HOCR – 10.22
Cotuit – 10.23
RTP – 10.24-10.26
Cotuit – 10.27
I’ll be hanging around the Northeastern Univ. boathouse and watching from the bridge by the Cambridge Boat Club. 508 360 6147 if you want to connect. My daughter’s boat is 12th off the line at 10:08 — I probably will be Cape Cod bound by noon.
Pete Blackshaw is smart:
“Take the idea of opening up literally: open the brand door and put out a friendly welcome mat. Make every consumer who knocks on the door feel important and empowered. Co-create a response in the form of an answer, an acknowledgement, a thank you, a solution, or, in some cases, a form of compensation for their willingness to share their ideas and suggestions with you. Do this even if there’s a wee bit of incremental cost in making the effort. Trust me, it’s more efficient than the way we throw paid media at consumers, and it targets efficiently against influencers.”
Content: Quality vs. Clicks « Magnosticism
Rob O’Regan is bemoaning the decline of editorial standards in a click-driven world. I hear him, I commented over there about what’s driving it. But it occurs to me that good content is rising to the top. I’d point at zeFrank as an example of excellence in emerging media or GigaOm. The victims in this world are in traditional media who can’t get beyond the dying page view model.
Excellence lives, but it’s gone freelance.
As any reader of this blog who uses IE will attest, I could care less about Microsoft Internet Explorer as indicated by the sad state of this blog’s WordPress template and the breakage that occurs when the right sidebar gets lumped at the bottom of the page. If I cared I’d fix it.
And I don’t care. In fact I have little interest anymore in cross-browser compatibility. This is a sad commentary on how selfish I have become in my singular view that world needs to be using FireFox. When I run across perfectly intelligent users who were on past versions of IE, and try to demonstrate how to use – to open links in a tab, only to see nothing happen I throw up my hands and question how anyone can operate without tabs.
So, someday soon my Windows Updater is going to suck down IE 7 and I’ll look at it, but I certainly don’t feel compelled to rush to Microsoft’s site to download a copy manually. For a page designer/usability geek, IE needs to be their primary interface for page checking; for me, as a selfish/self-centered user and operator, Firefox will continue and I look forward to the release of 2.0
My buddies in the UK are using eBay as a marketing play. Kind of cool – you get to bid on a cutout display of Brazilian football wizard Ronaldinho, proceeds go to Unicef, and we get a little marketing message in the auction description.
Bid away, but this is for UK delivery only.
I was approached by a headhunter two weeks ago recruiting an “editorial” manager for a venture backed company that had accumulated a large pile of domain names. The business plan was this: take advantage of the eight to ten percent of internet searches that occur not in the search box at Google, Yahoo, Ask or MSN, but directly in the URL bar of the browser and deliver a page with some “lite” editorial and a ton of links purchased by small businesses seeking people associated with the typed in term.
We’ve all hit them, especially when mis-typing a URL. The domain squatters and “seagulls” that collect domains build pages that either offer the domain for sale or cover it with links as part of an affiliate marketing program or existing paid search inclusion such as AdSense. This, to my thinking, is the bottom of the barrel in online marketing, similar to the bandits who played the 900 number game in the 90’s.
Now, according to today’s New York Times, the model has grown up thanks to the likes of Demand Media (founded by the ex-CEO of MySpace) and Oversee.net (the subject of the Times article), and Marchex’s purchase of the Name Development Company. Given the ease of scooping up expired domain names from the registrars, it’s a minor investment to accumulate a portfolio of domains, map them to loosely related editorial, and then plaster the pages with paid links.
This strategy works on a couple levels. First, it works on an SEO basis by creating link farms within a network, juicing the page rank of the network as long as the engines don’t catch on and penalize it. Second, “lite” editorial models are cheap. Splogs are the extreme side of this game, scraping other bloggers’ content and passing it off as their own.
The downside is this plays to the absolute bottom of the foodchain in terms of user intelligence. It assumes that one out of ten users are too ignorant or rushed to be bothered with a Google search and will use the address slot in their browser to type in “www.dogshampoo.com” or “www.beachvacation.com” in the hopes of satisfying their desires. It’s not dumb business to play on people’s natural proclivity to take a shortcut, nor did anyone go broke underestimating consumer intelligence, but …
As the Times point out, this is the direct mail business grown up and gone digital. Instead of hoping one out of a hundred envelopes will get ripped open and acted on, this hopes that one search out of a gazillion is an address typed into the right domain at the right time. I suppose it’s great for small businesses, but it smacks of domain squatting and pop-ups without the pop-up.
The only rational comment in the Times article (which is pretty naive in my opinion), was this:
“A longtime player in online commerce sees an evolutionary pattern. “The world of search engine optimization and marketing is very crowded, with players big and small looking for revenue opportunities,” said Ian Chaplin, of Galloway & Chaplin Capital, a founder of several businesses including Red Envelope, a gift site, and BidShift, a hiring exchange for hospitals and nurses and other medical personnel. Ultimately, Mr. Chaplin says, the “only sure winners will be Google and Yahoo and other major search engines.” “
I agree the engines are the ultimate winners, and, in theory, the biggest threat to the gulls should they decide to change the rules.
One of my favorite expressions, brought to me by my larger-than-life stepbrother, is “He/She gets the joke.”
It denotes whether someone is tuned to the same radio station, one step ahead, connecting the dots. I love it when my boss, Deepak Advani, the CMO of Lenovo, sits in a meeting and hurries along the PowerPoint presentations by saying, “Okay, I get it.”
He’s not being rude, he’s just acting like a modem handshaking with another modem, figuring out the bandwidth and adjusting throughput accordingly. Me, I tend let people drone along out of good manners, then when I am good and bored I blurt out something to show I too “get it” and push it along. I’ve also figured out that when I start nodding off in meetings the best way to wake up is to say something.
So I write while living on a day of conference calls and powerpoints ….