Marin Modus Vivendi

A plan to combat "guaranteed SEO"

2009-09-23T15:14:00.000-07:00

One thing that happens in the SEO biz is that there are a lot of companies who peddle "guaranteed SEO" results. I covered it in a formal way on our Thrivepoint blog. But maybe there is a better way to go about exposing these guarantees?

Basically, the game goes like this: An SEO company contacts an unsuspecting mark... er, marketer and offers them a guaranteed #1 ranking on Google and Yahoo. The client only needs to pay a monthly fee and "poof!" they are number 1. The catch is that the keyword is usually some obscure keyword that no one is actually searching for and probably no one is trying to rank for. So the SEO collects their check, gets the client #1 and fulfills their agreement. And the client gets... nothing. No traffic. No new customers. No nothing.

I've tried to explain this to people before, but a guarantee is always a lot more interesting them my long-winded explanation about how search engines work. So as of today, any client with a proposal from an SEO firm that guarantees rankings will be publicized on this blog with their very own text link with the targeted keyword as anchor text. Basically, I hope to preempt the silliness of guaranteed placement on obscure keywords by showing the client that if they do rank, they will not get any traffic, leads or sales.

By the way, have you heard of XOJET? They are a very interesting Aircraft Charter Rental & Leasing Svc in San Carlos. It's worth checking them out.

9/24/09 Update: A couple of questions from friends came up and I thought I would clarify. What I did is link to the client's site with the anchor text being the keyword the SEO company guaranteed rankings for. If enough people were to do the same thing on their website, the client's site would eventually rank for that site because no one else is optimizing for that keyword (because it has ZERO traffic associated with ). It's basically link spam -- which is what these guaranteed firms do -- and by targeting words no one else wants, it's easy to guarantee results, show the unsuspecting client that you got them a #1 rank and collect the monthly recurring fee. Once the client shuts off the fee, the SEO guarantor removes the link spam and your rank goes down -- then they come back to you to show that your ranks went down and try to win your business back. There are much sounder ways to go about SEO for companies like XOJET who do Aircraft Charter Rental and Leasing.

A proposal for College Football

2009-07-19T15:53:00.001-07:00

The following is a proposal to improve the college football championship.

The key requirements for the proposal focused on:

Ensure competition determines the champion;
Eliminate ambiguity in the declared champion;
Maintain the excitement of the college football regular season;
Maintain the unique bowl game structure and excitement of college football;
Maintain each conference's independence.

The proposal:

Implement a 16-team, four-round post-season playoff;
The teams in the playoffs will consist of each of the 11 conference champions and five wild cards;
Each conference can name its champion as it chooses (ie. via regular season round-robin play, via two sub-conference champions meeting in a conference champion, etc.);
The five wild cards will be selected on the basis of ranking in the BCS. A team will be a wild card if it is a. not a conference champion, and b. one of the five highest ranked BCS teams that is not a conference champion;
The playoffs will be seeded exclusively based on BCS rankings. The highest ranked BCS team will be the #1 seed; the second highest BCS team will be the #2 seed; etc. Conference champions may be seeded lower than non-conference champions;
The playoffs will be initially scheduled by pairing the #16 seed against the #1 seed, the #15 seed against the #2 seed, etc.; after the first round, the games will be scheduled based on the highest remaining seed playing the lowest remaining seed, the second highest remaining seed playing the second lowest remaining seed, and so on.
Round 1 will be played the first weekend after Thanksgiving; round 2 the next week and round 3 the following week;
The Championship and a Runner's Up game will be played on New Year's Day;
The Championship will be between the last two remaining teams. The Runner's Up game will be played between the 3rd and 4th remaining teams;
Location of Rounds 3 and 4 will be rotated each year between the four BCS bowls (Rose, Fiesta, Sugar, Orange);
Location of Rounds 1 and 2 will be rotated amongst other bowls;
Bowls that do not have a scheduled playoff game, may schedule a bowl game between non-playoff teams based on whatever existing agreements may be in place.

Other notes:

Conferences and teams retain autonomy on conference membership;
Teams should reduce regular season schedules to 10-11 games to account for additional games at the end of the season;
All bowl payouts remain the same (ie. a team advancing in the playoffs may collect multiple bowl payouts).

Update 8.7.09: ESPN has their own proposal.

Challenging Paradigms: Browsers and Music

2009-07-03T08:15:00.000-07:00

7/3/09 UPDATE: Going back to Firefox today for five reasons. 1. Chrome is failing to bring up many websites that I know are not officially down. I am getting "Oops that page does not exist" multiple times for facebook.com, twitter.com, etc., 2. Chrome has an annoying habit of opening up a new browser when I click the tab. The reason is that it is very easy to drag a tab to reorder them or you can drag it out of the tab row to open a new browser window. What happens is that I am clicking so quickly, I end up dragging it down slightly and it constantly is opening up new windows. Not cool. 3. I still have problems getting certain applications to work correctly in Chrome like flash video players, ajax menus, etc. I click and nothing happens. Not a big deal if it were isolated, but I can't get it to work on properties like Blogger.com which Google owners. Not good. and 4. RSS pages render as gibberish. Not a big deal, but in Firefox, they render RSS pages with a lot different options for subscribing; Chrome does not do that, and 5. I was speaking with a friend last night who recently had a meeting with Mozilla; he mentioned that they were a really cool organization and it reminded me that I agreed and that Firefox just released version 3.5 and I want to try it.

5/13/09 ORIGINAL: Today I am giving Google Chrome another shot at winning my heart over. Last time I used it, I did not like it, but my browsing habits have changed and so I might like it better now. Note, I think the reason I am giving it another shot is their video shorts available on the Chrome YouTube channel. I do not know for sure, but it's pretty much the only reason why Google Chrome has been top of mind for me over the past couple of weeks.

