Archive for March, 2008

Dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) is the process by which you can carry the search phrase into your ads on Google. You’ve probably seen the silly ads by companies like Ebay who end up with ridiculous ads such as “Buy Nuclear Waste on Ebay” for a search about Nuclear Waste. It’s no wonder eBay pulled these ads from Google last year… they were probably wasting huge money.

Sloppy PPC

Broad match PPC ads with DKI are sloppy. Such automated ads rarely improve the search experience.  A few more advanced PPC managers create morphing landing pages that account for this…but most advertisers are winging it.

Luckily for searchers - the syntax is hard for newbies and scares away many amateur advertisers. But there are plenty of fire-and-forget adwords buyers who are using it.

The only way I can see DKI being useful for those who care about the performance of their campaigns is through their use with exact match and highly researched keyphrases on the search network only. Here, you can insert text into the ad and guide the user into a relevant, thematic adgroup that funnels people into a landing page for the purpose. If the phrase doesn’t appear in the list you’ve defined, your ad does not display.

Will Quality Score Take Care of the Problem?

Will Quality Score slaps get rid of this problem on their own?  I’m not sure.  My tests have not shown any impact on costs of ‘poor’ ads using DKI that I’ve seen from clients.  The silly ads just keep running.  Google has said before that they use only exact matches to do the calculation, and they will disable poor quality keywords… but it still gets confusing about exactly what happens in the broad match + DKI situation.  I guess it depends on the landing pages.

Trademark Troubles

The trouble starts when people begin to enter trademarked terms. Now, the ad-buying company is posting ads generated by the search activity that might include trademarked phrases. This negligence appears to be gaining some legal footing as a justifiable lawsuit, where earlier it was a bit fuzzy and things were happening on both sides. Only if you post negative keyphrases of all trademarked terms in your industry can you prevent it.

Exact match DKI - What would this do?

Exact match DKI prevents the problem, improves the ads, and puts the responsibility for legal keyword use in ads squarely on the advertiser. If the ad showed the keyword in ad copy, there is no question the phrase is in the advertisers’ keyword list somewhere.  Google can disable poor quality keywords straightaway from the keyword list rather than through some mysterious invisible system.

What are your thoughts? Should Google block DKI on broad match? What are some good uses of this you’ve found? Does quality score, which is determined through exact match vesion of keyphrase only

I had the pleasure of attending the dinner for Dr. Abdul Kalam, 11th President of India last night, organized by the Bluegrass Indo-American Civic Society. It was a night filled with messages for the leaders of the world, and for the hearts of individuals. The room was filled with Kentucky’s most influential people, mixed with some of the region’s diverse Indian community with their families…a spectral array of native dress and beaming smiles. Standing in the Marriott vestibule, it was easy to imagine I was at a celebration in Hyderabad or Jaipur, and it was intoxicating.

Kalam, who served India as president from 2002-2007, moved India forward and set up an ambitious plan to create a fully developed nation by 2020 (see Technology Vision 2020 plan.)

Dr. Lee Todd of UK did a nice job of talking about diversity on campus and in Lexington, which I think is critical to the future of our community. During the presentation, a gift of $1M was given to the Gatton School of Business by Melappalayam S. and Sowmya Vijayaraghavan of Lexington to support professorships and research in India business studies. There was a commitment made to increase the ties between UK and universities within India. (more…)

I hope you’ll indulge me a little local Lexington Kentucky bragging… Our city was ranked top 5 in Forbes’ “Best Places for Business and Careers” for 2008. This doesn’t really surprise me. It’s also cool to revisit the heatmap generated by the Creative Class Group where the Cinci/Lou/Lex triangle glowed brightly (see below). The graphic shows how areas are feeding off of neighbors with creative class attributes (which explains Seattle’s lack of a glow.)

The top 5 on the Forbes list were

• Raleigh, N.C.
• Boise, ID
• Fort Collins, CO
• Des Moins, IA
• Lexington, KY

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I was really surprised by the new study by Arbitron, called “Infinite Dial 2008: Radio’s Digital Platforms” showing 33 million Americans age 12 and older listen to web radio, a growth of 14% over 29m last year.

