Adam Saunders's blog

My wife lost her iPhone last Saturday night. When we realized this Sunday morning, I first tried using Apple’s MobileMe service, but the locator service was disabled. I then signed up for AT&T’s FamilyMap service, which is designed to help track your kids, but is also a last best hope should you loose your phone. FamilyMap pinpointed the location of the phone to a restaurant in Harlem where we ate dinner the night before. I called the restaurant and was told that the phone was nowhere to be found. I would have to wait for the manager to find out if it was put away the night before. When I tried to locate the phone again, FamilyMap indicated that the phone was not available.

The connection between my phone call and the phone dropping off the radar made me very suspicious, so I walked over to the restaurant, which is only a few blocks away, to see what was up. I found two people cleaning the restaurant and their supervisor, who I had talked to on the phone. He and I looked everywhere and then I just decide to give up and wait for the manager. The most likely scenario seemed to be that someone found the phone while cleaning up and then turned it off when I called the restaurant. When the manager arrived she assured me that nothing was found and they would continue to question the staff and look throughout the day. There was really nothing I could do so I left and continued to try and track the phone throughout the day.

Later in the day I called and reached the restaurant owner, who said they had been looking throughout the day but could not find anything. They had gone over the whole restaurant and questioned all the employees. They even went through the linens from the night before to see if it got caught in those. I thought this was really going above and beyond, but as it turned out this was just the start. Soon after hanging up with the owner I got another signal from an address in Queens, so my wife called back and asked if anyone on the staff lived at the address. It turned out that one of the employees who cleaned up that morning lived at the exact address. Busted!

The owner called the employee and told him to come back with the phone or she would call the police. He showed up at the restaurant an hour later, but he completely denied taking the phone. The restaurant owner asked us to come over to show him the evidence we had, so we bundled our young daughter up and headed over to the restaurant hoping to quickly resolve the issue. No such luck. I showed everyone including the thief the detailed maps with the location of the phone at 10:30AM and the location of the phone at 6:30PM. Still the thief denied taking the phone or any knowledge of how the phone managed to get from the restaurant to his apartment. We told him we would call the police if he didn’t give us the phone but he persisted in denying it.

Now this was just getting stupid, but also interesting. We caught him red handed, he might be arrested if he does not give us the phone, but he continues to deny it. The logic perplexed me, however, a smart thief would not have turned the phone back on after getting home from work, so I was thankful for his stupidity. At this point we had no choice. We called the police and I went home to put our daughter to bed while my wife waited for the police with the owner and restaurant managers. It seemed that everyone had become fascinated with the turn of events.

While waiting for the police, my wife tried to locate the phone and found that it was now a few blocks away from the restaurant and it kept moving up and down the block. After putting my daughter to bed, I logged in to see this interesting activity. We guessed that the thief had left the phone with a friend, who was getting impatient and pacing the block.

At this point the police arrived and he continued to deny any knowledge about what was going on despite the evidence and the indication that the phone was just around the corner. However, after more questioning and the arrival of additional officers he finally said that he might have "dropped" the phone we were seeing it on the map. The police, my wife, the restaurant owner, and the thief all piled into squad cars to go find the phone. But, the adventure was not over yet!

The thief still, “did not know where it fell,” so the police began combing the entire area. They looked through everything on the street corner. It was really impressive how helpful they were! While everyone else was looking for the phone, the thief just stood there smirking. It became clear that he knew exactly where the phone was. At this point the owner of the restaurant told thief that she was giving his remaining wages to my wife unless he told us where the phone was. All of a sudden he seemed to remember that the phone was tucked under a parking lot fence in a CVS bag. Mystery solved!

We are sending flowers to the restaurant today. We are not sure how to reach the police officers, but they truly showed themselves to be New York’s finest. We will be sending them something soon. We are so happy to have all our picutures, videos, and memories back. Thank you all!

IBM recently came out with a research report titled “Beyond Advertising: Choosing a Strategic Path to the Digital Customer ,” By Saul Berman, Bill Battino and Karen Feldman. The report covers familiar ground for marketers, but should still be an interesting read, because it is chock full of survey data and puts numbers to many trends currently taking shape.

These reports are also interesting in that they provide insight into what IBM is thinking in terms of its role in the industry. Naturally, IBM is quite excited about the explosion of analytics in advertising. IBM seems to have great plans to help advertisers move to that brave new world “beyond advertising” with new data management, analytics, and targeting tools. While impartial and objective in tone, these research reports represent a key component of IBMs marketing strategy. Most marketers don't think much of academic papers, but they are well worth the investment when you are selling complex and expensive services to a select and highly educated group.

