better spent on funding ideas that move the conversation in the direction of innovation of advertising instead of arguing with Jason about a company you exited long ago? (If you are up for it, I’d like to create those realities with you in start ups in that future arena.)

In the end measurement of the type discussed in Jason’s post only matters in an advertising world based on page view based(CPM) or time sponsored impressions. As in my example above, considerable display advertising occurs in an irrelevant way after the fact. For example, I bought a car last September, I’m still seeing increased banners on the models I considered now – after the purchase. Women planning weddings likely have seen related retargeted banners long after the wedding has occurred, possibly even after the divorce is filed in some cases!!! We must do better.

The convergence of offline, online, search and mobile marketing will require entirely new processes to effectively manage them as it becomes a real-time individual decision marketplace. To me, it will have similarity to the changes I made in the 1990′s at BlackRock, where we created new data, new structures, new standards and created better information for us to create strategic advantages.  I actively network with some outstanding nascent start ups, sadly many are ignored as many VCs look for traffic or who is involved rather than focus on revenue models, vision, market size and evidence that there might be paying customers for such a new , disruptive model.

The economy right now is bad, but to state that it is just an economic event is way oversimplifying it. It’s prolonged and drawn out due to the structural effects of the Internet not being managed to corporate advantage effectively. Stated simply, corporations and our society is not allocating resources in an effective manner as it fails to migrate budgets and marketing strategy to the highest ROI activities which attract relevant customers. It’s time for scarce, new and often misunderstood breeds of executives that understand these concepts to be allowed to realign corporations big and small, new and old to these new realities otherwise we will see more corporations destroyed “by doing nothing”. There is certainly a significant cost to tapping new leaders, with new skills to lead organizations into new frontiers in terms of realignment and retraining. However, the costs of doing nothing are far greater to our society as not allocating budgets to the most efficient channels and allowing those decisions to be made by people who understand these new realities is far greater.

All I can ask the both the blogosphere and the world business community is to please stop the bickering about these legacy models so we can move onto the real issue and work ahead – realigning our corporate business strategy and our society to the realities of Industrial Revolution 2.0. It starts with board of directors, CEO, CFO and COO executives asking their CMO and marketing partners the right questions. The journey will be fun.

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From: GOOGLE PROMO <winners@googlelotto.com>
Date: Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 7:56 PM
Subject: You won £850,000.00 GBP in Google new year promotion
To:

You won £850,000.00 GBP in Google new year promotion. Ticket
number:00869575733664,CGPN:7-

22-71-00-66-
12,Serial,numbers:BTD/8070447706/06,Lucky numbers:12-12-23-35-40-41(12). For
more info,contact,grahams.benfield11@8u8.com

Comments closed 2/25/2010

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Boscos Local Business Results November 2009 Smudge

Yes, the email is for November, 2009′s local business results for some business named Boscos. A query of Boscos indicates a number of businesses with that name. Due to the size of the views, it appears to be Boscos , the Restaurant for Beer Lovers with locations in Little Rock, Nashville, Memphis and Johnson City, TN.

The following are the Google Local Business Center data elements the email contained (in case the above photo doesn’t render):
Appeared in Google local search results
Users clicked on this listing
Clicks for more info
Clicks for driving directions
Clicks to your website

My first thought was this was potentially some kind of joke by someone at Google due to the subject matter resolving to  beer, which has a long history of pranks in SEO circles. However, a Twitter user, @phillydesign sent a tweet with the following tweet with a link to Tweetpic:

Truly having trouble deciding why I rec’d this Google Local email. Is it spam? Have the googlebots lost it? http://twitpic.com/x0gp2

Thank you Danya! You allowed me to see I wasn’t the only one that received this.  That was a big help. We obviously don’t know the scope of this story yet, but I can say it wasn’t just one random email to me due to this tweet. I contemplated the meaning and potential impact of the event.  Immediately, my mind raced to the Google CEO Eric Schmidt press conference which I attended with Quentin Hardy back at Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2006, The full transcript of that press conference is located here

Several things stand out to me about that event, most importantly that Eric didn’t seem like he had fully considered the magnitude of the AOL data breach situation and how to answer it. These are the interactions with reporters that led to Eric’s retraction of his earlier statements:

Q:       People read the article today about AOL [inadvertently revealing search query data for its users] and say, “Oh my God, Google or whatever is going to give my searches away and everything about me is going to be known.” Can what happened at AOL happen at Google, and what do you say to the searchers out there?

Eric:    Well, our number one priority is the trust that our users have and that would be a violation of trust, so the answer is, it won’t happen.

Q:       Hi. I just want to follow-up on the AOL [privacy breach. Did you speak to AOL about this?]

Eric:     I did not contact them on this because I was busy doing these other things. I’ve been deal mode, unfortunately. So the answer is I did not.

Q:       [Follow up question asking his opinion of the eventual outcome of this AOL breach]

Eric:     In many ways, it may be positive because we want people to know things. We don’t want people to wandering around saying everything is secure, everything is protected. So I think that the awareness is positive. The specific is obviously bad. So please don’t get my message wrong here. It’s clearly a bad thing. No one disagrees with that, but I think more awareness is good. From a Google perspective, again, this would not happen. I don’t want to criticize AOL, they’re a good partner of ours, and they should answer the specifics. I don’t know enough of the details.

It is awareness, awareness that people know what goes on online, that is a good thing. The fact that people now understand that credit card fraud – again, please don’t take this out of context. This is important. I don’t want to be quoted as saying “this is a good thing.” It’s not a good thing. Awareness of what can happen, that bad things can happen, is a good thing. I hope that’s clear.

Q:       [Question regarding press criticism or negative reviews of products]

Eric:     Well, again, we get our feedback from our end-users on every search, on every use. So with all due respect to all of us, my opinions, and what you all think – we collectively are not the judge – the user is the judge. So when we bring out a product, or a new service, we look at how end-users respond to it. So the question about AOL, the real answer is, it’s an end-user trust argument. So we will do things that are specific to maintaining or improving end-user trust. And that’s how we’re going to sort all this out. There will always be people who criticize Google and that’s fine. We think the criticism is healthy, we learn from the criticism. It’s all perfectly fine.

Q:       [Regarding the AOL privacy breach …] On one side you said it’s a good thing that people understand that’s potential fraud out there. On the other side, it won’t happen here. Now why won’t it happen at Google?

Eric:     Hang on. Since we’re all on tape, I retract my previous statement because it was obviously confusing and I apologize. “[Privacy breach is] a bad thing. It’s a bad thing.” How am I doing? “It’s a bad thing.”

What  I’ll never forget is his tone when he said that…

This is the latest in a series of controversies regarding Google Local Business Results. If the Google Local Business Results were sent to many people, this could likely be as serious as the AOL data breach.

This all raises alot of fascinating questions with immense magnitude regarding Google’s trust.

1) Why are November, 2009 results being mailed on January 6th, 2010 in the first place? Seems kinda late.

2) Why did I randomly receive Boscos Local Business Listing view report? Why are others apparently receiving random Local Business Center reports that aren’t theirs?

3) What privacy issues does this incident raise?

4) Will Google discontinue the Local Business Results box altogether due to the issues with quality of this data?

5) Has Eric Schmidt broken his commitment which he made on August 6th, 2006 during the above mentioned  press conference when he said “Well, our number one priority is the trust that our users have and that would be a violation of trust, so the answer is, it won’t happen.”?

6) What does the apparent lack of controls that may have caused this incident imply about the integrity of the Adwords platform and Google’s relationship with businesses?

7) Did any companies receive a competitor’s apparent local business center results? If so what are the implications?

8.) What effect, if any, will this have on consumer adoption of the new Google phone Nexus One?

9) This event appears to imply a violation of Google’s code of conduct section I, part C (Privacy and Freedom of Expression). What actions might Google’s board of directors take with management team for allowing this to occur?

If you received one of these emails with apparent data, please leave a comment below with the details. As I learn more, I will update this post…I look forward to hearing people’s reactions to this incident.

Update #1 – Mike Blumenthal has a post on this.

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1. They Communicate Unique Value Propositions & Unique Campaign Propositions
2. They Make Persuasive & Relevant Offers
3. They Reinforce The Offer Sitewide
4. They Maintain Scent
5. They Make A Strong First Impression
6. They Appeal To Multiple Personas/Segments
7. They Don’t do Slice & Dice Optimization
8. Leverage Social Commerce: Use Voice of Customer
9. They Use It For Navigation
10. They Use It For Promotions
11. They Use It For Credibility
12. They Use It For Feedback & Research
13. They Use Persuasion Principles Like Scarcity
14. They Make Forms Engaging
15. They Provide Point of Action Assurances
16. They Keep You In The Process
17. They Consider Email Preview
18. They Budget For Experience
19. They Utilize a System for Prioritization
20. They Make Data Driven Decisions
21. They Know How To Execute Rapidly

Postscript: The session was well attended! In fact there wasn’t an open seat in the room, people were feverishly taking notes of Bryan’s material during his thought provoking conversion talk.

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The relationship probably works so well because it is really simple and low maintenance, I need to take the coupon to my local Einstein Bros Bagels location prior to 11AM each Friday to experience a freshly made bagel.  But rather than a one time only usage, the coupon remains with me after experiencing the bagel. It sits on my counter. Quietly. Yet I see it several times a week. And I admit to thinking about it more often than that.

So why do I like this reusuable coupon so passionately?

