A Grimoire for the Wizards of Search

SERP's & Searchers
A compendium of magical spells for the wizards of search and technology.

To the outside world, we are the mystical manipulators of magical energies that surround the inner sanctum of search. However, within our ranks, we are divided... the wizards of the white hat and the wizards of the black hat. We eternally battle to control the virtual domain of the everpresent Google, who was, who is and who will be to come, the Master of Past and Present.

There are powerful spells and arcane knowledge that we possess to channel the energies of semantics and the internet.

Level 1 Spells:

• Summon Keywords: This ability allows the wizard of search to conjure up lists of relevant keywords. At higher levels, this spell allows the wizard to have a more focused and refined list.
• Reveal Plugins: The legendary Firefox, unlike the Explorer has the ability to allow wizards to customize it according to their needs, during incantations, this can be helpful to give the wizard to see deeper into the site than normal.
• Detect Spam: Upon looking at the page, the wizard will be able to spot non-sensical and repeating phrases that plague the site.
• View Source: There is a hidden world behind all websites, the wizards of search are able to decipher the source and divine the hidden knowledge that it has.
• Summon Directories: The search wizard can tap the energies and forces that flow from public directories. These energies enhance the site with a glow that the Search Gods recognize.
• Spam Source: One of the first spells the wizards of the black hat learns, this allows the wizard to manipulate the search engines with repetative words. This ability could backfire however, as they could be banished by the Search Gods.

Level 2 Spells:

• Summon Key Phrases: The wizard is now able to craft the summoned keywords into phrases that match the intent of the site.
  
• Summon Title Tags: The wizard is able to manipulate the site's source directly and give it the ability to be named. Once a page or a site has a true name, the Gods of Search can properly identify it and give it its due.
  
• Detect Redirect I: This spell allows the wizard to detect the simplest of redirects, the meta-refresh and the Java Redirect. Once the redirect is identified the wizard is able to channel the coding magic to put them in order.
  
• Find Whois: The "Whois" spell allows the wizard to find other sites on the same IP, revealing other efforts of the black hat wizards.
  
• Text of Invisibility: A higher level of the spam spell, this allows the black hat wizards to hide their spam with white on white text, text under images, spammed ALT tags and source code spam so that the users dont see the spam.
  
• Shrink Text: Another black hat spell, this causes normal text to be shrunk past the point of legibility, yet still be seen by users and search engines. Another variation of the spam spell, it often causes confusion and anger in user behavior.
  
• Summon Links I: A summoning spell more powerful than "summon directory", this spell allows the wizard to manipulate the words on the page to draw unsuspecting users to feel a compulsion to link to them. At this level, the user has a good chance to resist the urge, but each link adds more energy to the site.

Level 3 Spells:

• Invoke User Intent: The wizard is able to determine the users' mind and use the keyword phrases to guide them along the path of their intent.
  
• Summon Description: This spell combines the ability to charm the user into entering the site, while keeping the keyword integrity intact.
  
• Summon Link Bait: The wizard is able to charm a massive amount of people into linking to their site.
  
• Detect Redirct II: Upon detection, the wizard is able to see more difficult redirects and divine the type of them, 301 and 302 redirects become second nature to the wizard.
  
• Summon Paid Traffic: By combining the energy channels of the search engines, the wizard sacrifices a small amount of their own vitality in exchange for traffic and the potential to gain a higher amount of vitality
  
• Div of Invisibility: The wizards of the black hat are able to hide some of their spam spells in a div of invisibility, while it's harder for the search engines to catch, there is a chance that they will.
  
• Summon Link Farm: Another black hat wizard technique, this spell summons thousands and thousands of links from other sites, these energy channels are less effective than the true channels, they provide a short term benefit to the black hat wizard.
  
• Evoke Lesser Blogger: Once evoked, the lesser blogger writes about the wizard and hails their efforts in front of their own audience. Both wizards benefit from this spell... but it's also a double edged spell, there's a chance that the blogger will turn on the wizard and try to break him down.
  
• Summon Lesser Industry Contact: There are many wizards of search, this spell allows the wizard access to speak with the industry contact over long distances, the incantations and help from the industry contact allow the lesser wizard to focus and potentially spark new ideas.
  

Level 4 Spells:

• Behavioral Scrying: With this spell, the wizard can see into the minds of multiple users and allow them to create enchantments to attract more and more people. The users find what they want and share some of their vitality with the wizard.
  
• Summon Links III: At this level, the links summoned are from high level wizards, institutions and other quality sites. There is a chance, that at this point, the summoned links will continually rise on their own.
  
• Control Page Rank: One of the tools of the black hat wizard is to manipulate the very energy of the mythic page rank, they're able to use the forces of the search engines against them and create an illusiory page rank.
  
• Decipher Analytics: This spell translates the numbers, graphs and percentages of the analytics portal into real information, when used with the spell behavioral scrying, the potential is limitless.
  
• Invoke Keyword Campaign: The highest level of the keyword spells, the wizard can form a vast chain of keywords that focus on user intent and relevance into a grand unified keyword strategy.
  
• Link Bomb: One of the tools of the black hat wizard, they're able to turn the search engines themselves into weapons. With the link bomb, the wizard can target specific phrases and force their enemy into a negative situation.
  
• Summon Greater Blogger: Like the summon lesser blogger, this allows the wizard to connect with the powers of the other wizards. At this point, there is a low chance of failure since the wizard is able to effectively wield their powers.
  
• Trade Show Teleport: A simple spell in actuality, but powerful in application. The wizard must be at a certain level to understand the concepts and applications of the trade shows.. the added benefit is that the material spell cost is usually paid by someone else.
  
• Create Spell: At this point in the wizard's experience, they're able to see the interaction of all the mystical energies of the search matrix and can create their own spells to see if they work or fail.
  

Level 5 Spells:

• Create Blog: With a vast amount of knowledge and experience, the wizard becomes a lesser blogger. Forging out into the search matrix and sharing ideas and thoughts, the wizard allows other, lesser search wizards to benefit from their knowledge.
  
• Hijack Ranking: One of the deadliest and dangerous spells of the black hats, this spell allows a wizard to take away, without knowledge or consent of the search Gods, the rankings of their competitors and enemies. However, the danger of getting caught and forcing the search gods to change the search energies is high.
  
• Pacify Client: Often times, those who the wizard deals with have unrealistic expectations of the limits of the search wizard. With cool logic and explanations, the wizard is able to charm the client into understanding the basics of the magic of search.
  
• Summon Viral Links: The highest level of link summoning, the wizard invests a small amount of energy and causes thousands of users to create links for them... once summoned, the users pass along and cause other users to link. The duration of this spell widely varies.
  
• Summon Named Blogger: The wizard, at this level is able to connect with and get a link from some of the demi-gods of search, Matt Cutts, Andy Beal or Jeremy Zawodny
  
• Voice of SES: Gaining the voice of SES confirms your status in the search wizarding world. Hundreds and thousands of other wizards come to hear your methods, your insights and your spells. Often thought of as the highest level to attain before you reach demi-god status, the more you become the Voice of SES, there is no limit from where you can go.
  
