Here’s the new features as announced by Compete.com:

New Compete PRO Enterprise Enhancements Launched!
Exciting news today from Compete, as we take another leap forward in delivering the actionable data that you need to drive business decisions.

We’ve made some major enhancements over the past few months to Compete PRO Enterprise, our most powerful PRO offering, and continue to roll out new consumer and competitive data that make it easier for you to discover, take action, and measure online marketing performance.

Our latest addition: Category Profiles, that provide a web wide view of traffic, search, and engagement metrics across 220+ industry categories and 45 Behavioral Segments.

As always, our goal is to make complex data simple to use. Categories does just that, transforming a complex universe of digital data into a solution that is simple and actionable:

“Clients rely on us for timely and comprehensive insights into what is happening in their markets…Having access to a tool that makes it easy to spot more effective customer acquisition partners or to stave off threats from a new competitor in their industry helps ensure that we’re always meeting clients’ needs.” - Adam Lavelle, Chief Strategy Officer of i-Crossing

How Compete PRO Enterprise can help you:
Track Market Share: Use Compete’s Category Profiles to track market share and understand daily changes across your competitive landscape. For instance, the graph below shows how market share of visitors has changed over a two-year period for five leading car rental companies in the Car Rental category.

Benchmark Performance: Use Compete’s Category Profiles to benchmark your own traffic and engagement performance against the industry and identify fast-moving longer tail sites within the group. The graph below shows how trends in page views of four different cooking websites compare to all page views captured by the Cooking category.

Take Action: Use Compete’s Categorie Profiles and Behavioral Segments to understand and design specific media plans and campaigns to reach unique consumer groups. For instance, you can see all the search keywords that are driving traffic to sites in a specific category (Cooking Industry keywords shown below) or behavioral segment and make sure you have incorporated them into your SEM campaigns.

The 2009 Clickable Guru’s Guide To Better Search Engine Marketing - is free, and you can become a “Clickable Guru” if you want - here’s the details which I got from Max Kalehoff, VP Marketing at Clickable, who is also a friend and supporter of my blog.

This book is simple and accessible to beginners, yet equally valuable for advanced online marketing professionals. You can download the free electronic version (http://bit.ly/qE14V), or let me know your snail-mail address and we’ll send you a hardcopy. If you like it, all we ask is that you tell your friends and pass along the link on Facebook, Twitter, or your blog.

Who Are The Gurus? The Guru’s Guide is an anthology of teachings from our team of search evangelists, who worked undercover for the past year to help struggling marketers. Their work gives back to the community, while helping us make better online advertising products. Online video is one of my hobbies, so I channeled my ninja skills to create this Guru Video Blog Post: http://bit.ly/1RExLe.

Become A Guru! We also launched a contest to identify the next Clickable Guru. Details are in our newly launched Forums, a new venue for interactive marketers to get help and connect with the Clickable Gurus and our product team. Visit: http://bit.ly/Az2oJ

There’s also an official announcement on the Clickable Blog -

I’ve been to several Clickable events, mostly the Interesting Cafe series including the last one with Peter Thum.  The video of Peter Thum’s talk about Ethos Water was quite inspiring and he let out a gem, but something mostly unrelated to his product (wish I had the video to point to what the said) - here’s the gist of it, as I recall it.

After experiencing water crises while working in South Africa, Peter Thum left his job to found Ethos Water. His mission: Address the world water crisis and help children get clean water. He led Ethos through its acquisition by Starbucks in 2005. Ethos humanitarian water grants will reach $10 million by 2010. All are welcomed to join the Clickable team to hear Peter’s inspiring story at Interesting Cafe, our monthly community and culture event. As always, we’ll have beer and wine bar, and refreshments.

Know someone who’s be interested in this talk? Feel free to share the link.

When: June 30, 2009, from 6:30pm - 8:30pm

Where: Clickable New York Headquarters, 7 West 22nd Street, New York City

What Peter Thum said - as we move farther up the chain of our “marketing message” it has to be shorter and shorter - so that it becomes a “catch phrase” - and this would relate very well to Search Marketing and the kind of campaigns you can run in AdWords and monitor and optimize using Clickable’s interface.  At the top of the pyramid,  you providing very little information, mostly a phrase, you are trying to catch a fish that has already bitten, taken the bait, and reel them in - you don’t want too much data to confuse a prospect that is ready to decide.