I'm also for the first time giving Pandora a real shot. Last.FM has been my music destination of choice but I want to take my music with me and Pandora offers a mobile app for the Blackberry. Having already parted with the idea of "owning" music files, the next paradigm shift is in tracking music. While Pandora will let me bookmark songs, it does not let me track every song I listen to and how many times I've listened to it. That part is disappointing because when I use Last.FM, I really enjoy looking back at my most listened to tracks because it often is different than what I think it would be. That said, I think I'd rather have portable music... I'll be testing that assumption over the next few weeks.

Post-Script:
Google paid 11 companies $10,000 each to produce a 1-3 minute video about Chrome. They then posted the videos to Youtube to monitor how many times each was watched; the 'winner' is being rolled out into a TV campaign. Here is the video I would've like to see them use for the ad campaign and here is the video which they did convert to a 30-sec spot.

For a single spot, I think they went with the right choice. The spot is easy on the eyes and mesmerizing. For a campaign consisting of multiple ads, I think Defenders in Tights would have created something recognizable in any media format... oh well

The Internet

2009-06-05T12:22:00.000-07:00

Just had a funny memory today:

Back in 2007, I was at Google Zeitgeist. I was the smallest fish in the biggest pond. Heads of movie studioes. Media personalities. Politicians. And me, EVP at a 50person search engine marketing shop.

Next thing you know I get a text from a coworker telling me Al Gore is sitting right behind me. Before I have a chance to look, Chocolate Rain comes out on stage and starts singing, well, "Chocolate Rain".

Next thing, I see Al Gore walking away with his cell phone on his ear. He then leaves a few moments later. Later I find out he had just found out he won the Nobel Prize.

I do not know what this means except that the internet made this unique set of circumstances possible and Al Gore invented the internet. ;-)

Twitter = Spam... and that's a good thing

2009-05-29T09:12:00.000-07:00

5/29/09 Update: Is Google reading this blog? Google Wave seems to be concepted along the lines of the screenshot I put in at the bottom of the post. I'm being vain, of course. But I love that it only took two weeks from when I had the thought to when a product was announced ;-)

5/14/09 Original:

A funny thing happened as Facebook passed 250M users and Twitter passed 19M... the number of email forwards I receive pretty much came to a complete and sudden halt. I seem to never receive (un)funny videos, political satire or random photos via email anymore.

Rest assured, I still receive plenty of Spam from people (or bots) that I do not know; but that is easy to deal with in Gmail. What was harder to deal with until now was how to filter out unwanted spam from friends, family and coworkers.

And while my colleagues are racing to figure out how Twitter will deliver a (useful) real-time search application or slay the dragon that is Google, I've been thinking about how Twitter and Facebook can be useful in the workplace. I'm not the only one and I am definitely not the first one to think about this.

The use case I find most immediately compelling is to use Twitter to replace email groups (think "all@companyx.com" or "workgroup@companyz.com). In a recent consulting arrangement at a very large advertising agency, I was using their email system. I estimate that on any given day 40% of emails were directed at a general email group (ie. no indivudal emails included in the To: or CC: fields), another 40% where I was cc'd and the last 20% directly to me. 80% of emails sent to me were not directly to me. Some examples of emails:

"Does anyone have a sales contact at Forbes?" (resulting in 3-5 replies to all)
"I have Giants tickets. First person to reply gets them." (resulting in a few replies to all and a confirmation that the tickets are not available any more)
"The meeting with Google is beginning right now in the conference room."
"Did you see this great new research report from the IAB?" (with some people responding with quotes from the report to show that they read it)
"I just thought I'd pass along this research report from the IAB in case you missed it" (when people in different corporate circles send the same thing out and people who cross over into both circles receive it more than once)

Wouldn't these all be better managed via a Twitter for the enterprise? Yes and my email would be that much happier for it. This, of course, is possible right now using News Groups in Outlook or other email apps. The problem with the current approach is that the sender wants to broadcast something and get it right in front of you right now; email newsgroups/message boards are pretty passive because they are on a different screen. I think to make it work, the user should have an interface that looks like Gmail except instead of ads on the right, the Twitter feed lives there. Integrating this into email by providing the feed directly into the mail interface and restricting "send alls" seems to be the best way to gain adoption. Here is a (lame) screenshot to show what I'm talking about:

Three things I think I know about Paid Search

2009-05-26T20:57:00.000-07:00

I have worked in online media and search marketing since 1996. In that time, I have learned a lot about paid search, but lately, it all seems to be boiling down to three things:

Broad match is a suckers bet;
A keyword's Adgroup is just as important as the keyword itself;
Creative testing, not bid management, is the place spend your time and effort.

Not abiding by these always clears the path to disappointment. Right?

PS: The title is a reference to Peter King's MMQB.

6/8/09 UPDATE: Just posted a longer post at Thrivepoint along the same lines as this topic: Tips for Google Adwords Testing

Five companies Microsoft should buy before Yahoo

2009-05-07T12:57:00.000-07:00

4/27/09: Microsoft is a software company. They are not a media company. Simple as that. So a software company buying one of the biggest media companies in the world (ie. Yahoo) doesn't seem logical. It's also not logical for a software company to buy a portion of the media company's media business... search marketing... no matter how big search media might be.

