Brendan McNulty- Web 3.0

Big Brother Africa

2011-11-30T04:57:00.000-08:00

Big Brother Africa is one of the larger “own productions” in the DStv product suite. It has a Facebook fan base of 650,000 people who are extremely committed about the show. Our brief was to add some interactivity through gaming to the show.

What we did was create a suite of Big Brother themed games (Bubble Popper, spot the difference, crossword, find word and quiz). We also created bespoke avatars and accessories that you could theme for the Big Brother experience.

The coolest part was the competition that we constructed around it; we had a tiered competition; the more points that were scored on each of the themed games the more beer and fast food that went into the house for the Saturday party. Players also got an opportunity to win cool Samsung prizes.

the results;
time on site increased by 40%
new players +20%
return visits +17%

milion pound drop

2010-11-09T21:12:00.000-08:00

I’ve been investigating the overlap between tv and games at the moment (more on the reasons behind that in the future). Nickolodeon and the BBC are doing some pretty interesting things. Mostly not to be monetised, but more as a supplementary service to their tv campaigns. For doctor who on the bbc they created four episodic games that correlated to the tv program. These were played over 2.4 million times.

This is cool, but to get an authentic second screen experience . I like the example of the million pound drop. The million pound drop is a new tv series from Channel 4. Essentially what it is is “who wants to be a millionaire” upside down; you start with a million pounds in cash, and get asked 8 questions, each time you have to guess and put a cash amount on a number that you think is the right answer. You can hedge your bets by putting it on numerous numbers, but every question that has a wrong answer has a trapdoor below it that your cash disappears in. this makes it more exciting for people watching because losing money is more tragic (and more entertaining) than winning it.

The gaming side is great because it taps into human behaviour around quiz shows. I always shout the answers at the tv, and this allows the same thing. You play along at the same time as the tv show, so you get to answer in real time. The presenter shares this during the show (i.e. They’d say you answered that as well as 50% of the playalong audience). If you at home keep more money than the person on tv you can play through till the end of questions (or until you lose). They’ve also partner with bet365 to offer betting games, which you can play to win money. This seems to really work with a maximum of 8.6% of the TV audience playing along.

viral loop

2010-10-06T21:51:00.000-07:00

I just finished a pretty great book called viral loop.
We all want our product to have a viral loop and not have to pay any acquisition costs for getting any new customers. I liked this because it was a history lesson about which elements worked best to grow a large audience naturally. The case studies include tupperware, hot-or-not, ebay and facebook. It went into the viral coefficient, the levers that you can control to make your product viral and which products are more viral. Recommended!

social games prezi

2010-05-08T21:55:00.000-07:00

i had to do a couple of presentations last week and i thought i'd do one of them in prezi

its a great presentation tool which uses a large screen instead of a slide and you bounce along through it. my learning curve was extremely steep (and actually too long) because; 1) i'm crap at powerpoint and 2) not creative with these kind of things it ended up pretty good though;

Social games & Farmville on Prezi

my favourite app

2010-04-28T21:27:00.000-07:00

I found an app the other day that i expect will be lifechanging for me. Its called runkeeper and basically what it does is approximate what a fancy watch will give you in terms of running statistics (distance, route, pace etc). i’ll look at this from two perspectives,; 1 the running dork, and 2 the digital marketer.

Running dork
This free app gives you a google maps overview of the route that you’ve run, on the go pace and distance information and your calories used at the end (less interesting, but still). Instead of buying an expensive watch, this does all of it for you and for free. It uploads it to a website where you can compare yourself to your friends, and show off/share through twitter and facebook.

Digital marketer
At first i thought they were giving away too much for the free version. You get all this functionality, and the pro version is $10, so its not an easy upsell. But after id used the product a little i found out it was a real smart try-before-you-buy model. You can’t change tracks on your iPod while the app is running (something i want to do surprisingly often), but you can do it with the pro version. The pro version also comes with specific programs that can be inputted and you can be coached through the headphones. I’m still debating whether i’m going to spring for it, but i’m motivated (hey time magazine had it as one of their top 10 apps). The other cool thing that they do is offer you reports on your fitness/weightloss etc. i read an interesting article in wired about how people start to get motivated by tracking their results, and i think this could tie nicely in to this (maybe they need to have a free trial of their measurements to get people motivated)
they

now have an android version too, so get running

ebookers fail

2010-01-15T00:27:00.000-08:00

I got up at 5 this morning to go to the airport;
We had a day flight from cape town via London to Amsterdam, booked a hotel and schipol and then a flight first thing tomorrow with easyjet to geneva for snowboarding. Unfortunately there was no plane waiting for me this morning. Ebookers had neglected to send me an email to say that they were rescheduling the flight to this evening. Which means that my hotel and flight to geneva are currently wasted expenses. Apparently they mailed me four times in july and once in august (i checked to see if maybe i had a delusional month and didn’t remember this important detail), but they didn’t (and i’m sure ebookers ensures they’re on every email whitelist possible)

So this is an exercise in seeing how closely ebookers pays attention to social media. I’ve twittered about it, and asked my colleagues to retweet it, and this post is to compound that....
I’ll keep you updated if anyone contacts me to sort it out.

UPDATE So today i have spent 2 hours and 4 phonecalls with ebookers. They said they sent the mails informing me of the change and as such couldn’t do anything to help (even though they never rescheduled our connecting flights). Someone has got a hold of me from on twitter but hasnt got back to me yet.

entertainment city!!

2009-12-21T06:14:00.000-08:00

i am part of the online games group on linkedin and i got the following post from someone in pakistan. its an interesting investment opportunity for the brave.

christmas number 1

2009-12-17T20:00:00.000-08:00

an ex-boss of mine once called me a "business hippy". but i've always believed in the idea of social media as a force for change, and i wear a beard- so maybe i am a bit of a hippy.

for these reasons i love the fact that rage against the machine is winning the race to be the uk's christmas number 1. a couple of people get irate about simon cowell, create a facebook group and orchestrate the mechanics around how to create a number one (when and where to buy), and mobilise a sufficient force/tap into a zeitgest.
and now the uk has the potential christmas number one with the most christmassy of all sentiments; "fuck you, i won't do what you tell me".

WoW vs Farmville

2009-12-01T01:38:00.000-08:00

I have been head down in budget season, which is challenging but fun (how to forecast 18 months in the future with 1 month of data- always interesting). Something that i picked up during this was how huge Farmville had become. Now everyone knows that 62 million play it monthly, but what you don’t see is how it stacks up against other games properties;
World of Warcraft is a great proxy for MMO games, and Farmville is the default social game. Look at the difference in searches for these over the last year. This is an industry that has got busy in a really short space of time, the next while is going to be interesting

mobile web africa

2009-10-27T20:40:00.001-07:00

i went to the mobile web africa conference a couple of weeks ago. it was very illuminating in terms of the challenges, opportunities and methods of overcoming these that people are employing to get their product out (whether it is philanthropic or commercial). i took some notes, so excuse how rough and indstinct they are. let me know in the comments if i can explain anything.

vodacom
6.65% of Africa uses PC internet
Top 10 countries= 85% of market
15% of cell users use net globally= 500MM
Google & Facebook #1 destinations- PV in Africa increased 422% YoY
SA 25.7% CAGR- 2013-16.9MM (2/3 mobile)
Tier 4 (R20/day) is shrinking, Tier 3 has exploded(R20-R140/day)
LSM 1-6 never use data
Big peak in December
Vodacom Live has 3MM on portal
Smartphone usage = 39x data usage
3 things to get net to Africa-data pricing
Settings configured
Content adaptation

the grid-location based services
LBA_ push-enter a mall, get an ad
LBA_pull-GPS then trigger something
How to find you- GPS, cellular LBS (cell mast triangulation), wifi hotspot(US), IP address, user defined
Advertising- time of day/week
Susceptebility to message
Low value of ads, high ctr
The grid-80% java, 10% mobi site, 10% other
90% prepaid

samsung
Africa 32% YoY subscriber growth
Cellular drives business, not just communication
Nigeria highest global access to BBC sports channel

opera
Opera Mini 4.2 – sync with internet cafe- (bookmarks, history etc)
Wml dead- big for games, porn & ringtones
More mobile future- simpler code, minimal javascript, move less data, adapt better for everyone, use what is available- less battery usgae & data cost
Content is still king
Make mobile simple
Site, apps or widgets?
Apps- rewrite for each device
W3c widgets- specialised tools, html- easy to make
Websites- generic spaces
2 year cycle from phones sold in europe to trickle down to markets in africa

mxit
16MM reg users
1,940 phones compatible
Daily- 20-23MM logons, 10MM logouts, 2MM pictures, 600MM packets.
Demographic 42% 19-25, 27% 15-18
First thing people ask- what is you SLR (sex, language, race)
Very price sensitive audience
Things they do (some more speculative; dating, counsellling, ads entertainment (virtual goods etc),social development, radio & TV interaction, classifieds, LBS, social network, microtransactions (skins, chat rooms)
Classifieds 2,100 postings/day 330k subscribers
Mxit confessions
Roleplayers in ecosystem- Mxit, phone manufacturers, end users, mobileoperators, content providers, brands & advertisers, government & regulators, competitors

google
How to catapult mobile web;
Free & low priced data plans
Bring down handset costs- don’t compromise on user experience
Create lots of local content

nokia
More mobile phones than toothbrushes
Next 1BB is emerging markets
$4-$40/day=1.5BB=voice/SMS/internet
$4-$2/day=4BB=voice/SMS
$2-$1/day=2.7BB= nothing
Need to find solution-total cost of ownership<$5/month

panel
Peer to peer learning vNB for getting people to use new technologies
Age 25-50 are not English speakers, technical neophytes, below that more literate

connected action consulting
Social fabric will be digitised & available on mobile
2% of the population care about a topic, 0.5% are regular contributors
-start conversations
-answer people
-trigger discussions
20% of internet content is Q&A
Information wants to be copied
2pm & 2am tells who you are
Robin Dunbar says your brain can handle 150 r’ships

mary meeker 2009 internet trend report

2009-10-21T04:19:00.000-07:00

read this, it will make you cleverer

Social media count

2009-10-13T21:30:00.000-07:00

iGoogle.co.za

2009-10-11T23:57:00.000-07:00

I wanted to check the weather this morning, so typed in my iGoogle page.this is what I got.

Plesk seems to be Russian webhosting software.it doesn't seem like Google would be using it, all in all pretty bizarre.

clever UI

2009-10-07T21:37:00.000-07:00

i was looking at my Linkedin inbox recently and i saw this great pop-up menu over people who have asked to connect to me. previously it used to give you the option to connect to someone or not, now it gives you a whole host of options;
1) don't show me this person
2) i don't know them
3) i don't know them well enough
4) i prefer not to connect
5) other reason

this gives you the ability to nuance how you don't know someone, as opposed to the general brushoff (i'm not sure if this sis communicated back to the other person, i'd say not). i think it would also allow you to not link to more people which should make the links that you do have more effective, and therefore linkedin more effective (or is that too tenuous an assumption?)

the benefit for linkedin is that you have more data about people's linking behaviour, more to analyse...

when 301 redirects do funny things

2009-10-06T21:14:00.000-07:00

we've put a number of 301 redirects in place for our new games site (please excuse gratuitous linking:)).

what should happen is that google should see the old domain as no longer existing and redirect all traffic back to the new domain. however that isn't happening here; it is still picking up both domains, however the meta tags that its picking up are the same for both pages and the links are going to the new site.

i'd expect that this is a blip in their indexing and would be remedied pretty soon, but it has me a little perplexed

Oneapp

2009-09-30T06:41:00.000-07:00

Oneapp is a very cool concept. I met with them earlier today and how they encapsulated it is that it is “the appstore for feature phones”. Its a Microsoft initiative where they want to make crappy phones able to do cool stuff. You do this by downloading a thin client and they put the rest of the content in the cloud. It’ll give you the ability to have facebook, twitter (and other yet to be developed) crucial applications on your phone. Its launching through mibli, an existing application which is similar/complementary to mxit.

If you look at the below video you’ll see that it is the global launch of this application, so it’ll be intriguing to see how it progresses. To state the obvious, it seems interesting to me because there’s a hell of a lot more feature phones out there than smart phones.

my new baby

2009-09-29T09:49:00.000-07:00

the games site i have been working on for the last couple of months launched last week. it was a sterling effort by all involved, and i'm pretty happy with the first iteration. there is a lot of potential for what we can do further; personalisation, web-2-mobile, different content. but the numbers will tell us where to go from here

What google views as Afrikaans culture

2009-09-10T07:30:00.000-07:00

We were looking for keywords around games (speleteje) in Afrikaans for the South African market, and Google offered some potential keywords that we may want to look at. As you can see they have a fairly reductive perspective of games vs the apex of Afrikaans culture;
Steve Hofmeyer ,religion and the bible , high school, recipes and animals.

Rich and varied, as you can see...

for the geek who has everything

2009-09-08T21:28:00.000-07:00

a plant that twitters when it needs water, has too much water and gives you a new follower. its the gadget that fills the empty void in your life a pet/child/a new season of battelestar galactica would fill.

buy it now

cultural nuances and communication

2009-09-08T05:39:00.000-07:00

Having worked in Europe for seven years I thought that i understood how to deal with different cultures. in the online/games industry people are pretty relaxed too, so you don’t expect scorchers to come across your desk. I received this one yesterday from a German company.

Hello Brendan,

It has come to our knowledge that you have been trying to cheat on our company by breaking common code of conduct in business.

It is not acceptable trying to avoid legal requirements and attempting to get approval by our CEO directly.
Because of this fact we will not continue the negotiations with you.

Please also refrain from contacting other persons at ------.