• Divine Competitor Strategy: The wizard is able to take all the spells, components, tools and scrying methods to divine the strategy of the competition. With this look into the actions of those against you, the wizard is able to create a counter strategy.
  

If you'd like to add to the wizards of search grimorie, just let me know and I'll add them.

Tagged With a Book Meme - Curse You Foseelovechild

Rules:
1. Grab the nearest book
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
6. Tag 5 people

Here we go:
1: The nearest book is "Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design by Michael Shermer".

2: "This is the fundamental difference between religion and science. If you attempt to reconcile and combine religion and science on questions about nature and the universe, and if you push the science to its logical conclusion, you will end up naturalizing the deity; for any question about nature, if your answer is "God did it," a scientist will ask such questions as "How did God do it? What forces did God use? What forms of matter and energy were employed by the creation process?" The end result of this inquiry can only be natural explanations for all natural phenomena."

The following people are tagged:
Garrett French
Cord Silverstein
Stephen Ward
Koenig
Randy H.

Now, make with the memes!

In-Game Ads Selectable by Users of Casual Games

Big Fish Games, with over 25 million unique visitors a month is planning on allowing their users to select which ads they want to see as they play their games.

Big Fish Games is a gaming site with hundreds of flash games oriented towards the casual gamer is owned by AWS Convergent Technologies. In order to maximize the revenue brought by the traffic and advertising click throughs are planning an opt-in system for advertising chosen by the people playing those games.

This is a smart move, not only do users select advertisements that they're interested in, and therefore more likely to convert upon, AWS/ Big Fish Games are getting valuable demographic and behavioral information from the users on the front end. Which will allow for more relevant and targeted advertisements.

According to MarketingVox, they've already secured Microsoft Live, Match.com, Western Union, Hoover and Walt Disney World as initial sponsors. This is not geared for the "hard core" or "nerd core" gamers, but the players who enjoy challenging puzzles and flash "twitch" games.

With this data, they can deliver contextual ads that enhance the experience of the user, maximize the conversion click throughs and allow the user to customize their experience, as personalization starts pervading through users' internet experience.

Most of the time when I mention in-game ads, I'm talking about PC or console games with billboards, or locations that represent real companies, or interactive objects like a bottle of Slurm that you can drink. The other kind of ad that is being looked at can be derived from your search and internet habits to deliver real time contextual ads into your game. As cleverly drawn from the excellent web-comic/ industry watcher site Penny Arcade. (Seriously, check them out, they're brilliant).

This kind of in-game advertising makes me a little nervous, not because it'll ruin the purity of dismembering zombies (an activity I heartily endorse), but because I am still not convinced that the companies engaged in the advertising will have the users' experience and best interests in mind.

Anyway, in-game ads are here, they're here to stay... lets just hope they do it right.

YouTubers Getting Paid, and a New Monetization Strategy

A little while ago, I wrote about some of the challenges of monetizing video. Undeniably, user generated online video (UGOV) is very popular and there's a lot of discussion about the legality, trademark issues, freedom of speech issues and ownership issues. Yet despite the details of UGOV, it remains a dominant form of media.

After Google acquired YouTube, there's been a lot of speculation to maximize the profitability, market penetration, user interaction and usability of the site. I have no doubt that of any company that would acquire YouTube, Google would probably be one of the few companies that could retain the philosophy of user generated and user focused content.

One of the steps to bring the users into a tempting accountability is the plan to share the profits from YouTube with the Tubers (potatoes?) I mean YouTubers... MarketingVox shares an article that, as Chad Hurley, the co-founder of YouTube says would "reward creativity" as the BBC News reports.

The fact that they didn't have to share the profit with its users most likely added to its success, which is measured in tens of millions of users. Now that they're going to change the monetization and revenue sharing model, it's going to have to split the profits with the uploaders. While the sharing details arent available at the moment, they say that they'll start rolling out the plans in phases over the next few months.

The second thing of interest is that YouTube is planning to roll ads before videos. While the plan for the video ads is to make them as short as possible, around 3 seconds, the details havent exactly been worked out.

Now, I'm not the guy who stands on the corner with a sandwich board that says "the end is near". But there's something about the second plan that bothers me just a little. The appeal of YouTube is that it's truly a user generated community that sometimes gets intruded by overly zealous companies who dont quite get the benefit.

If the balance is short ads for a little payout, then that might be enough. However, I think that there's something happening with YouTube that is chipping away a little bit from it's user focus. I mentioned before that UGOV is a feature and not an industry or a business model in and of itself and I think we're seeing that unfold now.

Google TV Beta Hoax - Too Bad Though, I'd Love It

From Google-Blogoscoped, they posted a video of how to get into Google TV's beta program.

They listed some of the creative ways that Google has engaged the community, some of the jokes they've done and generally, set the stage to soften the user's skepticality... then they drop the bomb.

This is the best kind of hoax, the kind that's almost believable, gives people what they want, and creates a fun buzz. Here you go, here's the video...

Defining Search Metrics: Search Engine Saturation

In my last articles about search engine metrics, I defined search engine presence as "the number of times a site shows across the search engines for a selected set of keywords". Next, I defined, explained and showed an example of search engine fluctuation as "the natural fluctuation of presence of the same selected set of keywords over time".

This time, I want to talk about the two types of search engine saturation. I'd like to defne search engine saturation as essentially "presence over the total data size". In statistics, the data size is represented by the variable "n". If the data size is a dozen eggs, then n=12. The data size of states in the US is n=50. In this case, we're measuring results over three search engines. "SE" = 3. If we included Ask.com in the results, SE would equal 4. However, at this point, we're only measuring 3 search engines, Google, MSN and Yahoo!.

The next part is the total number of results tallied. Since we're measuring the top 15 ranks in Google, the top 10 in MSN and Yahoo!. With this information, we can calculate the total data size for any data capture.

n= (# of keywords) * (15 Google + 10 MSN + 10 Yahoo!).

in this case:

n= (3)*(35) = 105

To calculate the saturation, you divide each presence by "n" to get the percentage of the search engines the site occupies as a function of the entire marketspace.

Domains	SE Presence	SE Presence	SE Saturation	AVG Saturation
www.apple.com	7	17	16.19%	11.43%
www.engadget.com	7	9	8.57%	7.62%
en.wikipedia.org	4	7	6.67%	5.24%
www.gizmodo.com	6	6	5.71%	5.71%
www.appleinsider.com	5	4	3.81%	4.29%
www.mobilewhack.com	5	4	3.81%	4.29%
www.thinksecret.com	7	3	2.86%	4.76%
news.bbc.co.uk	4	3	2.86%	3.33%
www.businessweek.com	3	3	2.86%	2.86%
appleiphone.blogspot.com	0	3	2.86%	1.43%
www.macworld.com	1	3	2.86%	1.90%
www.everythingiphone.com	5	2	1.90%	3.33%
gizmodo.com	4	1	0.95%	2.38%

Apple.com has a presence of 17, and divided by 105, the search engine saturation equals 16.19%, which represents the market share of the marketspace. This number will fluctuate as the results fluctuate. The saturation measurement is useful as a snapshot of the search engine space and a result of your campaign. However, what's really important is the trend of data. You want your presence to rise and you will want your average saturation to rise as well. The average saturation measures the health of the life of the campaign as the raw numbers of the presence fluctuate. In essence, it's a measurement that you can measure and quantify to see if you're doing well, or if you're trending down.

