Learn my theories on why certain kids deserve the cheapest Halloween candy you can buy on the latest M Show…
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Month: September 2007
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Sick Again
Unfortunately I have been fighting a cold this week so writing has been pushed to the back burner. The good news is that I now have a backlog of topics again! I did get Marketing Over Coffee out this week, which talks about email and Taguchi testing, among other things.
I also got to catch a game at Fenway with Jose, and got some decent pics:
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Branding outside of the F500
Conventional wisdom says that advertising only for the purpose of branding is reserved for the Fortune 500, everyone else should be focusing on a value proposition, and using advertising as lead generation. I’m questioning this if the fishbowl shrinks. Let’s say that you make fishing lures – can you do branding in Fishing Magazine? Can you be the known name brand in your space? Is it worth doing?
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Halo 3
Today is the release of Halo 3, a video game for the Xbox 360. It will be interesting to watch if the game hits the predictions of $200 million in the first week. Wired had a story last month about the unprecedented testing for the game. The real question is will gaming eventually overcome movies? More to come as the sales are totaled this week.
Some bad/good news – I was unable to login to XBox live tonight, so the volume has to be huge…
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The Problem with Playing Defense
By nature Marketing is reactionary, it’s playing defense. The consumer is about to make a decision and they have the ball. It’s up to you to convince them to shoot in your direction. The problem is that you only respond to the move (or try to influence the move), but the fact remains that the decisions happens elsewhere.
So marketing is much closer to economics or meteorology, than hard science. You can come up with best practices and systems to respond as fast as possible, but the important part is not tactics, but being able to create the strategy.
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Palm Makes A Smart Move
Or at least I think so…
Jay passed me this link on Palm abandoning the Foleo. I think they made the right move and I’m really looking forward to their next phone.
Yesterday and today I am fighting in the trade show wars, so not much going on besides logistics and a lot of running around. Intel has a chopper on the show floor from that show with the Father an Son who fight. I really like that show, you’d think I could remember it’s name. It’s American something….
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Sailing the SEO Seas
About two weeks ago I had an epiphany, we have been tracking a number of search results for some key terms that we optimize for (for those who don’t speak geek – when you type in a certain term in Google, we do some work to make sure that our pages come up on the list, I check the results for a number of terms weekly). I noticed some patterns where results would remain clustered (we would be placed with similar pages) but the locations would be all over the map. i.e. – Let’s say we were result 12, I would note results 13 and 11, and two weeks later we’d be clustered at 35,36 and 37.
It bothered me that sets of links would move as a cluster, and I think I have a reasonable theory: much the way campaign results evolve and go in and out of favor, so do search results. What was once the most popular link for “Paris” will change from week to week depending on whether the city has something big going on, or if the hotel heiress does.
One of the rookie mistakes people make in SEO is thinking that their content is the most important thing in search, this is ignoring the most important factor in search results – clickstream data from the results that users select. When Google shows you 10 results that can keep track of what you click on and then compare it to everyone else. If you modify your search phrase that gives them some more data. More important yet, if you click on a link and then come back 3 seconds later to try something else, that says a whole lot. This is a core argument why a lot of people say most of SEO is crap and unless you have content that engages and keeps readers, eventually you are going to lose, no matter how many keywords you stuff, or link farms you set up.
The last thing to remember is my Paris example. No matter what you do, if you are optimizing for the city and this week the celebrity is in vogue, your results are going to slip even if nothing else has changed.
One sure fire solution – be sure to work on the secondary terms so that when someone searches for “city of paris” the second time, you get the hit. Or you could just write good content.
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Blogtoberfest Boston 2007
Boston Blogtoberfest 2.007 is coming soon. Last year was a great time getting to meet a bunch of Boston Bloggers, and getting to hang out with svengali Franklin McMahon and Karen, voted the hottest of the Show Girls. Last year also got me rolling with the latest design of The M Show blog. Swing by if you can, first round’s on me.
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Digging Out (Part 2)
I finally got through all the email and comments I missed while off the grid. The latest Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast is up, and I just watched my first baseball game in HD. Now I need to fix a faucet and see if wireless surround speakers are worth the upgrade. More to follow…
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Verizon FIOS rocks.
Today I eat my words. If you follow The M Show you know the story of how I’ve said Verizon would have to pry my last dollar from my cold dead hand based on a squabble about 7 years ago. This was before my new BFF Daryl showed up this morning to turn the switch on for the glass tube that is now connected to Studio N.
Our past residence, Studio M had a Cable modem from a good company who I will keep nameless since I have no ill will towards them. Here’s the bandwidth I got:
That’s pretty darn fast, faster than anything else I’ve ever used. Just for fun I compared it to the pipe at work:
I knew that the download was crummy, but it’s interesting that upload was almost 2x. Of course this is worthless – 90% of your traffic is download and the majority of the 10% upload are text (filling out forms) so that’s wasted most of the time.
Then the glass pipe lit up:
Insane. I don’t think there are many services that can feed me that fast. You can take the SpeakEasy Speed Test here if you’d like to compare.
An interesting footnote – the Wireless B and G machines get around 6mb down, I only get the 20 on the Wireless N rig.
Game On! Marketing Over Coffee coming tomorrow…