I think the mixup stemmed from the fact that the agreement was summarised in a letter form (which had been approved by their lawyers. I’ve been on the phone to try and remedy but cant get through to my contact. Its an interesting quandary

The other side of the coin is that we have had someone making cupboards for us. He drove under a bridge with the set of cupboards so they were split, and then said he’d have it for us for last Friday. there was complete radio silence; not answering calls, emails, texts, nothing...
Until today when i got this message;
hi brendon firstly apologies 4 not getn back 2 u guys, wife dropped a bombshell (soon 2 b ex) so wekend went 2 shit, side and base ready by Friday am, really sory haven’t had time to check emails

from a customer service perspective its understandable (and we did sigh with relief.) but its interesting to counterpoint the two against each other and understand that communication is really difficult, no matter where you are (those were my jerry springer final words)

CSA OK

2009-08-23T08:55:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

We’ve just finished our first vegetable csa here in cape town. A csa (community sponsored agriculture) is the ultimate in food box dorkiness; you pay upfront for the farmer to buy their raw materials, which they dispatch to you (if their crops are successful) and you get whatever they’re growing. There are tours to visit the farmers during the season (we were busy, so didn’t go), which adds an extra element to the experience. You pick your crops up from a central area, and that’s about it.
The joys of the system are that you are getting farm-to-table food; something can be in the ground that morning and you can eat it that evening (so its not irradiated and sitting in some warehouse for ages before it gets to you). I’m a big broccoli fan, and I haven’t ever had such green tasty broccoli before, similarly to the sweet potatoes (unfortunately we only had one week of them though). Its exciting receiving the week’s produce and wondering what’s going to be in there. Also important is the dinner party conversations which allow you to take your food douchery to another level.
Its not all about eating fresh vegetables and marveling at the provenance of nature. You do tend to get a lot of repeats (we ate a lot of carrots), there is the shlep of picking them up, and it costs a bit more.
After doing the winter one I would be interested in looking at a summer version, and perhaps one that also focused on fruit. I’d also be very keen to get a share of a pig or a cow. I don’t know how well I would relate to my bacon if I had to meet it first, but I like the idea of being a bit more responsible in terms of understanding where my food comes from and how its treated along that path. I think it was fairly successful, so I’m intrigued on how it will progress.

new twitter spam

2009-08-19T08:28:00.000-07:00

so i've stopped following the polite practise of autofollowing someone if they follow me on twitter. there is a lot of crap out there, and i suffer through enough already without having to plough through unneccesary spam. my modus operandi is to search through people's bio, if that appeals and their first page of tweets appeal then i'll follow. and then mildred bowler followed me today,
at first i thought it was relevant (she wrote something about search engines), but then looking a little further i saw that each tweet was random. and as i looked through the first couple of pages i saw that every so often they had a tweet about making money through taking surveys.

And there is the secret of it; interspersed with the random/normal tweets (which i'm assuming they suck in from different people's twitter feeds), they plug in an ad of theirs. you're not going to unfollow them because they're a russian bride or some definite spam (and because of the wide cross section that they display, something will appeal every now and again). very so often someone will click on one of their surveys links and they make money. elegant spamming...

excessive advertising

2009-08-17T02:48:00.000-07:00

i was browsing the interwebs and i came across this page; i don't think i've seen such excessive advertising/lack of focus on usability in a while. You can just see the header above the fold, however when you go further down the page they have four large modal blocks within the content, keyword ads within the text highlighted, 3 more ads in the left hand column, and (a first for me) when you move your cursor it shows the logo of an advertiser.

its so crazy that its almost entertaining

Mxit

2009-08-04T21:16:00.000-07:00

This post is more for the benefit of my non-South African readers, South Africans would be aware of the phenomena.

I had a meeting with some guys from Mxit yesterday. Mxit is a very interesting product. Its a social network/instant messaging platform for your mobile phone that has 14MM users in South Africa (around 1/3 of the population). How it works is that you'll install Mxit on your phone and add your friends mobile numbers, Google Talk, MSN etc and be able to chat to them for free on your phone IM style.

They have a micropayment system called Mxit Moolah which then allows you to purchase games, wallpapers, song downloads, access to news and video and other paid content. One of the struggles is that they have to have initial payments come through the handset operators who take a 50% rev share immediately (however there are no further transaction costs when they're purchasing on their own ecosystem). The costs are extremely low, if you want to have a chatroom style chat, its about R0.05 (about eur0.004) compared with an SMS of R0.80.

They're an interesting case from a marketing perspective too, they've spent nothing on marketing to get them where they are, its all been viral. They're expanding to other developing markets too, very interesting company.

getting started on a mobile strategy

2009-08-03T06:24:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

One of the more interesting presentations I saw last week was from Sophie Stuart who runs mobile for Hearst in the US. One of the better overviews she gave was about how to kickstart your mobile strategy. This was for the neophyte (and directly focused on having a large amount of content ready to be repurposed), however I think they’re useful tips for anyone looking at mobile

audience
• what does your user need on-the-go from your brand?
content
• re-edit everything into “snack-sized” pieces
• q&a, quizzes, lists, polls
• make it portable: send to a friend, response options
business model
• free to user (mobile)
• ad-supported (CPM is best - advertisers want data)
• subscription fees (digital magazines/e-readers)
• carrier relations: no exclusives, monthly promos, ad splits

media 24 conference

2009-07-27T22:16:00.000-07:00

i'm headed into day 2 of the media 24 conference, and i'm pleasantly surprised at the quality and slickness of the program for an internal event.
not only do they have a very ugc conference site which details the program, gives you an opportunity to feed back on questions to ask the ceo, but also has a live twitter feed which people are encouraged to tweet whilst the cinference is ongoing.

for me yesterday had 2 highlights; the overview from the cfo about where the company is and is going (20% YOY increase in revenue after acquisitions in this climate!), and an overview (and workshop) from sophia who managed hearst digital's mobile platforms in the us. i'll go into more details about this, because there were a lot of things that resonated with me; how to design, what content to use, undersatnding of the user, how to sell it etc.

looking forward to day 2!

Zappo's & Amazon sitting in a tree

2009-07-22T23:41:00.000-07:00

Image by Javier Ruata via Flickr

I decided not to be the kind of blogger that checks their rss feed, sees what is on there and then responds to something that’s in the news. Firstly, I’m not as good as the big guys out there for whom this is their bread and butter. And also it gets a little tired reading the same stories over and over.
However , rules are made to be broken 
I think Amazon acquiring Zappo’s is big news. Jeff Bezos is a smart guy ; look at SS3 and the Kindle over the last couple of years. However although I use Amazon I don’t think its too great. Their customer service is soulless and you get autoreply emails all the time that don’t actually help you. The site is awesome, but the delivery is not as great.
Although I have never bought anything from Zappo’s (just because it isn’t possible), I really think they’re doing innovative things with creating a company culture and customer centricity that wins and retains customers and staff.(read more in my fanboy essay which asks the question of they'll be Amazon killer in 2015, I think Jeff Bezos has been reading my blog)
When they combine the two (and apparently Amazon is taking a hands off/wholly owned subsidiary approach) there are great results to be had; kickass front end customer knowledge combined with great great customer service can only be a giant killer.
Congrats Tony & Zappos

Searching for geniuses

2009-07-14T00:42:00.000-07:00

So, I'm back in South Africa for 6 weeks now (it kinda feels like I never left), and creating a games strategy for 24.com. Its great powering through Powerpoint and meeting people and getting things up and running, but the one man army thing can only take you so far.

Which is why I need you dear reader to help me. I am looking for some people to join my team. Having loads of games experience is not crucial (but would be nice), loving the internet, hungry to get things done and being keen is crucial.

Immediately I need a games marketer , an online marketer and a mobile marketer

Applications via twitter, in the comments, via homing pigeon (or even by email) are accepted

(photo does not necessarily reflect the new team)

social gaming- what's it all about

2009-07-13T00:33:00.000-07:00

Games are big news in the entertainment industry. I know I have to say that because games pay my salary, but if you look at game they’re moving out of the preserve of geeky teenagers and into the family sphere. I think the wii has done a lot for making games accessible to people who were born in an age when controller didn’t exist. The wii is all about simple movements much like you’ll use in real life and its really intuitive to use. Similarly the games that are being developed for it are easy to pick up and understand. Nicole Kidman aimed straight at the baby-boomers when she was advertising brain training through gaming as a way of reinvigorating your grey cells.
These are all interesting incidents of games coming more into the sphere of the common (wo)man , but there is another quiet phenomena which is revolutionizing gaming. Social networks have got people playing games in droves, I’m sure that you would have had an invite for Mafia Wars or Texas Hold ‘em on Facebook.
First, some facts about social gaming;
1) Monthly active users (the metric of choice) of the top 20 Facebook games apps was 139,820,009 in May (these are not deduplicated, so there will be some overlap with people playing multiple games)
2) Zynga (one of the top developers) claims to be making $100million a year
3) Playfish has 100MM installed games in 18 months
4) The top 25 Myspace games apps have had about 100MM installs
These are big numbers for an industry that only started less than 2 years ago. There are a couple of different approaches amongst the front runners in this industry; some are all about developing the best content, whilst others have a laserlike focus on the consumer and their experience. Both approaches seem to work. The big challenge is trying to monetize this audience; it costs a lot to keep servers running and the current monetization opportunities are through subscriptions, micropayments and advertising. These are less tested and guaranteed than the traditional method of license sales through some sort of freemium model. There is also a long way to go in terms of playing socially on your telephone. There have been some initial forays into this (“Who has the biggest brain?” used Facebook connect), but there is a scope to develop this into something huge in the future.
The big ideas behind social gaming is that it transforms gaming from where it is at the moment; its not about a solitary pursuit in the warm glow of the screen, its more along the lines of playing a board game with the family. Its entertainment with a low threshold for getting involved, with more of a focus on the communication and interaction around the game rather than strictly the game itself. Its early days in this market, but I’m excited to be involved with it.

Putting your brand into the wild

2009-07-09T01:24:00.000-07:00

Zynga is one of the top social games developers out there with revenues of $100MM annually (or so they say). They’re as web 2.0 as you can get (their games are developed for social networks) so it would stand to reason that they’re active on twitter and the other networks. Only problem being that their customer service is not supposed to be that great, and people do complain about it. I was on their site the other day and they have a live link of what people are saying about them on Twitter. 3 out of the 9 newest comments were complaining about their customer service and lack of attention to this.

This is something that they need to address. I understand; a buggy game with vast amounts of users that don’t monetize well =customer service nightmare (you can’t afford to get everyone the love they expect). But that’s why twitter and the web are such great tools. they could set up a specific twitter account for customer service/bugs, and aggregate the information to inform how to better improve their product. They can inform from there how they understand things are buggy and will work on making it better. It’s a tough job, but a necessary one to stop alienating their users

KRD- keyword rich domains

2009-07-06T22:11:00.000-07:00

I love an acronym more than most, and this is a good one
Google has an inordinate focus on domain name(and a difficulty in concatenating).What concatenate means is that brendan-mcnulty is a better domain about me that brendanmcnulty as Google has a way of differentiating where one word ends and the other starts.

As Google has a preference for the keyword in the domain, this gives you an opportunity to ran highly if you have the keyword in your domain. However if it is a highly trafficked term then you will struggle to get the domains. Which is where this tactic comes in. the theory is to build a number of simple websites with second or third tier keyword domains with a lot of interlinking between them. No need to create fancy sites, blogs will do, as long as you obey all the usual rules (h1’s, alt tags, keyword density etc)

I’ll explain how you would put it into practice; you want your Michael Jackson memorabilia site to rank highly, but all the good domains are gone (mjtribute etc). So you buy ilovethriller.com, billiejeanismylover.com (I’m being facetious, but things like thriller or associated terms around this would be useful, the yahoo keyword suggestion tool will help you with this). Put up relevant content about mj, and link cleverly between them (and with a link going back to your main memorabilia site from each of the pages), as well as putting your shop onto each of these pages.

Google views the domains that you have as being in the same interest group, so therefore relevant, and the number of sites builds an interlinked web of interest about a specific topic. The search volume on them is significantly less than on the more generic terms (which is a mixed blessing- the domains are still available, but you need more of them)

I wouldn’t put this topic as the first step in your SEO approach, but once you have exhausted your initial optimization on your site, it’s a good one to begin

Virtual goods, real pleasure

2009-07-03T00:11:00.000-07:00

Virtual Goods, Real Pleasure

View more documents from amyjokim.

5 hypotheses (and results) for getting blog traffic

2009-06-09T12:22:00.000-07:00

I say that writing this blog is all about sharing my brain, and promoting my personal brand, but at the same time it’s a bit of an ego trip. I like to know that you’re all out there listening to me rant.

So how do I ensure do I ensure there is more and more of you coming to my site on a regular basis? I decided to test a couple of hypotheses and from there to see how to leverage.

Hypotheses 1:
Comment on other relevant blog posts, and link back to your own post.
Result:
This is the one that really worked well for me. I used my post on iphone marketing (which I humbly think was pretty good), did a couple of searches and commented on the posts and presentations (on slideshare)with a link to my blog post. This brought me a huge amount of traffic (proportionally) as it went on a few blogs and they sent traffic back to me. I will continue to use this in the future, I think it was so effective because there isn’t a lot written about this niche, and I found the right people to seed it with, however this is a consistent method of getting

Hypotheses 2:
Use twitter to promote it
Result:
Its Ok. I do get traffic from twitter, and I announce some posts from Twitter. But (through my own choice) I don’t reciprocate/mutual friend everyone, and I don’t actively try and recruit people. So compared to the 50 odd people I have following me it’s a decent conversion.

Hypotheses 3:
Syndicate your content and try to get profile (and traffic) through that
Result
OK-ish. I posted an article/recycled a blog post for the Tech Leader board. It was read by 514 people, and I got 9 visits from it. I was expecting more frankly.

