Archive for July, 2009

Lots has been said and written about the current mood in the country right now. I recently got a chance to delve into the consumer psyche regarding banks recently and the experience was an interesting study in contrasts.

Regarding the financial world: people are incredibly angry, no surprise.  They feel betrayed and violated by the greedy banks, the government for failure to protect them and the foolish people who knowingly got in over their heads.

But there is an optimism that things will get better.  We’ll work harder to replace what was lost.  There are small signs of recovery they try to see in their everyday lives.  People will emerge from their spending paralysis, but with a renewed and hopefully more balanced perspective.  Hope springs eternal.

But that’s not the best of what I learned.  I found out that despite everything, people are good.  Kind to strangers invading their homes with obnoxious cameras and probing questions about their spending habits and lifestyles.  Every home or business welcomed me graciously with offers of beverages.  One woman, a teacher on summer break, baked a fresh batch of cookies and brewed a pot of coffee for my interview visit.  One small business owner who ran a beverage carryout and car wash walked me to my car after I interviewed him and insisted I drive it through their car wash.  He personally helped clean the rims.  One couple that talked much longer than we had scheduled offered to make me a sandwich for lunch knowing I was off to another interview shortly.

People are good.  And in my line of work, Blanche DuBois and I have a lot in common.  We both have to rely on the kindness of strangers.

(Note: I am overlooking the part of the story where someone shattered my car window at the Cleveland airport only to find nothing of any importance to steal.  But when I took the car to a local dealer and explained what happened, they agreed to fix the window while they gave me a rental off the lot to use for the day, complete with navigation since I was in foreign territory…the wilds of Cleveland, you know.  So a bad thing, followed by a good thing.   And a newfound love for my car brand.)

Twitter's New Homepage

It’s no secret that I’ve been critical of the way that Twitter has marketed itself to date. Want to know why most people aren’t interested in Twitter? It’s because they don’t think people will want to know that they just ate soup. No joke, that used to be one of the status update examples Twitter used on their website to encourage sign up. Technology geniuses, yes. Marketing wizards, no.

Now they’ve redesigned their homepage and its a baby-step in the right direction (so far its only their homepage — when they update the rest of the site I’ll upgrade them to an adult-step). The new design has the line, “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world“. I love that line so much more that “tell the world what you’re doing”. And they’ve added search to their homepage, which to me is incredibly critical.

Twitter presentation in Austin, TX

The secret sauce of Twitter is their search. When I speak to marketers about Twitter, as I did yesterday to a great group in Austin, TX (thanks Jenny for the pic from the event!), I find that most people weren’t really aware of the real-time search engine that Twitter has created. Truth be told, when I start talking about Twitter ushering us into the new world of the Real Time Web, my excitement perhaps goes a little overboard. I think this because someone in the presentation yesterday sarcastically commented, “It’s like the invention of the microwave!”. She was kidding, but I kinda like the analogy

Starting people off by educating them on the possibilities of real-time search will drastically improve the retention rates that have plagued Twitter thus far in its growth (still its the #1 growing social network, however). People will start their experience with Twitter seeing immediate benefits rather than feeling like they already use Facebook for status updates (Twitter is VERY different than Facebook, if you disagree let’s talk).

So, well done Twitter, keep the forward progress going. Now if you could just stop the spammer-guys that constantly follow/unfollow me in order to get my attention, you’d be on a roll.

I recently came across a search engine marketing report from predictive marketing firm [x + 1]. The report shows that the majority of SEM professionals gave a low rank to the performance of SEM (a ranking of 1 – 3):

While the report doesn’t clearly explain why SEM practitioners are dissatisfied, I can guess as well as the next person that it is due to the growing efforts required to run an SEM campaign. Eric Schmidt actually highlighted this fact during Google’s recent quarterly earnings Q&A session (for Q2 2009):

“Starting roughly [at] Christmas, people were spending more time searching and when they purchased products, they were purchasing products of less value. Furthermore, when they did so, the whole process just took more time.”