However, Social Media, being closer to the “base” of the pyramid, and involved in affinities and undeclared likes and dislikes,  allows much more information and dissemination of information, conversation.  Can Social Media be taught?  I don’t know for sure, but I think there’s a continuum that starts with Social Media and ends with Search (with another “inverted pyramid” where Social Media is done on your “Search” Customers - but that’s the subject of another post on another day).

Of course, I’m not sure my description is totally what Peter Thum said - or at least, my interpretation of it, but it explained how Ethos Water needed to refine their message to a catch phase - figure out who the target audience was and what they would respond to - and the knowledge of how to do this, the Branding around it, was quite complex - as is the Branding Message of Ethos Water.

Getting back to the Clickable Guru’s Guide to Search Marketing - the Guru’s Guide gets you to the point where you can articulate the “catch phrases” you want to advertise on, artfully, using Google’s and Clickable’s interfaces - to the point where you can excel, if you want to, at Search Marketing.

While we didn’t talk about Twitter, or really, much about the book (and that’s the funny thing, but sometimes Tweetups tend to be “unstructured” and there is a role for announcements - and maybe a short talk about the book, as part of a PR event, having some books on hand, would be optimal).

Laura Fitton, @Pistachio,  wasn’t at the Twitter for Dummies Tweetup, but she’s probably smiling because her new startup got funded last month - and I did see her speak at Jeff Pulver’s 140 Conference around the same time, as well.

Laura “Pistachio” Fitton’s TechStars project, OneForty, has received an angel round of funding to the tune of around $250,000 just 15 days into the business accelerator session.

Getting back to the Twitter for Dummies book - according to the Amazon Description - it covers…:

Twitter, the simple-to-use microblogging service, offers immense benefits for businesses and organizations. Fire departments, political candidates, and C0EOs have used Twitter to share up-to-the-minute information. Laura Fitton, maybe better known by her Twitter handle - @Pistachio, has more than 10,000 followers on Twitter, and gives presentations on how to use Twitter to build business and personal opportunity. She’s joined by Michael Gruen and Leslie Poston to share Twitter expertise in this easy-to-follow guide.

Here’s co-author of Twitter for Dummies book,  Michael Gruen and a friend, Cecilia, showing off the new book - it’s about time we had a Twitter for Dummies book as we’ve had so many other of the Dummies series - and I’ve bought a few over the years, even the Web Analytics for Dummies book - which was good, at the time it was published.

In fact, I just bought Twitter for Dummies for my iPhone (Kindle Reader) and when I’m done reading the book I’ll review it here.

Read/WriteWeb has the best post I’ve seen, so far, this morning on what the new Google OS might mean to us.

This morning the blogosphere is abuzz with the late-breaking news about Google’s new Chrome OS, a combination of the Chrome browser and windowing system running on top of a Linux kernel.

However, I want to point out my Google Trend is Sloping Downward post, where and why Google is doing this.   I’m going to take a stab and say that Google wants to provide the OS for new laptops and desktops - to replace Microsoft.

People already have a lot questions about the Chrome OS and the answers may ultimately determine how well it succeeds as a true competitor to both Microsoft and Apple, as is being widely speculated.

Apple?   Is anyone really going to replace Apple?   I don’t see that happening .

Some of the TED people, who have offices nearby, are here with me. The subject is New Business Models for Newspapers. However, our in person presenter thinks Design is the end of a process, not the beginning, and I agree.

TEDx = Independently organized TED event.

While TED started as one thing, it has evolved to spreading ideas that took place at TED conferences and discussing as a group. Last February, TED conference had focused on why Newspapers should survive. One approach - make Art on your covers, treat Newspapers as one entity (experience). This would be a design solution that increased circulation.

Bulgaria had the best results with 100% when design changes production and work flow. First media shift, put reader in the center of the equation. Latest shift is to measure ROI. What is needed now is the coverage of HyperLocal News. EveryBlock.com. Use Citizen News and Reporting- don’t bother doing national and international news, link to CNN instead.

Innovation will fuel new income, advertising will fill the gaps, and ATTACH AD TO CONTENT and attached to PROFILE of the PUBLISHERS.

The Paris simulcast finally kicked off with a recollection of how reporting was done in 1992, how the same events (LA RIOTs) would be covered now, then in 92.

Today we’d have better accuracy and the amplification of news with Twitter. Filtering and Micro Filtering.

Glad I came. I debated spending the 45 dollars to come, but was more focused on TED (I’d like to attend).

This is a rough idea, and one that, frankly, needs a bit of work - but I’m going to throw it out to my readers as example of what could be done, with a little more creativity.   On Page 9 of the Playbook, Forrester’s Technographic Ladder is described as a way of categorizing customers, but the information is illustrative where it could have been … well, more… actionable.

