Challenging Paradigms: Browsers and Music

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

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

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

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:

1. Broad match is a suckers bet;
2. A keyword's Adgroup is just as important as the keyword itself;
3. 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

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.