Since it takes longer for a visitor to complete a purchase, SEM professionals are pouring over more data in order to attribute a sale to an SEM campaign. Unfortunately, only 10.3% said they consistently saw lift rates above 20% so they’re not seeing the results that they desire. Clearly, there are plenty of professionals that are “testing the SEM waters” without much success but their continued dissatisfaction may lead to abandonment of the practice. Additionally, the report goes on to explain that companies continue to invest in SEM: almost half 48.6% said the economy had no impact on their SEM budget. For now, companies are investing because there are success stories where SEM grew the top line. But as with SEM practitioners, companies may become dissatisfied and cut SEM budgets if they don’t reach their ROI goal at some point in time.

And one final point. Before you decide to put your entire weight behind this report, you should note that:

• The number of respondents was not revealed. While the report states that “half of respondents … have decision-making authority on spending and allocation of search,” the report said how many people actually participated so there’s no way for one to determine if the findings truly represent the attitudes and concerns of most SEM professionals.
• There’s no context to the findings. While the report provided a snapshot for March 2009, there was no mention of prior findings so there was no easy way to determine if attitudes have changed over the past six months to a year.

While the findings are interesting, I am looking forward to seeing more valuable data from [x+1] in the future.

Monday July 20, 2009, I attended the Google Meetup at Steel in Midtown Atlanta.  My boss had sent out a message about it on Yammer which piqued my curiosity and then sealed my attendance (and this post) with the promise of free food; he sure knows how to motive his part time grad student employees!

The purpose of Google Meetup was for the company to get the feel of the community at large.  For the most part, the social media crowd was well-represented with a punkish self employed blogger, a few students, two representatives from Georgia Tech, some sales guys, and a few managers in the audience.   Google was represented by an engineer from Atlanta who works on the GWT project, a project manager for Google Search, and a couple of sales/public relations representatives.

The first half of the meetup was an informal meet and greet.  The second half was a Q&A session were the Googlers took questions from the audience as well as from questions which had previously been posted on the meet up ad.

The questions generally led to some informative answers, or at least clarifications.  The representatives spoke about Chrome, ChromeOS, Android, and the plans and motivations behind the projects.  They also explained some of the community initiatives that Google was running such as Google.org and Google 101.  One of the common themes in the answers was that the community that Google operates in does affect the company.  For instance, the effort to port Android to netbooks by the community led Google to pre-annouce ChromeOS so that the volunteers would not feel like they had been led on.

Overall, I was a little disappointed that the session wasn’t as technology heavy as I had expected.  The crowd was typically older and more management or marketing targeted.  This may have been a side effect of the event being advertised solely through Meetup and word-of-mouth.

It’s hard to keep up with all the new technology these days. I have a hard time just staying current on the new things that Google alone is doing. So it’s no surprise to me when I hear marketers say that they can’t keep up with the Joneses (I spelled that right, here’s proof).

That’s why I was so impressed with the Barnes & Noble iPhone app. Talk about late to the game. Personally I tend to buy from Amazon as much as possible, mostly because I’m a proud Kindle owner, but also because they make it so easy. But looking at this new B&N iPhone app, my habits may change.

First of all, the app runs quickly and seems to do a good job with inventory. But what is extremely compelling is some of the additional features that combine the online/mobile experience with the in-store experience.

They’ve integrated the SNAP functionality that allows you to take a picture of a book and immediately find out information about the book, including reviews and ratings. And of course you can then order the book immediately. Sitting next to a friend that is reading a book you want? Take a picture of the cover and buy it on the spot. Pretty handy. And they include videos of interviews with the author.

They also obviously will tell you the nearest B&N stores, but they also give you the ability to see which ones offer coffee and which offer free wifi.

So while B&N is what, like a year late to the game on this, they still managed to put out a product that is compelling and should prove useful to their customers. Too many companies today feel like if they aren’t the first movers that they might as well focus on other things.

I say if you aren’t first, so what? Take a page out of B&N’s book (pun intended) and listen to your customers, look at what the competition is doing and innovate accordingly.