Hypotheses 4
Use your family to blog-roll you
Result
Better than expected. Its consistent and bubbles under, even though people are coming from different genres (creative writing/literary tourism/crafts). I’ll try and ensure a higher profile or get more of my family to start blogging 

Hypotheses 5
Put your blog everywhere in your profile (Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, signature etc)
Result
Ho-hum. I was expecting more from these too, but it seems that my profile is not looked at as often as I would have expected.

So, number one is the one that works (at a scale of at least 10x the combined others) in terms of driving decent traffic to your site. Any other options you can recommend?

Blog posting slowdown

2009-06-02T11:28:00.000-07:00

Excuse the blog slowdown over the next week or so. We’ve taken the big jump back to South Africa, and we don’t have internet set up (not to mention we don’t have a couch, a table etc etc).

Not to worry I’m thinking of some kickass content to share with you.

link bait

2009-05-25T12:42:00.000-07:00

I was chatting to someone about creative link building and this example came up.
They wanted to create more World Cup focused traffic during the World Cup, but it’s a pricy time to buy search traffic. They came up with a plan to create the “Anti- World Cup Association”- women who feel abandoned by their husbands and boyfriends during the World Cup and wanted to protest again it. They created a page, sent some pretty girls with t-shirts and banners down to where the Dutch team was training to stage a protest. “Coincidentally” there was a lot of press covering the team, and their story got picked up and was syndicated worldwide. The result; they got a huge volume of links, and correspondingly rose in the natural search rankings. Clever, fun and effective. One caveat is that Google normally penalizes significant increases in links over a short time period, however if they come from news, then its OK.

the dark art of link building

2009-05-21T12:35:00.000-07:00

I understand why link building is so crucial; it gives Google an idea of how important a page is with regards to the number, quality and context of links that are linking to a the site.
However I still find it a bit of a dark art; why would people want to link to you? how do you keep it ongoing? Reciprocal vs one-way links?

In order to demystify it, here are some key points;
1. have the right ratio of qualitative vs quantitative links. You do need a lot of links, but err on the side of fewer links from sites with some sort of authority (Google pagerank of 6 and 1,000 inlinks). Ideally these should be within your industry; so if it’s a cooking site don’t link from a car site.
2. Wikipedia is great. If you can link to your site from Wikipedia/write an article about your industry- do so. Google gives Wikipedia a lot of clout (the second click phenomena)
3. Good anchor text- ideally someone should link to your site and the text next to the link (underlined) should say “cooking tips” (or whatever you want to optimize for), rather than saying e.g. click here. This gives Google some context about what the site is about if the link has a description.
4. don’t limit yourself; put relevant links back from blogs, forums, video sites, anywhere where there is a “follow” on the link (which means that Google will give it credence)
5. PR is a great way to get more links. News sites are usually authority sites, if you can get a well optimized release on to a news site it will help.
6. Link bait is an interesting opportunity. Do a zany stunt to get people interested and linking to you. once the newspapers start linking to you, sit bank and watch your pagerank rise.
7. Be persistent. Get a couple of interns in, and get them to get a spreadsheet going with prospects. This involves going through the sites that link to sites that are optimized for the keywords that you want to optimize for. put them all on a list and send them a personalized e-mail. be persistent with unanswered mails and buy your interns lunch every now and again. This is a fairly monotonous task.
8. Don’t buy links- it’ll cost you and it isn’t a sustainable strategy
9. The best way is to have good content that people want to link to. Sort of a no-brainer, but this is the quickest, most effective and guaranteed return method of getting links.

These are some tips to improve your links (concentrate on the bottom one and you’ll go far). Get busy.

SEO is a commodity

2009-05-19T12:31:00.000-07:00

Image by Stephen Poff via Flickr

I had 3 interesting search meetings recently, 1 with Google and two with SEO consultants. As a result of these I’ve written a few search related posts over the last week or so. The title of this post was a comment that someone made in one of the meetings and I thought it was a great (if contentious statement). Basically what he was saying is that the nuts and bolts of SEO; making sure that you’re in the right directories, ensuring that your on-page optimization (H1, alt tags, keyword density etc) is a must-have and that this isn’t the area to differentiate yourself.

So what is?
1. Powerful analytics- look at what works
2. watch typos- these are about 5% of all type-ins
3. get your domain names
4. optimize and tweak
5. be creative in link building

I will go into some further detail on the ones I haven’t already covered in upcoming posts.

International first love day

2009-05-15T00:04:00.001-07:00

As part of the launch campaign around my sister's book, there are a number of blog celebrations around international first love day. as today is the last day of my working at zylom/realgames i thought i'd give a bit of an unorthodox first love, to the job i first loved.
great company, nice people, i learnt a lot, sometimes frustrating. pretty much the same as first love i suppose

Your site is optimized, now what?

2009-05-14T07:16:00.000-07:00

Michael Jackson (via last.fm)

So you’ve done it. The checklist is done;
1. site is in all the directories.
2. Everything on the page is looking good; canonical domains, H1’s et al ()
3. you’ve got a load of inlinks

time to sit back and watch the traffic pour in, right? Nope, now its time to start optimizing. The first thing you need to do get a good perspective of all the possible words in your area, and the potential volume on them. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience and look at what terms they would be using. Google Insights and your own PPC search campaigns can help in determining volumes.

Once you have the list you need to start prioritizing;
1) what is the volume of searches on each term
2) how much competition is on each term
3) what data do you have from PPC to assist (CTR and conversion)

The ideal scenario is that you find words with a hell of a lot of people looking for them, which no one else is optimized for and you know that people will buy loads from you as a result of it. Lets assume you have a dental health website. All of a sudden Michael Jackson sings the praises of plastic toothpicks and it becomes a hot trend. The searches for “plastic toothpick” are going crazy on your paid search campaign, and you can see them going off the chart in Google Insights too. With each successive picture of MJ sucking a toothpick, more and more people are looking for this must-have summer accessory. You would want your product page for plastic toothpicks to rank well for this, because you know (from your PPC campaigns) that people who search for plastic toothpicks usually end up buying them, and you make a fortune on each toothpick

Start tweaking your site accordingly. You’ll need to change your domain structure to account for this, e.g. create a page that has plastic toothpicks in the domain name, as close as possible to the root (e.g. dentalhealth.com/plastictoothpick) or even better, buy platictoothpick.com and put up a site there. Ensure that the content that you write has a high keyword density around plastic toothpicks, this means that you have a couple of paragraphs that talk exclusively about the teeth cleaning benefits of these toothpicks and mention the words “plastic toothpick” as often as possible. Then you need to get some links into the domain and you will be printing money. Show celebrity magazines where to buy these lovely toothpicks, and ask people to link to your cool content. Link building for this page is not too difficult when it is within your own domain, because your other links will do the heavy lifting.

Now you’ve increased traffic to your site of more relevant people who spend lots. Just hope that Michael doesn’t bring out his own brand of floss.

search engine DE-optimisation

2009-05-12T07:13:00.000-07:00

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

It seems like a stupid question when you think of it. If you want to optimize your site for search engines, you would always want to end up on top, wouldn’t you? That’s where all the traffic is, and more traffic equals more revenues. Some statistics I read say that position 1 = 56%, position 2=13%, position 3= 10% and position 4= 4% of search volume, which means that there is a huge premium on being number 1.

But then I think of my own search behaviour, if I search for something you need to acquaint yourself with the data a little better before you can make a purchase decision. So, the first click tells you about the space, the second click gives you an idea about competition and by the third click you’re ready to convert. I don’t think it’s as simplistic as that (and I’m sure this varies significantly within industries), but it does take into account that you shouldn’t only steer on traffic, you should look at your conversions too.

To add a further layer of complexity it depends on the nature of the search how exhaustive the search will be, and which position is the best to aim for. For navigational searches its fairly immaterial, if someone is looking for you they will find you. For informational searches top 3 is good, depending on how high involvement the issue is (buying a car would be high involvement and would require a lot of searching around a topic). With transactional I’d go with my advice from above.

I’d love to know if anyone has experience with de-optimising their website to get a lower ranking and more conversions

top brands on twitter

2009-05-10T02:18:00.000-07:00

Image by . SantiMB . via Flickr

I saw a list of brands, mentions and their followers on twitter, and i found it pretty shocking.
starbucks at the top is quite impressive, 3.37MM mentions and Google with 307,342 followers is also OK.
But if you think about them in a little more detail I'd expect that half the Starbucks mentions are along the lines of "waiting in line at...", so its not huge brand coversions by brand ambassadors that are happening. Similarly for Google 300,000 people following them isn't that huge. Lots of people should be keen to have the pearls of wisdom from Google's lips (or at least more than a third of those who want to hear what Ashton had for breakfast)

Simialrly after the top 5 you're looking at 245,000 brand mentions and 1,000 followers for Amazon. This would lead me to believe that there isn't a huge market for brands to be present on Twitter. Within 140 characters its perhaps too challenging to fit in descriptions of brand interactions, or else this is the kind of information that people dont share on Twitter.

This leads me to think that focussing on Twitter as a channel to be on your media plan may be somewhat premature. I think the things that Federated Media are doing with Twitter are pretty cool (having top CEO's twitter through a specific sponsored channel), perhaps we'll see more innovations like this

book marketing 101- an update

2009-05-06T02:45:00.000-07:00

in a follow up to my post about how to best market your book online my sister has made a very cool stop motion video for the US launch of her book.

Watch it and share it

failsafe ways of getting a job in this economic environment

2009-05-04T02:02:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

Its tough to get a job in this economic climate, so I thought I’d put up a couple of tips (considering I have just got a new job- more on that later) for how to ensure that you get the job that you want.

1. One of the best things to do is to develop a web presence and work off that. If you have been following my lessons about personal branding, you’ll have the perfect online CV, as well as a thriving network of connections who are only too happy to recommend you.

But considering I only put that post up a couple of days ago, its doubtful whether you have got it to a functioning status just yet (but put some time into Linkedin at least).

2. Use your network. If you know people, or people in your family know people that work in your industry (or allied industries), don’t be scared to follow up with them
And ask for an introduction or recommendation. You may have a couple of pointless meetings, but you don’t know what the opportunity could be, or what their friends can do for you until you meet them.

3. This is the killer one for me. I have found 2 of my last 3 roles in the same way (and my wife just got an interview a similar way). I call it the “tsunami effect”. (well I just made that up now, but it at least gives a good perspective on the approach). The setup is simple but takes a while. Google terms around your business area and note all of the companies that come up. Put them on a list. Look at any awards that come up around your business area, look at the winners of the last years. Put them on the list. Look at conferences around that are focused on your speciality, who is sponsoring them, speaking at them, having a stand. Put them on your list.
Carry on following down all related companies, organizations and people until you have an uber list of potential employees. Then visit their corporate sites, find out some more about them, look on Linkedin, find out who the relevant people are (I err on the side of going for the more senior people). Give this person a call,give them your elevator pitch and ask if you can send them your CV to see if there are any opportunities within the organization. Also send to HR details on websites. Continuosly update your list with all the contact points and people and interactions you’ve had with these people. If you haven't had a reply chase them up again (telephoning is more effective and harder to ignore) Through the power of sending to so many potentials something should come up. The joy for the company is that if you fit a certain profile (and because you’re contacting them you should) they have a candidate without any effort from them, who they already knows has some initiative. The crux is getting to speak to the right person and getting your pitch in to them.

Once you have the interview, remember these rules.

Porn, a dying or thriving industry?

2009-05-01T01:52:00.000-07:00

Image by Kounelli via Flickr

I’m going to write a post about pornography today. It’s a difficult thing to write about because its hard to not regress to being childish about pornography; its not something you talk about in polite company, and its an easy thing to snigger about.

However in the US it’s a $15billion industry and has perfected two systems without which the web would be a different place today (online subscriptions and online streaming).

A couple of weeks ago I read an article about youporn (sfw Wikipedia link). This is one of the top 40 most trafficked sites online, and their annual revenue is around $1.5 MM, with 15 million + monthly visitors. That is some atrocious monetization, less than a cent per user per month and with costs attached to it.(and if you look at the proportion that it is of the $15billion you realize that as a smut peddler this is not where you want your business to be going)

Youporn is part of porn 2.0 phenomena, which like web 2.0 means that there is the danger of huge audiences without a clear monetizing strategy. The content is ripped from licensed content (sound familiar?) and amateur content that people post. Associated with the industry there is a host of issues; mostly rights for copyrighted work and age accreditation for amateur content. Which means that in addition to the huge hosting fees you also need a large staff to monitor and take down content.

It doesn’t seem like an easy way to make money (on a related note I once interviewed someone who ran paid ad search ads for a porn site, and said he could only do the keyword research and writing ad copy in the afternoon, as it turned his stomach a little in the morning). The rest of the industry is up in arms about these cowboys devaluing their product, pirating it and removing all their revenues from DVD sales and online subscriptions. (DVD sales are falling the fastest). They’re trying to create premium content (one of the latest movies a rip-off of Pirates of the Caribbean cost $3MM, and apparently made this back). However like the music industry there is a lot of head in the sand behavior about how to best approach this. If content creation and distribution is democratized, then what are the studios offering that you can’t get elsewhere. It’s a
conumdrum that the internet is causing with the movie studios, music industry, newspapers and numerous other industries.