What is logical? A software company buying other software companies. Politics aside, here are five purchases that Microsoft could make and still play in the sales and marketing market:

Salesforce.com: If Microsoft had focused on software instead of audience aggregation, wouldn't they have naturally ended up building Salesforce.com themselves? Well, this is a good way to catch up.
OpenX: Microsoft owns an adserver already - Atlas, but this is an opportunity to reach into a segment of software users that are frustrated with Google and other like offerings.
Efficient Frontier: Efficient Frontier is a search marketing company that manages $1B paid search budget annually. That's a lot of advertiser market share in one fell swoop.
Omniture: Marketing analytics and marketing intelligence are all the buzz, but current solutions are woefully inadequate. Why not buy Omniture and rev it up into a market leading interactive data aggregation and dashboard tool?
37Signals: Microsoft needs something to jumpstart them into the collaborative workspace. This crosses over with Salesforce.com and Office Online in some ways, but 37 Signals has a working model and a good client base to grow from. Most importantly, they are very popular with sales and marketing types.

So, I say to Microsoft, "Stop distracting yourself with building audiences and start focusing on building interactive marketing and sales software. Kickstart your effort with some acquisitions and then go ahead and build the best adserver. The best CRM. The best search marketing interface. The best analytics interface. The best collaboration tools. Build the best marketing toolset that can be built. Do it and the market will be yours for now and a long time to come."

4/30/09 UPDATE: Kara Swisher reports a nugget at the bottom of her most recent post: "Among the latest ideas is one in which Yahoo to take over both search and display advertising sales and Microsoft to run the tech behind the scenes." Now THAT makes a lot of sense.

5/7/09 UPDATE: Zach Rodgers thinks that Microsoft would never outsource adsales to Yahoo:

According to the source, the answer to both questions is no. "There's no way in hell is Microsoft going to give Yahoo control on its properties," he said.

Google wants me to buy less keywords

2009-05-06T09:51:00.001-07:00

Just noticed this in Adwords today... interesting.

My presumption is that by reducing the keywords have active, I will be forced to utilize Broad match as a way to "make up" for the volume lost by reducing keywords. This will force me to spend more and have less visibility on the results of the campaign. I can control this somewhat by using Negative match, but ultimately, this sends me down a path where my results would not be any where near as efficient (I estimate 1/2x) and yet I would be spending much more (I estimate 3x). Not such a good deal.

PS - love the Adwords Editor plug too

5/14/09 Update: Some colleagues have pointed out that this is actually just a poorly worded alert to let you know that the account structure itself is nearing its limits. In other words, there is a set limit in the database for the number of campaigns, adgroups and keywords in any particular account and this account has reached that limit. What Google is really asking is that we migrate some of the campaigns into a new account.

What's Popular tie-in with Google Reader

2009-04-28T10:11:00.000-07:00

Google recently launched, "What's Popular" for iGoogle. The gadget is being touted as a Digg-clone with users being able to submit and rate articles, etc.

What's disappointing is the lack of tie ins to other services at Google. How good would this be if it was part of the blogger toolbar? Google news? Google search results? and dearest to my heart, Google Reader? What is users could just click, "Share on Google" for anything and it gets automatically entered into the Google products through intuitive tie ins? I'll keep my eye on this, but I'm not optimistic that I'll see anything soon. Most telling? The fact that the "Share this gadget" link tees up an email to friends... really?

Twitter Spam!

2009-04-15T22:01:00.000-07:00

Today I was more active than I had ever been on Twitter. In particular, I got into a tweet-a-tweet with a friend about SEO, paid search and earned media. Next thing I knew, I had many more people following my account, strangers following my account. But why?

At first I thought it was because these strangers were interested in connecting with others interested in SEO and paid search. But then Reddy started to follow me.

To step back, when someone decides to follow you, it basically means that your updates appear on their screen when they login to Twitter. More importantly, an email alert gets sent to me every time someone decides to follow me. The email lets me know that someone is "following me" and provides a link back to that user's profile.

When Reddy started to follow me, I received the email from Twitter and as with the others I received, I clicked their profile link to check if they were somehow connected to me through a friend or colleague. When I arrived, I noticed that Reddy had one post only and it was a post touting a piece of search engine marketing software that I just had to have.

I then recalled that almost all my other new followers/strangers also were touting some deal or product that I needed. I did not catch it earlier because the other followers had many different posts of which many were "normal"; in other words, they appeared to be like other Twitter accounts that my friends would keep (except for the offers which I did not catch early on).

So Reddy, not being a savvy Twitter Spammer or maybe just being new to the game got me to his page, but forgot the rule of subtlety. By creating just one tweet, the jig was up and there was no chance that I would click on the offer or even worse, click to actually follow "Reddy" and receive his offers in my account on an ongoing basis.

How it works? I dont know, but I expect that Reddy has written some code to search for certain keywords in the Twitter feed and then automatically follow anyone who types in a keyword that Reddy targeted. From there, Twitter actually takes care of the rest...

Regarding the Future of News

2009-04-03T09:47:00.000-07:00

I updated an earlier post about short feeds vs. long feeds with an item about Rupert Murdoch investing in a mobile news reader. The post started to take a spin towards talking about news and I thought instead of adding on to that more, I should start a new thread. I responded to Andrew Sullivan's recent post a few weeks ago about the Future of News, but did not hear back... so I thought I would write down my thoughts here:

...I think that the whole presumed demise of the newspaper business can be put in parallel context with the supposed demise of the music business. The key challenge everyone is focused on is that there is a new form of distribution that is threatening the old norms of the business. Mainly, it is cheaper, faster, more efficient, etc. to distribute digital content vs. something tangible. So people are saying, well, we just need to stop giving away the content for free or we need to publicly fund news organizations or whatever.