• It Allows Me To Experience The Actual Current Attributes of The Brand – This is critical! It’s a unique piece of marketing in that regard alone as experiencing the attributes of the brand is what it’s all about!
• It Brings Unique Warmth That Builds A Relationship – The reusable coupon’s giving nature allows one to fell warm and fuzzy about the experience.
• It Gives Me Something To Look Forward To Each Week – This is pretty obvious. Heck this blog post is being written on a Tuesday!
• It Is Habit Forming – Getting in the habit of going to Einstein Bros Bagels each Friday would be unimagiable in any other way.
• It Encourages Risk Taking / Trying New Things – I likely would not have tried the Honey Whole Wheat Bagel had I not be incentives for a free trial of it’s attributes.
• It Serves as a Model to Mobile Marketing Pioneers – Image time windows where merchants provide deals everywhere and scan your phone in some way to create mesaurability of Word of Mouth and other types of unique marketing offers. The possibilities and combinations are endless. Get beyond the DNA of purely outbound marketing and into inbound and word of mouth possibilities.

All of the above are positive attributes that I am quite fond of and appreciate greatly in engaging marketing that builds affinity for experiencing a brand’s attributes. I love this kind of marketing!

So the coupon expires on 11/27, will my love affair with the coupon will certainly come to an end, but will I keep it a drawer like an aging love letter? Don’t know yet. What I do know is we should reward innovative and effective marketing of this nature as it’s a great pleasure to interact with when compared to non-relevant outbound marketing messages that are still too often the norm.

It would be interesting to see the vibe of this coupon applied to their website design, as according to Compete.com the top 5 search entry terms to the site are currently branded search terms and account for ~60% of the site traffic currently and the word Bagel is not in the title tag of the homepage.  Hopefully the online experience will one day rival the vibe that was created by the reusable coupon that sparked my secret love affair…

Companies should have that goal to create a passionate love affair with their customers. Applications for love affairs with me are currently being accepted…

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Michael clearly lays out the valuation issues with a situation like this.  My issue is that startups need to discover and map their potential data and revenue models before launching much more than they currently do so that it is incorporated into the user value proposition so that users don’t get rubbed the wrong way when large, seemingly random terms of service and/or privacy changes take place (and I’m not picking on Twitter, I’m pointing out an issue to the startup community at large). I’m not saying they should necessarily implement them on day one – Michael’s post points out why based on the way the world  currently does business cases.

If greater thinking through of revenue and data models is to occur, it can only happen if sites like TechCrunch and folks in venture capital demand that as the price of entering the game. I’m not going to name names, but there is evidence that some types of investors work off of the 1999 model, this guy has been successful in a startup before or he was a strong player in one and all too often emotional investments take place rather than ones based on the merits of the idea. There are regional variances to this of course and this is not the case in certain locations. I get exposed to some great ideas and business plans.  I’m currently in touch with a few very well thought out ideas with serious revenue models and they aren’t getting the investment checks written because they are serious non-sexy B2B businesses or they are well thought out B2C plays and they get push back on things like adoption. The behavior Michael described will not change until investors and to a lesser extent technology press put people’s feet to the fire on these issues prior to A rounds being granted. Bill Hartzer said it in his comment on Michael’s post:

“Sure, Twitter costs plenty (lots of money) to run. It’s a money pit, actually. And it appears that they don’t have a revenue stream (yet).

When are the VCs going to realize that they need to dump money into startups that are actually profitable?”

I think Bill meant “workable revenue model” instead of profitable as if they are profitable they rarely need growth capital, but his direction aligns with my views – have a well thought out business and data model. I’m not against freemium, but you need to be able to add features that people are willing to pay for and have a clear plan to succeed. To do this you need a management team that is customer focused and has the right balance of business and tech folks – too much of either and you’ve got a real problem.

So what are your views on how this should evolve? The dot com boom was focused too much on valuations, the web 2.0 boom was focused too much on tech and not enough on business models. Are we close to finally getting the balance right in the next few years? The net is still young, it’s not mature, new rules and breakthroughs will come but only if we move past legacy dogma…

Make sure you go back and read the comments on that post, it contains some really interesting ideas for you to ponder, I’m not  going to point out which ones are the best right now though as I have to run to a client meeting.

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To be clear, it’s a thoughtful post and I don’t disagree with anything materially in what was said. So why write about this? I find the entire conversation to be 100% completely unnecessary.

First a story. When I was a teenager, I saw in ad in the back of a magazine, it stated to send $1 and a self addressed stamped envelope (SASE) to receive information on a tried and proven money making business strategy. It sounded good so I sent it in. A few weeks later I got a my envelope in the mail. It contained a small note that contained a message like this:

A proven way to make money:

- Open a post office box

- Place a small ad in the back of a magazine asking for $1 and a SASE to “learn a proven way to make money”

- Put your $1 bills in the bank and send notes like this one

Yes, I was scammed. But being scammed was an important event in making me a more careful and better consumer. I learned. It was necessary for me to grow. Did the magazine know the ad was a scam? Probably. Did that stop them from publishing it? No. Consumers need to judge each situation for themselves based on the data available and make the best decision.

So Dave why is this potential FTC regulation unnecessary (and possibly quite harmful)?

1. The content revolution is not well enough defined to regulate it – It’s changing all of the time, if businesses and individuals still have trouble understanding it’s implications on our society. How can a group of elder statespeople in our government know what is right? Simple answer. They can’t. As traditional media loses relevancy/power content will increasingly be created by the masses. It’s a simple fact. Get used to it, in the long run, it may actually lead to the removal of the abuse of monopoly power.
2. Traditional advertising is not generally marked in the manner the FTC is suggesting – When you watch TV, ADVERTISING is not in giant letters on the commercial during the program is it? No. It’s not on outdoor billboards. It’s not in newspapers, magazines or the majority of web site banner ads. Why? Because it’s obvious to those who look closely. Creating a double standard here is just plain silly and it’s insulting to people’s intelligence.
3. Previous FTC measures have proven to be massive failures – The FTC instituted the Do Not Call List Registry and the CAN-SPAM  Act several years ago. Yet I get numerous unsolicited commercial calls to numbers I’ve registered on the list. I get tons of spam from email lists that I have NEVER signed up for on a daily basis. Regulation without enforcement results in selective usage of the law. This is not good and can be abused on both sides. The FTC has a proven history of failure and should go fix it’s previous messes before creating unnecessary new ones.
4. Social media platforms should do everything possible to prevent fraudulent usages – I see tons of fraudulent Twitter users emerging daily. Twitter should be creating validation of each and every user which would lead to an immediate reduction in questionable activity. Why aren’t they? Because it would put holes and raise questions about Twitter’s “growth story” and that with no revenue model in sight would lead to lower valuations and less money being pumped into the company. Twitter has a responsibility here and I don’t see it doing everything it can to eliminate questionable activity on the platforms. If the social media platforms acted responsibly – unnecessary legislation could be avoided.
5. The traditional advertising industry is apparently using lobby influence dollars to try to maintain it’s declining monopoly power via regulation – Content is taking over the economy as search allows people to find it and social media networks allow it’s distribution.  This is similar to how the printing press once revolutionized content distribution. We are living in something like this again now.  Yes there will be pain. But regulations in the middle of the content revolution will hinder commerce and slow the process of replacing business models that are no longer highly relevant. Do we legislate against fuel efficient vehicles in favor of gas guzzlers? No, of course we don’t – why create unnecessary legislation that harms new forms of efficiency? yes, this really is this unnecessary. 
6. “All Marketers Are Liars” – This famous book by Seth Godin indicates that deceptive advertising has always been a part of society and likely always will be. This is NOT new. Don’t we respect people enough to make their own judgments? I do. Why then act like it’s new? It’s not.

Look at the facts of history, the proposed FTC regulations will solve nothing and do nothing besides place a greater burden on commerce in an already struggling economy. We can prevent this grave mistake. Now let’s go do it.

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“It’s clear that latency really does matter to users,” said Mayer, the VP of Search and User Experience at Google and today’s keynote speaker at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference.

Do ya really think so Marissa? Having unnecessary captchas, massive memory leaks in gmail, outbound gmail that gets improperly classified as spam, adding SMS features to Google Voice with no instructions on how to turn them off in the email – that does matter. You’re absolutely right, Marissa! But my question is what are you doing about it?

This message appears on my screen several times a week, nobody at Google (and I’ve let several people know, can get to the root cause to fix it), financial analysts should be modeling the revenue loss. I’m tired of sorry, I’d like to see a permanent fix:

We’re sorry…

… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

If you’re continually receiving this error, you may be able to resolve the problem by deleting your Google cookie and revisiting Google. For browser-specific instructions, please consult your browser’s online support center.

If your entire network is affected, more information is available in the Google Web Search Help Center.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.

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Seemingly almost out of nowhere, after several years of being virtually invisible to the public, click fraud appeared on the pages of the New York Times and Microsoft took on the role of being the white hat with the filing of a unique lawsuit.

Whether the timing shortly after the launch of Bing is on purpose or not, this is a highly important event.  Time may one day look back at this first of it’s kind event as the most single important action Microsoft has ever taken in the battle with other search engines.

Tim Cranton, Microsoft’s Associate General Counsel, wrote a post about the lawsuit on the Microsoft on the Issues blog, entitled Using Enforcement to Crack Down on ‘Click Fraud’, Cranton stated:

Once we became aware of the click fraud attacks we quickly took action to address any impact on advertisers and to enhance safeguards to further protect our network.  Today’s suit seeks an injunction to help stop this activity and to recover damages.

As I’ve stated on this blog before, the Internet is all about trust. If Microsoft can build trust by taking these actions, that is outstanding. Over time, the question is this, “Will Microsoft will be able to take trust away from other search engines regarding this issue?”

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Highlights:
Google’s data can now predict home sales and home sales numbers with search numbers.

The data can be correlated with stock prices at this time.

