Author Archive
Last weekend under the auspices of “Operation Protect Our Children” the Feds pulled the plug on 10 domains, claiming child pornography issues with the sites.
The plug pulling went quantum when one of the domains was found to host over 84,000 websites; an assortment of innocent small businesses and individuals, having nothing to do with the accusations.
For 6 days, the URLs for all these sites pointed to a page saying the domain has been seized and implying that the website you were trying to reach is run by people that have done something very wrong. Read the rest of this entry »
I take self-help stuff these days with a pretty good-sized grain of salt. I’ve been reading self-help and business success stuff since I was in high school, so I’ve seen and heard pretty much anything that one could say in these types of books and, well… there are only so many times I want to re-read the same old tired principles.
But I have to admit that I’ve come up against a few walls in the last 18 months, and I’m ready to move past them. Ready enough to take a second look at a coaching program of some sort.
I found Darren Hardy’s stuff just before the new year and I was impressed. It wasn’t something that I just stumbled across, though, it was something recommended to me – and I saw such a profound change in this person over the course of the 3 months that he was implementing what Darren taught, that I was excited to take a look. Read the rest of this entry »
Last fall I wrote an article for the Theme Zoom blog about how I thought Google was dead, with Facebook moving into the realm of search and Google starting to copy Microsoft, it appeared to me that Google had become “established”, and was quickly falling into the ranks of gigantic corporate America, along with the likes of IBM.
However, the last couple of weeks has sparked the thought that this may not be the case. For those of you who have not heard, it was announced on Jan 20, 2011, that Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt will be resigning as CEO of Google in April and continue as the executive chairman.
The founders of Google, Larry and Sergie never gave up running the company, though Page handed off the CEO hat to Schmidt nearly a decade ago. Together the three of them manned the helm of the Google ship.
Now Larry Page has stepped back up to bring that huge ship back onto course. The goal, as stated by Brad Stone in Bloomberg, is to root out bureaucracy and rediscover the nimble moves of youth.
While 4th quarter profits for Google jumped 29% over last year, stock rose only 13.7% over the past 12 months, lagging behind the S&P’s 500 stock index.
Further, Google has lost serious ground to Facebook, who is now serving more display ads than either Google or Yahoo!, and is being visited by more US internet users. In reference to Google’s weekly meetings that bring project managers together to attempt to harmonize their disparate initiatives, there is talk of Vic Gundotra, who heads up Google’s secret project to combat Facebook.
Gundotra won’t say much about the initiative. Two sources familiar with it, who asked not to be named because the project is not yet public, confirm that it is tentatively called Google +1 and that it is designed to cull data about relationships among users from current services such as Gmail and YouTube.
Google will then let users share material through those connections, while using the information to make other products more social.
Search results may be skewed toward pages that your friends found useful—for instance, a Google Maps query for nearby Italian restaurants could return one that was positively reviewed by someone you know.
Google has realized more quickly than most companies that it needs to make changes to ensure it does not become its own obstacle to success. It will be interesting to watch how the changes progress and if Page’s vision for Google can be realized in the coming months.
Here’s a great post from my friend, Jeffery Smith, over at SEO Design Solutions about search engine algorithm changes and how to NOT panic by creating multiple keywords for which you are ranked .
I agree with Jeffery in that being a one trick pony with your website rankings will eventually lead you to despair and I’ve seen it cripple a business that has become dependent on the sales generated online.
However I think his suggested solution of having multiple keywords for which you are ranked does not take the solution quite far enough. In many ways you are still dependent upon the search engines and that still means all your eggs are in a single basket.
I would offer that you also diversify your traffic platforms by targeting video and audio as well as other platforms. Further, I would advise you to pick a social platform like Facebook or LinkedIn and have a presence there where you engage people on a regular basis.
Other advantages to this tactic, than simply having diversified sources of traffic, are that this moves your focus from your website and blog out into the media where your potential customers are already carrying on conversations about competing products.
This allows you to enter into these conversations and engage with that audience. At this point, you can gently introduce your products and educate your market (but don’t try to “sell” in the social realm, that’s a no-no). Educating, however, is a trust building activity and when you catch the shopper in the early stages of making a decision and alert them to your products and your advantages, they will likely take a longer harder look at your products and your brand.
Just make sure that there are clear paths from all the channels into your sales funnel so that you can convert this traffic from potential leads into solid sales.
You will find that your sales increase dramatically, because this on-line multi-channel approach to marketing will help to instill a sense of trust. People typically have to hear about you several times before they will buy from you and the multi-channel approach will help to do exactly this.
For more information about the different channels of online marketing and how you can most effectively incorporate them into your online marketing plan, check out www.pyramidofpromotion.com
I watched part of “The 11th Hour” a while back, but I never made it even half way through. They were going on and on about issues with the environment and the LAST thing I wanted to hear about were more environmental problems.
This time I waited and about half way they transition from individual problems to a more general point of view and then on to discuss solutions. This part of the movie I found somewhere between quite good and absolutely excellent!
Here are a few quotes I found interesting enough to jot down:
Thom Hartmann:
The problem is not a problem of technology.
The problem is not a problem of too much carbon dioxide.
The problem is not a problem of global warming.
The problem is not a problem of waste.
All of those things are symptoms of the problem.
The problem is the way we are thinking.
The problem is fundamentally a cultural problem.
It’s at the level of our culture that this illness is happening.
William McDonough:
We’re at a point in this world, with 6.4 billion of us, that we have to imagine what it’d be like to redesign design itself and see design as the first signal of human intention…
…and realize that we need new intentions for our future, where materials are seen as things that are highly valuable and need to go in closed cycles, what we call “cradle to cradle” instead of “cradle to grave”.