I think this argument fails to acknowledge the other thing that is happening. The web is not just an efficient distribution mechanism. The more urgent factor affecting newsrooms (and record labels) has to be that the web provides near infinite choice for consumers. This has been broached before but always in terms of the distribution question ("I can't charge for content because my competitors don't"). But the real challenge of infinite choice for traditional media is the fact that today's savvy internet user is their own editor in chief (or A&R guy). Who needs to have content arranged and chosen for them by an editor-in-chief when you can subscribe to 50 of your favorite reporters, bloggers or columnists websites? And because the subscription to any one of those websites can be changed at any time, the user is in constant control of their experience.

Check out the top 10 most visited websites online. 80% of them are focused on allowing users to find the content or products of their choice. 50% of the next 10 do the same. This is not going to change; choice is popular.

I can honestly say that the music I listen to is much, much better than the music I was listening to 10-years ago. This is partially because my tastes have evolved, but mostly because there is so much more choice. The same holds true for my knowledge of current events, world affairs, etc. I rely on about 50 others of my choosing to guide me through the interesting topics of the day. I am more than willing to support them, the content producers, but I can no longer stomach paying for a newspaper subscription which doesn't give me what I want and provides zero choice.

So the question really is: If we can retain the reporters doing the work they do and find an efficient way to pay them what they are worth, do we really care if the distributors of news papers die?

Bye Bye Google Adsense

2009-03-13T09:25:00.000-07:00

After 5 years*, 14,910 impressions, 85 clicks and $19.81 earned, I am taking advertisements supplied by Google Adsense off of Marin Modus today. Despite the decent $1.33 CPM, profits are not the motivating factor here.

With Google's announcement that they are adding behavioral targeting capabilities to their ad network, they have required that all sites using Adsense update their privacy policies:

As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557 to ensure that your site's privacy policies are up-to-date, and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009. Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, we're unfortunately unable to suggest specific privacy policy language.

So, instead of updating or adding a privacy policy, I am taking the ads down. I do not make enough money from Adsense to warrant the legal work and because they do not feel it is worth their while to suggest legal language, I do not feel it is worth my while to post their ads.

So, as of today, Marin Modus is now exclusively a product endorsements site! The only brands you see here are things we like to use and no one is paying us to put on the site (though, if you'd like to hire me as a product spokesman, I'm all ears).

* Google Adsense first delivered impressions on this site on Thursday, May 6, 2004

Google Reader now lets you Comment

2009-03-11T16:55:00.001-07:00

The way I share articles with friends is almost like a conversation. We each share subsequent articles to push forward the discussion. We are busy (and maybe lazy) and instead of articulating our points, we find and push articles that do. This has to be a weird modern way of communicating, but it works with certain friends.

That all said, we still do like to comment on the articles that each sends.

One of the frustrations I have had with the share feature in Google Reader is that when a friend shares something with me, I can not just send a comment about the article back to my friend in the interface. Instead, I would need to email that friend and that process took out a lot of the enjoyment in sharing articles.

Today, Google enabled a comment feature in Google Reader. This is great news and I am excited to use it and see how it augments the discussion.

There are dissenters out there. TechCrunch brings up some interesting points about Copyrights in a 2007 post.

For me, this is a welcome addition. Here is the official announcement from Google.

3/13/09 UPDATE: One more feature that Google needs to add is a 'Share on Google Reader' function for individual articles. Much in the same way that Digg, Reddit, Yahoo, and a multitude of others do. There are many times when I find an article out on the open web that I want to share. If I were to want to share it now, I would need to subscribe to the feed, find the post in Google Reader and then click share. That's lame. I just want to save and share it right from the original post.

Twitter... a search engine?

2009-02-25T11:42:00.000-08:00

Being in SEM, this is a dangerous post for me, but I do not think that search.twitter.com in its current form is the next big thing in search as John Battelle and many others do.

Look at one of Twitter's current most popular queries today: Bobby Jindal...

How valuable is this information from Twitter;
vs. this information from wikipedia;
or this information from Google Blogsearch;
or this information from Google News;
or this information from YouTube;

I think it is more fair to say: Twitter has developed an index of real-time thoughts and opinions. The value of Twitter is the data; but like any raw data it needs context, understanding and intuitive display.

An interesting application using Twitter's index was developed by Yahoo engineers combining Twitter with Yahoo News on the Yahoo Boss system - TweetNews Search. I find this information superior to the information above because it meets the user requirements of in-depth information, smart user interface and also delivers on the promise of real-time information and timely data sorting.

I look forward to seeing what else the other search engines (including search.twitter.com) can do with Twitter data...

Update 3/6/09: Bill Simmon's take on Twitter: "In 15 years, writing went from "reflecting on what happened and putting together some coherent thoughts" to "reflecting on what happened as quickly as possible" to "reflecting on what's happening as it's happening" to "here are my half-baked thoughts about absolutely anything and I'm not even going to attempt to entertain you," or as I like to call it, Twitter/Facebook Syndrome."

Update 3/9/09: I was just getting an error when trying to sign into Windows Live Messenger. The error I received said that the service was unavailable. That seemed strange and I thought to myself, "How do I verify this?" I first thought about Google News, but decided that was too slow. So I went to Twitter... lo and behold, others are having problems too. So, that was a pretty cool search experience (though it would have been better if Microsoft had tweeted, "We're working on it".

Update 3/13/09: More thinking on Twitter after I read Chris Copeland's article on Search Insider. The other search app not covered by the search.twitter.com app is the Q&A aspect of tweeting questions, thoughts or comments to friends. Unlike email where users force their random emails into someone else's inbox, Twitter has an elegant passiveness to it. If you want too participate, you can. If you want to just sit on the sidelines and watch, you can. If you want to ignore tweets altogether, you can. The Q&A aspect of this is certainly interesting angle on search, you just have to make sure your friends are more reliable than Google!

