Ok, so I thought that last post would be easy… how hard could it be to embed a YouTube video into a post? One hour later…
Thanks to this dude, Viper, and his WordPress video plugin, it rocks.
As a follow up to a previous post on Web 3.0, my friend Ron mentioned that I wasn’t as clear as I could be in explaining how page views are being wiped out. I found it was much easier to make a movie about it than explain it. What do you think?
[youtube]e4UEvSwfa5s[/youtube]
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?
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.
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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.
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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!
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…
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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.
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!
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.