B2B search terms are growing. Conversions are bouncing back in Q2 2009!

Research, online and offline, big company c-suite, SMB and government sectors.

Commentary: First a note about the c-suite portion of the survey, I have concerns about an offline study asking senior executives about actions used for decisions being accurate. Or worse assuming the numbers were generated from search itself when it wasn’t. Executives might answer what they think is the best practice, even if they don’t do it to appear competent. I know of Fortune 500 CEO’s who still have their emails printed, so I have doubts about the number actually being this high. I’d love for this data to be 100% correct more than anyone, I really would, but I have concerns.

First findings form the C-Suite:

- 73% of the C-suite is using the Internet for information verification and vendor selection.

- 92% Internet exceeding, 87% at-work contacts for referrals.

- 64% of C-level executives conduct 6 or more searches per day to locate business information.

Video and podcast content usage is growing in importance.

Small and medium size businesses:

77% of business owners use search to find suppliers.

Half are using blogs and social media sites in some form in their business.

Government:

Searches are way up on stimulus, energy, health care and related issues.

Huge impact of search results, with just an Adwords ad:

28% Brand Association

36% Message Recall

Commentary:  I’d live to see an example with a smaller, lesser known B2B example.

With both a top organic and Adwords listing, incremental increases are significant

53% Engagement

43% Message Recall

63% Brand Association

Commentary: Sam Did not provide data on organic listings alone. I’d love to see if this was higher of lower than the Adwords ad alone.

“Mobile Search Growing Rapidly” Start testing…(audience did not react much)

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It was also nice to meet Matt Mullenweg and Jim Turner in person for the first time.  Having all of my great friend from the Chicago SEO friendly meetup group was awesome as well.

It was fun to be part of a late afternoon speaking trio that put myself in between Kevin Palmer and Micah Baldwin. My talk was about the lessons of social media and search engine marketing measurement and how the driver is truly becoming web analytics management consulting to determine the proper course of action in the content strategy revolution. On your domain and blog you own your terms of service, on a social network you do not – this has major implications that need to be considered deciding what is the right path for your content. The talk got some nice reactions both offline and online…

All in all, it was an outstanding weekend and I made some great new friends.  I’m looking forward to Wordcamp Chicago 2010!

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After lunch he gave a highly intense 50 minute speech. He talks fast (as do I) so I think I missed a little bit of the talk in this blog post, but I hope that you are still able to glean the vlaue out of it that I did, seeing him live brought his ideas to a new level for me. He’s done a fantastic job of simplifying the complex, we shoudl all learn from his example.

Without further delay, here is my live blog post of his talk (please forgive brevity and language errors):

In the past 30 to 60 days have you used or replied to the following media:
Direct mail – 3% replied
Mainstream Media – 22% replied
Print Yellow Pages – 3% replied
Google, etc 100% replied
Tapped peer to peer network to get URL 80%

Why are we still focused on the 2-3% methods rather than the 80% and 100% methods?

Cindy Gordon at Universal Orlando told 7 just people the wizarding world of Harry Potter. Mainstream media and other people followed – when 7 = 350,000,000 million

What are we after? Attention. Cindy Gordon earned that attention via a Midnight conference call with 7 people.

David Meerman Scott – in 2002 he was fired laid off from Thomson for practicing cutting edge marketing. People are afraid of content based marketing. They are still afraid of it. THis fear is harmful in a multitude of ways.

Dentist in Boston. Started a blog. Wrote “Healthy Mouth, Healthy Sex” a free ebook. The ADA hated it. Her business is now doing $1 million dollars a year.

“You must unlearn what you have learned.” –Yoda

Prospects. Tell your story to an interested market.

Every hotel web site is the same. Boring, product focused.

Imagine a hotel website that was customized for each buyer? Businessperson, corporate travel manager, family choosing a vacation spot, wedding planning, event planner, etc

Who are your buyer personas?

What do you want your buyer personas to believe?

You can…
Buy attention…TV attention (talked about how silly CPM banners are would you like to buy space on the back of his laptop?)
Beg for attention…
Bug for attention…
Earn Attention…the best way…in the new rules!!!

Example: Approva
Internal Auditors…. iloveagoodaudit.com
Videos on Youtube “Happy Birthday Sarbanes Oxley”

On the web, you are what you publish…

It’s all about people…and some people aren’t playing nice on social media…

He put 14,000 post it notes on Jaguar, 3M liked it and contacted him. He asked for $2,000 for more notes. They said no. They got slammed and destroyed a positive thing.

If your mother would say it wrong, it probably is.

Encourage sharing…

Why do people use this Gobbledygook? 350 most overused phrases. Then counted the number of times this was used. The Gobbledygook Manifest.

Visual Gobbledygook – don’t do it.

Parents against reprehensible metal music…was a bait and switch – Toyota Matrix 2009

Causes this  “You are trapped on this website, you are screwed” syndrome

The back button is the 3rd most used web feature. (Sad isn’t it?)

You must lose control of your marketing!!!

The Grateful Dead allows bootlegging of their concerts and  music. Millions of people download it and adore the music. Lose control of your marketing… (I’d like to point out that this is not a new concept great to see an old school example)

Example: Mailer Mailer – made a whitepaper totally free – created a 20x increase in downloads – all for abandoning the email address! A good trade you should all make.

Put down roots – be where your audience is.

Kadient – The new rules of sales enablement – landscape rather than portrait, color rather than black and white.

Point the world to your virtual doorstep! Queensland, Australia had a contest, 34,000 entries and one guy creating content once he won.

FEAR – You have to unlearn what you learned

We want 330,000 people to be in Public Affairs.  In a world where people block social media, the Air Force promotes and social media.

I can’t do this…I’ve heard every excuse in the world…if a B2B German Toilet company can do it, you can.

STOP MAKING EXCUSES!!!

David like my recent post about VP of Communications at Universities enough to tweet it, check it out!

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In the “cage match” post, there is one phrase that got me out of my silence because the ignorance was too much for me to hold my tongue… Eric Clemons said:

“Mr. Sullivan argues that in all his years thinking through and working through issues in internet advertising he has never heard any company or any individual complain about paid search. In contrast, I have been hearing this complaint from senior vice presidents in travel companies for years, and this year the chorus has been joined by retailers and manufacturers”

Dear Mr. Clemons,

Perhaps it’s time for you to get some new senior vice president’s to talk to? It’s time for a new breed of leaders who know how to truly lead and not whine about taking the easy way out using purely 100% paid search.  Someone at that level should understand content strategy, social media strategy, seo strategy (do you even know what SEO is Professor Clemons?) and paid search and should be managing them strategically in conjunction with each other. All too often, I see executives whose qualifications to be a senior leader in an Internet company or large ecommerce division amount to little more than they worked at an Internet company since 1999, they worked and some ‘elite‘ business strategy consulting company(where they never executed or implemented anything), they’ve been passively recruited from place to place and it hides that they can’t move the needle or that they were a brand marketing person a long, long time ago and still think in terms of campaign awards…sigh.

To manage customer acquisition via the Internet effectively and create an awesome customer experience using all of the tools in the tool box isn’t tough if you have the right leaders in place who understand that strategy is about incremental daily improvement not hiring a 20th century management consulting firm. As a top 10 MBA holder myself I can honestly say that the education in almost all programs is lacking relevancy to today’s Internet world. I discussed this with the heads of the a major marketing professor conference here in Chicago recently – I was pleased by their receptiveness to my outreach. It’s too bad Mr. Clemons wasn’t there to share the conversation with us. My experiences at BlackRock managing data structures, living offline social media, creating elite customer service via the web and driving standards that created competitive advantages that have lasted a decade. Due to BlackRock’s B2B nature, much is still not understood publicly, but the Internet world would be wise to learn from BlackRock’s lessons.

The combination of my experience BlackRock, my top 10 MBA (least important of these) and the wonderful experiences I’ve had immersing myself in search engine marketing when Danny Sullivan was kind enough to let me hold a microphone in lieu of registration fee at my first SES conference in December, 2005 had led to the amazing learning that followed over the last several years. My life has never been the same since! I now have an amazing and wonderful small circle of the world’s greatest search marketing minds whom I can pick up the phone and discuss how search marketing is creating the largest change in business since the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago! I’ll admit it’s challenging and frustrating some days to be part of a tiny group that understands the massive power of how pull marketing via search is changing organizational structures and profitability at their very foundation.

The paradox is most of the leaders of companies don’t have the right combination of old and new skills to lead this change and the number of people in the world truly qualified to lead the largest change management project in the history of the world. I can truly count on two hands at most at present – yet senior management and the world’s understanding of search marketing is so limited at this juncture that those people aren’t even coveted…yet. How can one hire the best leader or search marketing if they are still basically clueless about what they are buying? That’s right, they can’t effectively!

Retained marketing executive search consultants are still picking most CMO candidates based on 1989 standards and position specs and/or last job title held nonsense – oddly a side effect of the effect of search being used too heavily in candidate sourcing and job search. Worse, they are letting the roles be defined by the CEO, CFO and boards of directors who don’t know the first thing about how search engine optimization, content strategy and marketing are changing the world. This causes people with outdated skills to frequently be placed in leadership roles again and again with less than optimal financial results and creating an unpleasant working environment (and a high turnover rate) for the wonderful and hard working search marketers and social media folks that they manage.

It doesn’t have to be this way Professor Clemons. It’s about time you had some new senior vice presidents to talk to that understood search, understand the theory of exactly how and why they need to transform their new organizations and will test and learn their way to success – the kind of success that you can write case studies about and that I can one day come visit your class and share about. But for now, I’d challenge you to name the SVP’s that are complaining instead of performing…I’d love to consult for them and make them look good…or be their replacement if they’d like to continue to complain and not build a balanced (and profitable) traffic acquisition strategy.

