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.

Google wants me to buy **less** keywords

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.