The report seeks to show that “the senario of the future is consumer centricity,” i.e. highly targeted and relevant advertising delivered in the format most appealing to the consumer. The key factors preventing the industry from achieving consumer centricity according to the report are the following:

• New format uncertainty - Particularly in the new economic environment, there are questions about the growth of new formats like advanced TV and mobile
• Fragmentation - Large number of suppliers in new advertising formats, and there is no agreement on format specifications.
• Siloed operating models - There is limited cross-platform integration of campaign support tools, processes or organizations to enable the selling, tracking or delivery of integrated, “know-me messaging.”
• Data glut - Enormous amounts of information exist, but are difficult to access given the lack of consistency in data structures, metrics or analytics.

These are certainly major problems. No matter how much we wish it were otherwise, the big ad agencies are just not that tech savvy. Traditional industry titans are being blindsided by technology and innovative business models. However, just when we were starting to feel really bad for Madison Avenue, the report suggests “Four capabilities to enable consumer-centric marketing”:

Last night I attended "Innovation in Media: Global Meets Digital" at the Levin Institute. Marc Frons from the NYtimes; Betsy Morgan of HuffPo, Geoffrey Sands with Mckinsey, and Tom Phillips of Google sat on the hot seats and answered questions posed by MC Garrick Utley and the audience. The general discussion centered on a short list of key issues that the media industry is currently facing, namely: What does the future of the media industry look like? How does/will anyone make money? Will New York City survive as the media center of the universe?

Mr. Utley started the discussion off by asking the panel what works in the modern media business? Or, does “nobody know nothing?"

Mr. Sands explained that the deterministic 5-year plans that Mckinsey used to create for clients no longer work, because everything now changes too fast. He suggests that companies create a portfolio of initiatives and quickly shut down the initiatives that do not succeed. He also pointed to the explosion of independent artists creating music, films, etc., and innovations in advertising from mobile to behavioral targeting as evidence that things are not all doom and gloom.

Picking up on the innovation, expansion, and optimism note Ms. Morgan pointed out that HuffPo has doubled its staff in the past year to nearly 60 people. Their newsroom in NYC manages about 10,000 bloggers generating 300 posts per day. Nearly all of the editorial staff is under 30 and many are under 25 years old.

So how does HuffPo make the money and stay financially viable in these tough times? It’s the classic model, ad sales pay for operations. There are no plans to change this. It also helps that none of the bloggers are paid. According to Ms. Morgan, bloggers are mainly writing opinion pieces and accrue other benefits from blogging, which make up for the non-existent paychecks.

This makes sense, trying to make money from blogging is not easy, kind of a stupid idea, but getting those published articles on a known site like HuffPo will often bring the notoriety that leads to big money, at least enough to buy a coffee! Also helping the bottom line are the young editors, who are paid “competitive”, read small, salaries.

Skittles just launched a new un-website that is simply a navigation block in the upper left corner overlaying various social media websites related to Skittles. The landing page is the Wikipedia entry for Skittles. Other links include Products (Wiki pages on specific products); Video (YouTube); Pictures (Flickr); Chatter (Twitter); Friends (Facebook).

The site borrows it's concept from Modernista!, but the Skittles has been lauded for being the first major brand to launch a website that fully embraces the concept that companies don't control their brand image, but rather must be active participants in the conversation that are continually shaping and reshaping their brand in the public consciousness.

The origins of this idea can be found in the Cluetrain Manifesto, which has been promoted for many years on the social web. At first it was a novel, even revolutionary, concept that markets are conversations, which corporate marketing departments have little control over.

However, the introductions of an un-website from a major CPG company like M&M Mars clearly demonstrates that at least one large corporation has understood and accepted its role as a participant and sometimes guide in the online conversation about one of it's products.

Putting marketing theory aside, the Skittles site itself is slightly awkward to view, because the navigation box is large and blocks out the upper left portion of each website visited. The navigation can be minimized, but just expands again as soon as the user go to another page.

The current initial landing page is the Wikipedia entry for Skittles, which was chosen after the Skittles Twitter page got raunchy on launch day. There are still a continuing stream of questionable posts running across the Twitter page. I quickly glanced at the Chatter page and noted a number of posts from a user named FuckCity. This uncontrolled nature of the content streaming across Skittles.com necessitated the addition of an annoying pop-up that requires users to enter their age before entering the site.

In sum, the Skittles site is an interesting and brilliant marketing experiment that has already generated huge acclaim and hundreds of thousands of fans and followers of the Skittles brand across the social web. The online world will probably reward the next few copycats of the un-website concept, but eventually this approach is going to get rather tired. Can you imagine if every website was just a link to the same five social media websites?