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They say that when one door closes another one opens and apparently Barney Harford is the gentleman that was actually meant to darken the doorway. He’s had extensive experiences in Asia and elsewhere for Expedia and more recently as an advisor to Kayak.com and eLong. As mentioned in the article linked to above, I strongly believe that geographical diversity is important to high performing corporate cultures and I praise the Board of Directors for this choice. It is my hope that this will effect Chicago’s landscape in a positive way far beyond Orbitz. Time will tell.

I know what it’s like to arrive in a strange new place from my experiences living in New York and Cleveland. I’ve always appreciated people orienting me to the cities I’ve moved to so I thought I’d return the favor before giving you a few thoughts on Orbitz. Here we go:

- Odd objects in parking spots that have been shoveled clear of snow: You managed to move to Chicago in the dead of Winter. It’s not exactly the most friendly welcome the city can give you. In fact when I moved back here in 1999 – we received 22 inches of snow on during the day I was supposed to move in – it took me a week to recover. Anyway, if you see a chair on a side street claiming a spot, my advice is to pass it by and go elsewhere as you never know what that person that put the object there might do. Of course this practice is chronicled in detail on a blog from Montreal.

- Orginal’s Hair Designers – Good haircut for $16 with the bonus of then giving you a touch up between hair cuts at no charge. You want John to cut your hair there. He arrives at 6AM sharp Monday through Saturday going there between 6-7AM is the best time to go. No appointment is needed. They are located at 134 North Wells.

- Shoe Repair – Beehive Shoeworks gives great on the stand shines and they do an excellent job with any shoe repair you’ll need. Ask for Sam.

- Lower Wacker Drive – A cab can usually make it to the Lakefront or Michigan Avenue faster this way, but they’ll never do it unless you ask as Chicago pays cabs partially based on waiting time. Yes, this is the same Lower Wacker Drive as in the movie the Blues Brothers!

- Free Valet Parking at Most Restuarants in Greektown – Take advantage of this, my favorite place is The Parthenon on Halstead.

- Pizza – As you likely know Chicago is home of the deep dish pizza. My favorite is Giordano’s, the one where the primary office of the chain at 310 West Randolph tastes the best in my opinion and I usually order it withcanadian bacon and mushrooms. If you want something a bit lighter near your office (my answer would be different in the suburbs) , I recommend Tomato Head Pizza at 945 West Randolph. They make their pizzas with a somewhat rare Faulds pizza oven.  You may have experienced this special oven at Delfino’s Chicago Style Pizzeria in Seattle previously. I researched this as I’ve often considered moving to Seattle.

- Italian Beef – This is a rare sandwich that you’ll have to work hard to find anywhere outside of the Chicago area. It’s roast beef immersed in flavorful gravy that is properly presented on freshly baked French bread. If consumed at the right places, this can be heavenly. In the loop you will find this at a place called Luke’s (walking distance from the currentOrbitz office location) or Portillo’s. Like the pizza above, many will passionately advocate their favorite place over another. It’s kind of like a sport.

- Origin of the term Windy City – This is highly disputed. But I mention it because you can judge how much a person studies history by asking if they have any opinion on this subject. Statistically speaking, there are many places in the Midwest that are technically windier, so I personally do not favor this explanation. The most likely in my opinion is the explanation of the politicians being full of hot air. There are others that abound on the net.

- If Your Furniture is Damaged by Movers – Weber Furniture has been in business since 1950 repairing, refinishing and reupholstering fine office and antique furniture. I recently did some work on the site and it already ranks #1 for the term – Chicago furniture restoration. It still needs a bit more authority from off site factors but the link above should likely fix that. Thanks for the opportunity but I hope your furniture travels safely.

OK, now that you are oriented a bit, let’s talk business a little bit.

In terms of my thoughts and philosophy on Internet companies:

- The world is enduring rapid business transformation which historians will may one day judge revival the Industrial Revolution. Corporations need to constantly test and learn to create and maximize the optimal business model mix. Those who create rapid testing and learning cultures will outperform.

- Search engines are changing the foundation of branding from brand name to one of a brand’s attributes to be found by the searcher and user experiences when interacting with the brand. This is a fundamental shift from push to pull where the consumer controls the conversation and it’s about meeting those expressed needs.

- Quotes of business leaders I highly admire are on this page, they are my guide posts.

- I believe that corporations need to restore balance to focus on both revenue and expenses equally, recent focus has been on expense reduction and risk aversion is preventing focus on new revenue potential. This blog post sums up my thoughts.

Thoughts on Internet travel vertical in general:

- Too highly dependent on paid search, need to lower traffic acquisition costs (TAC).

- Desperate need to create long term relationships with customers outside of purchase transaction.

- Customer data models need to evolve to create niche experiences to create best in space customer experience to meet the evolution in branding mentioned above and to increase CPM advertising rates.

- Considerable business travel is booked manually via phone from legacy providers. This presents a potential opportunity.

In terms of Orbitz from a consumers point of view:

- Orbitz does yet not consistently win the price competition in the hotel + airfare category – for my three day trip to SJC to speak at UGCX at the same hotel – Priceline was $411, Expedia was $428 this morning while the Orbitz quote was $476.

- The current Orbitz Terms of Service appear to be in need of revision in regards to link policy in terms of winning the search engine optimization battle.

- I use a pop-up blocker, but I’m sure you’d win alot of points with people if you removed those completely.

There is other advice I have but will keep that private at this time. So again, welcome to Chicago! Please let me know if there is anything I can help you with as you settle in. Good luck with your role at Orbitz!

OK folks, sorry this post was a bit long.  What suggestions do you have for Barney to improve the customer experience, customer acquisition and conversion rates at Orbitz while still reducing costs and improving profitability? I’d love to see your comments on this.

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Speakers:
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Greg Jarboe, President & Co-founder, SEO-PR
Steve Espinosa, Director of Product Development & Management, eLocal Listing, LLC
Gregory Markel, Founder/President, Infuse Creative, LLC
Barbara C. Coll, CEO, WebMama.com Inc.

I didn’t get to attend this session due to other conference activities.

However, I did learn that Greg Jarboe is working on a book about Youtube (I’d love to contribute or read an early version if you are reading this btw).  I look forward to seeing it.

I’d encourage people to check out my highly ranked post “How to do Youtube Video View (Search) Optimization” in addition to other posts about this session.

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Matt Wilburn, Senior Director, CPG, Matt WIlburn and Beth Uyenco went over example of how CPG companies are starting to use search. I missed Eli’s position of the session and Brian Lipman discussed the Hunt’s response to the tomato scare earilier this year and talked about the importance of cycle time. Randy Peterson’s talk was very similar to the 2007 Consumer Package Goods session.

Matt Wilburn, Yahoo!

Search Marketing for CPG Brands – Search provides scale and relevance for CPG brands percomScore study.

Is there brand equity in search results? Yes! Brand awareness rises 160% for items in search results

2009 need – greater accountability! 98% said a lack of standardization in reporting of internet statistics

Metrics that Matter – If you can’t tie odd knots, tie a lot of them…

Accountability will drive adoption of search…digital shows better ROI than broadcast

Beth Uyenco, Microsoft:

How search fits into the digital lifestyle of CPG’s primary shoppers

Moms are experienced and tenacious “Searchers”

86% feel that search engines are the best way to find information – compare prices, find retail locations, gather production information, product reviews, find sales, coupons and incentives

Women prowl for ‘good deals’ – how can we get them smart before the cart?

While the Internet has changed the shopping game, but its just trickling down to CPG…

Price leveler, ratings/reviews, trusted sources

Toilet paper surprisingly is researched at a high level

Randy Peterson, P & G

Presented 10 myths

70% of CPG searchers believe you are not a leading brand if you are not on page one of the search engine results page for the product type

Position matters and evidence is increasing that this increases brand recall

Reduce prices through improved quality scores.

Competitor isn’t there, why do I need to be?

Lipman
Rapid Response SEM Process: Identify the issue, Understand the issue, Respond

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Speakers:
Craig Macdonald, VP of Marketing & Product Development, Covario Inc.
Ellen Watson, Relationship Marketing Manager for Child Care Brands, Kimberly-Clark Corp.

This is a live session blog from Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2008, please excuse any typos and/or fragments. Thank you!

Ellen Watson – Kimberly Clark:

Paid search strategy requires balance:
Budget, Volume and Traffic Quality

2007 Strategy at Kimberly Clark was like this:
Fixed Budget
Max CPC set
Campaigns optimized for conversions

Sacrificed:
Impression share
Average position
Branded terms vulnerable

2008 Strategy now looks like this:
Maximize impressions share
Compete aggressively for top terms
Maintained good conversion

Required:
Increased budget
Regular monitoring

Agency partner priorities:
Forecast annual budget
Managed bids daily
Changed reporting to include new metrics
Adjusted match type, ad copy, landing pages to maintain performace

Global Search Lessons Learned:
US engines sufficient for North American campaigns
Server location is a big issue for international and localized sites – ip address of the site should be in the same country as the address of the server, but local may require a large investment in IT infrastructure

Craig McDonald, Covario:

The New (economic) Reality:
PPC growth at 5-10% level (down from 35%+ growth)
Need to get more from SEO
NO headcount increases in foreseeable future
Squeeze 15% cost improvements out of programs
3 month payback periods, max

The Role of Technology
Paid Search – campaign management automation
Natural Search – automation of audits and tracking and performance
Comprehensive Search Management – SEO/ content convergence, Automation PPC program impact on natural search results

There was then a lively question and answer session on spending in organizations.