And that energy needs to come from renewable sources, principally the sun and that water needs to be clean and healthy as it comes in and out of a system…
And that we have to treat each other with justice and fairness.
So the design itself changes from mass prduction of things that are essentially destructive to mass utilization of things that are inherently assets instead of liabilities.
Kenny Ausubel:
With existing technologies that we basically already have on the shelf, or things we know we can develop in a rapid period of time, we could literally reduce the human footprint on planet Earth by 90 percent...
Stephen Schneider:
The direction to go is to decouple from our dependency on oil. efficient transportation, better insulated houses, and the development of renewable alternatives like solar, wind and biomass…
and getting those to become the major part of the market, using efficiency as the transition.
…
Now to me the value is the healing power that comes from understanding:
that it’s not just global warming.
It’s not just fossil fuel dependency.
It’s not just soil errosion.
It’s not just chemical contamination of our land and water.
It’s not just the population problem.And it’s not just all of those.
The deterioration of the environment of our planet is an outward mirror of an inner condition.
Like inside, like outside.
And that’s a part of the Great Work.
Here’s the video if you’d like to watch the whole thing. I strongly encourage that you do. And spread the word. It’s about awareness. We can’t find a solution when we don’t know there is a problem. We can’t become personally responsible when we are ignorant of what that responsibility is.
For me this is all just in time for the “New Year / Decade” and fodder for resolutions… I wish you all a bright and loving Holiday Season and may we all come together in this new decade to re-imagine our world and ourselves as something we treasure!
–Sue
Microsoft unveiled a proof-of-concept prototype “LookingGlass” this week at Advertising Week 2009.
According to Jamey Tisdale and and Marc Mercuri from Microsoft, “LookingGlass,” will let companies listen to, participate in, and analyze social media. It harnesses the Microsoft platform to demonstrate how businesses can quickly and efficiently put social media to use as they create advertising. It’s a prototype of a social media business platform, “What we’re trying to do is to make social media actionable for businesses.”
The first step in making social media data useable is listening to the conversation. LookingGlass, which is built on a number of Microsoft technologies, lets users track customer sentiment across an array of social media sites. For example, the Zune HD marketing team could use LookingGlass to see what users are saying about the product in real time on Twitter, Flickr, or YouTube. Using technology from Microsoft Research, LookingGlass automatically rates each posting as positive or negative, so the Zune HD team could rank comments according to sentiment and see how customers are responding to the product and the campaign to sell it.
Under the Zune example, the team could use LookingGlass to post a quick response on Twitter or Facebook. With all that information, businesses will be able to participate in conversations taking place on the social Web or start new ones. At a glance, they’ll be able to see a spike in activity and to pinpoint how their campaigns are being received. marc enthused that that’s what gives LookingGlass its power “You can not only identify whether your message is on target or not, you can discover memes or customer segments that you’re presently unaware of.”
LookingGlass will be accessed via a web browser to allow for compatibility with both PCs and Macs.
With LookingGlass, businesses can overlay advertising, sales, support, and other key business information onto their Web sites. Built using Microsoft SQL Server 2008, LookingGlass readily integrates with other internal data. Marketers can then look at how internal data compares with, say, user sentiment of a product on Twitter or other social networking sites. They can then take targeted actions and enhance their investment of participating in social media.
This allows businesses to analyze their advertising investments in new ways. The emphasis is that LookingGlass is its own platform, which plays to Microsoft’s strength. “Microsoft is uniquely qualified to be able to connect business information with social media information in a way that makes it actionable,” said Jamey. Partners will be also able to build on top of the Microsoft platform to add their own insights and information for their clients.
“If we at Microsoft can change the discussion from banner ads to how do you provide a rich, relevant experience on the Web, we can start having a better business conversation. With LookingGlass, and some of the other proof-of-concepts we’re working on, we’re taking a big step toward changing that conversation.”
Quoted heavily from Microsoft Advertising Blog
Theme Zoom Krakken is an integrated application suite that radically combines Market Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Keyword DNA Creation, Automated Silo Structured Blueprint and Website Development.
For more information about Krakken or to sign up with The Last Keyword Tool Free Trial visit Theme Zoom.
For those of you who follow my (recently destroyed) blog and twitter you’ll notice that I’ve constantly had my head in analytics recently. I’ve got this company called Theme Zoom whose online marketing was put together by people who think broader than their analytics can reach. That’s a bit like your eyes being bigger than a stomach. With a corporate blog on one domain; Russ and my blog on totally separate domains; three products, each on separate subdomains; and a help desk on yet another domain; all I can say is thank heavens we got rid of the forum, because, yap, you guessed it, it was on yet another subdomain.
Can you imagine trying to follow funnel traffic through that maze? and on top of that, google only gave me 5 shots at defining a funnel with each profile, so that meant if I wanted to do it right, multiple profiles and then somehow connecting that mess back together again… and … WHO moved my asprin???
Yesterday all that changed! No, I didn’t go on a rampage deleting domains (though in retrospect…)
Google’s updates to their Analytics is nothing short of amazing. Now you can have up to 20 funnels defined and not only that, but there are aspects and degrees to the funnels. It’s not just about conversion tracking any more, they make it EASY to see improvements for time spent on important (product eduction) pages, as well as to track FAILURE metrics. Totally cool.
I could make a very long blog post out of explaining all this, but Justin Cutroni already did this on his blog post – so I’ll let you read all about it there.
–Sue
Theme Zoom Krakken is an integrated application suite that radically combines Market Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Keyword DNA Creation, Automated Silo Structured Blueprint and Website Development.
For more information about Krakken or to sign up with The Last Keyword Tool Free Trial visit Theme Zoom.