While the Skittles experiment does not represent the future of the homepage, there is no doubt that we are going to be seeing a lot more integration of social media elements in the websites of major companies. Skittles.com is surely just the beginning.

What is search engine optimization a.k.a. SEO? I've found that people, even search professionals, are often confused about what exactly search optimization is. Everyone is pretty clear on the goal of search optimization, to make a website or webpage rank highly for a keyword or set of keywords in the organic search results of major search engines. How exactly this is accomplished is another story entirely and this is where much of the confusion comes from.

The basics of SEO are really quite simple to understand, so let's break SEO down into it's component parts and cut through the confusion, which sadly is often created by inexperienced or even evil SEO practitioners who make things complex and mysterious in order to charge clients lots of money for questionably effective services.

There are three overarching strategies which are used to improved search engine ranking. For this article, let's call these strategies link love, semantic code, and search friendly copy.

Link Love

Link love is pretty clearly the mother of all SEO techniques. Google conquered the search world by recognizing that calculating the quantity and quality of links to a webpage was the best way to determine the relevance of a webpage rank it in search results.

Today Google determines search ranking through an incredibly complex algorithm that calculates search ranking based on thousands of variables, so the story goes. No one really knows since the Google algorithm is a super crazy big secret. The one thing that we do know for sure is that the number and quality of the links to your website are still the most important variables in that equation.

The funny thing is that most SEO firms are terrible at generating link love, because choosing to link to a site on some level involve passion and lust. Someone has to see something on your website that is so important or relevant to them that they just have to link to it and tell all their friends about it. Most SEO firms are composed of technicians who are not particularly good at eliciting this kind of passion. Generating lust is something that artists and writers are really good at, but you'll be hardpressed to find an SEO firm with artists and writers on staff, unless you come to Market Anomaly that is;)

Be very wary when an SEO firm tells you that they are going to generate thousands of inbound links to your website. How exactly do they plan to do this? Most likely their "plan" will involve some kind of paid inclusion technique, which if discovered by Google will get you totally black listed from the search results, meaning your site will not appear at all in their results for a very long time. In SEO land, don't trust the practitioner who seems to be offering something too good to be true. He most certainly is. Building link love takes time, patience, and a lot of hard work. Unless your SEO firm is a true hybrid with experienced writers and technicians, this responsibility should most probably be handled by your PR department with guidance from a competent SEO firm.

Semantic Code

Okay, enough knocking SEO firms. Many SEO firms are great at creating properly coded websites that can be easily indexed i.e. read and ranked by search engines. They are experts at taking terribly coded web pages i.e. the majority of the internet, and improving these pages so that search engines love them.

There are many techniques that go into creating search engine friendly webpages. The following are some important techniques for optimizing a webpage:

1. Add metatags to all pages and content on a website
2. Add important keywords to the path of all pages on a website
3. Change the structure of the XML code, so the most relevant content appears first when the search engine reads the webpage.
4. Create and XML sitemap of the webpage and submit it to the major search engines.
5. Fix .htaccess, robots.txt, and other files that may be misconfigured on your site.

There are many additional steps that may need to be taken to fix your website and it does pay to have a professional look at your site structure if you are serious about SEO. If you are working with an SEO firm, I would suggest focusing your project on this aspect of SEO, as this is what these companies truly excel at.

Search Friendly Copy

Many SEO firm will want to rewrite your website copy with a mind towards search optimization. Here is another area where the line between art and science gets blurry, so you will want to balance the input from your SEO firm with your own gut instinct. Remember, humans read your website too!

For this reason, you definitely don't want an SEO firm writing your website copy unless they actually have top notch writers on staff. The best relationship for the creation of search friendly web copy is one where the SEO firm is training those who write your marketing materials on how to write in a slightly more search engine friendly way. Good writers will know when to push back ignore certain SEO rules when they conflict with the meaning and relevance of the text to human readers.

Conclusion

It's important to create semantically perfect web pages that search engines can read, but this goal needs to be achieved while still creating incredibly engaging and interesting content that excites, entertains, and/or educates your audience. Only then will you achieve true SEO Zen and incredibly high search ranking.

The first thing that clients often ask when we start setting up a search marketing campaign is, "What do all these terms and acronyms mean?". Here is an overview of the basic search marketing terms you need to know when running campaigns with Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM), Microsoft AdCenter, and other search marketing networks.

Ad position: The the location of an ad on the search results page. Position 1 is the top of the first page. On Google, if your ad is in position 1-8, it will almost certainly appear on the first page of search results, though positions 1-11 may appear on the first page of search results depending on the configuration of advertisements.