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Speakers:
Dr. Larry Cornett, VP, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search
Mike Grehan, Global KDM Officer, Acronym Media
Chris Blakely, Director, Client Services, comScore, Inc.
Todd Schwartz, Group Product Manager, Live Search, Microsoft Corporation
Jack Menzel, Senior Product Manager, Google

This is a live session blog from Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2008, please excuse any typos and/or fragments. Thank you!

Mike Grehan:

You need to think differently.

Vertical creep is pushing organic results down the page.

Eye Tracking shows that people are not scrolling the way that they used to.

This creates a problem, you need to be at the top of the listings.

Local business center creates opportunities for local businesses.

New paid search results like paid results.

Chris Blakely – comScore:

Leverage comScore search data shows traction of universal search efforts.

Feature sets of search expanding. 48% of searchers are seeing different types of blended search results from their queries.

Lower clicks on sponsored links with the exception of ecommerce and travel.

Organic search strategies need to evolve from that standpoint.

Jack Menzel – Google Product Manager Universal Search:

Universal search has the following elements:
Comprehensiveness – Images, Maps, News, Products, Video, Books and more
Relevance – Run every query against every index, decide what to show only after we collect all of the data
Presentation – Summarize the content in the most efficient way possible.

Recently, there have been made into search results pages.

Better Ranking – Universal search is just a subset of ranking.

What’s next?
Keep improving relevance
Help users explore
Improved results summary

What does this mean for web masters?
- Publish the best and high quality content that you have.
- Take advantage of prominent new verticals

Todd Schwartz – Group Product Manager – Microsoft Live Search:

Evolution of Search:
Search – Directories, Keyword Trends, Rich Semantics, User Experience
Market – Immature, Closed Trends, Open Item????
Consumer – Search, Keyword Trends, Actions

Deliver, Simplify, Implement

Showed Samsung lcd tv model – showed elements of a shopping review, rating and engine – an interesting change

Showed weather and Barack Obama examples

More engagement
Better reach
Higher ROI
Update Product and Business Info
webmaster.live.com

Larry Cornett – Yahoo! Search:

Transformed from a static experience to a complete information in one search

Showed several Blended examples using Yahoo! Search:
Kyle Orton – Chicago Bears fantasy sports
Movies – including times and local listings
Beyonce – music videos on the search page
Sushi in San Jose
Barack Obama
Puppy

Richer, more relevant links…

Searchmonkey – publishers collaborate, meaning behind the link, richer experience, relevant and personal, etc.

Yelp is a Searchmonkey partner. (How does this affect Yahoo! Local?)

The infobar – Steve Jobs example

Share structured data: Publishers > Searchmonkey > Tell your users

Why is blended search important?
Unmatched opportunities and control for publishers
Key step for building a smarter search engine with structured data
gallery.search.yahoo.com

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IFBYPHONE SECURES $4.6 MILLION IN NEW ROUND OF FUNDING
Infusion of Venture Capital Insures Continued Expansion Despite Economic Downturn

CHICAGO–Nov. 18, 2008—In the middle of an economic slowdown and a drought in venture capital funding, Ifbyphone said today it has secured $4.6 million in a second round of institutional funding from five venture capital firms.
Ifbyphone is a hosted telephone application platform company that provides small and medium-sized businesses with telephony features that enable them to create phone solutions that enhance customer conversations, increase sales and lower costs.
The funding round was jointly led by Apex Venture Partners and Origin Ventures, who also invested in Ifbyphone’s first round of institutional funding. They were joined by Spring Mill Venture Partners, i2A and Blue Crest Capital Finance, L.P.
“We view this new round of funding as a strong endorsement of our growth and expansion strategy,” said Ifbyphone founder and CEO Irv Shapiro. “It positions us extremely well to continue our expansion during these complex economic times.”

“We are very excited to be a part of the Ifbyphone investor group,” said Ken Green, co-founder and managing partner at Spring Mill Venture Partners. “We believe that Ifbyphone represents the next great wave of Internet-enabled business services, allowing small and medium-sized businesses access to capabilities previously only available to their larger competitors. This kind of service offers an opportunity to level the competitive playing field.”

To learn more about Ifbyphone’s affordable suite of online telephony applications, such as voice broadcasting, Smart Toll Free Numbers, Google Analytics Call Integration and interactive voice response (IVR), visit  http://www.ifbyphone.com.

# # #
About Ifbyphone
Ifbyphone is a hosted telephone application platform company that provides small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with tools to enhance customer conversations, drive sales, and lower costs. Leveraging Ifbyphone’s extreme usability, developers and marketers can quickly create solutions ranging from simple click-to-call links to sophisticated call-routing and interactive-marketing systems. Ifbyphone’s solutions are available directly to SMBs and through a network of resellers. For more information, click to speak to a sales professional or visit the Ifbyphone Web site.

About Origin Ventures
Origin Ventures is a venture capital firm investing in early-stage companies. The firm invests capital and leverages its entrepreneurial, marketing and management expertise to help facilitate the growth of early-stage companies. The principals of Origin Ventures have been involved in successful entrepreneurial activities since the mid 1980s.

About Apex Venture Partners
Apex Venture Partners is a national venture capital firm based in Chicago. With more than 20 years’ experience financing early stage IT businesses, Apex has invested in more than 140 companies since inception. The partners at Apex look for companies that have unique products or services that address large potential markets in which customer needs are not being addressed.

About Spring Mill Venture Partners
Spring Mill Venture Partners is an early stage venture capital firm focused on investing in strong management teams in high-growth information technology and life sciences companies located in the Midwest region. We take an active role by providing the strategic and tactical assistance that early stage companies need to grow and prosper. More information is available at www.springmillvp.com.

About i2A
The Illinois Innovation Accelerator Fund (i²A) is an innovative $10 million early-stage investment fund which invests in companies primarily in technology-enabled products and services, new media and education products and services, and consumer and retail products.  The fund’s goal is to provide the first external professional capital raised by companies and nurture them through their early stages of growth. Visit www.i2afund.com for more information.

About BlueCrest Capital Finance, L.P.
BlueCrest Capital Finance, L.P., a U.S.-based commercial finance company, provides debt-financing solutions to development-stage companies in a broad range of industry sectors including IT, Communications, Hardware, Software, Semi-Conductor, Electronics, Energy, Medical Device and Life Science. The team, which has been together continuously since 1998, pursues debt transactions in the $1 million-$25 million range and has consummated approximately 900 transactions with total commitments in excess of $1.9 billion.

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The University of Chicago Booth School of business, formerly Chicago GSB

The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, formerly The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business sent this note earlier this month.

I am very pleased to announce a remarkable gift of $300 million to the University of Chicago for the benefit of the Graduate School of Business by University Trustee and alumnus David G. Booth, MBA ’71, his wife Suzanne Booth, and their children, Erin and Chandler Booth. This is the largest donation in the University’s history and the largest gift ever in support of any business school. In recognition of the Booth family’s extraordinary generosity, the Board of Trustees has voted unanimously to name the school the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

I don’t have any comment on this at this time other than Ted Snyder would be wise to take action on the issues in this blog post about business school rankings in determining how to use these funds and needs a multi-million dollar communication plan for the world’s experienced recruiting community so that this brand does not cause alumni great harm.

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Forget about monetization, can Facebook survive without any useful customer service improvements? While 98% of the service works great on autopilot, there is absolutely zero customer service for the things where you do need help. I don’t mean bad customer service, I mean there is absolutely no customer service for certain issues.

Case #1 – Last month, I created a group called Interactive, Search Marketing and Social Media Change Managment in my haste to leave for a conference, you can see that I mispelled Management in the group name. This field is not editable by the group owner and after 7 weeks, I have had zero professional response from a real human at Facebook to resolve the issue.

Case #2 – Lack of ability to add Networks of former employers properly. As more people are using Facebook as a sourcing tool, the inability to update this for historical employers, in my case BlackRock, is not just an inconvenience, it could be costing me opportunities and monetization due to the lack of focus on data integrity of my profile to the level I’d like. On this matter I reached out to an executive of Facebook directly – they said they were sending it to customer service as “they should be able to rectify your issues”. Ten more days have passed without correction of my two data problems. I’m putting a deadline of October 30th on this for Facebook to fix this as this is a more than reasonable amount of time to do so.

Lastly, a necessary enhancement. How about a button on people’s profiles that says, take me to all the messages I have exchanged with this person? Thank you.

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Hurricane Ike’s larger than category 2 impact suggests need to modify Saffir-Simpson Scale hurricane measurement and communication metrics. It is heartbreaking to see and hear the stories of people who wouldn’t evacuate before the areas on the Texas coast because Hurricane Ike was “only a category 2 hurricane”. The reports and pictures from airborne helicopters indicate massive hurricane property damage and, unfortunately, loss of life from Hurricane Ike. I dedicate this post to these victims.

This begs the question, could this loss of life been reduced with better communication of risk to the people in the areas of projected impact, causing them to evacuate?

Places like Galveston, Bolivar, Crystal Beach, Gilchrest, High Island, etc. had lower evacuation rates than during Hurricane Rita. This could have been much, much worse if it hit a more densely populated area. But the loss of any life is undesirable (and potentially is preventable).

A friend of mine who lives on the Gulf Coast has repeatedly suggested to me that there is a need to have “less media hype” and “more factual metrics” when hurricanes approach. As you know I think about metrics a lot in terms of the Internet and business processes and I started thinking about this issue and the implications of it.