Each of these metrics have value in and of themselves, however, when taken as a whole, they start to give you a clearer picture of the life of the natural search campaign.

Lord of the Rings Online's Launch Gains Traditional Media Response

Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, brought to life by Turbine Games is going to be released on April 24 this year. This is the first time that Middle Earth, the legacy that launched and inspired the entire fantasy movement will be available to thousands of fans.

There are two aspects of this release that I've found interesting. I would argue that 2006 was the year that MMORPG's (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) became prevalent in the eyes of the public, the news, investors, futurists... and as a rumor that's been circulating, even interesting to Google. Last year, we saw what was once really only noticed by those of us who have *cough* geekier *cough* interests, are being noticed by a wider audience and are gaining credibility within more communities. The watershed event, I would imagine, is when Blizzard Entertainment announced that their game World of Warcraft has over 7 million subscribers, even more recently, they announced that they just hit 8 million. There were figures released that reveal that MMO's represent over 10 billion dollars in world wide spend.

Now, it seems that more traditional sources of information are reporting on launches of MMORPG's. From the New York Times, to Fox News, there is a lot of buzz about this game that doesn't come from the gaming industry. I think that this combines the fact that the story of Middle Earth and the brave free peoples in it, is universal and loved the world over and the fact that MMO's are quickly becoming big business. While amongst the true fans of Tolkien's work, there is some worry and skepticism that the online version of the game will dillute Tolkien's story, I think that as more and more people embrace their digital lives, the art of other people will find themselves online.

In 1955, Tolkien began to worry his creation had become a “vast game” for some readers. This was not good, he wrote, even “for me, who find that kind of thing only too fatally attractive.” It seems that Tolkien would disapprove of his creation to be represented as a "game". However, I think that his use of the word "game" represents people who are taking his work as trivial, as mere fantasy and as something that, because it's not real, it cannot teach us anything valuable about ourselves. However, as we see science fiction, another aspect of the overall "fantasy" genre, we can see that often times, observance about the human condition can come from unlikely places.

This is what I think Tolkien meant when he worried that his creation was becoming a "game". In Turbine's MMO, they've assured the anxious, the excited people who love the story, that they're making the game reflect Tolkien's love, his detail and his message in the game. While there will be some departure from the canon, all the decisions that change the lore are, at least, faithful to the spirit of his work.

Back to the business of MMORPG's. When the game Star Wars Galaxies launched, there was very little response from the traditional media. The only outlets for information was from game related news organizations. However, because of the widely noticed success of World of Warcraft and Second Life, a launch that combines such a universal intellectual property and the timing of more media recognizing how big online worlds are, Lord of the Rings Online stands to have a significant entry into the MMO market. Time will tell if the players remain faithful to the game or if the skeptics will be converted... but at no other time has an online game gathered such an interest from the outlets that have traditonally ignored gaming (unless there was a scandal or controversy like Grand Theft Auto).

Following, is the preview of the game from Game Trailers' newly embedded player. Personally, I plan to be in Middle Earth with my friends, my digital friends and I plan to create my very own Fellowship.


Update: MarketingVox "The Voice of Online Marketing" has also picked up the launch of "LOTRO".

Business Intelligence Needs to Support the Front Lines

James Taylor, Vice President of Product Marketing/Management at Fair Isaac runs an excellent blog called Enterprise Decision Management. Recently, he posted about an article from Informatics about businesses not understanding business intelligence.

Nigel Rayner says:

BI has been around a long time and people do get returns out of it, but it has been technology and infrastructure driven and is not addressing the needs of senior management.

Mr. Taylor expands that comment to say that,

not only does it not address the needs of senior management, it does not support the needs of operational staff either. Not management, not analysts, but people working on the front lines helping customers. It also does not help the software that support customers.

When using business intelligence, it's always important to define the end results and the goals of the endeavors. Data that goes directly to the senior management doesn't necessarily mean that it makes people more efficient, infrastructure more manageable or the company more competitive.

BI (business intelligence) is the process of obtaining data from various sources, but that endeavor must be driven by the goals and real issues that companies face. One of the litmus tests of any BI driven decisions must be: how it helps operations from the bottom up.

This article has intrigued me, I added his blog to my RSS reader and I'm going to do some serious back reading on it. It seems that every article I read from him inspires a few questions.

Defining Search Metrics: Search Engine Fluctuation

LeeAnn Prescott, the research director for the US markets at Hitwise,
revealed that after Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone at MacWorld, that the search demand for the iPhone has superceded the search demand for the iPod. It's only a slight coincidence that earlier I defined the concept of "search engine presence" using the example of the iPhone.

That search engine presence measured the top ranking sites, ignoring position, instead focusing on ranking on a variety of terms, that dominate the search engines for a selected sampling of keywords.

Because I was explaining a concept, I chose to use a small sample of keywords that related to a topic that interested me. I used: "iphone, apple iphone, ipod phone". The results were as follows.

	1/10/2007
Domains	SE Presence
www.apple.com	7
www.thinksecret.com	7
www.engadget.com	7
www.gizmodo.com	6
www.appleinsider.com	5
www.mobilewhack.com	5
www.everythingiphone.com	5
gizmodo.com	4
en.wikipedia.org	4
news.bbc.co.uk	4
www.businessweek.com	3

These sites ranked for the preceding terms on 10 Jan. However, for the 4 weeks that ended on 20 Jan, Hitwise compiled the following top sites that had traffic from the term "iPhone".

Apple's sites receive over 50% of the traffic from the iPhone search, however, Engadget, by being one of the most trusted sites on consumer electronics and also having the benefit of ranking well across the board for the searches, received the 4th highest amount of traffic. Hitwise and my search engine presence tool measures two different things, I can only measure presence, Hitwise can measure traffic. While I know that I'm comparing apples to oranges, here's where we see the overlap of traffic and presence.

In the 13 days where I took my first measurements, the search engine marketspace has fluctuated. Supporting the idea that traffic and clickthroughs can influence ranking in the search engines. Notice that Apple and Engadget have a significant upsurge in their presence.

	1/10/2007	1/23/2007
Domains	SE Presence	SE Presence
www.apple.com	7	17
www.engadget.com	7	9
en.wikipedia.org	4	7
www.gizmodo.com	6	6
www.appleinsider.com	5	4
www.mobilewhack.com	5	4
www.thinksecret.com	7	3
news.bbc.co.uk	4	3
www.businessweek.com	3	3
appleiphone.blogspot.com	0	3
www.macworld.com	1	3
www.everythingiphone.com	5	2
gizmodo.com	4	1

We see EverythingiPhone.com, Gizmodo and ThinkSecret.com drop in their presence, we see Wikipedia increase their presence.

As the search for iPhones increase, as they have... that's created the circumstances for the search engines to continually shuffle the results, shuffle the ranks and shuffle the presence. However, what we have strong evidence for here is that ranks change, presence fluctuates and the environment changes. Therefore, it's vital for any company who has a search engine marketing strategy to keep tabs on the environment for their selected keywords and not just on the position or rank of just a few. If you dont notice the change, it's likely that you could be left behind.