Update 3/31/09: Good article from a fellow Jeeviant alumni, Peter Hersberg, on the Q&A aspect of Twitter.

Short Feeds vs. Full Feeds

2009-02-24T10:56:00.000-08:00

I have been using Google Reader for a few months now and have enjoyed the experience. The one thing that I have decided that I do not like is when publishers publish a short feed. The experience is not seamless when I am constantly clicking and opening up new browser windows. I want to read my content in one location and the short feed interrupts that. Worst is the news sites that publish a one sentence teaser.

To this day, I have published abbreviated feeds for Marin Modus. This means that if you read Marin Modus content in a feed reader, you would be to read the first paragraph and then would need to click through to the site to read the rest. I did this for two reasons:

I was afraid people would steal my content if I published my full feed. It is very easy to convert a feed to content on one's website. So long as you have the feed address, you can convert the content onto your own website. This happens a lot and it is very frustrating to see your content published on an automated website trying to make money by tricking people into clicking its ads.
I wanted people to come to my website. I have an ego and watching the stats on Google Analytics and Feedburner can be very addictive. Seeing which topics spiked the most visits and which topics have hardly registered is always interesting. It is also interesting to see which keywords people used to find the site. Mostly, I just liked it when people came into my environment.

I have realized that the experience of the short feed is not as good for users as the long feed and because my content gets stolen no matter how long the feed is, it does not make sense to punish my readers.

So today, I enable long feeds for Marin Modus and I will be methodically unsubscribing to short feeds over the next few weeks... while I might miss great content, I want a more seamless experience.

Post-Script: The news sites and blogs who do publish short feeds probably have similar reasons as me. They also have to make ad revenue and to do so requires building and retaining your audience. However, they should consider RSS feed advertising (display and text ads embedded in the feeds)... it might help them make some more money and open a new channel during this tough time.

UPDATE 2/24/09: Ouch... Hearst is going to close or sell the San Francisco Chronicle. Maybe SFGate.com should try RSS ads and release full feed formats? I do like their columnists and bloggers, but can't stand the one line teaser in the feed.

UPDATE 4/3/09: News Corp is investing in a mobile reader. Now we're talking! I don't need my news to be free. I just need it to be up to the minute and easily accessible. I'm not sure I love this idea, but at least someone is trying to innovate technology to see how to solve the problem. In the same article, Rupert Murdoch, "questioned whether the newspaper industry should continue to allow online news aggregators, such as Google Inc., to aggregate newspaper content without being compensated..." I think the news organizations should want products that send traffic direct to their site to continue doing that; it is free marketing and search engines are not going away. The issue content producers face is when their content is not original (eg. it is an AP article) or someone else scoops them or outright steals the content. I think the latter issue is the real problem. Anyone can appear in Google News, but the issue is not with Google because they enable it, it is with the content producers who are being scooped or being out optimized or having their content stolen.

An exposition on my decision to root for Bay Area sports teams

2009-02-19T09:18:00.000-08:00

Ouch... some scathing responses from friends about my decision to change sports team allegiances. Of course, these friends are spoiled; they can walk out of their house on any given day and go watch one of their favorite teams live and in person. I can not do that.

In any given year, I can watch the Cardinals once, Suns once and maybe ASU (football) once... so while I can go to 2-3 games in a two-year span, someone who actually lives in Arizona can go to 120+ games (not including playoffs and other hometown team sports).

Sports is about watching the games, marveling in the athletic ability and rooting for your team to win. Sports is not about reading stats online after the fact or watching the 15 seconds of highlights on Sportscenter. Those things are great, but without the game itself, there is nothing to root for and the pure enjoyment of the sport is lost.

I have great memories of rooting for Arizona teams, but those memories are all more than 10-years old. The players are gone, the coaches are different, the playbooks have changed. There is nothing about the teams today that resembles the teams I rooted for except for their uniforms.

I have no qualms about shifting allegiances. I do not owe Arizona anything and I am not changing because the teams are better. I am changing so that I can take my kids to games, root for the home team and build up a new set of fond memories. What's wrong with that? It's exactly what people in Arizona would do.

Live in the moment and always look forward.

Post-Script: How does it feel to attend a Cardinals-Cowboys game or Cardinals-Bears game or Cardinals-Steelers game and have more people rooting for the opposing team than for the Cardinals? "What's wrong with those people?" we used to ask. Now we know. They are torturing themselves.

Post-Script II: What is the bond between a fan and their team? The uniform? The players? The coaches? The history? When the Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore to become the Ravens, should the Cleveland fans have rooted for the Ravens because that was their team, players, coaches, owners and history just playing with a different uniform? Or should they have waited for the expansion Browns with nothing tied to the historic past of the Browns except the uniforms? Should St Louis fans not root for the Rams because the Cardinals used to be their team? In fact, should Chicago fans also be rooting for the Cardinals considering that is where they started? Watching games and experiencing the sport in person; that is the root of being a fan.

A Longiloquent Farewell to Arizona Sports

2009-02-18T21:04:00.000-08:00

I have lived in the Bay Area for 10 years. When I moved from Arizona, I was a fan of the Arizona State Sun Devils, Arizona Cardinals and Phoenix Suns. The Diamondbacks did not exist and since I never was a fan of hockey, the Coyotes did not strike my fancy (though the old IHL Roadrunners were fun).