The last National Hurricane Center report before Hurricane Ike made landfall in Texas contains the following two paragraphs:

DATA FROM NOAA DOPPLER WEATHER RADARS AND RECONNAISSANCE AIRCRAFT
INDICATE MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS ARE NEAR 110 MPH…175 KM/HR…
WITH HIGHER GUSTS. IKE IS A STRONG CATEGORY TWO HURRICANE ON THE
SAFFIR-SIMPSON SCALE AND COULD REACH THE TEXAS COAST AS A CATEGORY
THREE…MAJOR HURRICANE…JUST BEFORE LANDFALL. STRONGER WINDS…
AS MUCH AS 30 MPH HIGHER THAN AT THE SURFACE…COULD OCCUR ON HIGH
RISE BUILDINGS.

IKE REMAINS A VERY LARGE HURRICANE AND HURRICANE FORCE WINDS EXTEND
OUTWARD UP TO 120 MILES…195 KM…FROM THE CENTER…AND TROPICAL
STORM FORCE WINDS EXTEND OUTWARD UP TO 275 MILES…445 KM. DURING
THE PAST HOUR…HURRICANE FORCE WIND GUSTS HAVE BEEN REPORTED ON
GALVESTON ISLAND AND REPORTS FROM NOAA AND AIR FORCE RECONNAISSANCE
AIRCRAFT INDICATE SUSTAINED HURRICANE FORCE WINDS ARE JUST OFFSHORE
GALVESTON ISLAND.

I’m not certain how many years ago the National Hurricane Center started reporting Hurricanes in this format with the “hurricane force winds extend outward from the center ### miles” and “tropical force winds extend outward ### miles”, but I find that information useful as there is a significant correlation to size of the hurricane and the impact of the storm surge and geographic area that are affected. This is therefore extremely useful data, but it’s locked up in giant blobs of text that don’t allow it to be communicated effectively.

I’d like to therefore propose and suggest that the National Hurricane Center make the following modification the to Saffir-Simpson scale to the following new format:

Saffir-Simpson Scale number – hurricane force wind miles from center number – tropical storm force wind miles from center number

Hurricane Ike would have therefore been the following at landfall:
2-120-275

It is my opinion that this would be a much more useful as the overall radius of the hurricane force and tropical force wind fields would be communicated effectively and consistently instead of in inconsistent references. One could argue that you should use the circumference to make it more dramatic, but not all tropical cyclones are perfectly symmetric so I prefer usage of the existing communicated metric radius.

This humble blog post is clearly just the first of many conversations to openly discuss hurricane scale and metrics and creating this needed reform. The reform itself is more important than the exact final form of this reform prior to the start of the 2009 hurricane scale and metrics season. I look forward to seeing comments and other blog posts.

I look forward to someday having a clearer metric that can save more lives. Thank you for your participation in making this a reality!

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However, high rankings on entrepreneurship education alone is not sufficient, the next steps are:
1) To build a transparent, quick and efficient marketplace for entrepreneurs, experienced and passionate management teams and startup capital.

2) Modify the focus toward commercialization of businesses in the model outlined above, ultimately success is measured by the number and quantity of companies that they’ve enabled to scalable, not just lifestyle growth curves. I look forward to participating in this journey.

Here’s the full announcement…

DePaul University’s entrepreneurship program opened the new academic year on a high note Sept. 10 with news that it has again been recognized among the finest in the United States in Entrepreneur magazine/Princeton Review’s annual “Best Schools for Entrepreneurs” ranking.

DePaul moved up three places to second on the list of best rated graduate entrepreneur programs in the national rankings, which are posted on Entrepreneur’s Web site and will appear in the October issue of the magazine. The university placed seventh in the undergraduate entrepreneur education category and was the only Illinois university ranked in that category.

“DePaul offers students exposure to thousands of successful entrepreneurs in a large urban setting with sophisticated financing services available,” the magazine noted. “Entrepreneurial supporters are extremely active in sharing knowledge, resources, contacts and expertise. The program provides very supportive administration and infrastructure through the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center.”

Entrepreneur partnered with the Princeton Review, a leading educational services provider, to solicit surveys from 2,300 undergraduate and graduate program administrators to determine the rankings. The survey covered three areas: academic offerings and requirements; student enrollment and faculty quality; and “outside the classroom,” which examined student organization, mentorship and scholarship opportunities. An advisory board of entrepreneurship educators also provided evaluations of the surveyed programs. Based on the data and review, a total of 50 programs (25 undergraduate and 25 graduate programs) made the list of the best.

“DePaul’s rankings are a tribute to the academic excellence of our program and the quality of our faculty,” said Harold Welsch, Coleman Entrepreneurship Chair at DePaul, who founded the program. “Using their education and start-up experiences, faculty members help students look to the future and identify viable business opportunities. They share their experiences with the students willingly and with great enthusiasm.”

Founded in 1982 at the College of Commerce, DePaul’s entrepreneurship program has grown to encompass 12 undergraduate and graduate courses taught by 16 faculty members. The faculty represents a mix of distinguished scholars of entrepreneurship and successful entrepreneurs.

Courses cover business plan development, entrepreneurial strategy and management, new venture financing, business growth, creativity, innovation and technological change, among other topics. More than 600 students take undergraduate and graduate courses in the program annually. Students have opportunities to participate in a number of mentorship and internship programs, as well as entrepreneur organizations, including Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization, MBA Entrepreneurs Club, Social Entrepreneurship Club and Students for Entrepreneurs.

The program is supported by the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center, which manages education and outreach programs designed to stimulate the start-up and growth of entrepreneurial firms. The center also sponsors Launch DePaul, an annual year-long business plan competition that awards cash prizes and business start-up services for the most promising business plans submitted by students and alumni.

“We believe that today’s students need practical learning opportunities that extend beyond the classroom,” said Raman Chadha, director of the center and a member of the entrepreneurship program faculty. “The Coleman Center creates these opportunities by working with faculty to connect DePaul students with successful entrepreneurs, help them launch ventures and provide real-world experiences. Students are able to immediately apply what they learn in the classroom, acquiring wisdom that only comes with these opportunities. The entrepreneurial spirit at DePaul has never been stronger.”

The magazine’s “Best Schools for Entrepreneurs” top 10 graduate programs were:

1. Babson College
2. DePaul University
3. University of Southern California
4. The University of Arizona
5. University of South Florida
6. University of Illinois, Chicago
7. University of California, Los Angeles 8. Drexel University 9. Chapman University 10. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The top undergraduate entrepreneur programs were:

1. University of Houston
2. Babson College
3. Drexel University
4. University of Dayton
5. University of Arizona
6. Temple University
7. DePaul University
8. University of Oklahoma
9. University of Southern California
10. Chapman University

To view the full rankings, go to: http://www.entrepreneur.com/topcolleges/.

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So this could mean one of a few things are the culprit here…

1. Barack Obama Google Link Bomb – While it doesn’t rank #1, the fact that there is an indent entry after the Barack Obama entry is an indication that Google is seeing that page as important or having a link spike. Recently, Barack Obama had also recently been ranking highly for the term “Linkedin” so it appears that the Obama campaign is trying to utilize search engine optimization techniques on social media sites to compete with John McCain and Sarah Palin.

2. The www.new.facebook.com pages when mixed with old Facebook pages is confusing the Googlebot? - It wouldn’t be out of the question. It could be that it looks like a regular domain and a subdomain.

3. Other parts of Facebook are being opened up to search and these pages are causing issues somehow – several sites reported this. Facebook’s continuing inconsistently about what is public and not public to search is frustrating and is inviting an unnecessary future firestorm. They should really be more clear and communicative, have they forgot the previous lessons of the past?

4. None of the above – What is your theory?

While I’m at it – Dear Facebook – you have not solved the problem I submitted in August to your help desk. After waiting a week you sent me a message which did not even address the issue or indicate that a human has read it. I’d appreciate professional resolution of this request.

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However, her assertion that Jason Calacanis has “retired from blogging” is utter complete nonsense (some would say bullshit) that indicates a lack of research into the issue that distracts from an otherwise excellent article.

As you likely know, Jason Calacanis now has an email newsletter that seems to have a rather well organized “guest blogger” distribution network associated with it. Though Jason will likely never admit it publicly, it appears this was his plan all along. I have to tip my hat to him in as much as it actually increases his overall distribution network. Jason (and his “dogs”) also use Twitter which is called micro-blogging. Wikipedia defines it this way (as of this writing)

“Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.”

So to say Jason has retired from blogging is, in reality at this time, factually inaccurate. But a simple reaching out to other bloggers and sources by the Washington Post could have easily revealed this issue. This is important as others may misinterpret “Jason’s retirement” and it could adversely affect someone’s blogging strategy due to such misinformation.

Sarah – could you please check out the situation a little deeper in the future so that thousands of people aren’t misinformed?

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Please feel free to comment or reply if you have figured this arena out yet. As Facebook continues to grow in usage this is an area I’m seeking out information. Thanks.

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It’s a kinda different show this year in both the crowd and some of the content type.

Already have had great meeting with Jim Hedger, Bryan Eisenberg and many others. Bryan has a new book, Always Be Testing, which just came out. I can’t wait to read it!

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During Cluecon, I was able to drop in and catch Irv Shaprio’s speech, what follows are my live blogging notes of the session:

What does ifbyphone provide? Phone mashups – combine data from the world wide web with phone inputs and conversations.

ifbyphone goals:
- Technology Agnostic API – any language, host, data or location
- Dialog Support – Voice Forms (IVR), DTMF, Text to Speech, Automated Speech Recognition
- Call Management – outbound (termination), inbound (origination), Scheduling API, Broadcast API, Call Completion API
- Support Services – documentation, blog, user support forum, free development accounts and live support people

Lots of documentation is available, telephone scale

Phone mashup example – getting request from a form

Build a Voice Form Setup Form
Built in grammar allow branching of questions (Survo voice form setup)
ifbyphone uses forms instead of selectors for 100% reliability

Check out phonemashup.com for more examples.