While LeeAnn Prescott and I are measuring two different things, traffic vs. presence. The overlapping data as it applies to the search engines often complement each other and provide a larger picture of what's happening.

Thanks LeeAnn, your article was brilliant, informative and I enjoyed reading every bit of it.

In-Game Advertising, What Could Possibly Go Wrong - My Latest Article for Ten Ton Hammer

In Game Advertising Could Be the Next Best Thing to Gaming
By J.P. "Agon Thalia" Sherman

There's no easy way to say this… ingame ads are here and they're only going to get more prevalent. There are racing games that contextually place billboard ads according to the players' web traffic habits, there are plans to make interactive items ingame, like a can of Sprite on a table that a player can "drink". Some ingame art like graffiti can change according to advertisers demands. Even now, Google is courting with companies like AdScape Media to put their own brand of personalized, customized and targeted advertisements inside our games. I have seen the future and it is full of ads.

Read the Entire Article at Ten Ton Hammer...

2000 Blogs/ 55 Million = 3.6x10^-3% of the Blogosphere

Tino Buntic has decided to put up the faces and links to 2000 bloggers. It doesn't matter if they're A-List, D-List or complete unknowns. He's creating a very cool little mosaic blogging meme.

And of course, I had to submit myself.

Shout out to Cord Silverstein of Marketing Hipster for letting me know of this. My pic's a little fuzzy and I look 15 because of the hat.. but what the hell, it's fun!

My Name Is Earl: Drives Traffic Online and Adds Viewers

You know the kind of guy who does nothing but watch TV and analyze it on the net, then wonders why his friends think he's crazy? Well, that was me. Every time I watched something good or bad on TV, something had to be posted on the internet. That’s when I realized I had to change. My name is JP.

I really enjoy the show My Name Is Earl. I started watching it because I would turn on the TiVo early so I could fast-forward the commercials during The Office. The last episode of the show, "Kept a Guy Locked in a Truck" the character Josh gets killed in a tragic murphy bed incident. wait... let me rewind.

Joy, Earl's ex-wife, wanted to get back at a store for refusing her return, so in retribution, she stole one of the store's delivery trucks. She enlisted Earl to help, which he did because he was trying to make up his past sins toward Joy. They hide the truck for a few days. When they open it up, they find that there was an employee "Josh" locked in the truck. Eventually, Joy was booked for kidnapping and Josh was the only witness. Well, in the last episode, Josh dies when his murphy bed snaps back into the wall and crushes him.

As the story progresses, we find that Josh is a regular poster to the TV forum, review and recap site, Television Without Pity under the name "whojackie". During the show, he's shown typing on his computer and saying:

"No, I don’t think shows should do more meta jokes that cater to the online bloggers and I’m sure everyone at Television Without Pity Dot Com agrees with me."

Turns out that whojackie has been an active member for over two years, and on the day the show airs, there's a post from whojackie. Later on in the show, Joy tries to find friends to attend Josh's funeral and posts to the wide wide world of web.

My point is that NBC is brilliantly driving people online, in a round-about way to consume their content. Giving a shout out to Television Without Pity is a great way to create buzz among fans, give interaction between the stars and their fans and create a level of "reality" that's just fun and unique.

Later on in the thread, there are people who hadn't seen the show hear about what happened, and what they've done is watch some of the shows that NBC has on their site and they've been converted into viewers. Another thing that the producers of My Name is Earl does, is set up, through TWoP, a "whojackie Memorial", where all proceeds go to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Brilliant move for NBC, Greg Garcia and the entire show. Not only did they create perfect viral buzz among their target market, they did so well, that they're adding new viewers because of the efforts. They deserve every accolade they get, and more.

Freaking Brilliant

PS: Shout-out to Koenig
Edit: Crabman responds
Edit: Josh's death foreshadowed from Dec.

User Generated Video Popular, Yet Hard to Monetize

eMarketer, one of the best sources for marketing information, research and analysis posted an interesting article the other day about user generated online video (UGOV). They referenced a study from London's Screen Digest that found that user generated online video was responsible for 47% of all the video consumed in the US in 2006. They further predict that by 2010, UGOV will account for 55% (44 billion streams) of video consumption on the net.

Like my prior article about monetizing virtual worlds, companies and marketers are looking at the sheer numbers of eyes on the monitor and they're recognizing that this could become a significant source of revenue and branding for them. eMarketer goes on to recognize that while UGOV is a significant source of traffic and media consumption, it only accounts for 15% of revenue from online video sources.

So what's a company to do? How does one create a stable business and profit around UGOV? One answer is to do what Current TV is doing. One of the ways is to create a cable channel like Current TV. I truly enjoy Current TV. They're edgy, they're smart and they create an addictive program watching experience. I like the fact that in the span of an hour, I can be touched, offended, enlightened, frightened and entertained by their submitted videos. Current TV drives traffic to their site and the site drives users to their TV. I enjoy what they do and I think they do it well.

Another option is to monetize the traffic that comes into the site by putting ads and sponsored links on the site. However, this may backfire on the providers when ads start piling up on the videos they want to watch. iFilm and Atom films do a good job with putting short ads on their content, but as more and more providers emerge, it'll be tougher to insure that the users are getting what they want, without sacrificing their credibility. Lastly, if I can watch the same video without ads, what's my motivation to watch the ads?

There are other ways to monetize the streams and traffic: digital sales, subscriptions and licencing technology. The desire to generate revenue has reached a point, where it's becoming like the multimedia "industry" in the early 90's.

Viddling Around blog has an excellent commentary that ties in Esther Dyson's "blasphemous" but accurate comment that there "Was no Multimedia Industry". She maintained that multimedia was a feature and not an industry. The post goes on to note that we may be following the same path now and treating UGOV as an industry and not a feature for relevant sites.

The eMarketer article goes on to say that in 2006, revenues from UGOV sites reached $200 Million in advertising revenue. They predict that in 2010, that revenue will increase to over $900 Million.

I however, remain skeptical of that prediction. I believe it's based on current trending only and the theory that they're treating UGOV as an industry in and of itself... not a feature. Only time will tell at this point.

I think that UGOV has huge potential for relevant and contextual markets, but the rush to profit from it reminds me of a few other internet revolution bubbles. It's exciting, it's exhilarating, it's cool and it's hot... but I agree with Viddling Blog and Esther Dyson, it's a feature, not an industry.

Virtual Worlds Get Their Own Conference

Virtual worlds have been getting a lot of attention lately. It seems that people are realizing that digital property can translate into real world profit. In the past year, we've seen companies like Dell make announcements in Second Life and even some politicians like George Miller and Mark Warner have held events there as well. We've seen ideas about the taxation of virtual property, and even companies that run online worlds help real world police find criminals and victims.
The amazing thing about this, is that all this has started to reach a watershed after World of Warcraft announced that it has over 7 million (with an "M") subscribers. Even recently, they announced that they just reached the 8 million mark. Good for them! They deserve it.