So what are my conclusions and recommendations for the industry? I think they like the music industry are doing things to differentiate their content from that that is available online; one person’s box set with 180g vinyl is another person’s hi-def big budget porn epic with DVD extra’s. One thing that porn doesn’t have which music does it the touring revenues which seem to be supplanting the content sales (Coldplay are charging eur110 for their cheapest tickets for their concerts at a a Dutch football stadium, and they’re playing four nights. That’s a lot of handbags for Gwyneth). I’m not sure how this could be done without breaking a lot of decency laws, but we know that there is a core of under-fans who will pay for the extras; watching movies being made, tours, autograph etc (as this is a family blog I won’t speculate further). Similarly I’m interested if they led the way in the past if the porn industry will crack the monetization question within web 2.0 (which is apparently freemium, but we’ll see)

Twitter- the case study end

2009-04-29T06:50:00.000-07:00

Image by adria.richards via Flickr

I started on my refound Twitter adventure before Oprah kicked in with her first Tweet (though my experiment was arguably a more momentous occasion). I was determined to either discount Twitter completely or being a rabid twitaholic in my 6 week trial. Through this process I got swamped by spammers, got bored by the lack of tangible application, and have slowly started getting swayed.

I actually quite like Twitter after I weeded all the wheat from the chaff. I get to hang out with some family (@bridgetmcnulty) some old friends I don’t see often enough (@luapk ; @astepney ), some old colleagues (@nomonkeys, pebblebug ) and get to get some quick updates from people I respect within the industry (including some smart people I didn’t know existed)

In short, I use it and post once/twice a day, and give it a quick scan to see if there’s anything interesting going on. I think it becomes more useful when you post photos or updates from your phone as well, so I intend to do this (as I always enjoy looking at other people’s photos.)

At the beginning of putting some effort into twitter I didn’t think I’d enjoy it, but I enjoy it for the real time/small touch aspect of it. In addition I like the @ function, like Im- but not as disruptive. Like I said before, add your twitter below and I’ll follow you. I know Twitter is a divisive point, what do you think?

inspirational

2009-04-27T00:20:00.000-07:00

i recently read the omnivore's dilemma and really enjoyed it. it appeals to my beard wearing, organic butcher attending, food pretentious self.
i watched this video and found it equally as good. pollan is eloquent, convincing and passionate. if he had a political party, i'd sign up

Required reading-April edition

2009-04-25T07:51:00.000-07:00

Image by Denis Collette...!!! via Flickr

I have read a couple of interesting posts recently;
brendanmc
1) How to make freemium work, learn from the experts
2) Lessons on monetization from tencent
3) the acquisition channel you weren’t aware of, passed links

Read these, they'll make you cleverer (or get you to ask some good questions)

Change your life, create your personal brand

2009-04-22T00:22:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of talk about your personal brand, but the reason for it is that it makes sense. A personal brand is an essential way to differentiate yourself from the crowd.
This is unfortunately not something that you can do overnight, but there is no time like the present to do it. In order to develop your brand you need a positioning statement, a short précis of who you are and what you do. Concentrate on your skills and what you’re good at, and make sure that your career for a viable niche (writing for the newspaper is maybe not a good idea, but online publishing is). For example at the top of this blog I’ve summarized my areas of interest as search, social media and online trends.

The first channel that someone is going to use to find you is Google. So make sure you own your page for your name (or at least ensure that the content that is found about you is what you want to be found about you). This is the example for my name;

The listings are as follows
1.The first thing people see is my Google Adwords link (you can own what you say here- I try and show that I know/understand the web, as well as being a little irreverent/fun).
2. My profile on Linkedin.
3. This blog
4. One of the most read posts on this blog
5. A presentation that I did
6. My Facebook page

I’m pretty lucky as my name isn’t Brad Pitt, so it isn’t too difficult to get found, but if you persevere you will rank better. For your blog it’s a matter of SEO, good linking (even from comments) creates better ranking, and eventually you will achieve decent rankings.

This is how to create your personal brand;
1) set up a blog using your name as a domain. This is a key method, you can manage the entire relationship with your site; look & feel, content and tone. Google loves the exact term in the domain, so your name will drive search from people looking for your site (see andrew chen, peter kim, chris brogan etc). Also be consistent, try and blog as regularly as possible (I aim for three times a week, but daily is preferable). If it’s less than that make it impactful.
2) communicate with other people in your field; comment on blogs, follow them on twitter, be “part of the conversation”. This will drive traffic back to your site, but it will ultimately have you become smarter in your field. You’ll be participating in discussions about pertinent areas of interest for you.
3) make sure you have a Linkedin (one of the first natural search listings for your name). take some care in creating your profile, potential employers/associates will see this first, so you want to showcase yourself as well as you can. Add everyone you meet to your network. Ask people you’ve worked with to recommend you. this is kinda tough because reciprocal recommendations don’t mean a hell of a lot to me, and most people kinda expect it.
4) make those embarrassing photos of you drinking tequila on the weekend on Facebook private
5) buy the Google terms for your name and redirect them to your blog
6) Crosspromote from service to service (put your blog on Facebook, twitter, Linkedin etc) this will do good things for your search rankings, as well as giving you an easy opportunity for people to find out more about you..
7) Try and speak at industry functions about your speciality, showcase yourself and your knowledge.
8) Network offline (crazy concept I know ), go to dinners, industry meetings and conferences. I’m less good at this, but its imperative to actually make the connection and get to know people personally.
9) Track your blog on mybloglog and Google Analytics. What are your most popular posts, what are people returning, what organic search terms are important for Google for you. Write more posts about these, people are interested.

Building your personal brand isn’t about being a braggart, its about showcasing your strengths and finding a way to leverage them. Its more about having your CV ready before you need it, and at the same time becoming better at what you do. Chris Brogan has a lot more great tips about this.

whisky spiced pumpkin bread & butter pudding

2009-04-20T10:07:00.000-07:00

This was voted as the best user recipe from the guardian.
For me it ticks a lot of boxes; cinammon spicy, sweet pumpkin and baked desserts

I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about the recipe, suffice to say that it isn’t as difficult as it looks. And its even more tasty than it looks.

I didn’t have some of the ingredients, so I substituted them; I used milk instead of cream (it was a weeknight) and normal sugar instead of dark sugar.

Make this, people will love you

iPhone apps- Marketing 101

2009-04-17T01:37:00.000-07:00

Image by Victor Svensson via Flickr

Since two people I know are now professional iPhone developers, I’ve taken a bit of a closer look at the app store, the iPhone and the marketing of your app. There are a few things which I find interesting;
1) Its essentially a walled garden, distribution is exclusively through the app store, so Apple owns the customer contact.
2) First mover advantage was important. If you could get there first with an OK app in front of many rabid Mac fans you were guaranteed of making some money.
3) There is a real problem with the pricing model (if you’re a developer). in order to get into the top sellers bracket people try to get as many sales as possible, so developers keep their prices real low ($0.99). This is a doubled edged sword that you need to decrease your price to make sales, but then the revenues don’t actually mean much. Unfortunately you have to sell a lot of content in order to keep yourself happy with that.
4) It’s a groundbreaking device; it can tell where you are, connect to the internet, do crazy things associated with motion. This opens up the scope considerably wrt development.
5) The barriers to entry are so low (the SDK is available and most tech literate ish people could build something). With this low barrier to entry many people are putting their content up there, so its hard to cut through the clutter. If you look at how many apps are on the store its heading towards a hockeystick curve; end of December there were 10,000 apps, mid-March 25,000 and a week ago 33,000.

So how do you cut through the clutter. In order of importance;
1) it seems lame to even say it, but have differentiated content. Don’t have the same knockoff app that everyone else has- create some new exciting IP. Without a good product you’re sunk.
2) PR and reviews are key. Most developers don’t have a lot of money to advertise what they’re doing, so get the word out there and get people to review your content. Make up a good story about yourself to put in your bio (everybody loves the scrappy underdog, and the iPhone is pretty sexy at the moment) use these to make a character out of yourself and your dream of creating. Leverage these stories to push your app not only to the usual game and app websites, but also reach out to other avenues. If your game is about football, contact football sites or send it to the Sports pages. The more you can communicate about your game the better it is. Here is a list of possible reviewers

3) Google. Use Adwords to get out there and get traffic to your site. Start off small (your studio name & game name), build up your negative keywords and carry on adding new terms. This is a great case study of how it can work.
4) Have a trial/Lite version. This is classic coming from the casual gaming world, where the “try before you buy” model is an established way of getting people hooked on your content. Your timing in launching your Lite model has to be good (you don’t want to cannibalize full version sales), but it can definitely boost your sales.
5) Have a website that showcases your app (buy the domain name, so that it will assist you with natural search). Don’t mess up the basics; have well written copy, good screenshots, a video, and any 3rd party reviews/recommendations well displayed on your page, with a prominent BUY ME call to action.
6) Crosspromote your new app from your current app. If you already have a pool of users who are using your app, use them to promote your new app. I don’t see anyone selling these spaces to other app developers, but there must be an ad business in this.
7) Localise what you’re doing. The app store is big in Germany and other non-English countries too. Localised content always works better than English for a local market.
8) White label your app. I put this one last because people may not want to “prostitute” their development. Putting a skin on something (e.g. Coca-Cola on the loading screen) can have Coke sponsor your development so they can distribute it.

Update:
There were some interesting comments on this post about how you could better promote your app;
1) LOLerApps is having a competition around creating Youtube videos around their content. This should create some interesting buzz
2)MattJDrake came up with a failsafe method of ensuring that you get frequent promotion. The only part of the app store that you can control is the new releases. So if you release often, you will get pushed up the rankings and get more eyeballs on you. Easy and effective

Using these tips will get ensure that you differentiate yourself from the mass of people who are selling a ripped off version of Bejeweled

Twitter overload

2009-04-14T07:50:00.000-07:00

As part of my Twitter refresh I had a chat over lunch to 2 people who I know (in meatspace) and communicate with on Twitter about how I wasn’t getting as much joy from Twitter as I would like to.

@no_monkeys had the following to share;
1) follow people you actually know
2) follow people who’s bio appeals to you (he’s an iPhone developer)
3) unfollow people who update 80 times a day
4) follow people who post in English

I think these are pretty relevant pointers, however I have exceptions to the rule already;
1) I’m interested in following marketing/web people, however every web geek worth their salt is on twitter, so there is a huge volume of crap if I use the rule of following anyone who has social media in their bio
2) unfollow people who update 80 times a day is a good rule. I will do it, except with people like guy Kawasaki (when does he find the time to continue tweeting relevant stuff)

That’s about it, I’ve added my cousin to my list, and removed a lot of other random people. Let’s see how this tweets me (sorry, I couldn’t resist)

2 quick snacks

2009-04-12T09:27:00.000-07:00

Weeknights are tough to be an amateur gourmet, there are babies to feed and put to sleep, and life in general to be dealt with. However, its no excuse for not treating yourself right.(or at least that’s what I feel). The secret is to do good shopping, and then you’re prepared.

The other night we needed a quick starter snack, because dinner was taking a while. I had some persimmons and some jamon and thought of the classic parma ham and melon. This is the same kinda thing; the salty with the sweet and real easy to prepare. Chop up the persimmon and top it with some jamon (this one is pata negra, I’m salivating again looking at the picture)

Tuesdays are fresh fish days at our house (there is a market near my work), and we normally have it fairly unadulterated, as the fresh fish flavour is great by itself. The other night we had salmon steaks and I wanted a quick marinade to zing them up. I squeezed the juice of a blood orange and a tablespoon of harissa together to make a red paste and marinated them for half an hour in them. They were great; a little spice, a little citrus and a nice colour

Blog to book

2009-04-11T09:49:00.000-07:00

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

There is an interesting phenomenon happening of popular blogs getting transferred into books. On first look it seems like a fairly cost effective idea for the publisher, there is a community already interested in the book that should be more interested in purchasing the content.

If I look at the kind of blog-to-books that are out there, they span a lot of different interest groups;
1. Chocolate and Zuchinne (I bought two copies of this)- is a recipe book following on from Clothilde’s blog detailing her cooking habits. I’d say this was probably pretty successful because they also commissioned a further volume about food in Paris. Amazon.com ranking 2.459.073 & 17.773
2. web analytics an hour a day from Avinash Kaushik. This I pretty much the pre-eminent book/blog when it comes to understanding what’s going on with your website. Amazon.com ranking 1,064
3. Stuff white people like came out of nowhere and became a hit very quickly (I think the first post was January 2008, and the book was out in 2008) they also claim to have over 56 million “hits” on the website (whatever they may be) Amazon.com ranking 1,969
4. Postsecret comes out with a few postcards every week from people who tell their secrets in this anonymous format. They’ve got 4 books out, amovie made about them and an Amazon.com ranking 1,831
5. Postcards from your momma another fairly new blog (I think from some people associated with Gawker media) all about the zany ways moms use new communication methods and how sweet they are. (not yet published)
6. college humour has a guide to college, but despit having 4 million monthly unique users it doesn’t do so great in the sales 177,705

However (and this is something my mom said to me) why bother to buy a book when you can read it online for free. This is a good question. There is the issue that some people will always want something tangible in their hands, and having access to it on a website is insufficient. In the future this feeling may disappear, but its doubtful.

Apparently you are looking at about 13 sales/day for a rank of 1,000, and our of the books that are available on Amazon these are not bad rankings (actually I’m quite surprised that these rank so high). Also if you look at these there is a tendency to have a focus on coffee table ish, “funny” blogs turned into books. Though the one which translate least well from the net I would think is College Humour with its focus on videos and this is mirrored in its sales rankings.

Maybe all of these diversionary books are so popular at the moment is because of the economic climate, and people need some light respite. Either way this blog is available for publishing (hardcover only, lots of photos please, I have standards)

Required reading- Dave Chaffey

2009-04-09T09:45:00.000-07:00

I have been a long time subscriber to Dave Chaffey’s newsletter. They come out monthly and he always has a lucid perspective on some aspect of online marketing. One of the best resources that he has on offer is a presentation on SEO. Slide 3 gives a perfect overview of SEO in all its aspects summarized into one page.

The book is great in that it gives an exhaustive view into the specific tools, nature of customers, site design, media planning, budgeting of an online campaign. It includes case studies of how people have overcome specific challenges, as well as tips on how to get things done. it is updated as of last year, so you get updates on widgets, how to use Google Analytics- not just reviews on html e-mails.