Sure, the Playbook doesn’t try to provide actionable data, it’s more for ideas - and it gave me one (see the Technographic Ladder, below):

Imagine online customers (visitors) as Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators or Inactives, according to Forrester Social Technographics, however, were Social Technographics provided by Referral Source or by Campaign; it would much more valuable  for Social Media ROI than by Site or Segment, alone.

Here’s why - if you can tie specific efforts to drive traffic to a website with the increase of visitors who are participating (or “engaged) at one of the 6 Social Technographics levels, and your campaign is defined in terms of increasing engagment of, say, Creators and Joiners (say, from Facebook) you’d be able to prove the campaign succeeded or not.

But the data from Forrester doesn’t provide what’s needed to make those associations - or does it?  Perhaps the clues to it are there - but it needs work to assemble the data.  Here’s one way it could be done - but it’s much too labor intensive to do manually.

Use Comscore Media Metrix - for Referral Source

- Use Demographics and Forrester’s Social Technographics tool and create a Technographics profile of Unique Visitors to a site listed in Comscore (and it should, ideally, be updated monthly).  Take a company like Ford, not that Ford is doing so well, lately, but a least, it’s not bankrupt, like General Moters.

Use Consumer Profile Tool - plug in Media Metrix numbers at  http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html

Calculate the number of Unique Visitors that are Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators or Inactives from the Comscore raw data.  Using a Demographic Profile report:

Male 35-44      = 656,000   Unique Visitors

Female 35-44  = 559,000   Unique Visitors

Male Creators @ Ford      =          .21 x 656,000 =           137,760 UV

Male Critics @ Ford         =          .37 x 656,000 =           242,720 UV

Male Collectors @ Ford   =          .21 x 656,000 =           137,760 UV

Male Joiners @ Ford         =          .33 x 656,000 =           216,480 UV

You can look at any site this way - even though the categories overlap (there are more than 100% if you add all the categories your customers are in because many are more than one - i.e.:  a Critic and Collector, etc).

Use ComScore’s Source / Loss Report to estimate the number of visits from a site that are of each of the Technographics levels of participation or “engagement”:

Were traffic from all properties in Comscore broken down by Social Technographics  you could  get an average of how much traffic each month arriving  is of each Technographic level of activity and can dive deeper and look at the number of visitors from each site over time based on activity level (from Technographics which is a proxy for “Engagement” or the “Holy Grail” of Marketers) and decide if promotions are attracting the right types of visitors or the right tactics are being offered.

To finish off this post - as ideas come to me, like this one (I’m using the Playbook more as a way of focusing in on Influencer Score-carding - trying to make something that will go beyond what is currently offered.

I think many of the pieces of the puzzle are already present - but they haven’t yet been put together, at least, not well enough.

First, Steve Rubel published a post in his Lifestream on The Google Jail …

1) We kowtow to Google like it’s some kind of moral authority. In exchange it would be great to see them be more transparent.

2) As the number of places for producing and distributing content skyrockets then duplicate postings will become the norm rather than the exception. It would be in Google’s best interest to guide us rather than let us just test them.

Last week Marketingpilgrim had a post on a looming Anti Trust case against Google in Google: Pay No Attention to the Behemoth behind the Curtain where Google was portrayed as”…convincing people (or the government) you’re no big deal is kind of a big deal when you’re one deal away from anti-trust proceedings.”

Then, the DOJ did pounce on Google even as TechCrunch gives us the news …as The DOJ Pounces, Google Makes Book Search Even Better with

….Google received some unfortunate news today, with the U.S. Department of Justice formally announcing the investigation of the $125 million settlement Google made with the Author’s Guild to pay authors a nominal fee for copyrighted works it has scanned and made available on the Web. The settlement has drawn its fair share of critics, including Jeff Bezos. But Google keeps on plugging away, making its book search better and better.

The next day, Johnon.com publishes an important post on how we’re all now been brainwashed by Google to be  SEO Tools (of Google) and I found much of the thinking on this post similar to many posts I’ve published over the last two years that have been critical of Google, except now, it’s coming from more and more authorities, supporting my own opinion.

” …..it is very clear that Google stifles innovation on the Internet so that it can control traffic flows and the profits associated with that traffic. It is very clear that Google acts as a censor for public dissemination of freely-published materials, and it is becoming more clear that the popularity of SEO is helping Google (and the other search engines) further their control and censorship at all of our expense.