• Thirteen percent of Americans age 12 or older (an estimated 33 million people) listened to online radio in the past week.
• Nearly 25% of all Americans age 12 or older have a profile on a social networking Web site such as MySpace, Facebook or Linked-In, nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of online radio do.
• One-third of online radio listeners with a social network profile visit their social networking site nearly every day or several times per day
• The top social networking Web sites among online radio listeners are MySpace and the business professional networking service Linked-In.
• Twenty-eight percent of online radio listeners have a MySpace page.
• Twenty-four percent have a profile on Linked-In.

From an advertiser’s perspective, this means that social media participants, often the sneezers in social media, are listening online. While I’m not advocating interruption marketing strategies, one could make a strong case for participation in talks shows, podcasts, and other web media events held on web radio srouces.

Ok, folks - I pose a challenge to the geekdom out there. How to disable, permanently, these obnoxious speaker boxes that are attached to every friggin’ gas pump I’ve been to in the last 6 months. The MUTE buttons are worn out (”dimple collapse”) so you gotta sit there and listen to the bloody things go on, incomprehensively, about worthless crap inside the stores. It was some brilliant marketer’s idea - I can hear it now “We need to bring people into the store from the pump, ’cause that’s where the profits are. ” I know a few out there think it’s a great idea. Muzak was bad enough, but, it was in the distance, and didn’t drown out your cell phone or NPR on the car radio. And next it will be video, where we’ll need a different solution (I am so absolutely sick of TV everywhere I go - yes I own a universal TV-off keychain. ) And finally, Google Gas Pumps will surely be next.

How about an opt-out feature where I can pay you five freakin’ bucks for a year of peace and quiet? It’s unlikely. Nielsen media reports a 70% brand recall for gas station TV. Damn, that’s good. But I wonder how many are remembering the brand so they can avoid any product annoying them at the gas pump. “Never, ever buy friggin’ Dr. Pepper again.”

So I call out to you, the Hardware Gods of the Interweb….

I figure if we can mess with the electronic voting systems, we should be able to fk with these things a bit.

So, electronics wizards, how do you disable them without opening them or beating them with an object or getting electrocuted (and starting a large fire.)

Electronic pulse?
Handheld High Output Laser?
Freon-freeze+ gentle tap?
Secret series of keypresses? (that would be ideal!)

All ideas welcome.

Required Disclaimer, Of COURSE I am not condoning vandalism in any shape or form. This is just an academic discussion.

Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox post “Bridging the Designer-User Gap” is almost a follow up to the “Myth of the Genius Designer” which I consider one of my favorites from him.

Red emphasis mine.

….There’s a big gap between designers and the majority of users. …. Generally, if you’re a member of a design team, you are not representative of the target audience. I don’t care if you’re the interaction designer, the graphics artist, the information architect, the writer, the programmer, or the marketer. All of these people:

• know too much about the product (be it a website, intranet, application, phone, whatever);
• are too skilled in using computers and the Web in general; and
• care too much about their own baby (so they can’t imaging visitors bouncing after scanning the homepage for 30 seconds — but that’s what outside users do).

- Jakob Nielsen

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I just installed Folding@home today on my two quad-core machines. These are some high-power machines essentially sleep after hours. It does not decrease the in-use performance of your computer since it runs at the lowest priority available under Windows.

Join My Team… it’s #117081.

Folding@home is a distributed computing project, that very simply stated, studies protein folding and misfolding. Protein folding is explained in more detail in the scientific background section.

Folding@home does not rely on powerful supercomputers for its data processing; instead, the primary contributors to the Folding@home project are many hundreds of thousands of personal computer users who have installed a small client program. The client will, at the user’s choice, run in the background, utilizing otherwise unused CPU power, or run as a screensaver only while the user is away. In most modern personal computers, the CPU is rarely used to its full capacity at all times; the Folding@home client takes advantage of this unused processing power.

The Folding@home client periodically connects to a server to retrieve “work units,” which are packets of data upon which to perform calculations. Each completed work unit is then sent back to the server. As data integrity is a major concern for all distributed computing projects, all work units are validated through the use of a 2048 bit digital signature.