With the attention focused on virtual worlds, it seems as if companies, marketers and even the government are all scrambling into a multi-billion dollar industry because they all smell profit. While I have nothing against the free market, I can almost see the gaming community start smirking and waiting to pounce on the poor bastards who make stupid mistakes while trying to communicate to an educated, creative, intelligent and highly defensive and protective community.

Even Sony, the makers of the PlayStation and some of the best games around were pounded mercilessly for their ill-conceived "All I want for Xmas is a PSP" campaign. If there was any company that had some good will stocked up for all its done for us, Sony would be one of them. Nope. They were humbled and shamed into submission for its miserable and, in my opinion, patronizing campaign.

It's been announced by Digital Media Wire, that there will be a virtual worlds conference, to be held in New York. From the article:

"Fortune 500 companies seeking to understand and maximize marketing, entertainment and business strategies within virtual worlds."

I wholeheartedly support the efforts to embrace and understand virtual worlds and the people that inhabit them. I hope that the conference will educate those Fortune 500 companies that they need to do their homework first. I hope that when those companies enter our digital domains that they do so contextually, appropriately, entertainingly and respectfully.

However, I know that not all of them will. I predict that in the next year, there will be a company that jumps into a virtual world, hoping to connect to the gaming community and will get slammed against a wall with such force, other companies will think twice about entering our domain again.

Games marketing have come up with some real nuggets of pure advertising dren, and the good folks at 1UP were kind enough to share some of the worst with all of us. I would like to think that the worst is behind us, but I seriously doubt it. I would like to say that the conference will educate the people of the Fortune 500 to tread carefully, do their homework and for god's sake... talk to us first.

The topics to be covered in the conference will include:

understanding consumer behavior patterns inside virtual worlds; technology and design issues; and the benefits of standalone immersive corporate worlds versus destinations within "Second Life."

While I think that this would be a fascinating, exhilarating and educational conference. I have a hard time believing that these companies are there to understand a rapidly growing social phenomena. Instead, I think that they might just be there to learn how to profit from our virtual worlds.

We'll see if they gain credibility, I hope they figure out a way to enter the virtual world and not make asses of themselves. But we all know that at least one of them will do exactly that this year. I wonder which one it will be?

Standard Deviation When lnterpreting Web Analytics

One of my favorite blogs, Good Math, Bad Math has an excellent article describing standard deviation as it relates to the mean of the data.

The mean is more commonly called the average. It's calculated by the sum of the total data points in the population, then divided by the number of data points. A simple example of that would be the data set: (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). The sum of this population equals 15. There are 5 data points in this population, so the mean would be calculated as 15/5=3.

A fancier way to put it would be the following formula:



We can see through web analytics the average visitors per period of time... daily, weekly, monthly. However, measuring by mean alone can be deceptive. The mean doesnt describe some of the more important data sets that are important in determining the meaning of analytics.

The mean wont give you information on the low points, the high points, nor will they tell you the relationship of the mean between the rest of the data. In the earlier data set, the relationship between the data was very easy to determine. In web analytics, those relationships can be a little trickier.

I'll take an example that's near to me. My own web analytics.

Currently, I average 42 page views per day. This means that 42 of my unique pages are viewed... this is not a site visit. My low point is 4 page views in a single day and my highest is 124.

From this, we can tell that there was most likely a spike in my page views at some point. Because the mean is less than twice the largest data point, we can automatically start with that presumption. However, in order to get more information, we must take into account the standard deviation. It is defined as a measure of the spread of its values also, the square root of the variance. (From Wikipedia)

Each differently colored area is the standard deviation. Each section is the same length, but not the same area under the curve. This means that within one standard deviation of the mean, most of the data falls under those data points.

In my case, my standard deviation is calculated as 9.4.

What this means, is that using Chebyshev's Inequality rule,

At least 50% of the values are within 1.4 standard deviations from the mean.

At least 75% of the values are within 2 standard deviations from the mean.

At least 89% of the values are within 3 standard deviations from the mean.

At least 94% of the values are within 4 standard deviations from the mean.

At least 96% of the values are within 5 standard deviations from the mean.

At least 97% of the values are within 6 standard deviations from the mean.

At least 98% of the values are within 7 standard deviations from the mean.

At least 1 - 1/k² of the values are within k standard deviations from the mean.

When you apply this information to web analytics, one of the things I do is look at the geographic distribution of the users. When I find hubs of higher consumer acitivity, I start getting a clearer idea to who my users are. This could help me target my paid search campaign more accurately, this could let me know that if I provide content, analysis or a blog, a nice mention of something applicable and interesting in their area might be appropriate.

The standard deviation is a powerful method to segment your analytics into greater specificity. When Chebyshev's Inequality shows you that 75% of the data is within two standard deviations, then you have some focused and applicable data to improve your messaging and targeting.

More on Evidence Based Managment

I love this cartoon, and as I go through Pfeffer and Suttons' book, there are parts of the book that remind me of this.

This cartoon has been used to entertain math geeks, critique pseudoscience like Intelligent Design, and brilliantly show that knowledge starts with data and ends with something useful (hopefully). But somewhere in the middle is the arduous task of analysis, being wrong, being frustrated, hard work, peer review and all of the un-sexy stuff that gets ignored.

It's kind of a small rant, but it's the "CSI-ification" of science or analysis... they get a clue, then some fancy camera shots and a high tech lab... chemicals and viola! They get the information they need to catch the bad guy.

The miracle is hard work... it's the analysis, it's the brainstorming of lots of smart people trying to figure it out. To call it a miracle is almost an insult... and that's why I love this cartoon

Some Cliches Become Even Truthier

From Eric Mattson's Marketing Blurb, he writes about an interesting study from Susquehanna about the trends of content. In Eric's article, he mentions that in 2005, content sites accounted for 36% of the users' time. However, in 2006, that trend went upwards to 45%.

The interesting point here is where that trend is going to go, and where it will reach a critical mass. In 2007, will the numbers be somewhere from 55 - 60% or will the trend start to slow down, even out and become more static?

Another interesting aspect of this is how do marketers create content for users? Rather than having marketers jump into the latest fad, they actually need to have a strategy that's a little more in depth than slapping together a blog. Garrett French's blog has an excellent market conversation strategy guide.

Understanding that content sites are increasing in popularity, and putting together a strategy to communicate with your users could absolutely bring in business, but even more valuable... a relationship with the content providers and the company itself.

Hard Facts: First Section Review

This book is organized into three sections, for this post, I will be talking about the section called "setting the stage" in Pfeffer and Sutton's book.

Pfeffer and Sutton start the book by describing what evidence based decision making is. It's essentially defined as a process to find the best evidence that you can. Through primary or secondary research, collecting the data and acting on that data. They say that there is an inherent perception blindness when making decisions from what you've always done, what you thought was true, your personal philosophies or beliefs and what ever fad is gripping the business world at the moment. I was impressed with the description of evidence based management or decision making is not a "thing you do", it doesnt have discreet boundaries, it's a process, it's a way to make decisions with a little data to help you out.

One of the examples they explore is how mergers and acquisitions tend to show strain about a month after the merger. Cisco has a great record for mergers because they measure several aspects for its merger targets, not just product or service, not just market share.. but culture as well. They've walked away from deals when the culture didn't match.

Pfeffer and Sutton identify common problems that consistently cause failure.