Honestly, did you ever really believe that a commercial entity claiming to want to “organize all of the world’s information” would be unbiased, altruistic and benevolent?”

While risking invoking Matt Cutts “ere” that we all misunderstand Google and it has only the most benevolent intentions with the Webmaster Guidelines; I accept he has to take a supportive position on Google guidelines because still works for Google and, to a good degree, he was instrumental in coming up with many of the Webmaster Guidelines in the first place.  However, Johnon attacks many of the Webmaster Guidelines as self serving to Google and destructive to site owners, and to real creativity, and I believe he’s right.   Besides, Google, for all it’s “good” intentions, sounds to me more like one of those 9 foot tall Aliens from “To Serve Man”, that famous Twilight Zone Episode:

….. The spaceship that freely transports humans is taking them to be meals for their alien “friends.”

Ok, I’m having fun with this … consider that Google is, more and more, being seen as “seeking our own data” and using it for it’s own purposes.  That would be fine, if Google were just a private company with a much smaller sphere of influence, but doing it’s own thing and not affecting all of mankind with it’s ideas of “structured data” - but it’s the main player and  it’s totally unregulated.

Here’s a couple ways where the tide of opinion is now turning against Google - and I’m have a feeling that I’m  just scratching the surface.

Consider Keywords …

… the entire field of keyword research developed around search engines and their private, unilaterally imposed policies. If you are catering to search engines, you need an SEO and keyword researcher. But there is no reason why publishers (masters of language and communication, at least if they survive in a free marketplace) need a third party to tell them what words to use in their document.

Google corrupted the entire Internet with it’s concept of interlinking, according to Johnon:

External linking strategies only exist because of search engine’s corruption of the publishing process. Otherwise, external linking (and anchor text) is a free market innovation, outside of the purview of the content publisher (it is others, external, who make those links to your content). If you want to start to understand how Google stifles innovation, and recognize how Google is one of the worst web citizens the web has ever encountered, start with linking

Consider that many companies can’t get good links and end up buying Text Links and Text Link Ads - and it works (if you buy the right ones, so I’m told).    Links became important because Google needed a way to determine how important each page was in it’s search index - but links aren’t often “endourcements”, they way they used to be - and to have so much of the ranking “juice” tied up with links - that’s a Google thing.

Johnon.com suggests we stop using Google Chrome and Google Analytics, stop searching on Google and use Bing - (I won’t though, I still need them, but I can see, eventually leaving Google) if we really want to begin watering down their control.

Yesterday, Read/WriteWeb has a post on Carton: Search Engine Pessimized where

It’s happening to more and more of the blogs I read: the personality, quirkiness and unique voice that once made them so appealing to me are fading. In their place, an SEO-driven uniformity that puts keyword placement ahead of pretty much everything.

I noticed this phenomenon back in 2005, as Newspapers started to write for “Search Engines” - the text would end up being written as much for the Search Engine and it’s obtuse “ranking factors” as for the human beings that read the content.   As time has going on, the practice of optimizing text for search engines has been “dumbing up” content to serve  Google.

Finally, SocialMediaToday columnist Tacanderson writes that I Don’t Care What Google Thinks I Should do with My Content

When I asked Steve Rubel why he decided not to keep both his Life Streamand his blog his initial response was because Google penalizes you for duplicate content.

….. if Google’s not smart enough to tell the difference between good content re-purposed on a good site, versus good content scraped on a spam site then that’s their problem not mine.

My personal take is that I want my content all over the place. That’s why you’ll see this post on my life stream, on my blog and on the Thinkers and Doers blog. My blog is the main source, it’s why I wrote it but it’s also relevant to those other sites. You’ll also see this post on Social Media Today and My Venture Pad. Plus if you or your company is a subscriber to Lexis Nexis, Thomas Reuters or you have a Kindle, you can find my blog which is syndicated through Newstex.

I think what we’re seeing … the Internet is growing up and seeing Google, as a parent who hasn’t grown up and imposing rules that have more do with furthering Google, than helping the audience which they claim to want to serve.

In other words, popular opinion and conventional wisdom has started to turn against Google and in the future; requests for greater transparency on Google’s part will harder for Google to ignore.

According to SM2/Techrigy, with more than 300 results almost all of the opinions about Google are now negative in Social Media over the last 6 weeks:

The trend is gradually turning against Google - look at the 10 day moving average over the last 6 weeks

I used Techrigy because it would attempt to give me a positive/negative breakdown - even though it’s not that accurate, in this case, for the subject matter - figured Google is not as complicated an issue to have a clear opinion about, as some other subjects I’ve used SM2 for, and Radian6 doesn’t even attempt to do automated sentiment analysis (which is probably a good idea).

At the end of the day - I predict, Google is going to replace Microsoft as the big, bad company we all love to hate, people use Google, say they love it, but really, often, they hate and fear Google, instead.

However, bear in mind, I’m writing this post to provoke thought - there are many things I love about Google, like Google Reader, FeedBurner, Google Chrome (yes, I like it) and Google Analytics (believe it, or not).  As far as what Google is doing with the data - that is another story.

And one of the things PR is concerned with is “Share of Voice” and I’ve been working on that, quietly, determining the best way to measure it across several dimensions, placing it in a few dashboards.

Right now, I can visualize

a. Traffic (data can be pulled from Compete.com, much as Radian6 does now)

b. Search Share of Voice (calculated for select terms over time)

c. Social Media Share of Voice (divided up into different forms of Social Media)

More to come, as I test and crystallize my thoughts on this.

And here’s what Philip  Sheldrake has put forward as a starting point for an Influence Scorecard.Influence Scorecard June 2009

There’s going to be a meeting in New York this October which will be the first  Influence Scorecard meeting.  Right now, I’m helping Philip find a venue for a small group of people, which he’ll invite.

October will be an interesting month as I’ll also be speaking at Conference in Minneapolis on October 5th - more on that, soon.

I used Conversation Tracker in Blogpulse because I wanted to establish a sequence of posts as they appeared- noticed June 23 is when most of the controversy started (see above) and the very first place it appeared was on Kottke.org but it’s really Gawker ( <i>Wired</i> Editor Steals Content for Book About How Content Should be Free [Books] ) that gets the ball rolling with 4 more posts between 6/23-6/25

Also, it looks “kinda” suspicious (or maybe I’m reading too much into these charts) the spikes just “happen” 15 days before the book launch, seem to be 7 or 8 days apart and get larger as they approach July 7th.   Maybe this pattern is natural, I bet is influenced by some deliberate promotions.

But who is actually the influentials for this conversation about “Chris Anderson” and “Free”?

According to the criteria I set up in Radian6, the 4 sites most influential in Chris Anderson’s “Free” conversations are Techdirt, Chris Anderson’s own Long Tail Blog, Gawker and Valleyway (another Gawker blog) - which boils down to whoever wrote the Techdirt posts, Chris Anderson and Gawker Media.

The next question … what does Techdirt and Gawker Media get out of promoting Chris Anderson (are they all in bed together in this - or are they adversaries)?

In  Mike Masnick at Techdirt, it appears to be a honest question about the book (see below):

There was a lot of attention paid recently to charges of plagiarism in the book. Chris has admitted to the basics of the charges, and explained it as sloppy editing in an effort to deal with concerns about how to cite online content. I have to admit that sloppy editing seems like a weak excuse here, and a bit disappointing. It seems a bit lazy.

That said, I’ve discussed at great length my position on “plagiarism” in the past — and, amusingly, much of it is inspired by Malcolm Gladwell’s own discussion on plagiarism, where he recognized that someone taking his own work and adding value to it and doing something different wasn’t such a bad thing after all, and that it could actually represent an inspiration. So if I were actually “plagiarized” by Chris or anyone else (and I don’t believe I was), I’d actually find it something of an honor to have my works as a part of something better and more interesting. I don’t think it takes away from the quality of the overall work at all. I would have preferred that such mistakes in attribution did not happen, mainly because it’s a distraction, but the issue is a minor one. If Chris can take the works of others and make it into something more valuable, aren’t we all better off because of it?

In Gawker’s case Ryan Tate stirs up the controversy with a provocative title “Wired Editor Steals Content for Book About How Content Should be Free” on June 23rd and has been viewed 22,506 times in the last 10 days (as of the moment I checked it), but the post is more hype than substance, typical of what you’d expect from Gawker.  Ryan Tate write another post on June 29th about Condé Nast’s Grumpy East Coast-West Coast Feud that has had 7,000 views (last I checked).  Essentially, Radian6 told me we have a “geometric” relationship between Chris Anderson, Mike Mesanik, Ryan Tate, plus a few others; the debate was honest, as far as I can tell, but I’m not sure there’s much substance to “Free” (after all, it is “Free” which is being equated to “Zero”).

In order to create buzz, I guess, all we really need, is a product or idea and a few well known bloggers - disagreeing, right before publishing date for book - like 2 weeks - perfect, and just what Chris Anderson wanted.

Hmmm…..