Bid price: The maximum amount of money an advertiser is willing to pay for a click from a given keyword. Advertisers generally pay less than the maximum bid price set in the Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft ad management systems.

Call to action: Direction within an ad or a web page for the reader to take an action.

Conversion: A desirable action taken by a web site visitor. Conversions can include joining a mailing list, buying a product, calling a phone number, visiting a web page, or downloading a file.

CPC (Cost per click): The amount an advertiser is charged for a single click. Different keywords cost different amounts, depending on competition.

CTR ( Click-through rate): The number of clicks an ad receives divided by the number of impressions. The higher the CTR, the more effective ad management systems (AdWords, YSM, AdCenter) generally consider the ad. A high click-through rate doesn't necessarily mean your ad is effectively meeting your conversion goals, but it certainly means that Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft are making more money from your ad. For this reason, ad management systems generally rank ads with a high CTR above other ads.

Impression: The display of an ad on a web page.

Landing page: The first web page shown after an ad is clicked. The page is constructed to appeal to the same desire as the ad.

PPC (pay per clck): The advertising model that charges advertisers only when their specific ads are clicked.

Split test: Test that divides online traffic randomly between two or more creative approaches and measures which one generates more conversions.

Traffic: The number of visitors to your website.

Visitor value: How much money, on average, a single visitor to your web site is worth. Determining the visitor value will help you set your bid price, so that you can be sure that you are not losing money on your PPC campaign.

Monitoring, tracking, and responding to what others are writing about your company online is a relatively inexpensive and very effective strategy for building your brand's online reputation. It is an excellent way to learn about your customers, respond to issues before they get out of control, and generate customer loyalty that translates into increased sales.

The following free tools will help you stay on top of the conversation surrounding your business.

Google.com/alerts - Simply enter a search term, choose a "comprehensive" alert, choose how often you'd like it delivered, then enter your email address. You will receive updates every time any content with your keywords enters the GoogleSphere. This service will be even more useful when Google adds alert delivery via RSS.

Technorati.com - Technorati is the largest blog search engine. Add your RSS enabled website to Technorati and it will track other sites that link to you yours and add your blog to the Technorati network.

Backtype.com - This service does a scarily good job of tracking comments across the blogosphere. Type your name in to see all those pithy remarks you've made over the years. Type in your company's name to find out what people really think of your products and services.

Boardtracker.com - Indexes and tracks discussion board postings. Discussion boards were the original social media sites long before Facebook or MySpace existed. They often have a large, focused, and passionate user bases. If you want to have conversations with potential customers that care about what you do, then find and join the top discussion boards for your industry or area of interest.

Search.twitter.com - Twitter is of course the incredibly wonderful/annoying service that lets you update the world about every little thing that you do. While you may not use Twitter extensively, you will want to know if someone is twittering about your company, so try a search to see what comes up.

Yahoo Pipes - Yahoo Pipes allows users to get/pipe information from different sources and then set up rules for how that content should be filtered. Try searching for pipes that other users have built like the Social Media Firehose. You can modify existing pipes or create your own unique pipe to get your data just the way you want it.

Over the past few years marketers have focused on content creation as the primary means of "participation" in online communities. We've all been busy writing blogs, sending emails, building online communities, twittering, etc.. However, we would do well to take the time to seriously listen to our customers. Hopefully, these tools help.

Last week I sat in on an interesting panel session at the Mixx Conference. Dave Couture, Benjamin Hill, David Rosenberg, and Barbara Ward Thall discussed how personal publishing and social media tools have altered the way customers learn about, engage with and make decisions about products. The power has shifted from traditional marketing departments towards trusted peer networks and other influencers.

So what is your average marketing department to do? Obviously, everyone wants to engage in the discussion and take advantage of this whole “social media” thing, however, not all companies have the stomach for it. Benjamin Hill mentioned that, “You aren’t going to be successful in the social space unless you come with the intent to listen, read, react, and respond.“ People get tripped up by the half-hearted attempts to “listen” and “participate.”

A particularly egregious example that came up is the Johnson & Johnson blog. Here’s a quick excerpt of their comment policy, “All comments will be reviewed before posting. Since this blog is about Johnson & Johnson, comments that don’t directly relate to the Company or to topics covered on this blog won’t be posted." It continues, "We generally won’t post comments about products that are sold by the Johnson & Johnson operating companies.” So what exactly can I comment about?

Of course it’s fine to have rules about what you post to your site, but the net result of this draconian comments policy is that nobody comments. It would be better if J&J just disabled comments all together.