After I moved out here, it was easy to immediately become a fan of the Giants. The Phoenix I lived in had no team, the Giants AAA team was the Phoenix Firebirds and the Giants spring training was in Scottsdale. We essentially grew up following them. It did not hurt that at the time I moved here they were good and that one of their most memorable games in the past 20 years happened to be on my 13th birthday - October 17, 1989. So, when I was an assistant media planner being entertained at these games, it was natural that I would start to root for them.

For most of my formative years watching sports (ages 10-18), the Suns were really good. They had a good core of players in the late 80's and early 90's that could contend with the best in the West. Then when they traded for Sir Charles, they took it to the next level and lost a heartbreaker finals to none other than Michael Jordan. A few years after those finals, the team was completely different and I started to lose interest in the NBA. I don't remember if the Suns were any good during the late 90''s, but I expect that they were not as good and it made it easier to ignore them. I did attend some games (most memorably Sir Charles first trip back to Phoenix as a Houston Rocket -- he had 18 points and 33 rebounds; the crowd gave him an ovation when we was announced and then playfully booed him throughout the game.) Anyway, fast forward to 2009 and I still don't love the NBA like I did in the late 80's and early 90's... But as I watch the Warriors and attend their games I'm coming around.

I attended Arizona State and had season tickets each year I was there. One year, we were seconds away from winning the National Championship until David Boston of Ohio State (and future Arizona Cardinal flameout) caught a last second TD to take the game and championship away. But what a season! Growing up in Arizona, I had flip-flopped between UofA and ASU until I finally decided that because I lived in Phoenix (and ended up attending ASU), the Sun Devils would be my team (though I never really followed any other sports including basketball which they weren't good at and baseball which they were good at - and on which team Barry Bonds played college ball). I have followed Arizona State football pretty closely for a long time and there have been several great seasons and many not so great seasons. I try to attend games in the Bay Area and in Arizona when visiting family and watch Saturday nights when I am home (paying the extra $2/month to Comcast for the Pac10 sports package). Readers of this blog know that college football is a sport I enjoy watching and Arizona State has been an entertaining team for quite some time, but...

The Arizona Cardinals are a whole other story. They moved to Arizona in 1988. I met Neil Lomax, Bob Clasby, Ron Wolfley and Al del Greco just by walking down the street in our area and knocking on their doors. Every single one let us in, hung out with us for a few minutes and gave us an autographed picture. That was super cool and I was a signed and sealed fan ever since. I will say that before 1988 I rooted for the Giants and Bears. The Giants because I had moved from New York only a few years earlier (though my grandfather wanted me to be a Bills fan) and the Bears for the '85 super bowl because Jim McMahon and I have the same last name (I was 9, ok?).. anyway, with the Giants and Cardinals in the same division it became difficult to have dual loyalties (though they rarely were close in the standings) and I eventually moved my fandom to the Cardinals. In college, I had seasons tickets and went to every game I could. When I graduated and moved to the Bay Area, friends and family would make fun of me when I would talk about how the Cardinals were an up and coming team. Around that time, they beat the Cowboys in the playoffs and I was feeling pretty confident that they were on the rise. So confident that I predicted they would be in the Super Bowl withing 10 years... always to an audience of jeers and laughing. Soon thereafter, the Cardinals fell back on their typical losing ways and the bet/prediction was forgotten -- until this year. You know that story so I won't belabor it. However, before we reached this point, I almost had dropped the Cardinals from being one of my teams because being in the NFC East, I never saw there games and I did not want to pay for the NFL package (fall Sundays in Marin are too nice to stay inside)... then the NFL realigned and the Cardinals were playing the 49ers 2x per year and the Raiders 1x either in the pre-season or regular season. And the NFL and Cardinals lured me back in.... until now.

Today, I am announcing, to no one in particular, that I am officially resigning from the fanbase of the Arizona Cardinals and Arizona State Sun Devils (and all other Arizona sports for that matter). From this point forward, I will root for the San Francisco 49ers and Cal Bears. I have been here 10 years and am not returning to Arizona. I have many fond memories of rooting for Arizona sports, but what is the point of being a fan of a team that you can not easily follow and to who's games are difficult to attend? So, with regret but great anticipation, I say, "Go Giants! Go Warriors! Go Niners! and Go Bears!"

3/9/09 UPDATE: I changed my mind about Arizona State University football. I could not step aside so easily. Though I still stand by my declaration to root for the Cal Bears, I do not want to ditch out on the Sun Devils. That said, I have had absolutely ZERO regrets about moving on from the Cardinals. I've been following the Niner's exploits in free agency over the past few weeks and have found myself rooting for them and not caring about the news coming from Arizona. So, my gut told me to stay with the Sun Devils and move to the Niners. OK, that's settled.

Three thoughts for the day... Layoffs, Cloud Computing and California/Arizona budget shortfalls

2009-02-17T09:45:00.000-08:00

For a company facing 10% layoffs: Should companies offer employees the option to vote on:

10% layoffs
10% paycut + no raises for the next two years
1 day/week furlough (ie. unpaid day off) staggered so the company is always production ready

There is a certain fairness to letting employees determine their own destiny. It would not work in all cases (for example, the restaurant who does not have customers and therefore there are less tips to share or a factory with 50% less output). It would seem to set up an interesting prisoner's dilemma. The main reason to not do this is probably the politics involved with the actual decision making; that said, it would be interesting to see a company ask employees (maybe it has been done before?).

2/18/09 UPDATE: I guess I'm not the only one thinking about this. NPR did a story on this topic earlier this week.