Marketing people are using this to put the telephone into the existing treatment processes.

———————

Analysis: ifbyphone is enabling a bridge between web 2.0 and the phone. What I love about this is I think it’s part of a trend, removing silos to create effective solutions for companies and their customers. It’s small space with the potential to have large business impacts in terms of efficiency and customer satisfaction that will be fun to watch develop and watch who steps up to implement the solutions rapidly.

A recent interview of Irv can be found here. I certainly look forward to seeing and learning more about how ifbyphone will be impacting business results shortly.

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After this exercise, I now think there are groups of Digg users with different tendencies. I’ll tentatively entitle these tendencies Super Socialites and Relevants – users who wait for can’t miss content. These users fall into two subcategories – High Submit Success and Infrequent Participation. Check out the wide variations in these new metrics sources, which are agnostic as to the tenure of the Digg  user:

Digg User   # Popular
MrBabyMan 2644
msaleem 1681
zaibatsu 1410
supernova17 1210
MakiMaki 1046
mklopez 913
skored 842
tomboy501 563
IvanB 485
pizzler 459

Digg User   High Submit Success Ratio
kevinrose 97.105%
FirstDigg 80.180%
haxr 63.095%
diggboss 61.184%
sepultura 60.773%
macbot 55.556%
openthink 52.301%
lazycat 50.314%
supernova17 49.187%

Digg User   Diggs per Popular  (lowest voting participation)
normalkid 7.373
tarkullu 15.327
macbot 19.133
lnfiniteLoop 20.118
mklopez 24.648
Vinvin 25.163
kevinrose 27.827
MrEMan 27.909
MrBabyMan 36.769

Digg User  Diggs per Popular (highest voting participation)
ShuTian 1025.769
numberneal 901.385
maxyRO 820.896
zoomtechtv 767.209
emberjohn 713.982
FamilyGuyFan 711.771
lekahe 679.068
vroom101 675.685
iching 563.242
Konstantino 554.347

While every change of the Digg algorithm, these rankings shift anew in unpredictable ways.  These new metrics show some clear differences in the tendencies of some Digg users. It would be be wise to pause and analyze these different types of Digg users and how their mixture of roles create value on Digg.

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If I were the lead product manager at Twitter, I’d be setting up two primary screens:

1) Keywords across the entire network overall which toggle switches for the frequency compared to normal (it would be cool if this was somehow “normalized” so that less frequent words with huge percentage increases actually got noticed – so that everything wasn’t Angelina Jolie, Barack Obama, Brad Pitt, Michael Arrington, Jason Calacanis, Fred Wilson, etc).

2) Graphs and/or alert spikes of user defined keywords – ie ones that are important to oneself personally or to one’s business or clients. I would dare to say this might actually be a business model that could lead to meaningful monetization – I think alot of web services haven’t thought this through nearly enough. Organizing real-time data for useful decision making as a business model worked out OK for Michael Bloomberg if I recall correctly. Some might say Google Trends does this already from a search perspective, but it doesn’t break down the word clusters to core words with “sidekicks” and is not the leading indicator that Twitter is by an uncertain but definite time margin.

Before I’d get to this though, Twitter would have to become stable and Twitter would have to fix the AIM problem I posted about on June 1 and have not gotten a response to yet. Good luck on getting those items in order first, then feel free to give me a shout Biz.

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Let’s start an exploration of these issues in more detail:

- There is an almost total lack of imagination regarding potential emerging revenue streams – When I attend search engine conferences, I hear over and over how “63% of transactions occur offline after an online search (comScore 2006).” Tying together that transaction with it’s higher relevancy holds the key to a revenue stream potentially larger than Google’s Adwords product. Having once spent 6 months of my life trying to raise capital for a search advertising concept, I have to agree with Robert that there is lack of willingness to engage in serious funding conversations of this type – until half a dozen other people do it…that’s messed up!

- In large businesses, there is an obsession with basing business cases on expense savings rather than the potential for new revenue streams- Going back to that example above, financial services institutions could play a large role in this. However due to the lack of risk management processes that caused the housing crisis, they are risk adverse at this moment and risk removing themselves from this once in a lifetime opportunity. I saw 4 companies give presentations on their business cases on mobile retail banking and they all focused on the reduction of call center costs! Think about that a second, moving things from a PC to a phone will reduce call center volumes? Highly questionable at best form cost savings perspective, certainly missing the revenue opportunities completely.

- Everything in the world is converging, yet most companies have silos and are hiring specialists (set up for failure) – When banks are trying to become relevant in mobile and mobile is trying to get into advertising and payments, can you afford to hire people with one dimensional skill sets? The answer is no, not if you want to win.

- With increasingly rapid cycle times in technology, competitive benchmarking is becoming less useful – If none of your competitors has made a tough decision to reorganize a department, shift financial resources to new ways of doing things in marketing or customer service, how can you improve via benchmarking? Stated a different way, if your process is broken and all of your competitor’s processes are broken, you can’t possibly create market leadership by benchmarking. You have to hire the best and most brilliant people who hold little if any limiting beliefs and give them the authority to innovate based on what customers want. Serving those needs in the Peter Drucker fashion is the only way to create true market leadership. This does not mean that competitive analysis is dead. It does mean that the benchmarks you need to pay attention to are the breakthroughs regardless of industry.

- Existing legacy cost centers in large corporations are creating barriers to innovation and efficiency both internally and externally – These cost centers prevent reallocation of budgets to adopting usage of superior and more efficient technology or Internet/mobile advertising due to their all or nothing nature – smooth and frequent shifting to most economical resources is the unfortunate rarity. There is a large number of reasons for this and this topic is worthy of a post of it’s own (please submit suggestions). Cost centers make the silo problem worse and hard to solve.

- Traditional management consulting needs to acknowledge proprietary technology and data models as strategic and gain an implementation focus – If you come in for 6 months and never implement anything and nobody does any of the suggestions, your net present value is actually negative.

- We need to take back control of companies to focus on the customer as priority #1 – 5 year plans with a stack of initiatives in year 4 are interesting, but no longer practical. Notice I say take back control. This is the way the world used to work before endless Powerpoint and overly large bureaucracy like 18 month committee approval cycles. In fact Tom Peters stated on February 3, 1998 on Charlie Rose show as saying “I got tired of the McKinsey bureaucracy”

- C-level management and boards of directors treat social media, search marketing and Internet advertising like an island instead of integrating it into one’s culture and redesigning processes from scratch to support it – This is disruptive to companies using these products and companies that provide these products alike due to the lack of growth and monetization. But guess what? You can’t redesign these processes without bringing in people with a combination of skills that include both traditional management and the new tools. Right now we have people at the extremes. This doesn’t work.

Carolyn Shelby and I will be giving a talk to c-level executives on these an other related subjects this Wednesday at the Gleacher Center in Chicago. You may RSVP here. It is my first in a series of talks I hope to engage the world in over the coming years as we embrace this great challenge together! I need everyone’s help to help shape this vision and create this reality and maybe some famous quotes around the way. It is the furthering of a conversation that started with my appearance discussing these issues on SEO 101 – it starts at the 13:30 mark. Brian Mark said he’d love to see a Search Engine Strategies session on this, we are still working on fulfilling Brian Mark’s dream (24 minute mark).

I’d like to hear others like John Furrier, Fred Wilson, Dick Costolo and Don Dodge to chime in on this issues first chapter…

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Positives of the Nokia N81 8GB:

- The first thing you notice is new radically different navigation on N-series phones. The green and red call and hang up buttons are on the edges of larger buttons – it takes a few phone calls to get used to the new placement!

- I love the one click swipe to lock or unlock on the top of the phone!

- Now 1 click to writing a text message

- Battery life is really long, especially considering the extremely well lit back keys

- WIFI connection works well, I’ve been able to surf and test mobile web sites much more clearly.

Areas to improve on the next version:

- The Nokia N81 8GB is black background with white text – this can be hard to read in bright sunlight situations.

This phone should definitely serve me quite well until US version of 3G comes out.

I’d also like to give Andy Abramson special props for getting me in touch with someone at Tmobile regarding a coverage problem I’ve been having. Much appreciated.

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I’d acknowledge the relevancy of Sara’s nomination of Dan Rosenweig but will dismiss Marc Cuban as he’s more focused on acquiring the Chicago Cubs at present.

I’d like to nominate my own slate of nominees all would bring dramatic culture change and growth rather than an expense cutting mantra and I’d enjoy being a part of their team if asked:

Dick Costolo – Yahoo! arguably has the world’s largest mountain of content. Dick is one of the world’s thought leaders on distributing and monetizing content. He is also well qualified to build a culture of customer responsiveness. He also might have played a lead role in the recent Yahoo!/Google monetization deal.

Rich Skrenta – His knowledge of search is highly regarded. His new startup could also be lifted out to build a new company to replace many parts of the old one.

Brad Garlinghouse – Many would argue he understands and communicated the challenges to execution that Yahoo! faces better than anyone and is willing to make his case about it as he did in the peanut butter memo.

Jim Lanzone – If given the chance, it would be fascinating to see him have the resources to execute some of the lofty things he tried at Ask on a shoestring budget.

Those come to mind first, am I missing anyone? I’m certain I’ve missed some people out west that should be considered.

I’ll Tag:

Fred Wilson

Michael Arrington (via Crunchnotes)

John Battelle

Carl Icahn (please give me a shout if you read this)

UPDATE: Michael correctly points out that he’s already written this post…my bad…

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Skype: Enabling Conversations

If you put all of the time spent talking on Skype put end to end you would end up going back to the start of human species.