If you have someone in your team that needs to get up-to-date on online quickly, this is a great resource. If you want to look at the basics in an easy to read manner, its great too- recommended.

Further dimensions-potatoes

2009-04-07T09:17:00.000-07:00

Further dimensions

This blog has been very focused on the net and marketing on the net. Which is great, and is what I do on a day-to-day basis. However the domain is brendan-mcnulty.com , and I’m not just an internet guy, I have more dimensions. Which is why I’m going to start posting about more than just the internet on here, starting with a weekly recipe.

I love cooking and have a lot of cookbooks, but I tend to always cook off the cuff rather than follow recipes. Last week I bought Beyond nose to tail eating by Fergus Henderson. He is the chef at St John’s in London and is a big proponent of nose to tail eating, which means that you eat the whole of the beast, all the gristly pieces, and not just the fillets. I like the idea behind it, but I think I’m a little squeamish to eat all of the exotic bits of the beast. This book has a number of recipes for trotters, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever need one. However one recipe caught my eye for the best potatoes ever. Luckily I had made some duck confit the other day, so had some duck fat lying around the house. I adapted it a little;

Best potatoes ever

4 large potatoes (floury preferred)
10 cloves garlic
Duck fat

Roast the potatoes in the oven until they are soft when you squeeze them. Take them out and let them cool a little. At the same time cover the garlic with duck fat and roast them in the oven until they’re soft (slightly golden looking). Scoop out the centre of the potatoes and mash them with the softened garlic and some of the duck fat. Add some salt and pepper. Replace the mash in the potatoe skins and roast until the tops of the potatoes are golden.

These are as good as you would expect, but not something you should eat daily..

this day in spam

2009-04-04T08:35:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

Facebook spam is a first for me. It’s a fake Facebook update message;

Messages from Your Friends on Facebook, April 02, 2009

You have 1 friend requests - Personal Message:
Watch the video titled "Drunk Charlize is dancing striptease on my Birthday Party, March 28, 2009! We're absolutely shocked!".

Proceed to view full message:

http://facebook.shared.id-679sybzdyv.arekeninginfo.9874default.com/home.htm?/content/alternative=9o461o6h6

Added 18 minutes ago. Message ID: FB-gwcaj1ux4q9ooyd
2009 Facebook community, Message Center.

Using the all classic hook; naked girls. Again, simple execution, prompts you to make the click, which leads you somewhere strange

Twitter spam

2009-04-03T01:10:00.000-07:00

In my ongoing attempt to become a memeber of the Twitterati, i have been approving all the people that are following me. there are a lot of random people with like 30,000 followers and not much to share. (aside from guy kawasaki who has almost too much good stuff to share).

i was interested to see how spam has come on to twitter, if you look at the below example it ticks a couple of spam blocks;
1) hot girl (fake picture)
2) not much interest in it (bad follower to following ratio)
3) a couple of post only
4) trying to bump up stock prices

needless to say this is the only one i'm not following

Twitter fixation

2009-04-01T10:44:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

My six weeks of twitter is happening and I’m firmly ensconced in my twitter life. I’ve been looking for people I know, modifying my twitter page (that picture is a bunny chow by the way), and reading furiously about it.
two quick observations;
1) people cleverer than me are really raving about twitter. Jason from mahalo has been offering $250k and then $500k to own the sponsored link for questions (he did the math that with his expected acquisition costs he would make money out of it)
2) Guy Kawasaki highlighted a great tool called Twitterhawk which allows you to isolate people who are talking about your product. You can then send an automated tweet to them advertising your product. This is basically a CPC/Adwords type version of using Twitter, it can be frequency capped to a certain person, so it seems to be a “fairly” relevant inobtrusive way of messaging to people.

Book marketing 101

2009-03-30T10:41:00.000-07:00

My sister’s book is being launched in the US in May (buy it). We were discussing innovative methods of marketing her book (mostly online). It is a fairly nascent industry, but there are a few people writing some interesting stuff. One of the things about her book is that it’s set in Durban South Africa, and all of the reference points (places, products, names) have a very Durban flavour. This was one of the challenges we discussed in terms of how to make this very real to an American audience.

Here are some key pointers from our work in progress discussions about how to best harness the power of the internet to sell a book;

Understand your audience
Its marketing 101, but don’t try and communicate with people who cant read by using the internet. Similarly if you’re selling a magical realism book with a focus on love, its probably not the best route to go to people through a car website, because your audience is women 25+ and men read car sites.

Use bloggers.
This takes a number of different forms, you can;
1. Do a virtual book tour I would advise finding people that fit within your audience and find the blogs that communicate with them. Send through a review copy to them with a handwritten note and something to differentiate yourself (some small kind of gift). From there you can have them review you; write a guest post, have a profile or offer a podcast or excerpt from your book.
2. give away tastes.I’m very keen on the Seth Godin free approach. He has proved that if by giving his book away as a free pdf it promotes the sale of his other titles (I haven’t as yet been able to convince my sister to read her entire book and give it away, but giving away excerpts is under discussion)
3. Use your Facebook community to generate buzz, inform people about book signings and launches and run a competition to stimulate virality with other people. One of the cooler things that she did with her South African launch was to have people take photos of a kiss for a competition. This builds on the viral aspect of it and makes people more involved with the product because they’ve taken the time to get involved.
4. Create context. The book is set in Durban which most Americans have no idea exists. Use online tools to showcase specific spots from the book. Have a Flickr stream which shows places which are talked about. Have a Youtube channel and tour of Durban (or even interview yourself and detail why you’re motivated to write this book, how you feel about touring; it adds some personality to the author and thus interest)
5. Use bloggers to mobilize efforts around a specific offline event; she’s thinking of a picnic in Central Park this time. Ask bloggers to get the word out about events or book launches. These are great for PR if you can get a few people present.
6. Create a book trailer. She’s thinking of a stop-motion video about a cupcake to showcase to drive people back to the site. This could also be used with the “showcase the local” in number 4 above. Very important don’t forget to include a call to action message in the movie, e.g. join our FB, enter our competition, download the excerpt etc.

Update: and of course don’t forget to be part of the conversation. Make sure you’ve got a “vanity” search active on Google for your name and the name of your book. If you have some more budget use one of the tools that I detailed here. Once you know people are talking about you, reach out and get involved in the conversation. You can communicate with the blogger, ask them to profile you, contribute to the forum or anything else to get your message out there

I’ll report back with links and performance as things proceed.

Defending your budget

2009-03-30T08:03:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

In these bumpy economic conditions one of the first things that happens is that budgets get re-examined. If you’re making revenue and profit this can also happen, so the best thing to do is be prepared. I’ll outline a couple of strategies that you can use, firstly to safeguard your budget;
1) Try this ; “in order to safeguard revenues we have to ensure that we have a decent amount of prospects flowing through the funnels, by decreasing spend we will impact revenues
2) Look at spend; how does spend vs revenue compare YoY. If you’re spending similar this can be justified.
3) A downturn is the best time to win. Whilst others are covering their ass and consolidating you have more opportunity to get out there and scoop up all the customers.

Then the day comes when your protestations don’t work any longer, and you’re forced into a cost-cutting exercise. These five steps will help you do this more effectively;
1) Where aren’t you making much money (geographic area, product line, marketing program). Chop this areas first.
2) Ensure that you have watertight ROI calculations to back up your argument (this is obvious, but still crucial when you’re talking revenue)
3) How has your media costs changed (for us search is flay YoY and display costs have decreased), this will give you a cushion
4) Go back to your budget (tips for creating your budget are here) and look at your testing areas, your big spend. Look at how to prune this from your trial budget and areas which don’t directly contribute to the bottom line.

Good luck with the process

Daytum

2009-03-28T06:51:00.000-07:00

I just received a beta invite for daytum to increase the amount of microblogging that I can do. Basically what it is a graphical representation (smooth lines and nice pie charts) of things that you do with your day. You add a specific category (e.g. breakfast, albums listened to, smiles you received during the day) and then categorise it according to your own consumption patterns e.g under breakfast you’d include eggs, muesli and toast. Then you fill it in depending on how you consume and it spits out the below graphs;

I think it’s really cute, and a nice diversion, but I think unless you’re dieting or have an ocd, its going to be difficult to do on an ongoing basis.

Twitter- the emperor’s new clothes?

2009-03-24T00:41:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

I have had a twitter subscription for about 18 months and I have 16 updates. At a rate of one a month that is pretty poor microblogging. I have always had the opinion that it isn’t for me. At one stage I had one member of my team in London and the rest in the Netehrlands and we tried to use it as a team building exercise, to make sure that everyone was in the loop with everyone’s activities, and build some team spirit in that way. This kind of fizzled out, but I’m not sure if it blame twitter or lack of motivation for that.
Twitter has received a lot of funding, interest from Facebook to purchase it and just recently the amount of people that I know using it has started to increase exponentially. This increase in interest is not limited to my social group, if you look at the search traffic for twitter it has had a huge boost since December (Nielsen in the US has seen 1382% UU growth from Feb 08- Feb 09). I think the relaunch of the new “twitter-style” Facebook has had an impact, and then there are a number of other pop-culture things (some rapper was live twittering whilst singing on the Jimmy Kimmel show). Its sneaking its way into the mainstream, and I’m nothing if not a slavish follower of trends, thus I think its perhaps time for a reappraisal...

I think the reasons it didn’t appeal to me are;
1) Its essentially a vain exercise, I’m not sure how many people want to know that I’m brushing my teeth.
2) Its very disruptive- by its nature it’s a consistent barrage of information , and it will break my concentration on whatever you’re focused on.
3) I didn’t have any friends, so if you’re chatting into the ether, it isn’t very rewarding
4) Most of all I haven’t received any tangible benefit from it; social, business or anything, so why put anything in.

I read (and twittered ) a great post from Tony from Zappo’s about why he uses twitter and why it is such a lifechanging force. I think that everything that Zappo’s does is pretty great (aside from not sending me their culture book when they said they would), so I’m going to devote the next six weeks or so to trialling twitter. Please leave your twitter and I’ll follow you, I’m @brendanmc

dear internet, i love you, warm regards- brendan

2009-03-21T20:36:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

I have a record collection and a love of playing records. However my technical knowledge is extremely limited in getting to grips with how to get the most of out of my system. I needed to get a new amplifier the other day and wanted something cost effective, but powerful.

The old school experience would be to ask a knowledgeable friend, read some magazines for reviews, or go into a shop and hope you don’t get hoodwinked into buying something you didn’t need that was too costly.

My experience went something like this;
1) Post a question on the whathifi forums
2) Crossreference their recommendations through other boards and sites
3) Compare prices using a comparison pricing engine
4) Buy from the cheapest
5) Track the package till it made it to my house

From Friday night’s first search to Tuesday’s delivery, I couldn’t be happier with the process.

I love you most of all internet

Great usability testing

2009-03-19T12:29:00.000-07:00

Image by brycej via Flickr

Usability is a crucial way of getting feedback. I’m always surprised by the feedback that I get from usability testing. if you’ve designed a page you know exactly how it should be used, and when someone struggles to perform a “simple” task there is nothing more illuminating/frustrating. Especially when you’re looking at a target audience that is not like you (ie net literate), it gives great insight into how to structure your content.

This is a great idea;
You set a task, they run the test with your demographic, they film it, including clicktracking, send you a video and get a questionnaire filled in, all for only $19.

If you can’t afford that, ask your mother/brother/uncle to go through it and give you their feedback, all usability is valuable.

TV on the computer

2009-03-18T20:18:00.000-07:00

For the last three or four years we have had no TV.
By that I mean that we have had a TV, but we haven’t had any signal coming in to it, choosing only to watch series and DVD’s. This saves you from wallowing in crap teevee and just flicking through channels. However since having a baby, my brain requires switching off completely, and I’ve been wanting to increase my TV consumption.

We have a Mac Mini attached to our TV, so we can use the net, but the options aren’t great. We have used surfthechannel quite a bit, but you tend to get very grainy copies, buffering issues and Chinese subtitles (so all-in-all not a great experience).

Unfortunately being out of the US or UK there is no access to hulu or the iPlayer, which both have a wealth of good content in good quality (and no ads with the BBC).I saw a documentary that I wanted to watch on Rough Trade Records, so I thought I should try get access to BBC iPlayer. I’m not advocating piracy, however in the interests of investigation I thought I would give it a try.

Its pretty straightforward, install FoxyProxy as a Firefox addon (apparently FireFox is the best browser for this), follow the instructions and you’re up and running. You will need to refresh your proxy each time you watch (I believe), but there is a constantly updated list here. You need to add a UK proxy in one of the steps in the process (that’s well described in the how to on FoxyProxy). A quick tip for the technically inhibited (like me), the port is the numbers on the far right hand side after the last dot.

The next step to TV Valhalla is apparently boxee, a friend is using it and apparently its lifechanging. When we progress I'll keep you updated.

Happy watching.

Back!

2009-03-17T02:08:00.001-07:00

Happy Paddy's day. Apologies for the long non-commercial break. Normal posting resuming.

required reading- february edition

2009-02-08T22:14:00.000-08:00

a couple of interesting articles to keep you up-to-date in february;
1)a report on digital moms (with thanks to guy kawasaki and razorfish)
this tells you that moms can be reached through a;ll the channels that you would reach other consumers, but that not all of them are the same, so you'll need a more tailored approach.