Contributors to Folding@home may have user names used to keep track of their contributions. Each user may be running the client on one or more CPUs; for example, a user with two computers could run the client on both of them. Users may also contribute under one or more team names; many different users may join together to form a team. Contributors are assigned a score indicating the number and difficulty of completed work units. Rankings and other statistics are posted to the Folding@home website.

People from all over the country have enjoyed a music or sports event held in the Rupp Arena, a place that Kentucky Wildcats basketball fans consider sacred ground. But Arenas and other large venues have a very tough job, with many to please. They must excel in services for promoters to emerging as a winner in the highly competitive tour-date market, and assist with the tremendous physical challenges that changing an entire arena facility from basketball to tractor pull to wresting match sometimes in just days. Companies like Rupp are at are at the crossroad of fans, artists, record labels, sports promotion, and live concert companies – each with special needs. As the music industry changes towards higher end live shows and advanced merchandising, they will be in an increasingly important position

While record companies will probably transform themselves in the next few years, bands like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails led the industry by releasing recent albums directly to fans, while performing lucrative concerts and striking high-priced merchandising deals. In fact, as I write this, both of these bands are rumored to be headlining the gigantic Lollapalooza concert in 2008, where some tickets are expected to cost as much as $300 each and sell out in a few minutes. Just this week, I read where REM is releasing its latest album on the social site iLike.

Arenas Tap Fan Energy

By understanding and conversing with fans, venues can begin to take advantage of the tribal otaku of music and sports. Starting with a blog and Twitter presence, Rupp has embraced authentic, participatory media as a way to get closer to sports and music fans. But challenges, some unique to this business, particularly adhering to the protocols of promotion, licensing, and tour managers. Another logistical challenge is posting in a timely manner, especially while so busy and with events that often run late into the night. People will expect activity ahead of, during, and after events happen, as social media has no patience. I’m hoping they build up a list of guest bloggers to keep the energy alive.  If they have flexibility to do so, there are an infinite number of ways that artists can use social media too.

For most businesses, confusion abounds in social networking, but the team at Rupp seems to have hit the ground running, embracing the conversational nature rather than just making another way to pitch their wares. My friend and Social Media consultant Jason Falls noticed this about their efforts as well. Arenas may use Twitter / Blogs to answer questions, send out announcements, and run contests interactively, and since Twitter a mobile-friendly system, live event activities such as pre-event parties and more may take root as long as they don’t turn it into spam.

People close to the industry had some excellent commentary

Dave Brooks, writer with Venues Today, told me “Everyone is moving towards the various social media platforms, but I think it will take a while for them to hit their potential. Many venues are still reacting, exploring platforms and so on. We’ll have to wait and see the real impact.”

Connie Chesner, Wake Forest University Communications Instructor and Marketing Researcher with OTM Partners pointed out: “For ongoing relationships such as fans or sports enthusiasts, it provides an opportunity to build online/off-line relationships in a larger social context. The cohesive nature of event attendance provides fertile ground upon which to build socially dynamic experiences for visitors….. For ongoing relationships (university sports teams), it provides a massive opportunity to build an online/off-line relationship for a fan base where attendance at events becomes a larger social context than previously. Now, a ticket holder is not just going to the game with their friends they are driving with, they are meeting up with the group they’ve been interacting with online for days or weeks.”

Some Ideas for Arenas and Live Venues

Jack Powers, of IN3.org gave this excellent list of ways Social Media can be used in this industry:

• Post repositories of professionally created photos,video clips, text files, logos and sound clips that authors can use in their work
• Provide some “blogger-only” content
• Set up chats with performers, give links to relevant sites.
• Distribute widgets that provide always-fresh branded content about the artist, venue and event.
• Create a Twitter channel for pre-event updates, and an on-site channel for minute-by-minute tweets.
• Make a billboard page where users can post their own links to their blogs, Meet-Up groups. Flickr steams, YouTube channels, Facebook Groups and all the other user-generated gathering points.
• Organize the masses editorially with recommended keywords, folksonomy tags, content guidelines, parental ratings that professionalize the fan content.
• Distribute digital content that only ticket holders at the event can get: Bluetooth-ed music videos, phone cam photos of the performers with the audience, live shots of unique concert happenings — sort of an electronic autograph for the folks who showed up.
• Promote user links with contests and prizes; sell sponsorships in the user content and share the wealth
• Negotiate all this content freedom with the agents, lawyers, record labels and stars.