Skype is a thriving ecosystem 190+ hardware devices, 10,000 developers, partnership with world class companies.

Skype Developer Program (SDP) Vision:
More delighted users doing more with Skype
A vibrant ecosystem of external innovators
Supporting the long tail or outside innovation on the Skype platform
Growing selection of SDKs
Clear route to market

Where We Are Today:
Public Client API
Skype Extras Framework
Support Resources
Software Certification

Next Step: Software Certification Update
Focusing on a few really important issues
Much easier to understand and follow
Shorter test rounds

Coming Up: Next Version of Skype for Windows
Redesigned user interface
User and partner feedback is important
Extended beta program
API overhaul will follow

Later On: API & Extras Program
- Multi-Layer API
Core Functionality (cross-platform)
UI integration (platform-specific)
- Distribution and Management:
Extras Gallery
Extras Manager
Blacklist and Whitelist
- Backward and forward compatibility

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New Ebay API Calls released today
- most watched items
- deals
- related category items
- top-selling products

This uses eBay’s New Services Framework! This is an API upgrade…

Cross Merchandising
- sell products using the brand
- promote contextually relevant market

Merchandising in Action at Ebay.com – Buyer behavior, interests are now creating personalization based on past purchase behavior

Visit developer.ebay.com for access to tools…

SDK upgrades and SDK/JDK for Java…

Many Large Seller Improvements
- Batch upgrades
- Easier variant listing
- Feedback automation
- ASQ: Redirection to CS email
- Invoices: Invoices to A/P email

Making eBay Better
- Create a first-class buyer experience
- Create a trusted marketplace

Improving Buyer Experience:
- Number of recent policy changes improve buyer experience
- Mandating “critical item information”
- Previously optional items, will be mandatory

Shipping
- All items must specify at least one domestic shipping service
- Suggest passing, weight info to auction, suggest passing tracking info back for my eBay…

Return Policy Needs to be Transparent

Paymentsb – Paypal required in most countries…Paypal only in limited markets

Anonymous Member Email Address:
- Anonymous until sale is complete
- Protect buyers from fraud during eBay purchase

New Links Policy:
- Generally speaking, no link off eBay, whether or not an item is being for sale on that site
- Not a comprehensive list, more specifics to come…

Verification of new sellers is occurring

Trusted Selling With Identity Confirmation

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Will the AIM interface ever be fixed? I found posting from IM to be the easiest and fastest method, it’s been broken (or blocked by AIM?) for months dating back to 2007.

What is the status of the Twitter AIM interface? Anybody?

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Wow! That was tiring, I stepped on the L at 7:30AM and didn’t get home until 1:30AM the next morning! 18 hours of pure madness! Most people noticed the great speeches by Gary Vee from Wine Library TV and Dick Costolo (aka ask the wizard) and others. But what I really appreciated was the other things that the day brought to me. When Frank Gruber and Eric started TECH cocktail, one of the goals was to enable the interaction of people and removing barriers between entrepreneurs, funding sources and removing the boundaries between Chicago and the rest of the world.

When I sit at the first TECH cocktail CONFERENCE Chicago watching great speeches and meeting people from startups from both the east and west coasts while talking, playfully joking about Internet concepts and trading ideas with a local Chicago angel investor in the back of the room for hours on end – it’s at that moment one can clearly perceive a vision is starting to become reality…

For a first conference, it was very well run. There were those little things with a venue that didn’t go quite right with the elevators and not having enough power outlets (but you could say that about any conference) but those were out of their direct control. You could see that Eric and Frank went out of their way to challenge the audience about topics that too often go ignored at startups, like how to set up a corporate entity properly, partnerships and most of these challenges and experiments went well.

So what’s next? I’d like to challenge each and every person in TECH cocktail community to take things to the next level by taking the following actions:

1. Follow Up – People need to work to get to know each other better and learn to leverage each person’s special gifts and talents and realize that 1 + 1 > 2 when we behave in this manner. For me, I know that creating new business partners while listening to help iterate the product, data model or service is my area of strength.

2. Change TECH cocktail from an event to an everyday process on your own – a three month cycle time is not sufficient to build relationships to the next level – it’s everyone’s responsibility to make an hour here and there to sit down with someone, learn about what they are doing, give them a fresh perspective and potential assistance. Don’t wait for the next TECH cocktail event. If this means you need to organize your contact info, make that important time investment.

3. Listen to what Dick Costolo had to say about Internet company NDAs and then change your behavior accordingly (where is the video of that speech anyway?) – Stop sending people NDAs that serve no purpose other than to destroy your access to people who are the most qualified to help you. Ideas are a dime a dozen, assembling the right people with the current knowledge and future potential to create that reality is what matters.

4. Go beyond lurking, participate!!! During the conference, I had at least 10 people talk to me about a blog post of mine in detail, yet they’ve never left a comment on my blog. That’s sad. Leaving a comment leaves you a hyperlink back to your business or blog and allows distribution of one’s business network organically removing them as the bottleneck, please use this viral tool.

5. Learn to hire people for their current knowledge, network, blogs and future potential - not legacy job titles and brands – this takes work, research and being involved in the community, but it is how you’ll find the breakthrough thought leaders and future superstars.

6. Become an ambassador to expanding the understanding of the tools we all use and expand our base of understanding to new people outside our core – If you have a client or operate a service do they understand what Internet advertising, blogs, rss, social media, twitter, etc do? If they do is their organizational culture and structure set up to handle it to serve a customer’s needs? Many people know there is a problem but do not know where to start to fix it – I want to help those people as it will ease the adoption and enhance demand for disruptive new Internet services. I’m planning a series of future posts on this important, yet highly untouched topic. If you have examples of success stories or learnings in this area, I’d love to hear from you.

What else would you add to this list? I look forward to your contributions.

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4 startups including Feedburner

Feedburner all founders had same equity percentage – very important to teamwork dynamic and success

Entrepreneurs worry too much about valuation

Market Opportunity – sizing, does the market need it, team, product, market

Location – No Black Swans

Funding
Cash – Don’t kid yourself

CCs, your misunderstood friends – finding the right one

Options/Equity – options, pool, common stock, dilution

Board Meetings – Should be strategic discussions, not operations, board package, timing and who should attend…

Hiring – Best Available Athlete, Roles and Flat Organizations, Hierarchy begets bureaucracy, replace with tools (eg SFA)…Don’t hire for position…hire people that can do almost anything…a jack of all trades…this reminds me of a lot of what BlackRock was like…I sat at 23 desks in 4 years, I don’t know how many projects I worked on during my time there, I understood every process in the company.

No offices. Open culture and communication are critical…

Experience or Enthusiasm?

Performance – performance reviews and subjectivity

KPIs

Growing the team
- Sales and Marketing – don’t hire until you are ready to sell
- Interview process – long

Product Development and Business Strategy
Serendipity and Adjustment – visit to the eye doctor

Launch Late to Launch Often – data models and programs architected for extensibility can beat point solutions every time (I agree this is critical)

Focus and Speed of Execution are a competitive advantage
- Internationalization
- Early biz dev can hurt you, so can any biz dev

Competitive advantage
- Be first to market, not most sophisticated, not the best product, be itirative and fast

Let people you don’t know help you win (open/api) and provide your products/service with the best opportunity to evolve in the market

Startups who ask people to sign NDAs are stupid! Gave a great (and way too fast!) discussion on this…I wish he’d write a detailed blog post of his rant. ?

Quantum barriers to entry and market share – Get market share, market share is the only thing you should focus on.

Revenue plan: Don’t kid yourself. Revenue ALWAYS ramps slower than you think it will.

Don’t do unnecessary things because you think you’re supposed to

Try to let the business model come to you
- Easy to say, not easy to do
- It’s easier to lower the price than to raise the price?
- Look for always on opportunities

Don’t worry about an exit strategy, worry about everything else

Be a big small company
- Public face of the company
- Have a specific voice, have a culture

Be competitive on your merits

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Without further delay, here’s their tips on designing with users in mind!

Be Yourself – informal, fun

Be Fast – the perceived time when people see speed, they perceive the experience and organization as reliable. Image sprites can help this. Steve Souders is a good source on this topic.

Be Willing to Give Up Control – Give yourself permission to outsource certain tasks.

Be Engaged – have a blog, more importantly, be engaged in other blogs. It’s important to get the early adopters and beta testers to help you. It allows you to iterate.

Be Polite – Try to be considerate…from the users perspective.

Be Surprising – Do things outside the norm. Hackathon. Had new feature coding retreat days. Engage random users.

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Problems

Scaling…printers, vendors, etc

Inventory is hard….

The Internet is Serious Business

Dealing with problems that we are not prepared to deal with… (can be an advantage too)

Advantages

Our Users – Do they care? Do they help?

Technology Agnosticism

Awesome Staff – “Innovation comes from the bottom up” – Golden advice on how to build a culture…

Harper then ended with an interesting comment about Bin Laden….implied that he saw some false flag elements…

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The effectiveness hits home when you see it happen to someone you know who is less famous (but no less remarkable)…

Congrats, Dan! See you soon.

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Please focus on the second item:

At the time that entry was still in Google blog search, it reached to a dead link. Why is Dell censoring and deleting information about these Inspiron line issues? Do they have something to hide?

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It’s my expectation that interest in innovation in the text input, voice input or even new forms of shortcuts will accelerate in the near future as it’s a critical area to create an optimal user experience while increasing frequency of usage and monetization potential.

Are you aware of companies doing interesting work in this arena?

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