2)hp labs have been producing some insights into social computing. kinda dry and scientific (so not as sexy as the razorfish ones), but some interesting data. read crowdsourcing and online content popularity prediction

27 dinner- jozi

2009-01-29T06:49:00.000-08:00

i was in johannesberg visiting family and checking the town out, and thought that i would use the opportunity to meet with some of my online brethren in south africa. the 27 dinner happens on the 27th day of the month and gets together people who are interested in technology and its intersection with media; so there's a lot of startups and people involved in the online world.

firstly i was pleasantly surprised at the amount of people there. and how friendly they were. i chatted with a lot of interesting people, from an it ngo, mobile programmers, startups and a number of interesting agencies.

to kick things off they had a q and a with microsoft for half an hour which i thought was somewhat excessive (although the microsoft rep was suitably self-depreciating about their products)

it was a good perspective into the industry though, as others have said, there's a lot of consultants and not a lot of startups/people adding value...

china internet simulator

2009-01-21T03:30:00.000-08:00

we take our web rights for granted. we can surf the net and view, buy and write pretty much what we like. that's not the same for everyone, and this firefox plugin (http://chinachannel.hk/) shows you how viewing the net in china would be.

pretty depressing, and it brings up a number of free speech kinda questions. how much of your data do you want kept in order to protect you? the child protection issue is always contentious, but i'm in favour with as little net legislation as possible

etsy

2008-12-22T02:02:00.000-08:00

i have been a fan of etsy for a while, and my wife is even more of a fan. she buys all presents for friends, and we buy presents from there too, as you get a whole range of home made exciting stuff (e.g. i got some interesting prints for my birthday, handbags for friends and monogrammed pillow cases)

she has just open a shop selling african fabrics (go there and buy some nice african fabrics for christmas), and it was an interesting experience for me to help set up the store. its pretty painless to get it up and running, they have pre-ordained fields and images that you need to fill in in order to get up and running, all pretty standard stuff. the costs are reasonable too, $0.20 to list something and 3.5% of the sales price.

my google attuned brain came on overdrive when i thought of how best to optimise your page for the most traffic. i had a look online and there isnt anyone who gives an overview about which are the topics that get most searched for and the algorithm that gets used to get you best noticed. there are a couple of paid services which you can use to profile your shop or products but it would be great to find a way to push as much relevant traffic your way as possible. the one workaround is to list on a regular basis, so that your items are pushed to the top, but this isnt a sustainable solution. any ideas to use the semantic side of this?

top tips for budgetting

2008-12-11T04:49:00.000-08:00

This time of the year always involved a lot of focus around budgeting, which can be a very painful process. I’m here to help you structure your acquisition budget in a morning. I’m assuming you’ve done some initial work on the budget and have an idea of what you hope to achieve. There are two ways of doing this; top down- we need to make x, how much marketing spend do we require. Or bottom up; what is our strategy, how do we think things are going to change next year, and as a result of these how should that impact our spend.

I’m more of a fan of the latter, so that you at least have a view of the possibilities and aren’t just trying to shoehorn spend into some unknown perspective of what could happen. This year is also very interesting with the credit crisis; two opposing forces having an impact on your budget;

1)credit crisis impacting spend (even online advertising is set to slow/become static)
2) offline budgets move online because its more measurable

Looking at your average budget for an online property there are probably three major areas; pr/offline, display and search. I always look at these as a pyramid depending on the markets that you work in. depending on how core the market is, how well you can scale and the competition will determine whether you progress to the next highest level in the pyramid.
1.) the base of the pyramind is seo- in every market that you work in, you should have your site well optimized.
2.) The next tier (and slightly less distribution) is bidding on your brand name and anything which people are searching for which is further down the commitment funnel (e.g. anything with the words buy or specific product names). Scale your search as much as possible moving into the higher volume and more generic search terms.
3.) Next step is to plug in your affiliates/anyone that you can pay on an action (registration perhaps or a sale). Use affiliate networks and start looking at the auctions (things like rightmedia)
4.) then move onto display advertising (placements bought for a media spend). Homepage tenancies, banners on specific channels, behavioural targeting. Its going to cost more but there are advantages with mass reach and a higher quality audience.
5.) . Finally for markets where you need to really differentiate your brand, I would recommend pr and then offline media (radio, print etc).

How does social media fit in? for me its kind of parallel and all pervasive. It fits into PR (obviously) and it also should underpin your strategies. The costs are not huge also, so I don’t budget considerably for them (also in terms of results its more intangible).

Going through these elements in a little more detail;

1) PR/offline
Should you be spending on offline activities? If you can prove roi go nuts. I think your pr spend should remain equal to the previous year unless you have new markets or proven cases.
2) search
you need to look at look at your cpc’s and the trend. I would expect the trend line of cpc to be increasing, if so extrapolate them out for the next year. Look at your conversions, are they increasing or decreasing? Once you have these two trends you can put them together with your strategy and come up with how much you expect your ambitions to cost you. of course if you’re entering new markets google is your friend (you can look at expected volumes, and google insights to guage what the market is like, as well as look at your top keywords and see the volume of competition). Everybody thinks that seo is something you shouldn’t budget for, I disagree. I’m not saying you should go out there and buy lots of links (hey, I’m white hat J). But I do think that you can always get more assistance in this area, even if you read all the blogs. From my own experience it gets kinda tricky when you start talking to the techies, as I know what I want in the abstract (clean code), and what that means (better css), but how to brief someone and ensure that it’s done properly is beyond me. So to cut a long story short, budget for some seo advice; optimization, universal search, link building, keyword rich domains- there’s lots you should still be doing
3) display
I lump anything that isn’t search into this, so it covers a multitude of sine (homepage takeovers, affiliate marketing, cpa networks and all banner networks). Its pretty straightforward, what are your costs, what is your performance (click through, conversions, value of the users that you’re driving) and what is the value of your user that you drive. Put it all in a form and look at where you’re making the most money and how much you can cost effectively spend.

Good luck with your process!

business ethics

2008-12-04T07:28:00.000-08:00

Image by Azchael via FlickrI had an interesting experience recently with one of our new partners, which I found posed an interesting question about what business ethics. We are in the first month of working with this media buying agency, so they are in the process of proving themselves. At the same time they approach someone on my team to offer them a role at their company. The first I heard of it was from this employee explaining the new opportunity/proposal he was examining.

This made me angry, but not with the employee, but towards this agency. To me this is short sighted from this company, I would never sanction this kind of action, especially when you are providing a service. Its not in the business development handbook; wining/dining/poaching employees

My approach was twofold;
1) to inform the employee of the opportunities that still remain within the company
2) to phone our agency, give them a bollocking and ask/tell them to remove the offer

it worked, but that is a relationship that is flawed as a result of their behaviour. how would you have dealt with the situation?

everything you wanted to know about Google

2008-12-03T00:02:00.000-08:00

All about Google

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: google seo)

innovative facebook

2008-11-26T05:32:00.000-08:00

Image by Yandle via FlickrI was sent here by a blog post and I think it is really refreshing way of using Facebook. in fact I haven’t seen Facebook used as a sort of a magazine like Diamond Street before. unlike Myspace where you can really customize your page, this still has to use the traditional Facebook page structure, however I think they have amanaged to be pretty creative within the structures (though they could do a little more in terms of leveraging the social aspects)

The things they include are;
1. podcast
2. interview
3. favourite pages
4. fan photos
5. videos

Its simple and could be within a blog system, but it seems more self contained and easier to read/interact with when its in this format

the perfect games widget

2008-11-21T07:38:00.000-08:00

Or at least that is the aim. The anatomy of this clock widget is different to the other in that it has practical applications for our business (games company- games widget). The aim of it is to have a link at the top on the logo which goes back to our site (this has specific anchor text which should aid for some link juice for seo, though what I read is divided about the value of it). There is a link to free stuff, which is a page where we offer free games, screensavers and other fun stuff in exchange for people registering. And there is a link to have it play in a full screen. This generates our pop-up window for the game and at the same time shows our pre-game commercial which allows us to monetize the traffic a little. We thought about having a download button on there, but I think the other buttons are more effective (not many people choose to download). In terms of results we’re pretty happy, we haven’t started promoting it, but virally it has spread pretty well.

In terms of challenges, each of the platforms has its own idiosyncrasies, which makes it challenging;
Open Social is a lovely concept, but until it is standardized that is what it will remain. It is impossible to develop one application and expect it to work across all Open Social platforms, some are on 0.7 others on 0.8 and there are specific tweaks to all of them which require bespoke attention (Hyves is the ones that we work with mainly in the Netherlands, and it has been difficult to make it work with them).

The next challenge is distribution, the dream is viral distribution. Watch this one go 

top albums of '08

2008-11-21T07:14:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipediayes i know is early, but nothing else cool is coming out this year. the albums i listened mostly to this year were either;
1) fey disco/ 80’s ripoff
2) noisy garage rock
go figure. Anyway I thought it was a pretty good year for music, I’m keen to find out what I was missing out on. My list (In no particular order)
Cut copy- in ghost colours
Mixed like one continuous tracks. Great synths, crap lyrics, perfect
Jay reatard- blood visions
Proper rock. I loved both of the other albums he made this year, but this was the first one I heard (and the rawest). The stalker song (standing there) is hilarious & chilling in under 2 minutes
Hercules & love affair- Hercules & love affair
Authentic disco is the new hip genre. This is the album that is supposedly spearheading it
Neon neon- stainless style
A concept album about the delorean with gruff from the super furry animals. Also pretty 80’s sounding with some hip pop beats.
Various- Nigeria special
There were a few of these compilations this year, this was my favourite, but it shows how much cool highlife music is out there waiting to be discovered.
No age- weirdo rippers
Punk but with swooshy drones in it. This album is less pop than the newer one, though it needs a few listens to embed itself.
Flying lotus- los angeles
This is the album that I wish prefuse 73 had made. Same glitch hop, super smooth.
Young marble giants- colossal youth
I hadn’t heard this before (I only knew hole’s cover of credit in the straight world). Post punk, girl singer- great.
Chromatics- night drive
More death disco. This was my favourite from “Italians do it better”. sad winter/twilight disco tracks.
Vivian girls- Vivian girls
Girl singers again. Simple harmonies, classic rock.
Sian alice group-59:59
Avant jazz (good genre?), lots of pianos and drones
Health- disco
I thought the health album was ok, but this remix album was banging! (can I say that when I have a child?) really great noisy electro..

new clock widget

2008-11-05T11:57:00.000-08:00

This is one of the widgets that we have recently released. We worked together with Yourminis to get it up and running and I wanted to give an overview of the strategy behind it. Our objective was threefold; to have some type of branding vehicle, to drive some traffic and to generate some SEO backlinks. Getting more data on how things fit together is also interesting. The strategy was pretty simple, we know that one of the most installed pieces of content is a clock, and we know that our users are passionate about our intellectual property, so we wanted to find a way to combine them. The default clock is one for our game Pastry Passion, and there are options to change it to two other hits of ours (however we know that 80% of people usually stick with the default).

If you look at the clock there is a linkable logo (with some SEO’d anchor text), there is a link to free stuff (our free games, screensavers and other fun stuff) as well as link to more games. Using the yourminis dashboard you can copy it to numerous different platforms (blogger, facebook, bebo, igoogle etc) and achieve the joy of viral distribution. I’ll post about the other widget we made once its live and we have some numbers about how its performing.

spam update

2008-11-05T11:56:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

in my continuing efforts to learn more from spam, i got one today that i actually forwarded to my system administrator it was so convincing (the only reason i found out was that they sent multiple versions of the same mail)
copy below;

Dear Network Solutions Customer,

We recently notified you that the registration period for your Network Solutions domain name had expired. As a benefit of having previously registered a domain name(s) with Network Solutions, you are eligible to receive a percentage of the net proceeds that were generated from the renewal and transfer of the domain name you chose not to renew. Since you have chosen not to renew the domain name listed below during the applicable grace period, we were successful in securing a backorder for this domain name on your behalf and it has been transferred to another party in accordance with the Service Agreement.

Renew your domain now - http://www.networksolutions.com

You must click on the following link, enter your domain name, and confirm your contact information in order to claim these funds. If your contact information is not correct, you must enter Account Manager and make the appropriate changes prior to clicking "submit" from the confirmation screen. If you do not do this, you will be confirming inaccurate information and will not receive any payment. Checks will only be made payable and mailed to the Account Holder of record.

Sincerely,

Network Solutions. Customer Support

I’m not sure there’s a lot for the legitimate marketer to learn from this spam, except keep a clear call to action, decent spelling, short and explanatory.

Required reading- Autumn edition 1

2008-10-29T05:55:00.000-07:00

John Battelle (the guy who wrote that Google book) has been doing a lot of crowdsourcing for his conference to find interesting questions to ask his participants (and the participants are of top calibre too). one of the interesting things taht he did was ask for the best examples of online marketing through a Linkedin question. lots to get inspired by.

People keep talking about the deck that Sequio capital sent out that caused the wave of belt-tightening and cutbacks. its worth the read;

Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturn

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: depression recession)

State of the blogosphere

2008-10-03T01:05:00.001-07:00

Image by Getty Images via DaylifeInteresting analysis from Technorati about blogging becoming more mainstream. I'm not so sure about that, for me when a trend is completely mainstream it mirrors the makeup of the audience. the average blogger (according to this research)is 2/3 male, university educated and been blogging for nearly 3 years.

this looks like an early adopter segment and not the mainstream. or maybe there is a predisposition for men to blog more than women (which i would find difficult to believe)

How sociable & blog monitoring

2008-09-23T23:54:00.000-07:00

Image via WikipediaHowsociable is a nice resource, which gives you an overview of your presence within the “social sphere”. It is another version of the tools that I talked about here. You set up your brand/terms that you want to track and it then updates you with an e-mail giving you what the chatter has been about yourself on blogs, social networks and the interwebs at large. You can drill down into the different areas and see how things have changed over time too.