• Casual benchmarking
• Repeating what's worked in the past, or what's worked for others
• Following deeply held, yet unexamined ideologies
• Substituting facts for conventional wisdom
  

Each of these common problems can cause failure in strategies because they either ignore the data that's there, they fail to take into account new, unmeasured data or they assume that their belief is enough to make decisions. One of my favorite quotes (which I have in my quote generator) is David Hume's quote: "A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence". It's not wrong to believe, but in business and strategy, you need to have evidence to support those beliefs.

They provide logical and interesting anecdotes (which, in and of themselves are not evidence) that elucidate some of the principles, and they do an excellent job in documentation and referencing the examples they provide.

In my niche market of "search intelligence", I live and breathe data. Whether it's analytics or mined data, I try to be very careful to either only say what I can prove, or qualify any statement that has more intuition than data.

I just finished the second section, and without finishing it yet, I can say... buy this book. Read it, and let me know what you think. It's good.

Section by Section Book Review: Pfeffer and Sutton's: Hard Facts

I've started to hit the books hard, books on search, competitive intelligence, analytics, data gathering, analysis and even math. The more I read... the more the world of data opens up into an amazing pattern.

Rather than stay in my little reading hole, As I read the books, I'm going to do a section by section review of what I've learned.

The first book I'm going to take a look at is Jeffery Pfeffer and Robert Sutton's book: Hard Facts - Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense (BN, Amazon). The book is about examining the pre-suppositions, assumptions and ingrained beliefs that managers, analysts and decision makers face when making decisions about strategies and processes that affect their business.

Pfeffer and Sutton take evidence based management methodologies and deconstruct the myths and assumptions, and they take close aim to the more dangerous half-truths and faddish business mantras. Already, I've read the first few chapters and I've been impressed with the skill in which they dissect some of the all too common axioms and slogans that populate business training.

Stay tuned, I will be doing another post on the book later. So far, I'm enjoying it.

Privacy...Schmivacy... Balancing Personal Information with Service

A recent eMarketer article - "Is Privacy Overrated?" shares some interesting information about a "Personalization Survey" from ChoiceStream. They report that giving up personal information for more personalized content has a pendular affect.

In 2004, 63% of people who were 18-34 were willing to divulge Demographic information in order to obtain personalized content. In 2005, that number dropped to 47%. In 2006, it rebounded back to 63%. When we're talking about people over 35, the numbers are 2004: 49%, 2005: 46% and 2006: 54%. When we put things into context, 2005 was a pretty sketchy year for personal information, privacy invasion concerns and other geo-political events that made people a little more nervous about giving up their information, but apparently, they got over it and are now giving up more information.

The other part of that survey was about people giving up personalized information to a site so that it could track their clicks and purchases.

For 18-34 year olds, in 2004 it was 48%. This dropped in 2005 to 35% and back up for 2006 to 49%. The over 35 crowd remained a bit more skeptical, in 2004 it was 33%, which took a slight hit in 2005 to 29%, then rallied up to 38%.

The data here is very interesting, while it exposes an interesting behavioral trend, I wanted to take a look at what this means for consumers and marketers.

From the article:

"Consumers are overwhelmed with the vast array of content and choices coming at them every day online. They want guidance, even though they want the freedom to make their own choices and to explore the data if they want to," said Esther Dyson, editor of the blog Release 0.9 and an advisor to ChoiceStream.

While it's an interesting point that consumers are overwhelmed, I don't think that tells the full story.

2005 and '06 had some big stories about identity theft, MySpace stalking, data loss, government domestic observation and other news that really hit at the core of peoples' sense of security. I would find it interesting to research how online marketers changed their tactics to expressely address security concerns to their users, while at the same time, tried to understand what their users wanted so that they could provide the right value to the consumer.

Time will tell if this effect is pendular, we may see these numbers fall again, or they may continue to rise. However, i think that the lesson of privacy, personal information and trust to the online market is something that will be ever-present, and we'll also see if online marketers keep the lessons learned, or will they (if the trust continues to rise) accept the status quo.

Defining Search Metrics: Search Engine Presence

In an earlier post, I mentioned (without explicitly defining) the term of "search engine presence". This came from the dissatisfaction I felt when talking to clients about the health of their search engine optimization/ marketing campaigns. All too often, I would hear the same mantra..."I want to be number 1 for the term X" or "Why aren't I number 1 for the term X?"

This felt inherently wrong to me. However, I couldn't really answer their question, nor could I give them a sure-fire way to attain that position. I sometimes felt that I should be glib and say "If I knew that answer, I'd be working at Google as one of their engineers, right?"

At the same time, everyone who's been in search marketing for more than a week knows that it's best to rank well on a variety of keywords, while remaining true to the core goals of the site. After looking at some WebPosition Gold ranking reports, something struck me as odd about them, they gave the ranking reports, but the data it gave seemed too myopic. This is when I started thinking about "presence" as a metric for measuring the health of the search marketing campaign.

I went to Adam Schultz, and I proposed to him a creation of a simple program that we would later called the Competitive Analysis Baseline Reporting tool. This program would take the core, top level keywords from the client's input... adjusted and perfected by some keyword research and take a look at which sites ranked for those keywords. We wanted to get a good look at the entire search spectrum, so we took the top 15 results in Google, the top 10 in MSN and the top 10 in Yahoo!. This way we would get an overview of what I later called the search engine marketspace. It's a capture of data at a specific time of what the marketspace is.

For a practical example, lets take a few keywords... "iphone, apple iphone, ipod phone" for this example, we don't need a lot of keywords because I'm looking at defining, in a practical sense, "presence".

So, with 3 keywords and (15 Google + 10 MSN + 10 Yahoo) we can expect to have a sample size of 105 potential slots for search engine results to appear. When the same company, like Apple shows up across the search engines and at different positions, their presence is counted as 1. Each presence is counted and sorted for the total presence. In this case, the top 1o results is as follows:

	1/10/2007
Domains	SE Presence
www.apple.com	7
www.thinksecret.com	7
www.engadget.com	7
www.gizmodo.com	6
www.appleinsider.com	5
www.mobilewhack.com	5
www.everythingiphone.com	5
gizmodo.com	4
en.wikipedia.org	4
news.bbc.co.uk	4
www.businessweek.com	3

For those terms, Apple.com shows up in Google, MSN and Yahoo 7 times, as does Thinksecret.com and Engadget.com. Gizmodo shows up 6 times, and so on. The idea here is not to diminish the actual position, or rank of the site, but emphasize the presence in the overall search marketspace. When your company relies on capturing qualified traffic from search, it's obviously better to have several keywords working for you, rather than focusing on only one keyword. Unfortunately, all too often, SEO/ SEM companies attract the client by either telling the prospect what they want to hear, or implying that ranking on their top keyword is paramount to success.

What we see here is a lack of education and a hype of expectations. When the client is properly educated on the strategies of SEO and SEM, they're more likely to abandon the expectation of the single keyword on top hope and adopt a more gestalt view of the search engines as an environment that changes, evolves and fluctuates. Once they see that, they'll recognize the value of having several keywords that work for them and not just one.

Techdirt's Insight Community

Techdirt, one of the sites I read several times a day is looking for bloggers to join their community of experts in technology, business and the internet to become a source of feedback and information.

Currently, it's in beta, so all you have to do is sign up, list your blog, recommend a few other blogs for them to look at and they'll contact you when they can. Techdirt's Insight Community should become a valuable resource for businesses, bloggers and tech-affecionados. Techdirt's corporate intelligence is one of the gold standards, like Hitwise, of information gathering on the web.

Of course, I signed up and recommended Garrett French, Natasha Robinson and Eric Mattson to be looked at by Techdirt.

If you havent already read their blogs, I highly recommend you do so. Add them to your RSS feeds... they're brilliant!

Defining Your Marketspace Through Keywords

When I first started to apply competitive intelligence methodologies to search, I had to find a way to define and determine the left and right limits of not only the search marketspace but justify those limits with the clients' goals. With this in mind, I developed a theory. Not a theory as it refers to speculation or an opinion, but a theory in the scientific sense of the word to mean:

• Something that will explain and predict future observations of phenomena
• Something that describes a significant amount of observations
• Something that has few unknown variables
• Something that is provisional... the hypothesis may never be proven, but it can be falsified

My theory is that the keywords chosen as the core keywords for natural search efforts define your unique marketspace. Alteration of those keywords invariably change the marketspace and could redefine your true competitors (companies that have comparable or identical products or services), keyword competitors (competitors that don't necessarily monetize those keywords but could be blogs, wikis or other information/ resource related sites) and outliers (those sites that show up for the keyword results but seem to be un-related or random).

For the application of the theory, I will point to some research I recently did. I was researching the keyword marketspace for a company that provides STD testing. During our discussions, they wanted to show up for the following keywords:

HPV, hepatitis, AIDS, hiv pcr, hiv pcr test, herpes igg, herpes igm, std symptom, herpes symptom, hepatitis symptom, chlamydia symptom, gonorrhea symptom, hiv symptom, syphilis symptom, planned parenthood, aids hotline, std hotline, ASHA std, CDC hiv

While these keywords are good keywords for general STD information, they don't reflect what they do. These keywords dont define the company well, if well ranked, they wouldn't drive qualified traffic and they seem to reflect a desire for information, rather than testing. For these keywords, the top 5 competitors for this keyword selection (the top 5 are defined as sites that show up more often - discounting rank - in the top 15 in Google

Competitor URL’s	SE Presence	Search Saturation
www.cdc.gov	46	6.96%
www.ashastd.org	29	4.39%
www.nlm.nih.gov	18	2.72%
en.wikipedia.org	16	2.42%
www.medhelp.org	13	1.97%

Notice that each of these sites reflect what I predicted. Each site is for information, education and reference. None of these sites actually do any STD testing. The result of this information showed me that some more keyword specificity was needed. What if the keywords were changed to reflect more "testing" and "screening" related keywords? How would that change the search marketspace? So, I took the following keywords and looked at the marketspace:

chlamydia test, herpes test, gonorrhea test, hepatitis test, syphilis test, HIV test, AIDs test, chlamydia testing, herpes testing, gonorrhea testing, hepatitis testing, syphilis testing, HIV testing, AIDs testing, chlamydia screening, herpes screening, gonorrhea screening, hepatitis screening, syphilis screening, HIV screening, AIDs screening, confidential std testing, std screening, std test, std testing

Obviously, these keywords are much more applicable to the site's purpose and the overall goals of the client. However, what I found was slightly different. The sites that had the highest presence weren't sites that offered testing.

Competitor URL’s	SE Presence	Search Saturation
www.cdc.gov	37	4.07%
www.labtestsonline.org	36	3.96%
www.webmd.com	26	2.86%
www.ahrq.gov	24	2.64%
www.fda.gov	24	2.64%

Again, more informational and resource oriented sites... even LabTestsOnline.org is a non-commercial, peer-reviewed site about lab tests. I hit a wall at this point. It looked like I had falsified my theory. While the search space changed because the keywords changed, it didn't change to the benefit of the user or the comapny who provided the STD testing.

It's at this point where I started looking at the sites that didn't dominate the search results. I started thinking that the CDC was such a powerful resource, it essentially overwhelmed the search intentions of the user and forced its way into the results. So, what I did was compared the sites from both keyword lists.

I found that in the first keyword list, where the focus was not on testing or screening, cumulatvely, the companies that offered STD testing accounted for less than 2% of the total search marketspace. Looking at the second, more "testing" oriented keywords, sites that offered STD testing occupied just over 9% of the keyword marketspace. This is significant enough not to happen by chance.

The result was that after looking at the entire marketspace, companies that offer STD testing, in general, dont use SEO as one of their strategies. The result of the research showed that there was a distinct vulnerability in this particular market that had yet to be exploited by a smart company. However, to get over the .gov and .org hurdle, they had to be explicit and specific in their keyword choices. Otherwise, they'd get bowled over by the CDC like almost every other STD testing company that did show up.

When we use the checklist: Do these results provide any predictive power? Yes, they describe and identify both a vulnerability and a hurdle. Do these results take into account a significant observable size of data? Yes, the first one takes into account over 600 data points and the second on takes over 900 data points into consideration. Are the unknown variables known? Not really, unless I had access to Google's algorithm and a few PhD's... then I might be able to identify the variables, but the good thing is that these variables are all constant. The variables only change when the algorithms of the search engines change. Lastly, was the theory falsified? No, the data just wasn't where we expected it to be.

I would enjoy any and all feedback, this is something that I've thought about for a long time... and subjecting it to my peers for scrutiny will only make it better.

Perception Blindness and Competitive Intelligence Methodologies

For those of you who know me, you know that Michael Shermer is one of my heroes. Ever since I read his book "Why People Believe Weird Things", I realized how much of my life I had spent being a pattern seeking animal. I loved science, but never took it to be much more than a series of facts or theories. In fact, I couldnt even define "theory" very well.

It is due in part of Shermer and the Skeptic Society and Magazine that I live and breathe evidence. I need evidence in life and evidence in my work. Analytics seem to me a perfect example in marketing that evidence is needed. Before I do that, I wanted to show you a video... and you must watch this before you read on... from Michael Shermer's talk at TED - (it's short... less than 3 minutes).



Did you watch that? Did you miss it? Did you see it?

Perceptual Blindness hits all analytics readers at some point or another. Often times, when I'm speaking to a client about competitive intelligence, they think that it's a "thing" that I do. In reality, it's a process... like science is a process. Competitive Intelligence is a methodology and a way to process information in order to make predictions about something. Often times, it's about M&A's... in my line of work, it's about looking at an existing strategy of a selected sample of companies who dominate a keyword marketspace and determining what they're doing and potentially, what they're going to do... then comparing that against the goals of the client and the trends of the industry and making recommendations.

Simply put, it's multivariate research and statistics with evidence guided intuition and theory... and this is the important part - It has to be measurable. Perception blindness occurs when the analyst goes into the research with more than just the goals of the clients. The client often has their own expectations of what you can do, or what the industry is like. I used to tell people that "you know your business, I know your business online". It's two different animals.

One of my old clients wanted me to do an intelligence report on some of their competitors. They gave me a list of competitors and I went to work. When I finished it and presented it, they were impressed, they loved it and all was good. However, I had a nagging feeling in the back of my head. I felt that I had missed something. When I got back to work, I used a program we developed called the "competitive analysis baseline reporting tool". While it was a fairly simple scraper and easy to program through an excel macro... the reporting capability was, in my opinion, very powerful. I found that looking through their online competition, only one of the competitors they mentioned even had a presence (from a search engine marketing perspective). As soon as I found who their online competitors were, I was able to do some more research, report it, and the result was a 20-40% increase in all of their benchmark analytics. If I hadn't done that, if I hadn't recognized my own perception blindness, I wouldn't have done everything I possibly could to help that client.

In the future, I will be talking more about perception blindness in analytics and how to avoid some common mistakes.

For now, if you liked the 3 minute clip... here's the entire lecture from Michael Shermer from TED. It's brilliant.

MarketSmart Interactive Closes Its Doors

For the past two years, I worked for a single company with three names: Keyword Ranking, WebSourced and lastly, MarketSmart Interactive. On Friday, 5 Jan 07, MSI closed its doors for the last time. People like Garrett French, Andy Beal and Stephen Ward (all of them are amazingly smart and talented people that I have no end of respect for) have posted on its closing and its effects on them.

From MSI's peak in 2005, where we had more than 150 people, to December 06, when the company had about 30 total employees, we've all had some very hard times. Without going into some of the details of the problems with MSI (which are all well known), 21 people... 21 amazing, talented, smart, creative people lost their jobs. I however, have been rolled over into our sister company MarketSmart Advertising - MSA along with 8 other talented people.

On an emotional level, I've poured my heart and soul into MSI, I've been told by dozens of people about the writing on the wall... MSI was doomed to fail... some very talented people from MSA gave everything to save it, but in the end, it hemhorraged out and it was the best decision to remove the feeding tube and let it go. I feel guilty that so many good people, people that made me grow personally and professionally are out of a job, relieved that I still have a job, but it's pretty hard. I have nothing but faith in MSA, and their leaders and their people... they seem like a great bunch of people and I'm excited for the new opportunity, but it's always tough to transition and I'll always remember the great people at MSI. Stephen Ward says it brilliantly.

"It’s a harsh truth that being employed is like being alive. It’s ultimately a temporary condition that nobody likes to see brought to an end. I’m not suggesting that anybody has died, of course, but it’s difficult to tell the difference when you look at the faces of your coworkers."

On monday, I join MSA to add my expertise in competitive intelligence, seo, sem and usability to their already creative efforts. I hope to do well there. I'm nervous and a little scared, but excited and optimistic.

To all the amazing people who lost their job, I'm sorry, I already miss you and I know that it was not our fault. We were like the paramedics trying to resuscitate the patient after they flatlined. We tried, we failed... but I know that we all came out of this smarter, tougher and better.

Homosexuals Lead Social Network Usage and Acceptance

From ClickZ and MarketingVox comes a report from Harris Interactive and Witeck-Combs Communications that the Lesbian/ Gay/ Bi-Sexual individuals consume social media more than their straight counterparts.

Lets look at some of the data:

YouTube:
visits for an hour or less per week
27% of the GLBT population
22% of the heterosexual population

Craigslist.org:
Visits for an hour or less per week
20% of the GLBT population
13% of the heterosexual population

Friendster.com:
Visits for an hour or less per week
11% of the GLBT population
4% of the heterosexual population

MySpace.com:
Visits for an hour or less per week
33% of the GLBT population
28% of the heterosexual population

75% of the GLBT population classify themselves as heavy internet users
59% of the heterosexual population classify themselves as heavy internet users.

What does this imply for marketers and people who want to use interactive media, social networking and other aspects of social media to get their point across?

One of the things I think that may play a part in this is that because there is still a stigma associated with homosexuality, there are still many people in mainstream culture who continue to tread out the myths about homosexuals, there are still many gay people who are finding the social needs in a safe environment through social media. They're expressing themselves and finding an outlet for contact, friendship, support and fun.

Does this mean that marketers are going to have to "gay it up"? Firstly, to do so would be condescending and pandering. Secondly, marketers will have to realize that it's not the sexual preference that dictates most consumption, it's the willingness to explore alternative areas other than just the traditional media, that makes this population unique and on the cutting edge of social media exploration.

I think that Harris Interactive and Witeck-Combs have given all of us some insight into a group of people who are brave, explorative, creative and keep finding new ways to turn culture's pressure on them into innovation.

Stereotypes, Demographics, Soy Lattes and NPR

NPR recently did a story that I had the distinct pleasure in listening to called "The Listeners of National Public Radio". The show was done by NPR's On The Media. What impressed me was the incredible power of stereotyping and how it skews actual data.

I listen to NPR almost exclusively. I find that they have good analysis, good stories and a diverse group of people sharing different ideas in civil debate and discourse. So you can understand my shock when I heard a family member refer to NPR as "National Propaganda Radio"... he continued... "I'm upset that so much of my tax dollars go to support such a blatantly biased service". This isn't the first time I've heard NPR get blasted by people. On Fox News Sunday, the expert panelists Mara Liasson and Juan Williams are both correspondents for NPR, and on FNS, they tend to skew left of the political spectrum. This has always bothered me just a little bit, it seems to lend credence to the "left leaning" of NPR. An excellent analysis of that perception has already been done by Geoffrey Nunberg in his new book - Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising. Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving Left-Wing Freak Show.

So, when I heard On The Media's show about NPR's demographics, I wanted to share some of the actual data gathered.

NPR Listeners are more likely to:

• Visit Starbucks
• Buy a Volvo
• Read the Sunday Times
• Watch "The West Wing"
• Live on the coast
• Drink soy milk
• Drink French wine
• Describe themselves as "liberal"

NPR Listeners are less likely to:

• Watch Will and Grace
• Treat wrinkles (25% less likely)

From the article:

But one general impression you get reading through the survey is that you're more curious than average, more eager to spend time in other countries. Thirty percent of NPR News listeners are more likely to want to, quote, "understand how the world works."

What this tells me is that while you're more likely to listen to NPR if you describe yourself as a "liberal", many people who describe themselves as "conservative" listen and participate in the broadcasts. While more people on the left may listen to NPR, but the over-riding principle here is is not world view or fiscal/ social philosophy, but a desire to understand the world, the culture and events. This is not a political trait, this is a human trait.

I think that the further from the center of the political spectrum we move, we become less curious, less open and less inquisitive. I find that the more extreme your position on the political spectrum, you tend to view the opposing viewpoints as more antithetical to your core being and you become less willing to compromise.

In essence, we become less human. We become representations of an external ideal, and not the diverse accumulations of our lives, loves, education and experiences. We become fundamentalists to an idea that isn't really attainable in real life.

The data in the survey shows that people who listen to NPR may in fact lean to the left, however what's between the data is curiosity, exploration and a willingness to explore and experience new things. That's what I've always seen in NPR, whether I'm listening to a piece on Himalayan banjo stringers or the results of an election.

On Notice

Now I too can arbitrarily put things on notice!!

my friends better stay on my good side, or else.