Seth Godin further examines the tribal nature of these events

The next thing is this idea that people care very much about who is sitting next to them at the concert. They care very much about the secret handshake. They care very much about the tribal identification. “Oh you like them, I like them”. The Grateful Dead is an amazingly successful paradigm for many of the things I’m talking about. They didn’t make any money selling records compared to the way they made money doing everything else. Part of it was, you knew if you met someone at a dead concert, they had some things in common with you. The secret handshake, the clothes, whatever it was. And that was important and you were willing to pay money to be with those people. And after Jerry died it was very interesting. Because obviously there was thousands of hours to listen to but that’s not what the people missed. The people missed the place they could go to meet the people like them. At Facebook, it’s all about that. 64 million people who go there every day so they can meet people like them because [Facebook] is very good at dividing people up. ….And the last one is back to this tribal thing. It’s really important to people to feel like they are part of that tribe, to feel that adrenaline. We are willing to pay money, we’re willing to go through huge hoops, trampled to death in Cincinnati if necessary, in order to be in the environment where we feel that’s going on.

What do you think???

arena photo credit: Sonnett
reflections photo credit: code poet

>>Special Thanks to Brennan White for this answer: Brennan is Founder of Pandemic Labs and writes the Pandemic Blog which brings knowledge of social media marketing, experience with social networks and experience with professional media creation together for clients.

Scott Clark asked Me The Following Question:

“Malcolm Gladwell, Elihu Katz, Paul Lazarsfeld, Ed Keller and Jon Berry subscribe to versions of the theory that each marketing message flows through two stages - to influencers first, and then to the masses. Followers in the marketing industry therefore spend lots of money targeting those influencers. Duncan Watts has stimulated a lot of discussion and debate by publishing research[pdf] and arguing (well) that such starts with a random set of people, and then spreads in a more organic way - so we should spread messages to the masses (at least the receptive ones) in order to improve viral penetration. Which theory do you subscribe to? What modes of Internet Marketing (multiple or single) would best fit these theories? Is there a hybrid theory that makes more sense? “

As is usually the case in my experience, the answer to this question lies somewhere in the middle. That is to say in this instance that both extremes are effective to some degree, but the most effective strategy involves aspects of each theory. In this particular case, the hybrid argument is made stronger by the fact that accomplishing one “extreme” effectively will actually “double dip” and accomplish the other extreme as well thereby erasing the distinction between the extremes almost entirely.

To start, it is inarguably worthwhile to have the attention of traditional influencers. One mention from Oprah can “put you on the map” and change your business. A mention will almost definitely create additional blog discussion and a longer “shelf life” of the buzz surrounding your product. In my experience, these are all good things.

The difference that a lot of “old-school” marketing and PR folks seem to be missing is that Oprah, the Wall Street Journal and your local paper, are no longer the key influencers that everyone needs to target to build effective buzz for their business. A mention of your new technology offering by Engadget can drive as many views as a mention from the traditional media and those views come from micro-targeted individuals. For example, an Engadget mention will drive people interested in technology to your site, rather than people just interested in overall business in general as would a WSJ mention. It is clear that, while the WSJ provides some targeting of buzz, internet sites generally are more specific and more tightly targeted. Additionally, due to prevalence of blogs, wikis and the like, the number of influencers has become more numerous and your job of contacting them has gotten much easier. (more…)

Lighting Store in the Dark About True Cost of Arcane Policies

I recently went to get my hair cut at one of the most Mayberry-like barber shops you’ve ever seen. It’s the Facebook of the 1950s, stuck in time, the chairs are original. The smiles are authentic. Conversations filled the air. It was a pretty day, and the place was busy.

A person I know well was there with her child, and was talking about how she recently bought a lighting fixture . Once it was up, she didn’t like it. It just didn’t look right when they held it up in it’s proposed location. She it back to the store in original condition. That’s when the trouble started. (more…)