This whole “buzz measurement” has progressed quite a way from searching on technorati, and there are a number of services in this area being offered (and if I look at my inbox I see a lot of proposals coming in from companies offering these services). It’s an interesting bridge between PR and online marketing (which is where I think a lot of social media outreach fits). The immediate application of finding people who are talking about your product (or related) and being able to join in the conversation allows you to put your message out in front of an audience that is interested in the topic. This isn’t advertising, so a third party recommendation tends to resonate well with the audience. As best practice dictates; identify yourself and be honest.

The other great application of these is for fire-fighting. Inevitably there will be an issue with your product or service, and people will talk about it. You would rather be involved in the conversation, apologise and allow your perspective to be heard.

Thirdly its great customer research, people are in their natural environment and will say what they naturally believe as opposed to a more forced response from a questionnaire of focus group.

The conversation is going to be happening, whether you are involved or not. It is better that you are knowledgeable about what people are talking about, and have the ability to react rather than not knowing what is going on.

6 tips for using Google Insight

2008-08-28T07:59:00.000-07:00

Image by Danard Vincente via Flickr Google Insights for search has just been released, offering a whole wealth of data that previously was not available. For your SEO and PPC campaigns there are a lot of words that can be targeted based on this. However if you are looking at this from an industry perspective and want to gauge yourself and how you rank it is also extremely valuable. Having played around with it a little recently these are some skews I would advise;
1) Look at your category
It may be difficult to find the exact niche that you inhabit, but drill down to as close to it as you can. What is the trend in terms of searches, is it seasonal, is their growth in the category, what are the top keywords. Then look how much share you get proportionally of the big terms, this is illuminating because it gives you an idea of the size of the opportunity, can you optimize your page better, should you bid more on this area.

2) look at your brand
how have the searches for your brand been performing (as marketing person you hope that your brand becomes even better known). Can you tie in bigger peaks in spend with promotions that you undertook. Can you see what is working to get your name out, and what isn’t. Are there cycles on how people look (time of the year/month/week), is there some way that you can optimize based on this (this ties into how you manage your campaigns and the information you have about customer behaviour- day/week parting, bidding more round payday etc)

3) Look at different geographies
Start off on worldwide for all your searches and then split them into different countries. Look at these and see if you have some large market share in an unknown geo (that’s the joy of having an online business, no borders). Is your site big in Norway, why is your site big in Norway, should you start adding localized payment systems and structures? This can isolate areas where you should focus, similarly it may outline areas that you’re underperforming.(as this is based on IP address I wouldn’t take the extremely local/city perspective too seriously)

4) major searches
look at what the core search terms are around your brand and in your category. Are you bidding on them, maybe if you drill further into this they will give you some interesting phenomena. E.g. marketing in other languages you may not know what the up-to-date slang terms are and these may be reflected in the upcoming terms.

5) segment over time
this I think is one of the more interesting functions. You can find out how things developed with your brand/category/search term. How the geographic makeup changes over time, and what happens with related terms. If you have made specific promotions around a time, how did people react to it, did they search for you for terms related to it. Where do you experience the most organic growth, also look at your share of the search, how does this change over time. Looking at the matrix of marketing spend, competition and time and try to figure out how it fits together.

6) competitors popular search terms
are a mine of information. What is their positioning, what are the major terms that people are searching for around their brand, what should you be bidding on, what are the major traffic drivers from a seo perspective. See what share they have of the top terms. In most industries/categories there are a few key terms which drive the majority of the traffic (good old 80/20 rule). We call these the k10 (for our top 10 keywords). Who owns the largest share of these and how does it change.

These are a couple of things that you can do with Google Insight that should give some more beef to understanding your market and where you sit within it

this day in spam

2008-08-12T06:51:00.000-07:00

Image by Getty Images via Daylife there are two major industries that shape the way the greater internet is moving; pornography has been instrumental, it is the large revenue stream of which no one talks, but it does power a large number of developments in terms of moving to handhelds, payment systems and ecommerce that have been instrumental in developing the web as we know it.

the other area which i am always interested in is spam. spam is all pervasive and for years people have been saying that it will kill legitimate e-mail due to the barrage of spam (now said to be 81.5% of all e-mail)

what i find interesting is that people continue to spam, they must need to continuosly innovate in order to ensure that they get some kind of a return on their investment. and i think this is something that we as marketers can learn from. how do these guys get their mail opened, what do they use as their calls to action, and the speed at which they innovate.

i continue to see more new trends in spam, and the cycles seem to get shorter and shorter. there are still the perennials like getting a fake rolex, viagra, software, porn and the like- which i find pretty tired and without much innovation. a form that seems to have died is the stock tip. apparently it only used to push the price of the stock up a couple of percent, so it must have been pretty tough to make money on it anyway.

my favourites of this year have been;
1) personalised and naked;
this came in a number of permutations on my name, and we have photos and we have seen you naked. it was short, punchy, had my name (so personalised) and was spelled correctly (a lot of people make that elementary mistake, which really makes you not believe it).
2) personalised and insult
this used my name and called me a number of names. again it uses the same trick of making it personal, but stimulating a response within me that makes me want to act (emotion = action)
3) cnn update
this i only got within the last week, it looks like a mail from CNN with a number of latest stories (samples include "michael jackson sued by his dog", "celebrity seen naked"). it is very lowest common denominator (so appeals to a large audience with a low threshold of having to get involved), comes from a reputable brand (which i trust). another interesting thing was that all of the emails had the same URL attached to each link, so irrespective of where you clicked you would go to the same page (the illusion of choice).

the cnn spam seemed to be pretty virulent with 10 million mails an hour being sent.

however with all of this spam you must have to innovate very rapidly, as after i have ascertained that this is spam i will treat it like spam in the future. i'll keep posting more of these aas they continue to innovate...

best blog monitoring tools

2008-07-08T07:21:00.000-07:00

In the nascent area of social media its kind of a minefield as to how best to navigate. We’re using the tool of a company called attention to monitor what people are saying about us, as well as their guidance in how best to find our way through it. However that’s not the only tool, a list I’m on sent through this exhaustive list of opportunities to monitor what people are saying about you;

www.technorati.com
www.blogpulse.com
www.moreover.com
www.opinmind.com
www.yahoopipes.com
www.boardreader.com
www.boradtracker.com
www.omgili.com
www.nielsenbuzzmetrics.com
www.attentio.com
www.wavemetrix.com
www.23.co.uk
www.radian6.com/cms/home
www.magpie.net
www.tnsglobal.com
www.clipability.co.uk
www.precise-media.co.uk
http://ewatch.prnewswire.com
www.cyberalert.com
www.newsnow.co.uk/services
http://alerts.yahoo.com
www.tweetscan.com
www.summize.com
www.netvibes.com
www.newsping.com
www.trackengine.com
www.collectiveintellect.com
www.newmediaintelligence.com
www.divinitymetrics.com
http://andiamosystems.com
www.diydashboard.com
http://www.onalytica.com
http://www.1000heads.com/
http://www.marketclusters.com/
http://www.marketsentinel.com/
http://factiva.com
http://www.asomo.net
http://www.brandintelligence.com/
http://www.infonic.com
http://www.mediatrack.com
http://www.cision.com
http://www.thomson-intermedia.com
www.Mymarketmonitor.com
www.spannerworks.co.uk
www.wavemetrix.com/
www.compete.com
www.beyondanalysis.net
www.envisional.com
http://trend.icerocket.net
www.radian6.com
www.reuptica.com
www.reputrace.com
www.vml.com

search update

2008-07-06T22:08:00.000-07:00

Image by Getty Images via Daylife
I saw a couple of interesting search things this weekend

- whilst reading a blog favourite of mine I saw that Microsoft have started actively started advertising that you can get cash back by using their search engine. This is a pretty aggressive way of gaining market share, not only are they paying people a portion of their money to purchase through their engine (a whiff of desperation perchance?), but they’re then spending even more on acquiring customers through it. Its still early days, but it will be difficult for them to change this inbuilt consumer behavior that Google is the default (Google’s US market share in the US is growing and in western Europe its almost insurmountable, whereas MSN/Longhorn has as yet only launched in France and the UK).

Microsoft also acquired Powerset this week which may be another arrow in the quiver in developing a better search engine. Powerset is focused on developing a more intuitive way of you searching the web, which mirrors natural language. This means you don’t have to search in a search engine friendly manner but as how you would speak to a friend or communicate in that way. I can understand that it’s a great way to query, but as a result of it you have to understand (as they used in their example) that cancer is both a disease and a star sign, and understanding the context is a crucial element. They’re apparently integrating this into the Microsoft search technology by the end of the year, but the real challenge is to get people to use the service rather than how innovative the model is.

You can innovate in search from a querying perspective as above, from an indexing perspective or from a display perspective. With regards to display people are trying to innovate from numerous different ways (and I quite like what Ask is doing with mixing video, commercial and text links in a clean looking display) I’m less enamoured with searchme, it displays the search sites in a page where you can scroll through the pages kind of like Apple’s coverflow for iTunes. It looks very slick and sexy, but it doesn’t display the content as I like to process it; looking at a full webpage doesn’t give me the ability to scan the text and find out if it contains what I’m looking for. however shuffling through pages is easier to use than tabbing through pages, so you can see a lot of pages in a short space of time.

I think the display are of search si the easier area within which to innovate, creating a good gui that is easy to navigate is easier to do than finding a new way of indexing the web or developing a new algorithm to search in amore relevant manner. It will be interesting to see how all of these (and other) technologies fit together to create the next generation of search.

In other news, if you’re thinking of quitting Yahoo! (and it seems like many people are), here is easy to use resource for creating your resignation letter… (its multiple choice, so you can choose the tone)

UPDATE: it seems that implementing Live Cashback has had a positive effect on Microsoft's market share in search

wii is me- a customer service opportunity

2008-06-18T23:46:00.000-07:00

(first off apologies for the awful pun)

Ninetendo missed a great opportunity with me. My wii broke within 1 year of purchasing it. I sent it back, and the unfortunately the fan wasn’t covered by the warranty, but they could replace it for a third of the price of a new one. we hadn’t been overly careful with it, so wasn’t too perturbed about having to pay this reduced amount. Last night we went to go and pick it up from the post office and on the way we were excited about getting it back; which games were we going to play first, who was the best player, how the TV was a thing of the past. We had a “kid at Christmas” feeling about the magical wii and what our friends at Ninetendo were going to send us.

And when we got the wii it was stuck in a box with polystyrene chips, with our customer service letter taped to it. They didn’t have a personal note, a n overview of upcoming titles they were launching, no free game, no coupon for money off our next game, no invitation to join the wii club, nowhere to access your saved games and mii’s from our old machine. These are a couple of ways to make us a little more engaged with the product. They missed a golden opportunity to tie us in forever, we are obviously interested, we shelled out money again for a second wii, but at a time when our interest was highest they didn’t capitalize on it.

search for your affiliate program

2008-06-10T22:14:00.000-07:00

We have been having an interesting conversation about how you should structure the relationship with your affiliate program and whether or not you should allow them to bid on your search terms. The overall objective is to get more cost effective traffic to your site. On one hand allowing affiliates to search makes perfect sense, Google only allows you to bid on a term once, and with a highly competitive term you can then be in the rankings on a couple of places in order to receive a larger proportion of the available search share. However if it is on a brand term or on a term where there isn’t much competition affiliates could end up taking some of your search share, and then you end up paying more for the same traffic.

After speaking to a number of people and arguing around our sites we came up with the following best practises;
1) only allow a couple of search affiliates
2) Don’t allow them to bid on brand terms
3) No overbidding or outranking us
4) They need to send their keyword list for approval
5) Google doesn’t allow you to link to the same domain, so they have to create an interstitial page (which will be a huge decrease in clicks)

Essentially you want it in areas when there will be more competition and it gives you an opportunity for further traffic.

Zappo's

2008-05-28T23:39:00.000-07:00

I am a fan of zappo’s
Not of their shoes (they don’t ship to Europe), but of the way they sell their product and run their company. I was looking around for some shoes online (I have a sneaker fixation) and got to the zappo’s site, what I found was; numerous photos from different angles, clear description, nicely laid out page. I asked them if they’d ship to me but the nice lady in their customer service department explained that they were only focussed on the us, unfortunately didn't ship to europe, but had i tried site x. And that’s the key to what they do, they’re a customer service company (their tag line is “powered by service”)

I’ve kept up-to-date with them anecdotally since then, there was a marketing Sherpa interview with them that highlighted that they don’t believe in marketing, but they do believe in delivering a WOW ™ experience. Jim Sterne talked about buying shoes from them (in a web analytics newsletter!) and seth godin highlighted a story that someone blogged about the customer service they offer. A woman had bought shoes for her terminally ill mother, and she had passed away without wearing them. She got an automatic mail asking her if she was happy with them; zappos has free shipping, 15 days evaluation, and free return shipping. She explained her situation, and zappo’s apologized for bugging her at this time, and then sent dhl to come and pick up the package. They then sent a condolence bunch of flowers the next day. This is the human touch that is lacking in many operations these days, zappos has no kpi’s on talk time or restrictions on what is done to keep the customer happy, but the focus is to keep the customer happy (you’ll see in one of the graphs in the presentation the significant revenues they make from return customers, so this pays off)

They get it; the customer experience is key; and its not for some bullshit reason that they then plan to pr what they do. In this case someone had a blog and talked about it, but there must be many such occurrences which remain undocumented (or spread to a couple of close friends).

Following on from the customer experience being key is that you need the right people on board in order to deliver that customer experience. Which is another innovative thing that they do. Everyone that works at zappos (irrespective of what they will do at the company) has to do a minimum of a week (and 4 weeks for customer service) working on the front line, packing boxes and understanding the nuts and bolts of how the company works. After the first week of this training everyone is offered $1,000 plus their pay-to-date to LEAVE the company; the thinking behind this being that if there isn’t an immediate culture fit, then the person can leave and both zappos and the employee are better off (this $1,000 has increased from $100 to $500 to $1,000, and could be looking at increasing).