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The major problem I see with Cloud Computing right now is that there are many clouds in the sky. The dilemma for the consumer is that they do not know which cloud to choose. Using social media as an example, the consumer has to choose between Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn and Plaxo just to name a few. None are really compatible with each other in terms of data portability. New services are coming out to help the user manage their data and privacy, but its not there yet. Some may not think of social media as cloud computing, but what else is it? It's basically a hosted software as service which allows the user to store data online instead of on their desktop. Another example is online photo sharing. When consumers log on to each, they are now responsible for managing a different set of data (photos) on each. Adding photos to Kodak is a different data set than photos shared on your blog which is different than photos shared on Facebook and on and on.

While, in many ways, cloud computing is already on its way to achieving critical mass, the next step needs to be horizontal integration that opens up data across closed platforms and the ability for the user to manage one set of data.

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In speaking with my father over the weekend, he described the budget deficit that Arizona is facing... $1.6B this year. In California, we are facing a $41B deficit over the next 18 months (so let's say $30B/year). With 5M people in Arizona, the total budget there is $9.9B (which means that they have a 17% budget shortfall). With 31M people in California, we have a $100B budget (and a 30% shortfall). I am not sure of Arizona's plans (besides job cuts at the government), but California is going to borrow $10B, cut spending by $15B and temporarily raise taxes (sales and gas) by $15B over the next 18 months.

So who is in a better situation - Arizona with collections of $8.4B and a budget of $2000 per resident or California with collections of $70B ($80B after the changes) and a budget of $3,000 per resident? Is more money a better starting point? Or is it just wasteful excess?

The NFL Pro Bowl: Brilliant Marketing

2009-02-11T20:08:00.000-08:00

Next year (2010), as a test, the NFL Pro Bowl will be played the weekend before the Super Bowl (during the off week after the conference championship games). What a brilliant idea! Besides adding some excitement to game (because the season is just hitting its climax), this is great marketing. I love this decision... let me count the ways:

Pro bowl players are going to get a lot more recognition than they do playing the week after the Super Bowl... good for the players, good for their teams and good for merchandise sales and sponsorships... cha ching
Host cities get two events, not one. That means they will bid more for the event... cha ching
More travelers and more early arrivals to the host city means more money for retail and hospitality... cha ching
The game will be watched by more viewers who are still excited about the season and looking forward to the upcoming Super Bowl... cha ching
Commentators will have more to talk about on TV and Radio and Newspapers which will sell more ads... cha ching
You might even sell more pro bowl and Super Bowl merchandise... cha ching

Some people have complained that the new timing of the game eliminates the super bowl players from the game... but who cares? They will still be honored with Pro Bowl status and who was watching before? Football was the only major sport to not have its all-star game during the season and it is no coincidence that it is probably the least anticipated and watched all-star game of the major sports. Yes, super bowl players will not participate, but that is OK, because THEY ARE PLAYING IN THE SUPER BOWL the following Sunday... which would you prefer to play in?

PS - While playing the week before the super bowl is probably the smart move, it could have been cool to make Super Sunday a double-header...

The future of TV

2009-01-29T09:37:00.001-08:00

John Battelle is up with a post about the future of TV. He points to a post about search and TV converging in a Tivo like box. I think he is right and the only thing I would amend is to say that the need to program TV shows for a certain time block is getting less important and probably irrelevant.

Back when I was living 'Life without TV' in 2007 when our TV broke, I wrote about what I thought the future holds:

I imagine digitally delivered content breaking down into four different buckets:
LIVE: Sports, News, Events, Etc. could command the highest price because they have timely content people want right now. The would probably be priced higher and have commercials (best of both worlds) because of the time factor of the show (it's hard to fast forward live TV).
Premium / No Commercials: Pre-recorded shows that can be bought pay per view at a higher price point to compensate for no commercials. High production quality is important here.
Premium / With Commercials: The same pre-recorded shows but priced more cheaply because they are commercially supported. No fast forwarding allowed.
Free/Amateur: The long tail of video content will be user generated content, smaller production companies making a splash, etc. This will most likely be free, but the best will rise to the top and join the ranks of premium.

Interestingly enough, I thought it would be interesting to go 3 months without TV. Our daughter has gone 2-years without it. Today is her first day watching -- she is home with the flu and there is nothing like TV to slow down a 2-year old! (she is watching scenario #2 above: Premium / No Commercials - which is a DVD)

Teetering back... Google cancels Google Print

2009-01-20T20:23:00.000-08:00

News today that Google Print is no more. I find this very, very interesting.

One, it confirms my belief that the Google Print system offered no inherent media ROI benefit to its advertisers.

Two, it disproves my belief that Google Print was a superior workflow software for buying and selling print advertising. (I actually still believe this though and think perhaps the economy, newspaper advertising's woes, and potential revenue share %'s were what caused Google to rethink this product)

Most importantly, this teeters Google back a little bit from the tipping point I thought they had reached. Perhaps Google is not quite ready yet to be the buying and selling hub of all media. Perhaps just electronic media?

2/12/09 Update: And today they canceled Google Radio ads.

2/19/09 Update: Word on Alley Insider that Google may cancel (or let expire?) its MySpace deal. I expect the deal was not profitable but it is interesting that this is a piece of online advertising that their algorithms could not make profitable. Of course with rates coming down so much in advertising, any deal with guaranteed payouts would have to be renegotiated. But, what do I know? Its like putting together a jigsaw puzzle with only 1/2 the pieces and wearing a blindfold.

Why Search Spend is Down 8% in Q408

2009-01-19T20:18:00.000-08:00

Efficient Frontier, a company I know very well from my Fathom days, issued a report that said spending on search advertising was down in Q408. Alley Insider had a take about the implications but did not surmise why search spending unexpectedly declined in Q4. I thought I would give it my best shot.

