Month: December 2006

Categories
Brain Buster Geek Stuff Productivity Booster The Marketeer

Multimedia-Content Management System

So I got a demo of Brainshark about a week ago. The idea of a Multimedia-Content Management System was a bit of a brainbuster for me. To boil it down – now that anybody with a decent computer and the right software can create some kind of multimedia presentation, you need a system to manage these presentations, better yet make them simple to create and host. It was funny because I talked to some people over there a couple of years ago before I started working at MarketingSherpa.

I had to go with a hyphen to make it clear that this is not a Content Managment System (CMS) with a Multimedia interface, but rather a tool to manage media that includes audio and video. I was impressed with the system, but the content generators I am working with now are extremely technical so simplifying the process is not a pain point for me (yet). We are using Camtasia to generate video files and I’ve found that a Shure SM-58 mic into a Mobile Pre USB does a great job of capturing audio.

The UI reminded me of Macromedia Breeze, a tool I have not had a chance to try out. Last time I tried to get a copy it was around the Adobe acquisiton and it was hard for me to even figure out who to call to buy it, I just gave up.

Enough rambling, I’m off to bed… did you listen to the podcast yet?

Categories
Geek Stuff Productivity Booster The Marketeer

Second Life versus GoToWebinar

I’m going to be talking in Second Life (SL) on Thursday as part of a CaseCamp. CaseCamp is when a bunch of Marketeers get together and talk about stuff they’ve been trying (at least that’s what I’ve been told, this is my first). I’m looking forward to it because I’d written off Second Life, it’s very cool but First Life is kicking my ass right now so I don’t really have the time to figure out how to get my Avatar to stop dancing or where to buy a shirt for a virtual person. When I heard about CaseCamp though, I jumped on it (it’s all about the content, yadda yadda yadda).

I’m interested to see how it compares to other online collaboration tools. Between the new version of GoToMeeting and a good conference call service that’s a combination that may be an overpowering heavyweight to a challenger like Second Life and Skype, but we’ll put it to the test on Thursday.

My prediction? Yes, prediction. Pain. (Sorry, just carried away with an obscure Rocky III reference, I may even see the new one.) G2M can handle 200+, SL’s servers aren’t in that weight class yet, but I’m only about 3 hours ahead of a SL n00b so we’ll see what I might be missing.

Categories
Daily Life Podcasting

The M Show – I hate the holidays

It’s Sunday, so yet again you can cruise over and check out the latest M Show, your favorite Business Podcast, which will be posted as soon as the upload finishes.

Find out why I hate the holidays, the government, and why I have to short change charities this year so I can bear my tax burden.

You can also build your own movie trailer here.

Categories
Daily Life Geek Stuff

Saturday, it’s a Saturday

Even though it’s the crazy holiday season it’s been a good day of rest. I got some work done this morning including the first cut of my Web 3.0 video that I sent off to the master of the lost art of audio story telling. I watched “The Sandlot” with my neice today and saw “The Holiday” with the lovely Carin last night (good date flick, a lot of fun).

I’ve also been messing around with Brain Age on my Nintendo DS, the UI for Sudoku is surprisingly good, exceptionally simple. The DS continues to astound me, I have no doubt there will be a Wii in my future.

I’m getting ready for a Christmas party tonight. Bonus points and a shoutout for anybody that knows the song that the title of this post came from. Have a good weekend, tomorrow’s The M Show!

Categories
Brain Buster Lead Generation SEO and Paid Search The Marketeer

Google AdWords Quality Score

I had already been dealing with the changes in AdWords for the past couple of months, and then I had a chance to learn the latest and greatest in Chicago this week. For anybody new that might ask “What is Google AdWords” – it’s paying Google so that your ads will show up on the right side of their search results page, or if your ad is really relevant, in the blue space above the normal results.

In the past it used to be that if you had a high enough bid, you made it to the top. As the story has it, one day someone from Google Googled “Google” and found that the ads had gone from PPC (pay per click) to PPC (pills, porn, casinos). As fruit of their anger the quality score was born.

The bottom line is if your ad doesn’t get .5% click through and have a decent landing page you will ultimately pay more for your ad, and as a result not show as high on the page. Like everything else in this domain, we don’t know exactly how google does it, but there’s some statements from google and tests by marketeers that have created some best practices.

Your ad copy is important, you need to test to make sure you stay above the .5% click through. You need to decide when to walk away from a keyword if you can’t get the click through high enough (maybe modify with negative keywords, or use the exact match). You need a good landing page (preferably with the keyword on it).

The down side is if you’ve been doing this shotgun style your minimum bids will rise fast (I’ve seen keywords go from 50 cents to $10 in a week), and you will have a hard time getting a good position on the page. On the other hand, if you work hard at creating relative content you will bid and pay less than those whose ads aren’t as good, and if you do well enough you can make it over to the one box where you will perform better than on the right side.

I’ll be presenting some data and other observations on this next week at the Case Camp Second Life – now if I can figure out how to get my avatar to stop dancing…

Categories
The Marketeer

You can’t handle the long tail

I have an idea rattling around in my head about some shortcomings of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail and it’s starting to come together, but not enough to really run with (a barticle, if you will).

One part of it is that the average person can easily remember 3 things on a topic, anything beyond that gets more difficult. The army has done some studies on that, I have something on that somewhere around this virtual mess on my PC. This explains a peice of why you get 3 big players on the vert ramp and everyone else is on a trip to the long tail ghetto.

The other is the mistaken notion that you’re ever going to make more than a nickel if you are out on the tail. People seem to be stretching it beyond the fact that one must own the whole curve.

I’m also working an an addendum to my Web 3.0 post which will show why the browser will die, more on that tomorrow.

Categories
Productivity Booster SalesForce.com

SalesForce – Holiday Cheer, Handling Pat

Things have been a bit crazy, I got back from Search Engine Strategies Chicago last night, I didn’t know about the Yahoo party in advance so I had no chance to network at all. I was hoping to find someone in a similar size company to trade best practices and war stories with. At least I did get to pick up some CheeseCorn, a Chicago must-have.

I have notes on my laptop with a whole list of topics but I’m not about to boot that up now. So here’s the latest SalesForce tips – we’re doing a holiday gift, some pretty cool mugs if I do say so myself. I’ve added a field in SF for contacts so the reps can check the box if they want them to get one. This way our admin can run a report and generate labels in one shot.

I saw another salesforce installation where a smart admin added a gender field to avoid embarassing situations with “Pat” or “Chris” this also comes up with names outside of your home country. CheeseCorn for Pat!

Categories
Daily Life The Marketeer

Jason Calacanis goes to Sequoia Capital

He’s announced that he’s going to be the “Entrepreneur in Action” at Sequoia Capital and saved the announcement for this morning at Search Engine Strategies in Chicago.

Categories
Brain Buster Productivity Booster SEO and Paid Search The Marketeer

What is Scraping and how to stop it?

I’m at the Search Engine Strategies conference and we just had lunch with a team from Google who showed off some of the new webmaster tools (and I managed to get in a vote for a crawl error referral report to Vanessa Fox, but that’s another post). The topic of scraping was raised and Danny Sullivan mentioned that there will be a full session on it later in the week. My general rule is not to blog during business hours but since we’ve been fighting this battle at work it’s relevant (and remember that AccuRev has the Ultimate Source Control Tool).

In our Web 2.0 world you can make money just by generating traffic and putting up Google AdSense ads. For the Ronin Marketeer, you post quality content, get the traffic and are regarded as a hero by all. Another approach for those of more flexible business ethics is to copy someone else’s content and show it as your own. This is happening more and more in the blogosphere, is already an issue for corporate sites.

The practice of grabbing content from another website and posting it as your own is called scraping. I’ve never played with scripting this myself but there are varying degrees of automating this process. Most people come across it when they are googling themselves or their company and they get some results that are outside of their own domains (often blogs using a default template) that copies their content verbatim. More recently these pages often include copy from multiple websites.

So, what to do about the theives in our midst? Adam Lasnik of Google discussed this during the panel today, and here’s a summary of the answer as I heard it:

  1. Overall, “Don’t Panic”. It’s fairly easy for Google to verify this, your site published it first and your domain has been established with Google. The scraper is not established, their URL is newer and probably registered for a year or less.
  2. You can file a DCMA Takedown request with them
  3. The takedown request is good but Adam referred to it as “swatting flies”, your time is better spent staying the course – make sure you are the source for your content by continuing to crank it out and remain the source.

Keep in mind that in the grand scheme the majority of scraping is garbage and clutter, and anyone providing search results will continue to screen it. But then again, it’s yet another cat and mouse game for us to follow.

I’m learning some good stuff, more to follow.

Categories
Daily Life The Marketeer

It’s Sunday – that means there’s an M Show

boots

Nothing better than drinking Mulled Wine on public property at the German Christmas Market. Back to business tomorrow!

Check out your Monday M Show