Hearing this was pretty groundbreaking to me, and I started to do some online sleuthing into them. I read their ceo & coo blog, watched some movies, and contacted them to get some of their presentations.

So now I know more about zappo’s, and I’m even more impressed; I have an invitation to go and visit them for a tour the next time I’m in las vegas, they’re sending me their culture book (I’ll update you when I get it), and I am a firm believer in their value system and way of running their business.

2008; $1billion revenue, selling shoes & accessories;
2015; Amazon substitute?

things to make you smart (and look smart)

2008-05-19T21:58:00.000-07:00

In my ongoing search for being more efficient (and it is a tireless cause), I came across this very interesting article. It claims that instead of picking your nose/sharpening your pencil/surfing the net you should prioritise what you need to do and have a project at the top of the list that is big and hairy and has a deadline. When you inevitably don’t want to do it, instead of just chilling you should do things (which are still extremely worthy) further down the list. In this way you are still being extremely efficient whilst essentially procrastinating. it sounds simplistic, but can have major impact (or at least with me).

this article details the future of books for publishers and booksellers. There are some interesting analyses of the role of the Kindle, the long tail and publishing on demand. I think there were two other elements which I thought were particularly noteworthy;
1) he doesn’t prophesise the end of the paper book (which I agree with, I think the book will carry on as a physical entity, and it’s a guarantee that the act of reading isn’t dying)
2) communities are the future for selling books; create a community around and make your content an integrated part of it.

Its interesting to see how a product which has been unchanged for centuries have so many interesting ways of changing in the near future, and as usual we have the internet to thank J

the semantic web

2008-05-08T12:47:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of hype around about the semantic web and web 3.0 at the moment, but how many people actually know what its all about (note: its not tagging a youtube video so that it shows up in the natural links) . This article explains the different technologies which are currently in place; the top down and bottom up methods of classifications as well as who are the key players in this market. There are some pretty complex technical explanations to get to grips with, but it’s a great primer for understanding these emerging technologies.

music- my way

2008-04-28T08:32:00.000-07:00

My promised post about my music consumption online is finally ready.
The times/places of music listening determine the formats that I listen to;
On my way to the train I listen to my mp3 player, and on the train I listen to either my mp3 player or tracks on my computer.
At home I listen to records.
In the car I listen to CD’s.

In terms of music I have a browsing method of finding music that I like. Surprisingly enough for these days I actually do buy music, after years of only downloading I started buying vinyl about 2 or 3 years ago. One of the cool things with vinyl (aside from great big pictures, and the act of putting a record on) is that it now comes with a free download coupon inside the vinyl, so you can get the digital version too. the wierd thing is that as yet I haven’t used one of them.

The process I go through in terms of discovery and acquisition goes something like this;
1. consistently browsing pitchfork and the mp3 blogs that I read (on my iGoogle page).
2. If I hear something that I like (or that I have downloaded from an mp3 blog) or read about something with a high score/from an artist I really like, I see if it is on Rhapsody.
3. If its on Rhapsody I put it on my mp3 player and listen to it a while, until I decide if I want to buy it. If it isn’t on Rhapsody and I still like the track that I’ve heard I’ll go to Myspace and try to hear some more, or I’ll go to the Hypemachine and see if it on any other blogs and try to download more.
4. if it’s a band that I’ve heard, I want to buy an album of but I’m not sure of which one, I’ll go to amazon and look at the reviews and see which one I think is best.
5. Once I’ve been through this process and I have an idea of what I want to purchase, I look on ebay for older stuff, and if its new releases I tend to buy from the us (cheaper with the $ value, and cheaper anyway), my personal favourite being insound.

This is a fairly constant process of iteration, so I can be on top of the “next big thing”, because as with all hobbies/passions there is a joy in outgeeking your peers. I always enjoy telling my friends about new bands/factoids, or making a mixtape for them. One service that may make this process a lot more cohesive for me is something like Last.fm (a friend of mine works for them, and is a true evangelist). The problem is that I don’t use iTunes (except for making mix cd’s); vinyl isn’t digital, Rhapsody doesn’t get indexed and a random collection of mp3’s are not expansive enough to collate. So my music listening remains unclassified without a central point to manage it digitally. This is not the end of the world for me, I enjoy the process that I go through, but I can understand how a pandora or last.fm would allow you through the wisdom of crowds to find music that you like more effectively.

I wanted to also take a look at the major channels that I consume, see what I liked and disliked about them, and what could be done to improve the service;

pitchfork
pitchfork is the premier indie music website. It has a monthly readership of 1.5MM unique users, and has included a section which gives trial mp3’s, videos and streaming tracks It has recently launched a tv channel (pitchfork.tv).
Strengths
I like it for telling me which albums are coming out (even though their reviews are often a little florid), I really like the q & a with artists and music “gossip” (which includes upcoming gigs). Good seo on review pages means that they often come up top when searching for albums (I was in a record store last week, and could search it in on my blackberry)
Weaknesses
Snarky editorial tone may not appeal. Navigation is very flat, it all happens on the homepage which is then indexed according to age, it doesn’t go into different channels. They could do a lot more with their advertising, I saw them pushing Adsense ads, when they could be doing great things with the demographic they reach (its impossible to find this demographic on tv these days)
Opportunities
I am surprised that they haven’t tried to launch some kind of community around the site, I think that they inspire a committed kind of music nerd, and as soon as there is more of a reason to come back to the site (even if its just to see how someone has commented on your initial comments) it brings more traffic and ad revenues. as yet I haven’t got involved in their new pitchfork.tv offering, but it seems a little backwards to me, more of a “push strategy” when they have content available for a certain period of time, rather than having an ability to search through it. Its early days yet.

Myspace
i don’t go to myspace very often. I use it if there is a link to a Myspace exclusive, free tracks to download from someone’s myspace or to check up on gig dates or maybe explore who someone is in a little more detail (if there isn’t a lot of pr about, also the blog posts could be interesting)
strengths
good showcase of a single act, listen to tracks, watch videos and find out more about their band aside from just hearing the songs
weaknesses
I’m probably not the first one to say that myspace is extremely chaotic. The design is cluttered and there are too many distracting elements
Opportunities
Myspace is well known for their music coverage, but they could do a little more to leverage it (especially considering their reach); a Myspace music widget that streams all my favourite choices, some form of recommendation; “you like this, you might like this”. To me it seems like the product hasn’t developed very far since being acquired by news corp, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t good, just that it hasn’t moved.

Music/mp3 blogs
I read a number of music blogs on a fairly regular basis. Some of them concentrate on a specific genre, some only on cover versions; most are imbued with the writer’s personality and tastes. The average post talks about a specific track or album and gives you one track to download and listen to. These are often pre release, or new releases and mostly illegal. As they are hobbyists there is a degree of enthusiasm, and non professionalism/lack of editing which I find refreshing. Some blogs have grown significantly over the last while, so they have essentially become part of the “establishment”. Stereogum has begun these projects where they get popular artists to cover classic albums (bjork-post, rem- new adventures in hifi) to provide full covered albums, gorilla vs bear puts on live shows, and music-for-robots makes compilation cds and clothing.
Strengths
There are so many of them, get pre-release tracks, you get an opinion
Weaknesses
Posting can be erratic, doesn’t fit with a
Opportunities
I’m not sure what the opportunities are for music blogging. I think that the fact that they are so small and not part of a larger organisation is part of their charm, people like AOL have tried to get involved, but it doesn't have them same feel, i think the MP blogs are destined to be best as they are.

Rhapsody
I love Rhapsody. I think it’s the future of digital music consumption. You search for something and they have all the albums, nice clean design, a short review/info and a useful suggestion tool. Im not sure if the person-in-the-street is ready for using only a subscription program, I think ownership of a product is still important (but for the price, $10/month forever you could never accumulate enough music).
Strengths
Huge array of content, cheap cost/ song, ease of use
Weaknesses
Doesn’t appeal to the casual music consumer, non-ownership is scary.
Opportunity
Like I said earlier, I think rhapsody is the future of music consumption; its key usp I think is the ease of use and depth of content (I don’t have a sonos, but apparently that’s the way to go)

Anyway enough talking about music, here’s a muxtape of current favourites to keep you happy…

Rickroll'd

2008-04-21T00:05:00.000-07:00

Excellent video of Steve Ballmer explaining how acquiring Yahoo! would fit well into their strategy

What I just did there is part of an online phenomena called “rickrolling”;
You claim to have some very interesting piece of content and then you link it to Rick Astley’s classic 80’s hit; “never gonna give you up”. Although it would seem to be a mundane kinda lame joke, its been spreading like wildfire; Youtube linked their homepage videos to it on April Fools Day, an American football team had a user vote for their new theme tune and got rolled.

Quirky, but great

me vs teh internets

2008-04-19T01:25:00.000-07:00

The internet has become so woven into my lifestyle that I cant think of a time when it wasn’t part of what I do (and I got shocked the other day when friends explained that their only ecommerce activity had been buying books from amazon,this is 2008 even my mom does that).

What these and the successive blog posts will be looking at is how I use the internet within my life. in using a first person case study I hope to celebrate the success stories, and hopefully find gaps. Maybe the gaps i uncover are only small enough that it would be a market for 1,or maybe there aren't any gaps.
In order to understand the market you need to understand the target audience, so I’ll create a persona, lets call him brendan;
He is a dinky, (ie double income no kids yet), he is post graduate educated, earns a decent salary, drives a car, owns his house, is married, lives in a city and works full time.
Interests are food, music, running, reading and the internet. as these are his/my passions, it stands to reason that internet time will be most well spent in these areas. I’ll go into a little more detail on these areas in posts to come, firstly starting with music.

Alexa overhauls tracking

2008-04-17T04:17:00.000-07:00

As previously complained about, Alexa is not the most effective measured form of traffic measurement. But it’s global, and free, so that makes it more difficult to complain about.

this has all changed with the release of their new method of calculation,; according to their press release; “Your ranking wasn’t wrong before, but it was different.” . so I took a look at our “different” ranking, and it seems like it hasn’t had a considerable change, I checked a couple of weeks ago and we were on about 500 and this morning we were on 530. so it seems the new and improved ranking is just as effective (at least for our site) than the old site. i know there have been some pretty seismic changes if you read the comments below the techcrunch post

Interesting book

2008-04-15T10:17:00.000-07:00

I read this word of mouth book a couple of years ago (but I was in hospital, so maybe it didn’t stick so well). This time I read it, and it made a whole lot of sense. Along with widgets and seo it fits into my favourite kind of web traffic- free!
The steps in the process it outlines are pretty straightforward;

Find some TALKERS
Give them a brief but enagaging TOPIC to spread
Give them some TOOLS (banners for their blog, insider info, refer a friend forms)
TAKE PART-don’t let the conversation carry on without you, offer support if it’s turning nasty, or support positive discussions
Ensure that you do TRACKING, so that you can monitor the power of what your doing and optimize your message so that you employ your resources in the best direction.

The book was really easily laid out, easy to understand and gave everything in a series that you should employ one after another. We’re going to try it, I’ll report back once I have seen the successes.

Trademark & scrollable ads

2008-04-07T00:46:00.000-07:00

in other Google news (i'm not just following them, honest). it is now possible to bid on trademarked terms in the UK and Ireland similar to the US system. I'm not sure of the customer advantage here either...

also Adsense now has ads which are scrollable, it makes senseto increase the amount of inventory that is available. looking at my own consumer behaviour I'm not sure how "engaged" i would be to look for more ad content, but looking at the volumes of ads served there must be an incremental value for them

new google functionality

2008-03-11T11:50:00.000-07:00

interesting new functionality which provides an extra search within a site functionality. quite interesting, but i'm not sure why it's on Google's site, does it allow for extra ads potentially to be served?

Update: i have spoken to Google about this, and apparently you can make yourself exempt from this process;

The site: search operator is not new to Google -- it has been around for several years. The Site Search Box feature is just being made more accessible to users where Google has determined that it helps them in their search.
Ad triggering behavior has not changed either, but as the number of site: searches have increased, advertisers are noticing it more. The ads team is aware of these concerns and will determine if any changes are required.
It is possible for an advertiser to opt out of this feature, but sites can be opted back in as Google makes improvements to the feature.
I would recommend that you look at the analytics information to objectively look at the result of this feature before making a decision.
Because Google is constantly evaluating search results and making improvements, it is possible that this feature might change and reappear in the future.
There have been more opt-in requests than opt-out requests, so not all webmasters are against this feature.
It is not possible to opt-in to the feature at this time give that this feature is determined algorithmically. As we refine this feature, the sites for which it appears may change and new sites can trigger this.

cool website

2008-02-21T22:51:00.000-08:00

this is pretty great;
http://producten.hema.nl/
a heath robinson style showcase of all the products hema (a dutch supermarket chain) has to offer. as the page loads the products interact with each other and fall over the screen. nice design, not functional, but fun

two interesting studies

2008-02-14T21:28:00.000-08:00

i have read 2 interesting studies in the last couple of days. the first is a release from Comscore which details people's clicking habits on display advertising. it seems that heavy clickers (6% of the population) account for 50% of all clicks on display advertising. i personally don't click on banners, but there must be someone who does so (and apparently this person is below average income, a heavy internet user and into gambling, auction and career guidance sites). however if you are basing your roi on clicks alone and not any post click behaviour, you're in deep trouble anyway.

the other study was a definitive guide to online testing from some ex-amazon/microsoft guys. they talk through the relative advantages and disadvantages of the various approaches; A/B testing, multivariable (not multivariANT), parallel and split tests. its well written and has all the statistical backup of why you shouldn't only rely on the HiPPO (highest paid person's opinion)

internet party

2008-01-29T11:11:00.000-08:00

what happens when google's parents go away