The basic problem for a corporation is that it is setup to be systematic and to speak with one voice, but participating in online conversations is chaotic and distinctly not systematic. It’s not always going to be pretty when you go online and start participating in conversations about your company. These are real conversations, so people will not always have great things to say about the company. Some will be fans, others will be legitimately ticked off customers, and then you will have your share of hopeless trolls who are just looking to draw you into a fight.

Naturally, you have to be flexible and ready to role with the punches, because sometimes you won’t get the result you want. Sometimes your carefully orchestrated plan won’t work. So how can you explain to brand managers, corporate execs, and the fretting legal department that it might not be pretty, but they have to participate anyway?

You have to help them see how rampant the conversation is around their brand and explain to them that they can either participate or let the conversation happen without them. Sometimes it really is better to just observe a conversation and not sully the waters with an interjection from corporate that could very likely sound stilted an out of place.

Even if a company has no plans to participate, they should at the very least be listening. My suggestion to J&J would be that they kill their blog and put themselves in listening mode and invent more traditional TV, Banner, and search campaigns around the insights.

Nicholas Negroponte of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and Paul Lavole of TAXI talked at Advertising Week about the progress of the project and TAXI’s upcoming advertising campaign to support the November 17th, 2008 launch of the "Give a Laptop. Get a Laptop" store at Amazon.com.

The XO Laptop is great little machine that has won numerous design awards and tugs at heart strings like few other computers can. However, questions remain about its ultimate success and ability gain traction in world markets. Currently, a search for "xo laptop" on Amazon returns a list of low cost laptops like the Asus eee that compete with the XO for market share.

The advertising campaign aims to significantly improve the marketshare and mindshare of the XO laptop over the upcoming Christmas shopping season and generate widespread interest in One Laptop per Child project. The look and feel of the campaign seems very Appleish. The campaign concepts shown in the presentation consist of cute pictures of the XO on a white background with messages below like “Give a laptop. Get a Laptop. Change the world” and "Let’s create generation XO."

The partnership with Amazon is similar to last year, "Give a Laptop. Get a Laptop" lets consumers purchase two XO laptops and keep one while giving the other to a needy child somewhere in the world. However, this year Amazon will handle the entire sales and fulfillment process. Hopefully, this will eliminate the bottlenecks that plagued last year's campaign.

Interestingly, the next generation of the XO is an e-reading device that would seem to compete with Amazon's Kindle. It remains to be seen how this will play out given the close relationship with Amazon.

I would like to know what the XO campaign is doing to target expatriates living abroad and people with an interest in helping specific countries. Naturally, people will be more willing to give if they know that the donation will be directed towards communities they are involved with. I would certainly love to post an ad on Tadias.com to support laptops for Ethiopia.

When starting your typical open-source project, there is little or no monetary incentive for individuals to participate in the project. Participation is largely dependent on the brilliance and usefulness of the idea, the leadership of the project’s originators, and the platform for collaboration that is implemented.

Ideally, the software itself serves as a platform for collaboration and is designed to encourage participation in the project. This is the case with many popular content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, Mambo, etc.. These systems allow users to easily post content and create social networks that encourage a positive feedback loop of creativity and software development. Project participants end up creating a system, which allows them to work more effectively on the system they are creating.

Of all the content management systems I’ve worked with, Drupal does the best job of designing collaboration into the structure of the software itself. The design is simple, but fundamental to Drupal’s success. Drupal is a bare-bones framework that allows modules of code to be plugged into it. The modules provide nearly all functionality in the Drupal system. Each of these modules has its own maintainer who is often the module's creator.

This structure automatically creates a team environment, because each developer has her own piece of the pie so to speak and is committed to managing the development of her module. Further, there is a strong incentive to contribute modules to the project, since contributing a module gives the programmer credibility within the Drupal community, as well as the opportunity to have the community improve the programmer’s code. This simple mutually beneficial system drives Drupal's development.

Drupal also excels at organizing programmers and users in real communities around the world. There is one site and one module that contribute the most to the massive worldwide organization of Drupal communities. The sub domain Groups.drupal.org (GDO) runs off of the Organic Groups module, which allows for the creation of an infinite number of topic and location specific sites. In this case, the subject is Drupal, but the same network of groups could be created around anything. GDO allows users and programmers to organize on a massive scale and drives widespread community involvement in the Drupal project.

The basic principles of Drupal’s success can be applied with technical and non-technical teams in for profit or non-profit organizations. Create a positive feedback loop that automatically rewards individuals for contributing to the project. Break the project into modular components that are owned by an individual or team. Create a platform for collaboration amongst team members.

Drupal is an impressive tool for marketers and community organizers looking to take advantage of the best social media tools. Consider using it on your next project and feel free to contact me with questions about building online communities and collaborative teams.