The answer is actually simple: Conversion Rates are down.

In my experience, minute changes in the conversion rate can cause significant downward pressure on keyword prices (and spending). At Fathom, we saw it over and over again with clients such as mortgage brokers -- when housing interest rates would marginally rise, mortgage applications would slightly decrease, and keyword cost per clicks would plummet.

In a recession, it is natural that conversion rates would decrease for any type of retail (including ecommerce) and the holiday retail figures confirmed that sales were down.

Keyword spend had to decrease as marketers realized that conversion rates were not delivering the desired ROI. With ecom marketing, ROI is the driver of spend and no ecommerce marketers wants to pay for visitors - they only want to pay for customers.

And because search is so ROI-centric and so easily measured, it is actually exposed to this type of decisioning more so than a lot of other media. Probably why Google was smart to go into this recession warily.

Best Mobile App Ever

2009-01-12T10:55:00.000-08:00

Finally, someone made something truly useful for my mobile phone... and of course, it was Google. I'm probably late to the game on this, but Google Maps for Mobile now offers the user the ability to choose from driving directions, walking directions or transit directions. THAT is truly useful.

Link to Google Maps for Mobile.

Now, if they could just create an app for Google Reader instead of sending me to my mobile web browser...

2/11/09 UPDATE: Google just calculated that it would take me 10 days and 16 hours to walk from my house in California to my buddy's house in Arizona... awesome. Of course, Google did warn me... "This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths."

Round 2: Feedly vs. Google Reader

2008-12-15T15:24:00.000-08:00

Last week, I switched from Windows Live in favor of Feedly. I did it as a test (much like the switch I tried with Google Chrome earlier this year). I had a feeling that Windows Live would be the loser in the battle and thus far, I have not missed Windows Live at all. Here is what I like from Feedly that I could not get with Windows Live:

I can organize the RSS feeds into topics, by chronological order or several other ways that offer me more flexibility than Windows Live. I ultimately always use the Chronological order which provides me one list of links across all of my feeds. This was not an apparent options with Windows Live.
I can read the feed from a webpage Feedly. With Windows Live you need to mouseover the link and keep your mouse hovering over the link to be able to read it. That takes too much work so I just end up clicking it and then I end up with so many articles open that I never get around to actually reading it.

So, I definitely do not see myself going back to Windows Live at this point, but should I keep using Feedly? The answer is 'NO'. There are two reasons why:

Feedly is a plugin with Firefox which means that I can only access Feedly from the computer I installed it on. That is a problem as I am constantly on different computers. I have no loyalty to any computer and prefer to configure my poreferences on the web instead of the desktop. This seems like a serioud weakness, but more importantly...
Feedly 'feeds' off of Google Reader and as far as I can tell, does not really provide any must-have incremental features that I would not otherwise find on Google Reader. And because Google Reader is a hosted service (ie. found on the web, not the desktop), I can access it from anywhere.

So, now I move on to Google Reader. I am excited about the stats page which will show me just how much time I waste and I am excited to keep adding feeds to my reading habit. Just this week since I started using Feedly, I have added probably 10-15 new sources of information. That is something I would not have done on Windows Live because it would get too cumbersome. Now, I can do it seamlessly.

Next up, solving that Kindle problem...

12/16/08 UPDATE: Google Reader just launched a redesign today. We'll see how this affects my perception of the tool. My first impression is that the redesign is pretty minor with some color changes and some minor features. At its heart, I do not see any major changes that will affect my original requirements. Here is what is new.

12/20/08 Update: Google Reader is just what I wanted. More and more, I seem to be using Google's applications - Gmail, Blogger, Reader, Docs and Sites... just to name a few from this past week. The two additions I'd like to see to Google Reader are: update the stats to show me a breakdown of my media consumption (pie graph showing % of total read by source & tag) and the last one is on me: I love the share feature but I need to figure out how to convince my Dad and other friends to use Google Reader so we can share articles back and forth... hmmm

Feedly vs. Windows Live: Start your engines

2008-12-02T20:12:00.000-08:00

I just loaded the Firefox extension for Feedly. The reason is that I want to get a single feed of all the news that I read. With more than 50 regular websites and news sources in my rotation and probably hundreds of other potentials, I found I had graduated to needing a new way to consume this information.

I have been using Windows Live for the past 2-3 years because of the tab experience that they introduced a couple of years ago when they launched. With the tabs, I could categorize the feeds into different buckets based on topics. I liked this because it was much better than My Yahoo which forced me to put all of my feeds onto one page.

Now, I find that I want my feeds all on the same page, but co-mingled with each other. This means, that instead of looking at my feeds separately as I do on Windows Live or as I did on My Yahoo, I want to see all of the articles co-mingled and organized chronologically.

After trying about 5 different add-ons from the Mozilla website, I settled on Feedly. The one thing to note about Feedly is that it pulls directly from Google Reader which also offers the co-mingled article feature that I want... but the interface is just not as appealing. To add a new feed, I need to add it to Google Reader and then Feedly brings it in. A little time-consuming, but we'll see if it is a frustration or just a hurdle.

Perhaps most interesting is when I take a step back from the features and reflect on how easy it is for me to maximize the volume of and efficiency of how I consume news and other information. Incredible. And it is all FREE (except for my internet access charges... which is still cheap when you think about it. How much do you think a King would have paid 500 years ago to have access to all of the worlds printed information?)

Now, I just need to figure out how to get all of this onto a Kindle (I need to figure out how to get a Kindle 2, first, I guess). Oh, the frustration we face when we desire what is new and shiny!

Feedly as of 8am on 12/3/08:

Windows Live as of 8am on 12/3/08: