Q: You mention Henry Ford creating the assembly line: “Productivity was so astounding that Ford stopped measuring it. By 1914, other companies needed for five times as many workers to build the same hundreds of thousands of cars as Ford.” Henry Ford was also known for paying workers well. It seems the best way to improve standards of living is large productivity gains?

Jeffrey Hayzlett: That’s one way, I don’t know if it’s the only way or the best way.  It’s more of a philosophy, give people what they want and get the things you want.  Provide a great product or service, of high quality, and there will be consumers.  The same theory can be applied to anything you are advertising, marketing or promoting.  For example, use the workers in Henry Ford’s plant and productivity. In Ford’s plants they became so good they stopped measuring.  It was about not only paying workers a fair wage – a good wage – but about offering them other things, enticing them, so they could buy the product they made, have pride in ownership, pride in building the products they created.  There are lots of different ways to go about getting the things you want.  Money may not always be the greatest incentive when gaining productivity or motivation.  Again, find out what people want and then give it to them.  Motivating my salespeople isn’t always about making good money – it can be a way to keep “score” – but sometimes it can be offering incentives such as golf balls, trips, even cowboy boots to get the team excited to want to go out and do more on the company’s behalf.

Q: Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975 but didn’t launch it back then……why?

Jeffrey Hayzlett: Their success led to their own demise.  Because they were trying to protect the great margins film had – you had a product that was 70, 80 even as high as 90% in terms of profitability.  They were doing everything they could to keep that alive for as long as they could.  The problem became they forgot what type of company they were.  They started to believe they were a film company rather than a company that would help people make images and move information, a company focused on innovation, a company providing emotional technology.  They had the only product people would actually run into a burning building to save, yet they focused on being a film company rather than a company that can innovate and recreate itself again and again and again.  If we look at the most successful companies, whether it be IBM, Apple or a host of others it’s about being able to reinvent yourself as well as remembering at the core of it all who you really are.

Q: You suggest a fear of change and that this can inhibit healthy debate with those that disagree with us. What is the best way to create culture that can thrive on healthy debate, starting with how we pick a new breed of leaders?

Jeffrey Hayzlett: We all know that leadership starts at the top but is also reinforced and thrives at the bottom.  So across the organization if you don’t have leaders at the top of the org that are willing to not only to create tension but take it as well then you are not going to get the give and take that you want at an organization.  You won’t be able to encourage innovation, encourage change and encourage growth because everybody will be looking out after themselves because they are afraid of what they might say because the boss might have retribution.  So the key is to create an organization where people can stand up and question things.  By standing up and questioning things you create the tension in the system and you get something better than you first started with.  If I start with item A and someone starts with item Z and we start creating so much friction back and forth and this friction creates a fire of new ideas somehow we’ll go one way or the other to move the new idea to a better place.  I think that’s what great leaders try to do.

Q: When I worked at BlackRock(BLK) there was discipline around process, but it was flexible to allow breakthrough ideas. In Chapter 14 you wrote “Some people get caught up in the idea rather than the process, but I think the process leads to the idea.” Please elaborate on this concept…

Jeffrey Hayzlett: It’s a little bit of both in this particular case.  Certainly you can have a great idea but if you can’t get it out and get it through the process it will never see itself through fruition – it will never make it to market.  I can remember one time sitting in a meeting with a chief technology officer – one of the smartest guys in the world that I had ever met.  He said, “Jeff, you realize because I make this product, I create this software program – if it weren’t for me you wouldn’t have a job.”  I had to remind him that it could be the greatest product in the world but if it weren’t for me selling it and marketing it – getting it out through the process and to the customers’ hands that he wouldn’t have anything.  So that’s what I’m talking about the process leads to the idea.  By having great processes and great systems set up then you can try to push things through to allow things to be able to win. If you don’t have a great process, even the greatest ideas will lose before they begin.

Q: So when done right, this can allow a company to focus on the future more effectively?

Jeffrey Hayzlett: Absolutely, by having a great system, a great process, a great way of channeling greatness then you’re going to be able to look for more things to put through to your following.  Look at the greatest sports teams in the world, it is those that focus on the fundamentals of having great athletes – not just one great player or two and then try to build the team around them but yet having a great team made up of different people and that’s what process does for us.

Q: In the 1993 classic book, Reengineering the Corporation by Michael Hammer and John Champy they mention that executives are “frighteningly unfamiliar” with three forces, separately and in combination: Customers, Competition and Change. You actively did this in those retail stores. Given the popularity of that book almost two decades ago, why do you think companies are still so unable to focus on these basics?

Jeffrey Hayzlett: I think so many companies focus on the next big thing, the big peel, the magic peel.  I think especially in the US we look to that one big thing that will do it for us rather than again getting back to that process, getting back to good and hard work.  If it was easy anyone could do it – it’s not supposed to be easy.  Therefore, the focus on competition, the focus on customers, the focus on change are just as good today as they were decades before.  It’s important for us to be able to take a look at how we implement change, look at customer and competitors to be able to drive and channel the forces behind being successful.

Q: “Radical transparency is not a one-way street of engagement.” Why do people have such a hard time developing a 2-way mindset in search marketing and social media?

Jeffrey Hayzlett: Inherently, I think it’s because people are scared.  Most people don’t like to get feedback.  I was one time in a phase in my life where I wore all black all the time.  Someone asked me why and I said because it makes you look slimmer.  The person turned back to me and said, well it’s not working.  I think a lot of people are afraid to hear that feedback sometimes and it takes a very strong leader and a strong person to get into that 2-way mindset, that it’s ok to get feedback – both positive and negative.  By the way, look at the negatives as a gift because that’s a way for you to be able to change, to turn around that potential customer or that person who’s had a negative experience.  I’ve heard from brand leaders and internal departments (HR, Legal) where they want to try to control the situation but you can’t control the situation. When it comes to brands especially, you can’t control it because a brand is nothing but a promise delivered.  It’s about delivering a promise and when you deliver that promise or opportunity up to the customer it’s going to be interpreted in different ways.  Sometimes that’s positive and many times its also negative.  Yet you should be strong enough in your leadership abilities, strong enough in your offering to be able to understand that this will come with everything.  There’s going to be a good, a bad and an ugly but the good should always outweigh the other two.

For more information, please visit http://hayzlett.com/. Thank you!

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His lasted book is THE MACKAY MBA OF SELLING IN THE REAL WORLD (Portfolio, 2011). The wonderful publicity folks retained by Mr. Mackay were kind enough to grant me an email interview after I read the book. His answers below build on a great read and create the basis for a larger conversation that the world desperately needs to have. Harvey is part of an increasingly rare breed of business leader who understands that people, human capital and organizational transformation are vital to success. For our society to survive as we know it, we must rapidly work to reverse this trend and create a new generation of leaders with these all too rare skills. You feel the sense of urgency in his answers below. I can’t wait to spend another day with Harvey Mackay, the mutual learning would be overwhelming.

You stated “Fostering employee loyalty is the first step to creating customer loyalty” in Chapter 4. Over the past two decades, many companies have treated employees as disposable assets. How would you convince management to reverse this unfortunate trend?

Harvey Mackay: Our company mission statement is to be in business forever.  That means no compromising … not compromising your core principles and taking any shortcuts.  It is virtually impossible to stay in business over a long period of time if you treat your employees as disposable assets.  In 50-plus years in the business world, I know of no one who stayed in business with a revolving door of employees.  It’s sad to say, but in these difficult economic times there are still too many businesses that still don’t get it.

Chapter 15 states, “Your past is not your potential” and “Far too many people exist in a world of “what is” rather than applying their energies to “what can be”.” Today skills are dynamic and changing; this has implications for returning to the basics of recruiting naturally curious lifelong learners based with the vision to lead change. How can companies best stop the practice of picking leaders of the past?

Harvey Mackay: I have hired over 500 people in my career, and the single most important word in the dictionary that I look for and demand is trust.  Once I have established that, then I immediately look for capacity and willingness to learn.  I can’t begin to tell you how many people out there in the marketplace and disciples of the Peter Principle.  There has been a seismic shift in the business world.  The great classical business principles still hold true but they need to be fused with cutting edge internet technology.  That’s the kind of leaders that companies should be looking for.

Fred Smith got a “C” on his term paper for his idea for Federal Express. Mike Bloomberg was told his idea for what became the Bloomberg terminal would never work by his former employer. Why is it often so difficult for most executives to grasp paradigm changing business ideas?

Harvey Mackay: It’s way easier to stay in the comfort zone, especially when things are going good than to go out on a limb and take some risks.  My philosophy is exactly the opposite:  Sometimes it’s risky not to take a risk.  And remember, if you walk backwards, you will never stub your toe.  One of the most difficult things in life for any individual or business is to accept and adopt change.

So, as you like to say, “People don’t know what they don’t know?”

Harvey Mackay: The way I like to fine tune this statement that I made up in college is – I know that you don’t know, but you don’t know that you don’t know!  By that I mean there are three reasons why individuals and businesses fail:

1.    Arrogance

2.    Arrogance

3.    Arrogance

There has been a consistent, gradual decline in ethical business practices in the United States for about 50 years, and it reached new extremes in the “daisy chain” of the sub-prime mortgage industry in the period of 2002-2008.  This was caused by executives getting chapped lips from kissing the mirror too much, which is a perfect example of how arrogance set in.

You discuss the importance of listening, what is the best way for a salesperson to use the obtained information to create a successful sales?

Harvey Mackay: First of all you can’t learn anything if you are doing all the talking.  Sales people should always be developing their earQ, not their IQ.  The only way to create a successful sale is to understand that knowledge (from listening) does not become power until it is used.  And ideas without action are worthless.

You talked about enthusiasm, what is the best way to maintain it in the face of adversity?

Harvey Mackay: First of all, I have never yet met a successful person who hasn’t had to overcome either a little or a lot of adversity in his or her life.  If life there is a lot of lumps and bumps … a lot of throttling up and a lot of throttling down.  Failure is not falling down, but staying down.  Therefore, you have to ignite your own enthusiasm.  The ten most powerful two-letter words in the English language are:  If it is to be, it is up to me.  Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and you will accomplish your object.  I agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”

In chapter 67 you cut the world-famous Mackay 66 to the Mackay 25, Please share more about why you changed it…

Harvey Mackay: The Mackay 25 does not replace the Mackay 66.  Rather it is a streamlined version, which gets you to an instant snapshot of the prospect or buyer’s attitude and expectations.  It gets to the heart of what is commonly known today as relationship selling.

In a recent blog post you stated that you are always surprised when you ask who their customers are and they say everyone. Rob La Gesse (@kr8tr) asks who is your customer?  Have you decided who is not?  If so, you have already self-limited your ability to affect change?

Harvey Mackay: You can’t be all things to all people.  In most businesses the company will have what I refer to as nitch-picking.  In short, virtually everyone has their own niche within an industry.

I had the distinct pleasure of spending the day with you during your Chicago media tour in 2010. I was amazed by the way you prepared for each interview. You were seeking to learn about each interviewer and worked to bring that into the on air conversation. What can aspiring radio and TV guests learn from your techniques?

Harvey Mackay: I call this humanize your selling strategy.  I attempt to do a Mackay 66 Question Customer Profile on everyone I meet throughout my life.  That means customers, employees, suppliers, competitors, audiences, radio and TV talk-show hosts and journalists.  This is what I teach our sales force and the people I mentor, and that is that every single person I encounter I have a deep-down burning desire to learn what turns that person on and what he or she is most interested in.  In any relationship, you must find a common denominator.

———————————————————————————————————————————–

Thank you Harvey! Every CEO, board of directors member and business leader should read this interview and distribute it (and his book) to their teams and then talk about these meaty issues! I welcome the world changing conversation.

Learn more about Harvey at http://www.harveymackay.com/

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The article brings something in the bright, bright light that had been hidden in the darkness, the TIME article states, “…Newt’s numbers are way out of the ordinary – even for a politician. While about 8% of his followers are real, other politicians were deemed to have anywhere 20% to 30% of “real” followers. In comparison, the average Twitter user, like you and me, have anywhere from 35% to 60% real people following them.”

It makes one wonder where all these non-real followers are coming from and more than a few CEOs are likely reading this article and asking the question, “Is all this investment in social media justified and an activity that will grow my business and improve the bottom line or are there wiser marketing investments to be made?” The answer is not one that will immediately be answerable completely. Before we get into that, a little history is required. Twitter has API’s that allow people to interact with their data to build other tools. For reasons that are completely unclear, the API allowed people to automate certain actions like posting, retweeting, even creation of new accounts via automated programmatic methods.  This appears to have helped Twitter grow users to create user adoption rates that were shown to venture capitalists. Some have suggested that certain due diligence steps were missed, I don’t know whether it is true or not. Time will tell.

What this incident has a potential to do is bring this conversation into the boardroom and have serious questions asked like are these 80,000+ Twitter follower social media experts really experts at anything at all? Are all of these investments in social media justified? Shouldn’t I be focused on a well diversified portfolio of relevant marketing activities? What does Klout’s influencer score of 72 for @NewtGingrich say about fake retweets being counted as real and will Klout eventually become the solution with verified users and replace Twitter altogether (if Twitter doesn’t buy it someday soon)? How many reports of social media ROI are sitting in executive boardrooms right now that are not true representations of actual real world reality? How many marketers departments will have new and different leadership 90 days from now due to questions raised due to this incident? Will people across the globe stop looking at the number of Twitter followers as the Holy Grail of social media efforts?

The answers to these questions aren’t fully clear yet, but I wanted to raise some of the most important ones. I can confidently say that the goal should always be one of diversified marketing strategies that reach relevant demographics and real, actual target customers.

It’s time for CEOs to rewrite the job spec of the CMO to the creation of relevant business results instead of hype, buzz and hocus pocus. This needed migration is just an idea in most boardrooms today, it needs to one day become reality. It’s time for businesses to adapt their organizations to perform in this environment which is something that must be customized for each company in solutions provided based on the markets that they serve.

How big is this marketplace? According to Google’s Keyword External tool over 3,361,550 queries on Google occurred on the term Twitter Followers. This quantifies 1) the amount of people researching how to improve their Twitter followers is large and 2) it means that social media people seeking Twitter followers are not talking to their friends via Social Media about this, they are using a search engine called Google, which is the primary tool that most people use for this research as well as what the majority of the population uses at the moment they are seeking highly relevant information.

Keyword    Global Monthly Searches
how to get twitter followers    90500
top twitter followers    4400
get more twitter followers    40500
get twitter followers    90500
twitter followers free    27100
increase twitter followers    8100
get twitter followers fast    4400
how to increase twitter followers    8100
most twitter followers    27100
find twitter followers    60500
pay for twitter followers    390
twitter followers tool    1900
twitter follower    246000
get more twitter followers fast    1000
free twitter followers    27100
twitter follow    301000
get more twitter followers free    6600
getting more twitter followers    880
get twitter followers free    14800
get free twitter followers instantly    480
build twitter followers    1300
targeted twitter followers    2400
who has the most twitter followers    12100
grow twitter followers    720
get thousands of twitter followers    480
more twitter followers    49500
get targeted twitter followers    320
twitter followers fast    5400
get more twitter followers instantly    320
buy more twitter followers    590
more twitter followers fast    1300
get instant twitter followers    390
increase your twitter followers    880
get free twitter followers    14800
how to buy twitter followers    33100
twitter followers for free    27100
more twitter followers without following    390
twitter follower software    1000
how to get more twitter followers    40500
add twitter followers    3600
get lots of twitter followers    4400
download twitter followers    880
more twitter followers free    8100
how to use twitter    135000
add more twitter followers    320
get more followers on twitter    40500
fast twitter followers    5400
buy twitter followers    33100
increase twitter followers free    720
twitter follower adder    720
get twitter followers instantly    880
automatic twitter follower    1600
buy twitter followers without following    590
how to get twitter followers fast    4400
buy guaranteed twitter followers    1600
get twitter followers for free    14800
free instant twitter followers    390
twitter for business    60500
twitter advertising    14800
twitter follow back    12100
best twitter to follow    14800
get alot of twitter followers    2400
twitter software    49500
twitter adder    12100
twitter who to follow    301000
twitter more followers    49500
purchase twitter followers    14800
getting twitter followers    14800
get more twitter follower    40500
best twitters to follow    880
get twitter follower    74000
get twitter followers without following    1000
buy youtube views    18100
guaranteed twitter followers    2400
get more followers on twitter free    6600
free twitter followers instantly    880
twitter increase followers    8100
auto twitter follower    1900
how do i get more twitter followers    49500
who has most twitter followers    12100
get followers    165000
buy real twitter followers    110
twitter followers following    9900
automatic twitter followers    1600
instant twitter followers    1000
buying twitter followers    12100
generate twitter followers    260
how do you get twitter followers    301000
free twitter follower    22200
increase twitter follower    6600
how do i get twitter followers    301000
get free followers on twitter    14800
twitter follow Friday    1600
how to get twitter followers without following back    480
how to get more twitter followers fast    1000
highest twitter followers    14800
how to get a lot of twitter followers    4400
get followers on twitter free    14800
remove twitter followers    6600
twitters to follow    8100
twitter followers    301000
Total monthly Google queries for the term Twitter Followers on Google Keyword External Tool    3361550

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This month, one of the largest earthquakes in the modern history of the world took place in Japan. As you may know, Japan is one of the highest penetration rates of digital camera and digital phones in the world. Since most of the areas affected by the earthquake are without power and without Internet and mobile connections this content is going to ever so slowly trickle out instead of hitting instantly. It will likely become a torrent of video over time. This amazing video of the tsunami was obtained by Russia Today:

Many more of these videos will show the massive magnitude of this event in Japan and the insignificance of our species when compared to the forces of nature.

OK, what does this have to do with digital marketing strategy? Everything.

- Marketing Department Organizational Structures Are Still Aligned to the Pre-Internet Era – budgets, the position spec of the CMO, marketing channel management, lack of understanding of the need to change communication formats. Embrace UGC, rather than resisting it.

- Executive Leadership Teams Are Not Actively Managing Marketing Budgets – The commoditization of content and creative due to globalization, Apple computers, digital cameras and the creation of sites like 99designs.com create opportunities for management teams to significantly change business results. The portfolio of marketing channels is not naturally efficient. It requires highly specialized skills to optimize properly. These opportunities can only be realized when these assets are managed to the the proper business result objectives instead of branding measurement objectives that were appropriate in the 20th century.

My your preferred higher power bless the people of Japan during this difficult time. I only wish that the great coverage that the Los Angeles Times was doing about the earthquake and tsunami right now was just as focused, just as strong on the tsunami of change affecting the world of business gradually everyday across the world. The majority of the world has yet to see the drivers of the damage and are not properly responding to realign to new realities.

The time to act is now!

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“Small local furniture retailers who sold mid-range to higher priced furniture already were challenged before the recession because of competition from lower-priced Chinese imports.”

“Porters of Racine, one of the oldest surviving high-end furniture retailers in Wisconsin, soon will close after struggling for several years with declining sales.” Reaction: Notice that phrase “several years”, it’ll become vitally important in a minute.

“Through November, retail furniture sales in the U.S. dropped by 12.1%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The decline followed an 8% slide in 2008.” Reaction: Yes, after the housing bubble which created unnatural demand for furniture in 2005, 2006 and 2007, this would be natural.

The story states that Porters of Racine “will close after several years with declining sales”. Yet the story mentioned sales figures that only showed declines for 2008 and the first 11 months of 2009. dictionary.com defines several as “being more than two but fewer than many in number or kind”. This seems to indicate a period of two to possibly up to seven years. A previous 2007 story mentioned Porters of Racine being in a challenging business situation, before the housing bust took place indicating a clear issue about the business had formed earlier than 2007.  What could possibly explain several years of declining sales that included a four year boom in housing that correlated with increased buying of correlated household goods? That is a really good question.  It would seem to indicate that there was an agonizingly long, slow drop in quantity of qualified store floor traffic.  Let’s examine Porters online marketing channel usage, obviously without the help of the actual marketing plan in my hands.

The following branded terms for Porters of Racine had the following monthly query volume:
porters of racine outlet    36
porters of racine    1000
porters of racine furniture    91

According to my post, Local Search Marketing Keyword Allocation: Porters of Racine, there were about 48,948 qualified queries for the term Wisconsin furniture, 38,971 for Milwaukee furniture and 3,110 for Kenosha furniture for a total of 91,020 queries. Give that the standard 1/3 Google keyword haircut and we’ll call it 60,000. However, if you include the other communities in southeast Wisconsin and northeast Illinois, you’d probably have between 40,000 and 60,000 long tail queries for places like Lake Forest, Wilmette, Winnetka, Kenilworth, Highland Park, Glenview, Northbrook, Deerfield, Buffalo Grove, Lincolnshire, Mettewa, Libertyville, Schaumburg, Kildeer, Lake Bluff, Barrington and Riverwoods. In Wisconsin, there is places like Madison, Green Bay, Appleton and other cities within a drivable distance of Porters. To be conservative, we’ll even leave the high query volume term Chicago furniture completely out of the equation. So let’s call it 100,000 monthly queries in the regional furniture query market.

A look at website of Porters of Racine, shows a classic flat small web site with “Porters of Racine” on every title tag. And while the site had several more pictures on it before the going out of business sale banner was added, this was the case before the change. A further look back at the Internet wayback machine, indicates a series of websites built over the years that did not venture far from the current web sites theme. The word Milwaukee does appear on the site during a year 2000 version. Well you are getting my point, Porters of Racine appears to have never created an effective content strategy that would attract the types of searchers that would be looking for high end fine furniture and lived in the region. In fact it only ranks for the non-branded attribute term – Racine furniture. In my opinion, the shift in how companies engage customers has been shifting from many traditional forms of media to effective content and relevant paid search marketing strategies that can create engagement with potential customers. I’m making an assumption about content only as I see no evidence of an active paid search marketing campaign.

One might assert that many of those 100,000 queries aren’t qualified customers of a high end furniture store like Porters of Racine. Alright I’ll grant you this. But before we write them off, let’s talk about their potential benefits for a minute. Thousands of people wanting the best and aspiring to buy furniture from Porters of Racine! The amount of word of mouth, the number of people who visit the store and tell stories about it. All great things!  Not to mention we likely all know someone in our lives whose significant other caused them to buy something more expensive than they should be buying right? I do! OK, so let’s drop 90% of those queries as completely unqualified customers. This leaves us with around 10,000 queries a month.

10,000 queries a month for how long? Let’s say 7 years from 2003 (once Google had mainstream traction) through 2009. 10,000 queries times 7 years times 12 months per year yields us = 840,000 queries over the past 7 years! During a time period where customers were deluged with tons and tons of new content in news ways and forms. Not to mention that all of these queries were people putting in the word furniture with a regionally local qualifier – so they were relevant prospects! If done right, much more effective than traditional brand marketing spend that wastefully sends outbound messaging to many unqualified and uninterested customers.

So would 840,000 queries from relevant prospects have made a difference in Porters of Racine viability as a profitable and thriving business concern I think so.

Not fully convinced? Consider this. Doris Hajewski’s next “Shop Talk” entry was about Steinhafels opening a new mattress store. Who ranks #1 for the terms – Wisconsin furniture and Milwaukee furniture? You guessed it, Steinhafels!

Back in Chicago, I performed business content strategy and seo services on Weber Furniture Service, a fine furniture and refinishing and restoration provider, at the end of 2008, in the 1st quarter of 2009 versus the 1st quarter of 2008, a very different economic period, unique site visitors were up 45%!!! The company was able to cut traditional media spending as an added benefit which improved profit margin!

To be perfectly clear, my goal here is not to rip on Porters of Racine. Quite the opposite. By profiling a business which is going out of business, it is my hope that tens of thousands of other businesses can learn about the importance of effective SEO, SEM and content marketing practices from this event, which in my personal opinion is one of missed opportunity.

Let’s summarize what we’ve observed here in this post.

1) Effective search rankings can contribute to business success (Steinhafel’s) or business failure. Do you want to learn about Gen X CMO management techniques so you can prevent other businesses from this fate.

2) With the emerging changes in operational risk liability laws is your Board of Directors receiving qualified advice from someone who understands seo and web analytics as well as traditional executive level business techniques? Are they keeping current with these items are transforming the world of business strategy and customer distribution? If your Board of Directors  is not yet receiving this advice, it should be. Shareholders should be demanding it!

3) Are you aware of the trend of how search marketing is allowing product attributes to be electronically stored and retrieved from non-branded search queries allow you focus on the customers needs instead of your product push? As volume of content increases there is an ever increasing lack of mental band with to absorb additional information. You may wish review the appendix to this post.

4) Are you aware of the microeconomics of your marketing channels and successfully migrating organizational resources to align yourself with the customer and lead this change management initiative?

5) We are living in a time that is similar to the industrial revolution.  Marketing is changing from a purely outbound medium to a medium via search that is creating inbound marketing. This is a 180 degree process change that has large process ramifications. We are in a recession, but there are structural changes happening to the economy as a result of search and most businesses are not properly adjusting.

6) In the new normal economy, one needs to utilize the power of the Internet to lower marketing and sales costs to create competitive advantages over their competition. It’s actually not that hard to do once you understand it, but one has to understand that revenue and profitability improvements are possible. This is why the change management is so difficult, many don’t understand what is possible and are not aware of the far reaching organizational issues. One further needs to understand that SEO content strategy is not instant, but rather a long term process.

7) Newspapers, online news sites, TV and cable news need to cover more than just the facts. The reality is yes businesses are closing and jobs are being lost, but that is a symptom, not a root cause of these complex business issues. But these are things that happen well after the damage that is caused by not migrating your marketing channels to an ideal search marketing strategy.

If you’d like to learn how to become aware of these issues so that you can migrate the structural changes in our economy, please consider attending Think Tank Live in Waukesha on February 23, 2010, code WI50 gets you a $50 discount. Chris Campbell of Lakeshore Branding and WordPress Expert Lisa Sabin-Wilson wrote blog posts about the upcoming event where you will learn things such as “How Breaking Business News Stories Migrate to Mainstream Mass Media“. We hope to see you there!

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The first thing one notices is as the geographic search qualifier term covers a larger geographic area the quantity of searches in the head containing a branded term fell for these furniture terms.
Wisconsin Furniture Monthly Search Queries
Attribute 38119 95.4%
Branded 1818 4.6%

Milwaukee Furniture Monthly Search Queries
Attribute 14014 83.6%
Branded 2757 16.4%

Kenosha Furniture Monthly Search Queries
Attribute 2070 78.7%
Branded 560 21.3%

Does anyone know of anyone who has studied this issue on a larger basis across many geographies and industries? It makes sense to me I don’t yet have enough data to elaborate on it further at this time. It would make sense though as when you are looking to travel farther you are less clear of the path and that when you are doing a hyper-local search you could be influenced by such queues as seeing the physical location and word of mouth marketing factors. If you’ve noticed similar trends, please let me know about it with via a follow on post or private email.

The following is the keyword data I used in the analysis so you can see how I classified the attribute versus branded data:
Wisconsin Furniture Keywords Monthly Searches Attribute/Branded
wisconsin furniture 22200 Attribute
wisconsin furniture stores 3600 Attribute
furniture in wisconsin 3600 Attribute
wisconsin furniture store 1600 Attribute
wisconsin amish furniture 1600 Attribute
furniture stores in wisconsin 1300 Attribute
ashley furniture wisconsin 1000 Branded
wisconsin office furniture 1000 Attribute
wisconsin wood furniture 590 Attribute
wisconsin furniture company 480 Attribute
american furniture wisconsin 480 Branded
wisconsin furniture outlet 390 Attribute
furniture store in wisconsin 390 Attribute
amish furniture in wisconsin 390 Attribute
wisconsin furniture manufacturers 210 Attribute
oak furniture wisconsin 170 Attribute
rustic furniture wisconsin 170 Attribute
colders furniture wisconsin 170 Branded
furniture manufacturer wisconsin 140 Attribute
unfinished furniture wisconsin 140 Attribute
ashley furniture in wisconsin 110 Branded
amish furniture stores in wisconsin 91 Attribute
best craft furniture wisconsin 58 Attribute
american furniture store wisconsin 58 Branded
Total Wisconsin Furniture 39937

Milwaukee Furniture Keywords Monthly Searches Attributes/Brand
milwaukee furniture 22200 Attribute
milwaukee furniture stores 2900 Attribute
furniture in milwaukee 2900 Attribute
milwaukee furniture store 1300 Attribute
furniture sale milwaukee 1300 Attribute
milwaukee office furniture 1300 Attribute
furniture stores in milwaukee 1000 Attribute
milwaukee furniture outlet 480 Attribute
milwaukee bedroom furniture 480 Attribute
ashley furniture milwaukee 480 Branded
american furniture milwaukee 480 Branded
colders furniture milwaukee 480 Branded
furniture store in milwaukee 210 Attribute
boston store furniture milwaukee 210 Attribute
rubins furniture milwaukee 210 Branded
rubin’s furniture milwaukee 170 Branded
furniture stores milwaukee area 170 Attribute
steinhafels furniture milwaukee 170 Branded
contemporary furniture milwaukee 170 Attribute
baby furniture milwaukee 170 Attribute
wood furniture milwaukee 170 Attribute
antique furniture milwaukee 170 Attribute
home furniture milwaukee 140 Attribute
office furniture resources milwaukee 140 Attribute
bachman furniture milwaukee 110 Branded
leather furniture milwaukee 110 Attribute
wayside furniture milwaukee 110 Branded
biltrite furniture milwaukee 110 Attribute
unfinished furniture milwaukee 110 Attribute
national business furniture milwaukee 110 Attribute
rubens furniture milwaukee 91 Branded
milwaukee furniture company 91 Attribute
amish furniture milwaukee 91 Attribute
furniture stores in milwaukee area 91 Attribute
colder’s furniture milwaukee 91 Branded
scandinavian furniture milwaukee 91 Attribute
colders furniture store milwaukee 73 Branded
built rite furniture milwaukee 73 Branded
american furniture store milwaukee 73 Branded
milwaukee furniture dolly 73 Branded
boston store furniture gallery milwaukee 73 Branded
Total Milwaukee Furniture 38971

Kenosha Furniture Keywords Monthly Searches Attribute/Branded
kenosha furniture 1900 Attribute
kenosha furniture stores 480 Attribute
total furniture kenosha 390 Branded
furniture stores in kenosha 170 Attribute
ashley furniture kenosha 170 Branded
Total Kenosha Furniture 3110

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Home Page Title Tag – Hot or Not?

Moderators: David Dalka and either Mike Grehan, Greg Jarboe or Stewart Quealy

The first thing one learns about search engine optimization is about the importance of title tags, especially the home page title tag. Yet when an experienced SEO surfs the web they often must stop and scratch their head at certain home page title tags! It certainly indicates a lack of understanding by senior management teams out there.

In this session everyone is the expert! We will share 30 title tags and URLs in 30 minutes. Everyone gets to tweet their impressions of the title tag for with the Twitter hashtag #sestitle!!! Then we’ll do Q&A and figure out what it all means. The benefits of this session are certain to include venting of pent up frustration, bonding with your fellow search marketers, extreme laughter and far reaching communication of the session to people far and wide not even at the Search Engine Strategies conference! Spread the gospel. Change the world. See you there.

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Obviously one must consider that without true reform of advertising models away from CPM driven page view models how display in 2010 can do nothing to further the goal of lowering costs of marketing and sales for companies and improving our standard of living. CPM can only maximize revenue of an ad network with some residual benefits to publishers. A few days ago I considered writing something about this, but thought this was part of something larger than just Google and their display initiatives in 2010.

Surely, less than 48 hours later, Jason Calacanis started a discussion about comScore that has the Blogoshpere abuzz. Michael Arrington also chimed in (as did a bunch of other people) in his post, Jason Calacanis Punches Comscore In The Face. Comscore Punches Back. Fred Wilson Drags Us Into It. $SCOR” rel=”bookmark” href=”http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/24/comscore-calcanis-wilson-punch-face/”>Jason Calacanis Punches Comscore In The Face. Comscore Punches Back. Fred Wilson Drags Us Into It. $SCOR.The buzz around Jason and his conversation is ultimately about symptoms of the current ecosystem, not the root causes of the future end game.  While the conversation about the current state is certainly an interesting conversation to observe, it’s not the conversation I wish to take to the next level. We need to have a different conversation. There is so much more to achieve and limited marketing resources of companies need to be put to work effectively. There are advertising models of the future to consider where offline, mobile and Internet will collide and will someday make this entire conversation look primitive.

Sure enough reading this post brought me back to the conversation about Google and the worthlessness of poorly targeted and untimely display banner ads. You see there was not one but two large banners on TechCrunch that stood out as irrelevantly served by Google. What were they? They were display banners for a company I had interviewed with to be the CMO of in Spring of 2009 that I would have likely have increased the revenue significantly by now.  Unfortunately most CEOs don’t yet fully understand the magnitude of the amount of change  that is necessary to transform a company successfully for marketing on the web while improving customer satisfaction and the corporation’s profitability. I had researched them and their competitors back then. I was never a potential customer of the service. So now, a full nine months later, here I am looking at this completely irrelevant ad on TechCrunch of all places (which is completely unrelated to the vertical). Wasteful. Pathetic. Sad. Not something a rational business leader following the rules of being a Gen X CMO where search marketing becomes the top of the strategic process.  The first decade of the Internet got us to the batters box to start the game of corporate business strategy transformation, I look forward leading that conversation into the first inning during the next few years. The magnitude of the change and the amount of transformation needed is massive, whether it is a small company or a member of the Fortune 500.

You should read those comments in Michael Arrington’s post and think about their motivations – extremely carefully. You’ll also find a link to Jason’s original post there if you wish to read the full details. The future of not only the Internet, but also the future of business organizational structures and marketing strategy budget direction hangs in the balance.

So my question for Jason Calacanis, Fred Wilson, Michael Arrington and EVERYONE ELSE is the following, “Is it time to stop pretending that offline branding models simply converted online is the future of the advertising? If a world migrated budgets from CPM banner ads to CPA/CPL and other emerging forms, who would really care about unique visitors besides site owners seeking an ego boost? ”

Bonus question for Fred Wilson: Wouldn’t your energy be better spent on funding ideas that move the conversation in the direction of innovation of advertising instead of arguing with Jason about a company you exited long ago? (If you are up for it, I’d like to create those realities with you in start ups in that future arena.)

In the end measurement of the type discussed in Jason’s post only matters in an advertising world based on page view based(CPM) or time sponsored impressions. As in my example above, considerable display advertising occurs in an irrelevant way after the fact. For example, I bought a car last September, I’m still seeing increased banners on the models I considered now – after the purchase. Women planning weddings likely have seen related retargeted banners long after the wedding has occurred, possibly even after the divorce is filed in some cases!!! We must do better.

The convergence of offline, online, search and mobile marketing will require entirely new processes to effectively manage them as it becomes a real-time individual decision marketplace. To me, it will have similarity to the changes I made in the 1990′s at BlackRock, where we created new data, new structures, new standards and created better information for us to create strategic advantages.  I actively network with some outstanding nascent start ups, sadly many are ignored as many VCs look for traffic or who is involved rather than focus on revenue models, vision, market size and evidence that there might be paying customers for such a new , disruptive model.

The economy right now is bad, but to state that it is just an economic event is way oversimplifying it. It’s prolonged and drawn out due to the structural effects of the Internet not being managed to corporate advantage effectively. Stated simply, corporations and our society is not allocating resources in an effective manner as it fails to migrate budgets and marketing strategy to the highest ROI activities which attract relevant customers. It’s time for scarce, new and often misunderstood breeds of executives that understand these concepts to be allowed to realign corporations big and small, new and old to these new realities otherwise we will see more corporations destroyed “by doing nothing”. There is certainly a significant cost to tapping new leaders, with new skills to lead organizations into new frontiers in terms of realignment and retraining. However, the costs of doing nothing are far greater to our society as not allocating budgets to the most efficient channels and allowing those decisions to be made by people who understand these new realities is far greater.

All I can ask the both the blogosphere and the world business community is to please stop the bickering about these legacy models so we can move onto the real issue and work ahead – realigning our corporate business strategy and our society to the realities of Industrial Revolution 2.0. It starts with board of directors, CEO, CFO and COO executives asking their CMO and marketing partners the right questions. The journey will be fun.

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Highlights:
Google’s data can now predict home sales and home sales numbers with search numbers.

The data can be correlated with stock prices at this time.

B2B search terms are growing. Conversions are bouncing back in Q2 2009!

Research, online and offline, big company c-suite, SMB and government sectors.

Commentary: First a note about the c-suite portion of the survey, I have concerns about an offline study asking senior executives about actions used for decisions being accurate. Or worse assuming the numbers were generated from search itself when it wasn’t. Executives might answer what they think is the best practice, even if they don’t do it to appear competent. I know of Fortune 500 CEO’s who still have their emails printed, so I have doubts about the number actually being this high. I’d love for this data to be 100% correct more than anyone, I really would, but I have concerns.

First findings form the C-Suite:

- 73% of the C-suite is using the Internet for information verification and vendor selection.

- 92% Internet exceeding, 87% at-work contacts for referrals.

- 64% of C-level executives conduct 6 or more searches per day to locate business information.

Video and podcast content usage is growing in importance.

Small and medium size businesses:

77% of business owners use search to find suppliers.

Half are using blogs and social media sites in some form in their business.

Government:

Searches are way up on stimulus, energy, health care and related issues.

Huge impact of search results, with just an Adwords ad:

28% Brand Association

36% Message Recall

Commentary:  I’d live to see an example with a smaller, lesser known B2B example.

With both a top organic and Adwords listing, incremental increases are significant

53% Engagement

43% Message Recall

63% Brand Association

Commentary: Sam Did not provide data on organic listings alone. I’d love to see if this was higher of lower than the Adwords ad alone.

“Mobile Search Growing Rapidly” Start testing…(audience did not react much)

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In the “cage match” post, there is one phrase that got me out of my silence because the ignorance was too much for me to hold my tongue… Eric Clemons said:

“Mr. Sullivan argues that in all his years thinking through and working through issues in internet advertising he has never heard any company or any individual complain about paid search. In contrast, I have been hearing this complaint from senior vice presidents in travel companies for years, and this year the chorus has been joined by retailers and manufacturers”

Dear Mr. Clemons,

Perhaps it’s time for you to get some new senior vice president’s to talk to? It’s time for a new breed of leaders who know how to truly lead and not whine about taking the easy way out using purely 100% paid search.  Someone at that level should understand content strategy, social media strategy, seo strategy (do you even know what SEO is Professor Clemons?) and paid search and should be managing them strategically in conjunction with each other. All too often, I see executives whose qualifications to be a senior leader in an Internet company or large ecommerce division amount to little more than they worked at an Internet company since 1999, they worked and some ‘elite‘ business strategy consulting company(where they never executed or implemented anything), they’ve been passively recruited from place to place and it hides that they can’t move the needle or that they were a brand marketing person a long, long time ago and still think in terms of campaign awards…sigh.

To manage customer acquisition via the Internet effectively and create an awesome customer experience using all of the tools in the tool box isn’t tough if you have the right leaders in place who understand that strategy is about incremental daily improvement not hiring a 20th century management consulting firm. As a top 10 MBA holder myself I can honestly say that the education in almost all programs is lacking relevancy to today’s Internet world. I discussed this with the heads of the a major marketing professor conference here in Chicago recently – I was pleased by their receptiveness to my outreach. It’s too bad Mr. Clemons wasn’t there to share the conversation with us. My experiences at BlackRock managing data structures, living offline social media, creating elite customer service via the web and driving standards that created competitive advantages that have lasted a decade. Due to BlackRock’s B2B nature, much is still not understood publicly, but the Internet world would be wise to learn from BlackRock’s lessons.

The combination of my experience BlackRock, my top 10 MBA (least important of these) and the wonderful experiences I’ve had immersing myself in search engine marketing when Danny Sullivan was kind enough to let me hold a microphone in lieu of registration fee at my first SES conference in December, 2005 had led to the amazing learning that followed over the last several years. My life has never been the same since! I now have an amazing and wonderful small circle of the world’s greatest search marketing minds whom I can pick up the phone and discuss how search marketing is creating the largest change in business since the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago! I’ll admit it’s challenging and frustrating some days to be part of a tiny group that understands the massive power of how pull marketing via search is changing organizational structures and profitability at their very foundation.

The paradox is most of the leaders of companies don’t have the right combination of old and new skills to lead this change and the number of people in the world truly qualified to lead the largest change management project in the history of the world. I can truly count on two hands at most at present – yet senior management and the world’s understanding of search marketing is so limited at this juncture that those people aren’t even coveted…yet. How can one hire the best leader or search marketing if they are still basically clueless about what they are buying? That’s right, they can’t effectively!

Retained marketing executive search consultants are still picking most CMO candidates based on 1989 standards and position specs and/or last job title held nonsense – oddly a side effect of the effect of search being used too heavily in candidate sourcing and job search. Worse, they are letting the roles be defined by the CEO, CFO and boards of directors who don’t know the first thing about how search engine optimization, content strategy and marketing are changing the world. This causes people with outdated skills to frequently be placed in leadership roles again and again with less than optimal financial results and creating an unpleasant working environment (and a high turnover rate) for the wonderful and hard working search marketers and social media folks that they manage.

It doesn’t have to be this way Professor Clemons. It’s about time you had some new senior vice presidents to talk to that understood search, understand the theory of exactly how and why they need to transform their new organizations and will test and learn their way to success – the kind of success that you can write case studies about and that I can one day come visit your class and share about. But for now, I’d challenge you to name the SVP’s that are complaining instead of performing…I’d love to consult for them and make them look good…or be their replacement if they’d like to continue to complain and not build a balanced (and profitable) traffic acquisition strategy.

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They say that when one door closes another one opens and apparently Barney Harford is the gentleman that was actually meant to darken the doorway. He’s had extensive experiences in Asia and elsewhere for Expedia and more recently as an advisor to Kayak.com and eLong. As mentioned in the article linked to above, I strongly believe that geographical diversity is important to high performing corporate cultures and I praise the Board of Directors for this choice. It is my hope that this will effect Chicago’s landscape in a positive way far beyond Orbitz. Time will tell.

I know what it’s like to arrive in a strange new place from my experiences living in New York and Cleveland. I’ve always appreciated people orienting me to the cities I’ve moved to so I thought I’d return the favor before giving you a few thoughts on Orbitz. Here we go:

- Odd objects in parking spots that have been shoveled clear of snow: You managed to move to Chicago in the dead of Winter. It’s not exactly the most friendly welcome the city can give you. In fact when I moved back here in 1999 – we received 22 inches of snow on during the day I was supposed to move in – it took me a week to recover. Anyway, if you see a chair on a side street claiming a spot, my advice is to pass it by and go elsewhere as you never know what that person that put the object there might do. Of course this practice is chronicled in detail on a blog from Montreal.

- Orginal’s Hair Designers – Good haircut for $16 with the bonus of then giving you a touch up between hair cuts at no charge. You want John to cut your hair there. He arrives at 6AM sharp Monday through Saturday going there between 6-7AM is the best time to go. No appointment is needed. They are located at 134 North Wells.

- Shoe Repair – Beehive Shoeworks gives great on the stand shines and they do an excellent job with any shoe repair you’ll need. Ask for Sam.

- Lower Wacker Drive – A cab can usually make it to the Lakefront or Michigan Avenue faster this way, but they’ll never do it unless you ask as Chicago pays cabs partially based on waiting time. Yes, this is the same Lower Wacker Drive as in the movie the Blues Brothers!

- Free Valet Parking at Most Restuarants in Greektown – Take advantage of this, my favorite place is The Parthenon on Halstead.

- Pizza – As you likely know Chicago is home of the deep dish pizza. My favorite is Giordano’s, the one where the primary office of the chain at 310 West Randolph tastes the best in my opinion and I usually order it withcanadian bacon and mushrooms. If you want something a bit lighter near your office (my answer would be different in the suburbs) , I recommend Tomato Head Pizza at 945 West Randolph. They make their pizzas with a somewhat rare Faulds pizza oven.  You may have experienced this special oven at Delfino’s Chicago Style Pizzeria in Seattle previously. I researched this as I’ve often considered moving to Seattle.

- Italian Beef – This is a rare sandwich that you’ll have to work hard to find anywhere outside of the Chicago area. It’s roast beef immersed in flavorful gravy that is properly presented on freshly baked French bread. If consumed at the right places, this can be heavenly. In the loop you will find this at a place called Luke’s (walking distance from the currentOrbitz office location) or Portillo’s. Like the pizza above, many will passionately advocate their favorite place over another. It’s kind of like a sport.

- Origin of the term Windy City – This is highly disputed. But I mention it because you can judge how much a person studies history by asking if they have any opinion on this subject. Statistically speaking, there are many places in the Midwest that are technically windier, so I personally do not favor this explanation. The most likely in my opinion is the explanation of the politicians being full of hot air. There are others that abound on the net.

- If Your Furniture is Damaged by Movers – Weber Furniture has been in business since 1950 repairing, refinishing and reupholstering fine office and antique furniture. I recently did some work on the site and it already ranks #1 for the term – Chicago furniture restoration. It still needs a bit more authority from off site factors but the link above should likely fix that. Thanks for the opportunity but I hope your furniture travels safely.

OK, now that you are oriented a bit, let’s talk business a little bit.

In terms of my thoughts and philosophy on Internet companies:

- The world is enduring rapid business transformation which historians will may one day judge revival the Industrial Revolution. Corporations need to constantly test and learn to create and maximize the optimal business model mix. Those who create rapid testing and learning cultures will outperform.

- Search engines are changing the foundation of branding from brand name to one of a brand’s attributes to be found by the searcher and user experiences when interacting with the brand. This is a fundamental shift from push to pull where the consumer controls the conversation and it’s about meeting those expressed needs.

- Quotes of business leaders I highly admire are on this page, they are my guide posts.

- I believe that corporations need to restore balance to focus on both revenue and expenses equally, recent focus has been on expense reduction and risk aversion is preventing focus on new revenue potential. This blog post sums up my thoughts.

Thoughts on Internet travel vertical in general:

- Too highly dependent on paid search, need to lower traffic acquisition costs (TAC).

- Desperate need to create long term relationships with customers outside of purchase transaction.

- Customer data models need to evolve to create niche experiences to create best in space customer experience to meet the evolution in branding mentioned above and to increase CPM advertising rates.

- Considerable business travel is booked manually via phone from legacy providers. This presents a potential opportunity.

In terms of Orbitz from a consumers point of view:

- Orbitz does yet not consistently win the price competition in the hotel + airfare category – for my three day trip to SJC to speak at UGCX at the same hotel – Priceline was $411, Expedia was $428 this morning while the Orbitz quote was $476.

- The current Orbitz Terms of Service appear to be in need of revision in regards to link policy in terms of winning the search engine optimization battle.

- I use a pop-up blocker, but I’m sure you’d win alot of points with people if you removed those completely.

There is other advice I have but will keep that private at this time. So again, welcome to Chicago! Please let me know if there is anything I can help you with as you settle in. Good luck with your role at Orbitz!

OK folks, sorry this post was a bit long.  What suggestions do you have for Barney to improve the customer experience, customer acquisition and conversion rates at Orbitz while still reducing costs and improving profitability? I’d love to see your comments on this.

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Forget about monetization, can Facebook survive without any useful customer service improvements? While 98% of the service works great on autopilot, there is absolutely zero customer service for the things where you do need help. I don’t mean bad customer service, I mean there is absolutely no customer service for certain issues.

Case #1 – Last month, I created a group called Interactive, Search Marketing and Social Media Change Managment in my haste to leave for a conference, you can see that I mispelled Management in the group name. This field is not editable by the group owner and after 7 weeks, I have had zero professional response from a real human at Facebook to resolve the issue.

Case #2 – Lack of ability to add Networks of former employers properly. As more people are using Facebook as a sourcing tool, the inability to update this for historical employers, in my case BlackRock, is not just an inconvenience, it could be costing me opportunities and monetization due to the lack of focus on data integrity of my profile to the level I’d like. On this matter I reached out to an executive of Facebook directly – they said they were sending it to customer service as “they should be able to rectify your issues”. Ten more days have passed without correction of my two data problems. I’m putting a deadline of October 30th on this for Facebook to fix this as this is a more than reasonable amount of time to do so.

Lastly, a necessary enhancement. How about a button on people’s profiles that says, take me to all the messages I have exchanged with this person? Thank you.

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Hurricane Ike’s larger than category 2 impact suggests need to modify Saffir-Simpson Scale hurricane measurement and communication metrics. It is heartbreaking to see and hear the stories of people who wouldn’t evacuate before the areas on the Texas coast because Hurricane Ike was “only a category 2 hurricane”. The reports and pictures from airborne helicopters indicate massive hurricane property damage and, unfortunately, loss of life from Hurricane Ike. I dedicate this post to these victims.

This begs the question, could this loss of life been reduced with better communication of risk to the people in the areas of projected impact, causing them to evacuate?

Places like Galveston, Bolivar, Crystal Beach, Gilchrest, High Island, etc. had lower evacuation rates than during Hurricane Rita. This could have been much, much worse if it hit a more densely populated area. But the loss of any life is undesirable (and potentially is preventable).

A friend of mine who lives on the Gulf Coast has repeatedly suggested to me that there is a need to have “less media hype” and “more factual metrics” when hurricanes approach. As you know I think about metrics a lot in terms of the Internet and business processes and I started thinking about this issue and the implications of it.

The last National Hurricane Center report before Hurricane Ike made landfall in Texas contains the following two paragraphs:

DATA FROM NOAA DOPPLER WEATHER RADARS AND RECONNAISSANCE AIRCRAFT
INDICATE MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS ARE NEAR 110 MPH…175 KM/HR…
WITH HIGHER GUSTS. IKE IS A STRONG CATEGORY TWO HURRICANE ON THE
SAFFIR-SIMPSON SCALE AND COULD REACH THE TEXAS COAST AS A CATEGORY
THREE…MAJOR HURRICANE…JUST BEFORE LANDFALL. STRONGER WINDS…
AS MUCH AS 30 MPH HIGHER THAN AT THE SURFACE…COULD OCCUR ON HIGH
RISE BUILDINGS.

IKE REMAINS A VERY LARGE HURRICANE AND HURRICANE FORCE WINDS EXTEND
OUTWARD UP TO 120 MILES…195 KM…FROM THE CENTER…AND TROPICAL
STORM FORCE WINDS EXTEND OUTWARD UP TO 275 MILES…445 KM. DURING
THE PAST HOUR…HURRICANE FORCE WIND GUSTS HAVE BEEN REPORTED ON
GALVESTON ISLAND AND REPORTS FROM NOAA AND AIR FORCE RECONNAISSANCE
AIRCRAFT INDICATE SUSTAINED HURRICANE FORCE WINDS ARE JUST OFFSHORE
GALVESTON ISLAND.

I’m not certain how many years ago the National Hurricane Center started reporting Hurricanes in this format with the “hurricane force winds extend outward from the center ### miles” and “tropical force winds extend outward ### miles”, but I find that information useful as there is a significant correlation to size of the hurricane and the impact of the storm surge and geographic area that are affected. This is therefore extremely useful data, but it’s locked up in giant blobs of text that don’t allow it to be communicated effectively.

I’d like to therefore propose and suggest that the National Hurricane Center make the following modification the to Saffir-Simpson scale to the following new format:

Saffir-Simpson Scale number – hurricane force wind miles from center number – tropical storm force wind miles from center number

Hurricane Ike would have therefore been the following at landfall:
2-120-275

It is my opinion that this would be a much more useful as the overall radius of the hurricane force and tropical force wind fields would be communicated effectively and consistently instead of in inconsistent references. One could argue that you should use the circumference to make it more dramatic, but not all tropical cyclones are perfectly symmetric so I prefer usage of the existing communicated metric radius.

This humble blog post is clearly just the first of many conversations to openly discuss hurricane scale and metrics and creating this needed reform. The reform itself is more important than the exact final form of this reform prior to the start of the 2009 hurricane scale and metrics season. I look forward to seeing comments and other blog posts.

I look forward to someday having a clearer metric that can save more lives. Thank you for your participation in making this a reality!

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However, high rankings on entrepreneurship education alone is not sufficient, the next steps are:
1) To build a transparent, quick and efficient marketplace for entrepreneurs, experienced and passionate management teams and startup capital.

2) Modify the focus toward commercialization of businesses in the model outlined above, ultimately success is measured by the number and quantity of companies that they’ve enabled to scalable, not just lifestyle growth curves. I look forward to participating in this journey.

Here’s the full announcement…

DePaul University’s entrepreneurship program opened the new academic year on a high note Sept. 10 with news that it has again been recognized among the finest in the United States in Entrepreneur magazine/Princeton Review’s annual “Best Schools for Entrepreneurs” ranking.

DePaul moved up three places to second on the list of best rated graduate entrepreneur programs in the national rankings, which are posted on Entrepreneur’s Web site and will appear in the October issue of the magazine. The university placed seventh in the undergraduate entrepreneur education category and was the only Illinois university ranked in that category.

“DePaul offers students exposure to thousands of successful entrepreneurs in a large urban setting with sophisticated financing services available,” the magazine noted. “Entrepreneurial supporters are extremely active in sharing knowledge, resources, contacts and expertise. The program provides very supportive administration and infrastructure through the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center.”

Entrepreneur partnered with the Princeton Review, a leading educational services provider, to solicit surveys from 2,300 undergraduate and graduate program administrators to determine the rankings. The survey covered three areas: academic offerings and requirements; student enrollment and faculty quality; and “outside the classroom,” which examined student organization, mentorship and scholarship opportunities. An advisory board of entrepreneurship educators also provided evaluations of the surveyed programs. Based on the data and review, a total of 50 programs (25 undergraduate and 25 graduate programs) made the list of the best.

“DePaul’s rankings are a tribute to the academic excellence of our program and the quality of our faculty,” said Harold Welsch, Coleman Entrepreneurship Chair at DePaul, who founded the program. “Using their education and start-up experiences, faculty members help students look to the future and identify viable business opportunities. They share their experiences with the students willingly and with great enthusiasm.”

Founded in 1982 at the College of Commerce, DePaul’s entrepreneurship program has grown to encompass 12 undergraduate and graduate courses taught by 16 faculty members. The faculty represents a mix of distinguished scholars of entrepreneurship and successful entrepreneurs.

Courses cover business plan development, entrepreneurial strategy and management, new venture financing, business growth, creativity, innovation and technological change, among other topics. More than 600 students take undergraduate and graduate courses in the program annually. Students have opportunities to participate in a number of mentorship and internship programs, as well as entrepreneur organizations, including Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization, MBA Entrepreneurs Club, Social Entrepreneurship Club and Students for Entrepreneurs.

The program is supported by the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center, which manages education and outreach programs designed to stimulate the start-up and growth of entrepreneurial firms. The center also sponsors Launch DePaul, an annual year-long business plan competition that awards cash prizes and business start-up services for the most promising business plans submitted by students and alumni.

“We believe that today’s students need practical learning opportunities that extend beyond the classroom,” said Raman Chadha, director of the center and a member of the entrepreneurship program faculty. “The Coleman Center creates these opportunities by working with faculty to connect DePaul students with successful entrepreneurs, help them launch ventures and provide real-world experiences. Students are able to immediately apply what they learn in the classroom, acquiring wisdom that only comes with these opportunities. The entrepreneurial spirit at DePaul has never been stronger.”

The magazine’s “Best Schools for Entrepreneurs” top 10 graduate programs were:

1. Babson College
2. DePaul University
3. University of Southern California
4. The University of Arizona
5. University of South Florida
6. University of Illinois, Chicago
7. University of California, Los Angeles 8. Drexel University 9. Chapman University 10. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The top undergraduate entrepreneur programs were:

1. University of Houston
2. Babson College
3. Drexel University
4. University of Dayton
5. University of Arizona
6. Temple University
7. DePaul University
8. University of Oklahoma
9. University of Southern California
10. Chapman University

To view the full rankings, go to: http://www.entrepreneur.com/topcolleges/.

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During Cluecon, I was able to drop in and catch Irv Shaprio’s speech, what follows are my live blogging notes of the session:

What does ifbyphone provide? Phone mashups – combine data from the world wide web with phone inputs and conversations.

ifbyphone goals:
- Technology Agnostic API – any language, host, data or location
- Dialog Support – Voice Forms (IVR), DTMF, Text to Speech, Automated Speech Recognition
- Call Management – outbound (termination), inbound (origination), Scheduling API, Broadcast API, Call Completion API
- Support Services – documentation, blog, user support forum, free development accounts and live support people

Lots of documentation is available, telephone scale

Phone mashup example – getting request from a form

Build a Voice Form Setup Form
Built in grammar allow branching of questions (Survo voice form setup)
ifbyphone uses forms instead of selectors for 100% reliability

Check out phonemashup.com for more examples.

Marketing people are using this to put the telephone into the existing treatment processes.

———————

Analysis: ifbyphone is enabling a bridge between web 2.0 and the phone. What I love about this is I think it’s part of a trend, removing silos to create effective solutions for companies and their customers. It’s small space with the potential to have large business impacts in terms of efficiency and customer satisfaction that will be fun to watch develop and watch who steps up to implement the solutions rapidly.

A recent interview of Irv can be found here. I certainly look forward to seeing and learning more about how ifbyphone will be impacting business results shortly.

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If I were the lead product manager at Twitter, I’d be setting up two primary screens:

1) Keywords across the entire network overall which toggle switches for the frequency compared to normal (it would be cool if this was somehow “normalized” so that less frequent words with huge percentage increases actually got noticed – so that everything wasn’t Angelina Jolie, Barack Obama, Brad Pitt, Michael Arrington, Jason Calacanis, Fred Wilson, etc).

2) Graphs and/or alert spikes of user defined keywords – ie ones that are important to oneself personally or to one’s business or clients. I would dare to say this might actually be a business model that could lead to meaningful monetization – I think alot of web services haven’t thought this through nearly enough. Organizing real-time data for useful decision making as a business model worked out OK for Michael Bloomberg if I recall correctly. Some might say Google Trends does this already from a search perspective, but it doesn’t break down the word clusters to core words with “sidekicks” and is not the leading indicator that Twitter is by an uncertain but definite time margin.

Before I’d get to this though, Twitter would have to become stable and Twitter would have to fix the AIM problem I posted about on June 1 and have not gotten a response to yet. Good luck on getting those items in order first, then feel free to give me a shout Biz.

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Let’s start an exploration of these issues in more detail:

- There is an almost total lack of imagination regarding potential emerging revenue streams – When I attend search engine conferences, I hear over and over how “63% of transactions occur offline after an online search (comScore 2006).” Tying together that transaction with it’s higher relevancy holds the key to a revenue stream potentially larger than Google’s Adwords product. Having once spent 6 months of my life trying to raise capital for a search advertising concept, I have to agree with Robert that there is lack of willingness to engage in serious funding conversations of this type – until half a dozen other people do it…that’s messed up!

- In large businesses, there is an obsession with basing business cases on expense savings rather than the potential for new revenue streams- Going back to that example above, financial services institutions could play a large role in this. However due to the lack of risk management processes that caused the housing crisis, they are risk adverse at this moment and risk removing themselves from this once in a lifetime opportunity. I saw 4 companies give presentations on their business cases on mobile retail banking and they all focused on the reduction of call center costs! Think about that a second, moving things from a PC to a phone will reduce call center volumes? Highly questionable at best form cost savings perspective, certainly missing the revenue opportunities completely.

- Everything in the world is converging, yet most companies have silos and are hiring specialists (set up for failure) – When banks are trying to become relevant in mobile and mobile is trying to get into advertising and payments, can you afford to hire people with one dimensional skill sets? The answer is no, not if you want to win.

- With increasingly rapid cycle times in technology, competitive benchmarking is becoming less useful – If none of your competitors has made a tough decision to reorganize a department, shift financial resources to new ways of doing things in marketing or customer service, how can you improve via benchmarking? Stated a different way, if your process is broken and all of your competitor’s processes are broken, you can’t possibly create market leadership by benchmarking. You have to hire the best and most brilliant people who hold little if any limiting beliefs and give them the authority to innovate based on what customers want. Serving those needs in the Peter Drucker fashion is the only way to create true market leadership. This does not mean that competitive analysis is dead. It does mean that the benchmarks you need to pay attention to are the breakthroughs regardless of industry.

- Existing legacy cost centers in large corporations are creating barriers to innovation and efficiency both internally and externally – These cost centers prevent reallocation of budgets to adopting usage of superior and more efficient technology or Internet/mobile advertising due to their all or nothing nature – smooth and frequent shifting to most economical resources is the unfortunate rarity. There is a large number of reasons for this and this topic is worthy of a post of it’s own (please submit suggestions). Cost centers make the silo problem worse and hard to solve.

- Traditional management consulting needs to acknowledge proprietary technology and data models as strategic and gain an implementation focus – If you come in for 6 months and never implement anything and nobody does any of the suggestions, your net present value is actually negative.

- We need to take back control of companies to focus on the customer as priority #1 – 5 year plans with a stack of initiatives in year 4 are interesting, but no longer practical. Notice I say take back control. This is the way the world used to work before endless Powerpoint and overly large bureaucracy like 18 month committee approval cycles. In fact Tom Peters stated on February 3, 1998 on Charlie Rose show as saying “I got tired of the McKinsey bureaucracy”

- C-level management and boards of directors treat social media, search marketing and Internet advertising like an island instead of integrating it into one’s culture and redesigning processes from scratch to support it – This is disruptive to companies using these products and companies that provide these products alike due to the lack of growth and monetization. But guess what? You can’t redesign these processes without bringing in people with a combination of skills that include both traditional management and the new tools. Right now we have people at the extremes. This doesn’t work.

Carolyn Shelby and I will be giving a talk to c-level executives on these an other related subjects this Wednesday at the Gleacher Center in Chicago. You may RSVP here. It is my first in a series of talks I hope to engage the world in over the coming years as we embrace this great challenge together! I need everyone’s help to help shape this vision and create this reality and maybe some famous quotes around the way. It is the furthering of a conversation that started with my appearance discussing these issues on SEO 101 – it starts at the 13:30 mark. Brian Mark said he’d love to see a Search Engine Strategies session on this, we are still working on fulfilling Brian Mark’s dream (24 minute mark).

I’d like to hear others like John Furrier, Fred Wilson, Dick Costolo and Don Dodge to chime in on this issues first chapter…

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Wow! That was tiring, I stepped on the L at 7:30AM and didn’t get home until 1:30AM the next morning! 18 hours of pure madness! Most people noticed the great speeches by Gary Vee from Wine Library TV and Dick Costolo (aka ask the wizard) and others. But what I really appreciated was the other things that the day brought to me. When Frank Gruber and Eric started TECH cocktail, one of the goals was to enable the interaction of people and removing barriers between entrepreneurs, funding sources and removing the boundaries between Chicago and the rest of the world.

When I sit at the first TECH cocktail CONFERENCE Chicago watching great speeches and meeting people from startups from both the east and west coasts while talking, playfully joking about Internet concepts and trading ideas with a local Chicago angel investor in the back of the room for hours on end – it’s at that moment one can clearly perceive a vision is starting to become reality…

For a first conference, it was very well run. There were those little things with a venue that didn’t go quite right with the elevators and not having enough power outlets (but you could say that about any conference) but those were out of their direct control. You could see that Eric and Frank went out of their way to challenge the audience about topics that too often go ignored at startups, like how to set up a corporate entity properly, partnerships and most of these challenges and experiments went well.

So what’s next? I’d like to challenge each and every person in TECH cocktail community to take things to the next level by taking the following actions:

1. Follow Up – People need to work to get to know each other better and learn to leverage each person’s special gifts and talents and realize that 1 + 1 > 2 when we behave in this manner. For me, I know that creating new business partners while listening to help iterate the product, data model or service is my area of strength.

2. Change TECH cocktail from an event to an everyday process on your own – a three month cycle time is not sufficient to build relationships to the next level – it’s everyone’s responsibility to make an hour here and there to sit down with someone, learn about what they are doing, give them a fresh perspective and potential assistance. Don’t wait for the next TECH cocktail event. If this means you need to organize your contact info, make that important time investment.

3. Listen to what Dick Costolo had to say about Internet company NDAs and then change your behavior accordingly (where is the video of that speech anyway?) – Stop sending people NDAs that serve no purpose other than to destroy your access to people who are the most qualified to help you. Ideas are a dime a dozen, assembling the right people with the current knowledge and future potential to create that reality is what matters.

4. Go beyond lurking, participate!!! During the conference, I had at least 10 people talk to me about a blog post of mine in detail, yet they’ve never left a comment on my blog. That’s sad. Leaving a comment leaves you a hyperlink back to your business or blog and allows distribution of one’s business network organically removing them as the bottleneck, please use this viral tool.

5. Learn to hire people for their current knowledge, network, blogs and future potential - not legacy job titles and brands – this takes work, research and being involved in the community, but it is how you’ll find the breakthrough thought leaders and future superstars.

6. Become an ambassador to expanding the understanding of the tools we all use and expand our base of understanding to new people outside our core – If you have a client or operate a service do they understand what Internet advertising, blogs, rss, social media, twitter, etc do? If they do is their organizational culture and structure set up to handle it to serve a customer’s needs? Many people know there is a problem but do not know where to start to fix it – I want to help those people as it will ease the adoption and enhance demand for disruptive new Internet services. I’m planning a series of future posts on this important, yet highly untouched topic. If you have examples of success stories or learnings in this area, I’d love to hear from you.

What else would you add to this list? I look forward to your contributions.

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“Businesses are not paid to reform customers. They are paid to satisfy customers.”

- Peter Drucker

“An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.”

- Jack Welch

“Innovation is the central issue in economic prosperity.”

- Michael Porter

“Learning is not compulsory…neither is survival.”

- W. Edwards Deming

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

- Sam Walton

To the rest of you, there is still hope for you and encourage you to come over to the other side.

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Andrew was a fascinating guest! He was ultra low maintenance and had great stories to tell about living in New Zealand and then moving to the UK,  the music industry and his love for jazz (all too rare in the UK). He is the proud new owner of a Leica D-Lux 3 camera – which takes ultra sweet photos, even at high speed on Lake Shore Drive! More importantly I think I experienced several new things about Chicago that I never had before such as Chicago’s many jazz clubs and music stores. Andrew experienced Italian Beef (pictured below), Greektown and tasty BBQ ribs and cornbread! I’m glad he stopped by for a visit and I hope to see Andrew again someday soon!

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I was sitting next to Mike Sansone all day and I learned a ton about community! I got a little tip from Robyn Tippins who I’d known for years online and had never met in person! I met Lorelle VanFossen – one tough cookie who really knows her WordPress. I met other great online friends like Easton Ellsworth and Jason Alba for the first time. I built relationships with people that blossomed into subsequent relationships. Most importantly they are blogger relationships! So many other great stories from wonderful people.

For the 2008 attendees, I’d like to tag you and ask you to write what you hope to achieve from the experience this weekend. For the 2007 attendees, I’d like to tag you and ask you – what foundation did the experience create and how has it impacted you in the following year? If you were an attendee last year and will be attending this year, you will have been tagged twice but one post is OK…

For me I learned about conversational blogging and learned tons of blog tips and tricks! It was so much fun! This year I hope to continue that journey. I’d also like to learn how time strapped bloggers find or make time to blog when you are ultra busy…my frequency has been down recently for this reason…I look forward to hearing your replies to these issues!

Please take this html link lists and repost the link love to the 2007 folks as well as this year’s people too!
Click on the link, right click, then select all, then copy and paste!
2008 SOBcon Chicago blog link list
2007 SOBcon Chicago blog link list

SOBcon2008 attendees…
Cliff Atkinson
Shashi Bellamkonda
Chris Brogan
Harry Brooks
Anita Bruzzese
Dave Bullock
Mark Carter
Brian Clark
Tom Clifford
Valerie Combs
Chris Cree
Lisa Cree
Thomas Croghan
Donna Cutting
David “Chicago Mobile Marketing” Dalka
Kevin Dixie
Tim Draayer
Andrew Dubber
Monica Duncan
Easton Ellsworth
Kevin Ferrasci O’Malley
Jonathan Fields
Sarah Filipiak
Mary-Lynn Foster
Annie Galvin Teich
Brian Gardner
Chris Garrett
Jon Gatrell
Phil Gerbyshak
Jared Goralnick
Karen Hanrahan
Joseph Hauckes
Vicky Hennegan
Scot Herrick
John Hong
Stephen Hopson
Robert Hruzek
Timothy Johnson
Sara
Pete Jones
Todd Jordan
Bob “Internet Advertising” Kakoliris
Christine Kane
Kristen King
Jen Knoedl
Stephen Koernig
Bryan Kress
George Krueger
Amy L
Tammy Lenski
James G. Lindberg
Eli Litscher
Rick Mahn
RIP http://www.utterz.com/ Sim Margolis
Michael Martine
Becky McCray
Maria Meadows
Cory Miller
Ann Michael
Dawud Miracle
Debra Moorhead
Matthew Murphy
Paul O’Flaherty
Tim Padar
Jesse Petersen
Melissa Pierce
Wendy Piersall
Sandra Ponce de Leon
J. Erik Potter
Karen Putz
Susan R Quandt
Levy Rivers
Barbara Rozgonyi
Jeff Sable
Sheila Scarborough
Mary Schmidt
Derek Semmler
Maria Sharon
David Sherbow
Steve Sherlock
Brad Shorr
Louise Silberman
Sonia Simone-Rossney
Julien Smith
Stephen Smith
Michael Snell
Derrick Sorles
Terry Starbucker
Liz Strauss
Jon Swanson
Ruth M Sylte
Windsor Tanner
Michelle Vandepas
Lorelle VanFossen
Colleen Wainwright
Denise Wakeman
James D. Walton
Randy Windsor
Joanna Young

SOBcon2007 Chicago Attendees:
Sandra Renshaw
Brad Shorr
Timothy Johnson
Tammy Lenski
Muhammad Saleem
Lorelle VanFossen
David Dalka – Mobile Search Marketing Speaker – Chicago GSB MBA
Todd And
John Yedinak
Joe Hauckes
Tim Draayer
Jeremy Geelan
Carolyn Manning
Sheila Scarborough
Steve Farber
Dawud Miracle
Doug Mitchell
Jeff O’Hara
Dave Schoof
Jamy Shiels
Adam Steen
Hannah Steen
Chris Thilk
Barry Zweibel
Eric Bingen
Ellen Moore
Cord Silverstein
Jean-Patrick Smith
James Walton
Sharan Tash
Vernon Lun
Tony Lee
Scott Desgrosseilliers
Mark Murrell
Kammie Kobyleski
Easton Ellsworth
Mark Goodyear
Ann Michael
Kent Blumberg
Ashley Cecil
Robert Hruzek
Sabu N G
Mazur Krystyna
Lisa Gates
Franke James
Chris Brown
Troy Worman
Karen Putz
Jesse Petersen
Andy Brudtkuhl
Lucia Mancuso
Peter Flaschner
Derrick Sorles
Mike Rohde
Thomas Clifford
Rajesh Srivastava
Claire Celsi
Jason Alba
Cristiana Passinato
Sean R.
Alex Shalman
Cristiana Passinato
Brad Spirrison
Ari Garber
Dr. Rob Wolcott
Cheryll Cruz
Sharon Scherer
Jonathan Phillips
Jason Wade
Jill Pullen
Doug Bulleit
Wendy Kinney
Chelsea Vincent
Ayush Agarwal
Paul Mangalik
Premchand Kallan
Xochi Kaplan
Michael Snell
Ella Wilson
James Bergstrom
Raj Majumder
Keith Levenson

SOBcon2007 Chicago Internet Marketing Speakers:
Andy Sernovitz
Phil Gerbyshak
Liz Strauss
Mike Sansone
Drew McLellan
Mike Wagner
Terry Starbucker
Rodney Rumford
Ben Yoskovitz
Chris Cree
Robyn Tippins
Diego Orjuela
Vernon Lun
Wendy Piersall

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As many of you might recall, founder Joshua Schachter (who has not yet bookmarked my blog in del.icio.us) sold del.icio.us to Yahoo! in December, 2005 making Fred Wilson a happy man.

Many people in the search engine community tell me at conferences that other search players have actually been getting more value from del.icio.us since the acquisition because they have crawled del.icio.us. If Yahoo! were to hire me as a consultant, it’s something I might want to do some testing and learning with to see how it would affect the competition.

To test this theory, I registered a domain last Summer and tossed it on a host and had a few friends post a del.icio.us entry but gave the site no other links and checked it once a week. The following engines indexed the domain in this order: Google, Live.com/Msn, Yahoo! and then Ask. A few weeks ago I noticed a significant shift in some Yahoo! rankings and now it made sense now that this change is apparent.

Just in case you’re wondering good tags for my blog in del.icio.us are – chicago gsb mba marketing business development startup executive seeking venture capital funding – for a limited time every person who bookmarks me with those tags and emails me (see my Chicago gsb marketing bio for the email) with a the del.icio.us page and their blog, I will add a link to them in the bottom of this post. One exception to this currently would be Jason Calacanis (whom I wouldn’t actually consider linking to until he returned my phone call from October when I was in Santa Monica).

So why did this take so long? This is a good question. You may recall all the hub bub in 2006 about Yahoo! building modular programs that could be easily swapped out. This obviously has taken considerably longer to complete than the initial estimates. But this is a sign of a much needed glimmer of light eminating from Yahoo!

Analysis:

- Good move for Yahoo! overall in terms of relevancy (though this did not need it to be visible?).

- This move is not without a significant risk. What if Yahoo! users were to migrate enmass to del.icio.us and make it their default search engine? It’s not monetized. If this scenario were to occur in the current state Yahoo!’s earnings would take a serious hit. Robert Peck at Bear Stearns should most definitely analyze this scenario.

- The display of the del.icio.us social media result might prove distracting to the user and users may defect to other search engines.

- This may attract more del.icio.us spam activity.

What do you think of this move by Yahoo! to test integration of del.icio.us into Yahoo! search results?

Links from del.icio.us pages project:

- Bryson Meunier from Chicago has bookmarked me in del.icio.us

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Many of my thoughts are contained here and I’m kinda busy lately, so linking to this post will serve as a proxy.

I hope your 2008 is most outstanding and prosperous!!!

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Begin Your Research Project:

URL Structure
Search Engine Indices
Current Rankings
Spider Activity (Net tracker gives great spider research…)
Determine Target Terms
Overcome technology, resource and/or political challenges
Index, Optimize
Monitor improvements

Your Page Titles: Are they Really Optimized?

Example: Wine racks (Pier 1)

Page title – is it right?

Dynamic versus static – do they need to be static? No.

Basic Optimization Tactics – keyword embedding

Home page title matters – a lot!!!

Relevant Page Title page, Footer – best first quick steps

Are pages titles enough? H1, H2, Intro optimized, URL optimized, page rank updated.

Hierarchy of a website – URL, how deep and often is the crawl?

What We Found

- We found minimum of 3 issues

- Additional reports and trending are important

When that isn’t enough?

Universal Search?

Update the robots.txt file to remove things.

Canonical issues, soft 404’s get it right!

301 redirects – are they still in place?

Matt Bailey, Sitelogic

IT for marketers

IT and marketing need to work together.

Robot.txt is the welcome mat to your house…

Redirects.

Use Webbug

Architecture – if you using JavaScript, it will not work properly

Duplicate content – avoid it!

Cannibalization problems

Legacy spam – invisible text links…

When Google finds pages though natural crawling, its’ better – Using Webmaster Central helps…

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Charles Knight from Alternative Search Engines also blogged this session

Websitepros, Tobias Dendel

255,000 customers/providers, 700 employees

It’s a mess to figure out how to position a small business online.

Do I spend money on radio, newspaper, whatever?

Even for a small business a web site is a critical factor in creating trust.

We don’t believe per action will be effective as it’s too complex.

Example, roofer in Indianapolis 15 unique calls and 15 qualified emails.

Local.com, Bruce Crair

1 million people advertising online, 18 million listings which shows the great opportunities still ahead.

Too many choices, the small business owner is confused. Even if they do understand the choices, the cost is hard. Then how do they create an ROI?

Most businesses don’t have websites, they need them to do the job. They need to figure out how to make the data accurate. All too often, it’s not.

Any business can do it. Just doing paid without organic is a waste of time.

Pay for placement, click bundles, pay per click, make sure you start witht eh simple stuff first.

Locallaunch, Justin Sanger

150 people, thousands of orders per week.

We intended to create the SME (Small Medium Enterprises).

Innovation outpaces adoption.

The innovation is amazing and significant. The SMEs don’t feel this. These enterprises are not yet able to take advantages.

Destinations and inventory abound.

Yahoo! local and Google local  provide new experiences all the time. Vertical search plays nice together with geos. This is pretty complex.

Who is winning?

Yellowpages are winning due to directional relationships

Pure Plays

RH Donnelly is a sales company. Google and Yahoo! realize this and are partners.

Margin pressure is intense and unsustainable.

Marketplace trends

Sales Organizations are driving the experience for SMEs

Content aggregation is a strategically vital business strategy

SME aggregators strive to collect and store richer, vertical-specific local business content

IYP is an old heading. It is now simply local search

Pure sales organizations are selling at non-sustainable margin – this is a critical driver of consolidation or service pressure

PPC pricing pressure will further compound an already fragmented marketplace

Marchex, Scott Finholm

We are a local online advertising company and leading publisher of local content.

Advertisers of all sides, we work with sales forces to teach them how to sell search.

Sites:

SEM and SEO aren’t the same thing

A great site isn’t necessary..but a “good” site is…

Services:

Can’t automate creativity

All businesses are not created equal

Clicks and calls both matter

Sales:

Small businesses look to trusted, proven providers

Simple product = more sales

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Should organizations be smaller like tree trunks instead of the traditional pyramids?

How can this change take place if most leaders don’t know it’s necessary and are not up to speed about what to do or how to do it even if they acknowledged the issue?

How will recruiting morph to put the generalist thought leaders in place to lead this change – perhaps those with competencies derived in other industries or through accelerated self learning?

Other coverage of Seth Godin’s Search Engine Strategies Chicago speech:

Meatball Sundaes and the Smelly Old Guard

Seth Godin Tells Marketers How to Avoid Meatball Sundaes

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Marketing (r)Evolutions

Mass advertising on passive customers was what used to work.

People sleep while watching TV, hard to pay attention to advertising when sleeping.

Sleeping while surfing the Internet is not something that happens.

Godaddy.com Super Bowl XL TV commercials didn’t use the same model on the web site. Did Godaddy leave money on the table.

Money is better than traffic.

Apple had to give rebates due to word of mouth on iphone pricing.

Marketers still think customers are dogs.

But search puts the power of when and how in their hands (the sonsumer).

Overcoming sales friction – 85% of car purchases start online – you arrive knowing more than the salesman in many cases. Attack of the blogs – Consumers trust other consumers more than marketers. 54% resist, 56% avoid, 69% block ads – yet we still want to buy.

Customers will control the conversation. People have forgotten how to have relationships.

The web is a major influencer, a mere 26% of consumers were SATISFIED with the experience. They are missing the BASICS. Conversation rates are continuing to fall.

All new brands are based on the experience model. Invest in the customer experience.

We are obsessed with the how many, not the who. This needs to change.

Customers desire great and meaningful experiences.

SCENT, ads must think it has scent to be useful.

80% of traffic dies off within three clicks.

GEICO – connects the story…

Zafu – bras in launch video didn’t match website.

Usability – Frederick Winslow Taylor is the father.

We are all connected and customers will control the conversation. It involves persuasion architecture!!!

Traffic generation is about money. Don’t imitate your competitors. It’s the tiny pieces that matter. Focus on making your service better.

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At first I was thinking this would be a long speech, it was in actuality a short, crisp presentation followed by a spirited, fun and playful question an answer session. It far exceeded my expectations and Kevin Ryan should be commended for having this type of community event.

Now onto a discussion of his new book, Meatball Sundae. The foundation for a new economy is being built. The past several years have laid the foundation for a new industrial revolution.

Told the detailed story of Josiah Wedgewood and his high standards for pottery.

There are 14 main themes occurring right now in the world – though there are many smaller and industry specific trends playing out. These 14 trends are (I typed them fast in a live blog situation so I might not have them exactly right):

- Direct communication with customers is creating massive change

- Individuals can amplifying their voice and become a critic – these are not hassles to be dealt with. The answer is building an organization that thrives and survives on this…

- Having an authentic story is vital

- We don’t have attention spans anymore (why are you still reading this post? )

- The new marketplace long tail – very few organizations are embracing it

- Create innovation – If you can describe a job it can get done by somebody cheaper

- Google and the shredding of information and bundling

- Noise and infinite channels of communication

- Consumers can talk directly to consumers without the middleman or company

- The changing balance of scarcity and abundance – it’s hard to imagine people being bored

- Big ideas can reach many people quickly

- The shift from how many to who – the idea of being on the today show instead of a blog is higher value is over

- Democratization of the wealthy – the gap between the rich and poor is getting wider but the rich is going up

- Gatekeepers are more important as they distribute information yet less important as you can go around them easier than ever

After the short speech on the trends there was a free for question and answer session…

Is your marketing out of sync?

SG: They should say how change your marketing (what you do) so that it’s in sync with what the market demands.

Why don’t most companies get it yet?

SG: I spent many years selling advertising. People buy TV advertising, it’s fun and it’s not measurable. When the Internet came along and they went running to Yahoo! to buy ads that aren’t measuring. Google and Overture were used by small business people in the ad. The choice is Superbowl ads that don’t work and measurable ads that are harder to make work. It’s naïve to hope that they will shift in a month or a year. They will eventually have to shift. The prices will continue to go up. People still applaud the commercial not the SEM.

(At this point the Gmail javascript froze all of my browsers. I had to reboot and relaunch. OF COURSE THIS WAS THE MOMENT KEVIN RYAN CHOSE TO ASK THE QUESTION I SENT IN – SO I’LL HAVE TO WAIT FOR THE AUDIO THERE.)

Where do you find thoughtleaders to lead organizations and instead of hiring people with “experience”?

SG: I wrote a post on a similar topic about the loss of relevancy of credentials today. Basically, there are two types of leaders qualified to do this:
- People who have managed change before
- Idea people who don’t necessarily know better

How do make a corporate blog work?

SG: Blogs don’t reach people, people reach blogs… You need to be quick and candid. It’s all about change and being iterative in nature.

Everyone attending SES Chicago will receive a copy of Seth’s book. I look forward to continuing our conversation and maybe even hearing his answers because Gmail’s javascritpt won’t be interfering with his in person appearance!

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If you were recruiting in the traditional manner, you’d seek these attributes:
- college degree in music
- experience working for an orchestra or band
- experience in an educational institution as a music teacher

But if you were looking for a true leader and innovator these measures would miss the hidden gems. People who are self taught are often thought leaders and innovators who lead to breakthroughs because they lack certain limiting beliefs. Tommy Emmanuel is one such person. Let’s look at his unique attributes:
- Tommy is self-taught, having picked up a guitar at a young age
- Tommy has never had any formal training in music
- Tommy has never learned how to read sheet music, yet he knows how to play literally thousands of songs
- Tommy never uses a set list in his solo performances, the creativity flows from circumstance and audience participation
- Tommy constantly innovates and reworks his songs making incremental improvements

Yet, Tommy now plays 300+ nights a year on five continents!!! If you looked at his resume based on traditional measures, you’d likely pass him over. But in the scarce talent, post baby boomer generation we are now entering, people need to look beyond keywords and look into passion and self-taught competencies. Those who do will build industry leading companies. Others will rapidly fall behind and lag in relation to their peers.

I’m fortunate to see Tommy again this evening in Chicago! I had the great pleasure of interviewing Tommy Emmanuel in 2003. Such a remarkable and inspiring person. Here are some samples of his live work on Youtube, enjoy!

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John asserts that two major things are changing at present in the advertising marketplace:

1) The destruction of integrated marketing and direct control of brands is no longer possible.

2) The nature of storytelling is changing. People can understand multiple branding messages and themes, especially in Generation Y.

It’s totally awesome to be at a traditional marketing conference and hearing some of these themes being not only talked about, but actually practiced. There is still a long, long way to go. This conference with 13,000 delegates traveling from all corners of the earth dwarfs the size of the search marketing and social media conferences that I frequently attend. It quantifies the immense magnitude of the amount of change that is potentially still ahead. It’s kind of overwhelming to think about actually and I don’t overwhelm easily!

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New term POST

People

Objectives

Strategy

Technology (notice how this is listed last? Charlene pointed out that this is on purpose! In other words don’t execute until you have things thought through!)

Mantra: Embrace your customer to turn revolt into reformation

Ask yourself: How do you turn (customer) revolt into revolution?

Hopefully both speeches will be online later.

What was the high point of the speech for me that told me that a revolution was taking place at Forrester?

It was when Charlene pointed to a technology adoption benchmarking slide and then put a red X through it saying “don’t pay attention to that”!!!!

What does this mean to me? It means that benchmarking it starting to die due to the increased cycle times and shorter shelf life of information. I’ve long felt that you can’t benchmark your way to the top. You have to lead and take risks. To lead and take risks you must have the top generalist thought leaders of our times on your team. People who understand things like search engine optimization as a strategic tool, social media, bottom up communities and cultures, defining a defensible data model from the start and who practice customer listening for their innovation.

After Charlene, Christie Hefner gave an amazing speech about the history of Playboy’s brand and demonstrated how it’s always been customer focused dating back decades and how it’s embracing the demise of the one to many media model. I hadn’t been aware of this but Playboy has had a mobile presence since 2002! Wow.

She also talked about the brands usage in search and have it’s a frequent search term. In fact a quick check of Google trends indicates a large lead in search volume for Playboy over the New York Times.

Her speech was fascinating from the historical side, yet the brand of Playboy is softening as it’s constantly evolving, Charlene’s conversation was far more disruptive and unnerving to many of the people seated around me. Yet it became clear to me that Playboy is a company that has lived many of today’s social media principles long before they were fashionable.

In in the end, it’s all about building a bottom up culture that has the executive support to constantly innovate. Most people don’t get that yet and if they do it’s even more unlikely that they view customers and other stakeholders as critical to success. We are just starting this journey and I can’t wait to participate fully in the fun parts of this revolution to come!

fcf07

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When I saw this description I knew I had to attend this session…

The HR systems at Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest investment bank in the world, have traditionally been siloed, probably just like yours. But, competing with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, VP Heather Redderson knew she had to integrate them all so her 27,000 employees could collaborate around their careers and new opportunities for internal mobility. She’ll tell you how she aligns and compensates them and tries to leverage best practices, and fill you in on the internal community she’s created for employees with new tools and competitive intelligence on those other, bigger guys.

When Heather arrived, Lehman Brothers systems appeared disorganized. How disorganized? A Summer intern gets to give a presentation to a C-level team during the first month she is there. The intern’s presentation? Two slides. One basically system mapped out the systems Lehman has. The second with all demonstrating how many don’t talk to each other. The intern stated that “this was a problem that needed to be fixed” and then sat down.

I don’t know if the intern got a full time job at Lehman upon graduation. If they didn’t I’d love to hire this person at the next company I work at. Why? People who can point out the root cause of problems and say this is what needs to be fixed are all too rare. The intern likely created the vital executive sponsorship for the magnitude of the changes that Heather is now making.

In reference to internal mobility, internal employees were frustrated as they were applying and never got hired. Hiring managers were frustrated with volumes of people applying for roles at the wrong level. Employees were frustrated with lack of execution.

Using Vurv and Congos there is now rule driven reports and drivers. They now focus on the relevancy of resumes and are trying to add other data elements to the mix.

$12 million dollar savings in just four months by reducing outside contingency recruiter fees! Put all new initiatives for 2008 on hold and reallocated budget money. Focused on utilizing what we have better.

Discovered that there were many people in roles with job descriptions that didn’t match. Fixing that through transparent conversations is occurring at a rapid rate.

Lehman HR mantra:
To recruit talent
To protect our employees
To gage our landscape

They are also creating an alumni site. (I wish that BlackRock would create an Alumni site, it would bring me joy in so many ways.

It’s clear that Heather’s efforts are not only transforming HR, they are transforming the process and way the whole organization operates. That’s what it’s all about effective execution with what you have. Develop a data strategy and process then iterate and improvement. I’ve always loved Lehman Brothers scrappy style when I worked on Wall Street, it’s good to see them laying a foundation for future transformation and differentiation.

More on this when I have time to elaborate on an element I saw that fascinates me. Soon.

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While I applaud the removal of this duplicate content highly (I hope they do this in search results as well – Matt Cutts can you tell me?), all one has to do is Google – AP sucks – to see that there are many people that would likely highly disagree with making the AP stories more prominent. Furthermore, AP stories lack transparency, ie contact information for a real reporter. I would suggest and hope that Google would create a feedback mechanism to the reporter as some sensitive topics are better handled personally rather than in topics. Remember the Duke Lacrosse incident? The AP spread inaccuracy during that incident that led to innocent people having their lives damaged by being prosecuted in the national media quoting questionable people not even closely related to the case. (Ironically none of those AP stories can be found easily on Google today when I searched.)

I’ve got a few points I’d like to make here:

1. Danny Sullivan wrote an excellent post that you should read on this that properly linked to the source Google blog (Not to Blogger team: Danny’s link isn’t showing on the blogs that linked to this feature).

2A. The New York Times inappropriately did not link to the source Google News blog when they wrote a short, non-value adding fluff piece the next day. A reader of that publication was deprived of their ability to click through to that Google News post as were other bloggers. All mainstream news sources and blogs should link to original news sources whenever possible so that people can see the original detailed source content. I’d like to call on journalism schools, universities and standards bodies to join together to make this the standard protocol a reality in the future.

2B. To show the dysfunction that occurs when news media or blogs do not link directly to a source blog I’ll point to Jeff Jarvis’ post on the subject. I appreciate Jeff as an elder statesman in the blogosphere, however when he read the New York Times fluff piece (you can read the link in Jeff’s post) he was deprived of seeing the original Google blog post. This caused two unfortunate things to occur 1) Jeff likely did not read the Google Blog post because there was not link to the source and 2) Jeff unknowingly committed an act that adversely affected Google’s search algorithm by linking to the New York Times story, I’m almost certain Jeff would linked to the Google News Blog or other in depth commentary if he were aware of it, in fact I’d encourage him to update his post to add a link to the actual source.

3. In this case the source story is a blog, which is an increasingly common occurence. As I’ve stated many times before, I think Google should revamp the increasingly outdated separation of blogs and news sites, if news starts on a blog and is linked to it should be the relevant source document in Google News…

4. The ultimate irony in all of this is the Google News original source blog entry that started all of this Original Stories from the Source – is not in Google News itself! Google, until you incorporate blogs fully into Google News and allow users the option to see all news and blog sources together, you likely will not have this original source thing nailed down quite right and I highly encourage you to do so.

I look forward to thoughtful conversation and hopefully progress towards adoption of the concepts above in the coming weeks. Thanks for joining this important conversation.

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Quite likely the busiest session of the day to the fullest house. One can’t help but notice that if Greg Jarboe had gone to Google and designed Universal Search himself he likely couldn’t have designed it to play into his strength areas in news and pr related issues. The implications and transformation for universal search are still evolving, but they are clearly changing the landscape. One other thing that became clear from this event was that Ask is becoming a serious contender in this marketplace.

Greg Jarboe –

Universal search is the biggest event since “Florida” update. 70% of what I used to know is now obsolete. The patterns are not yet clear in personalization.

News results ranked #4 if you searched for the term iPhone on June 29

In the #8 position, was a Youtube video. We don’t know if it was done on purpose.

July 17, Rupert Murdoch – news with image – brings up a whole new reputation management – be prepared to optimize images.

Early chapters of Henry Potter were leaked, the blog results are on page one of results

Investor relations now is moving to the front page of Countrywide. Few companies have complete control of their brands now on Google.

Unflattering images of Hillary Clinton and that vast right wing conspiracy is building links to unflattering results.

Blogs on Hurricane Dean already on front page. Images will likely come next.

All of the rules have been rewritten – how do I research this? Focus on the upper left links. News seems to be on the top left all the time. Search remains #1 way journalist find information about a company.

Newsknife and Google News Report – be checking this. Your PR people aren’t ready for that yet. If you are not giving a jpg file in a release, start now.

Google News right now doesn’t do video news. Likely to create that.

Social mapping tools can help identify most influential bloggers. In certain categories they show up.

A couple of years ago there was vertical creep session here at SES – I now rank for that term. Not a good thing.

You can’t afford to ignore Universal Search Today

Google is making specialized or vertical content more visible through Universal Search

Sherwwod Stranieri, Catalyst Online

This throws a lot of  curves into the theme. Ask 3D and Google cut new paths.

Conventional web pages that once rank well are going to move around maybe down. Other things will move updates.

Number of videos is significant in the Youtube world. Are the search engines using comments as an indicator?

We are looking at it as search marketers. Showed client example.

How to look at it: Google PR, Y! Page links, keyword phrases in tags.

Videos ranking correspond well with views, comments, etc.

Bill Slawski

Why does news, images and video show up there.

I’m not sure I see this all as a revolutionary concept. How do we get out content into our results.

Showed examples of screen prints from each engine for the word spider.

Showed the Google patent, oddly looks quite different than Google’s universal search does now.

Google acquired several Infoseek patents.

Discussed Onebox and log file data.

Ranking in Vertical databases – how do you rank for that vertical?

User behavior – key value pairs, be certain definition and being defined. Questions and Answers work the same way. Html formatting may play a role.

Enhancing the user experiences.

David Bailey – Google
Technical lead for the vertical search.

What are our goals?

Make google.com the search box of first resort.

Display special features for special results

Keep it fast. Keep it simple. Above all, keep it relevant.

Showed example: origami crane

This will continually improve and extend to more result types.

It’s still about the web.

But: think about creating quality content in other forms. Expect similar SEO guidelines to apply.

Create quality content, describe it well and we’ll see what happens.

Tim Mayer, VP Product Management

We are transitioning to a better optimized user experience

Freshness and user intent became relevancy issues.

News, local and other verticals – the possibilities are infinite. Federation plays a role.

Some implantation examples:

Music Artist Shortcut

Movie Shortcut

Hotel Shortcut Inline

Consumer Electronics Shortcut

As we go forward, it’s going t be more about the intent of the searchers.

Eric Collier, Director of Product Management

“We are the scrappy innovator of search.”

Ask.com 3D: SERP Design

We moved the content up top and removed the top links.

Large jumps in user satisfaction seen in both the site analytics and surveys

Increase in vertical channel usage

Starting to see a reduction of multiple query sessions around the same keyword term.

Expect to see a larger percentage of SERPs with blended results

User location will play a larger roles in SERPs

Expect to see fewer web results in SERPs

Blogs, Images and Video results will take online reputation into account when ranking

Pay attention to other search drivers

Other coverage of this important session:

RB Digital Boots

Rustybrick

AIM Clear Blog

Lee Odden’s Toprankblog

Bonus coverage:

Lee Odden interviews Tim Mayer

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David Sifry today announced that he has stepped down as CEO of Technorati. While the search for a new CEO continues, Teresa Malo (CFO), Dorion Carroll (VP-Engineering), and Derek Gordon (VP-Marketing), will manage the day-to-day operations of the company. Sifry will become “Chairman of Technorati’s board”. What does it ultimately prove? It again clearly demonstrates that Internet experience is not the primary indicator of Internet executive future success.

Hello people. Technorati did a redesign that refocused on mainstream media as I noted in my earlier post the death of blog search. Then Technorati used tags to grow traffic from other search properties. As Arrington asked in early June “When will the Technorati traffic party end?” Apparently Google and others took notice of this and the party ended in July based on Alexa data – I’m surprised Michael did not discuss this at length today in his post actually. This dip exposed the payday to payday advertising dollar budgeting leading to the departure of Sifry and 8 others. It should be noted that this followed the dismissal of several other employees during the July 4th holiday.

Looking at a May 9th Mashable post, it seems that around $1 million was raised when it expanded a round of funding from 10.52 Million to 11.52 Million. It appears that Technorati was spending more cash than it was taking in, even before the traffic decline in July, based on the early July layoffs. The traffic decline in July only made that situation worse.

This leaves Technorati in the unenviable position of needing to generate new advertising dollars at a time when the engineering needs an overhaul it can’t afford. Repairs such as Typepad blog overcounting, flawed link metrics and many other flaws can not occur at this time.

In fact, someone suggested to me in a phone conversation today that perhaps they should shut Technorati off completely now and just sell it’s likely most valuable asset – a 301 redirect of the Technorati domain. The talk of taking Technorati public via IPO will likely be nothing more than that talk in David Sifry’s previous blog posts.

So where is a blog searcher to go now?

Ask – They have recently revamped their offering dramatically and comment search is now combined with post search. It is an offering that is available directly on their front page.

Google – They should move blog search to the front page as I suggested previously and ideally should build and option to show it mixed with news sites.

Icerocket – Plain, simple, no nonsense blog search.

Other players like Topix, if they were to index the blogosphere fully, could also emerge as an alternative that would properly mix news and blogs together demonstrating that most news is being lifted from blogs by the mainstream media.

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How does one avoid this? Simple. Integrate blogging into your C-level management team. Don’t have any bloggers in your C-level management team or board of directors? Maybe it’s time to consider a new approach altogether with fresh faces. Is a highly educated and experienced person who is a blogger, with startup and innovative company experience mutually exclusive? No. But it’s a requirement if you are going to win in today’s increasingly complex world that requires broad generalist thinkers to navigate not only the blogosphere, but the constantly changing world we live in everyday. Stop building organizational pyramids from 1975 and start building effective organizations that look more like tree trunks! An informal survey at Blogher07 showed that are almost all self taught people and therefore innovators of the future.

So, where are your C-level bloggers? I know where you can find more than a few that understand that blogging is about living the Peter Drucker principles of innovation and customer listening.

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“”At some point you think, we all think, it’s time to let somebody else do this,” said the 58-year-old. “Somebody else might have a different, fresher approach.”"

No kidding! I’ve stated previously that UPS is not customer service focused and I’ve advocated major changes in the way UPS does business for a long, long time! If that board of directors ever wants to build an efficient company that package RECEIVERS love, my contact info is on my bio page.

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But why pay people to frequently repurpose content as their own? Why not remove these middlemen entirely? If you really want to have a network of blogs, why not give local bloggers revenue to post their content directly as a blog hub?

Aaron Wall discusses the link and arbitrage issues in this unique post. Scott Karp also raises interesting questions.

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Professor Ian Robertson, a neuropsychology expert based at Trinity College Dublin who carried out the study, said: “People have more to remember these days, and they are relying on technology for their memory.

“But the less you use of your memory, the poorer it becomes. This may be reflected in the survey findings which show that the over 50s who grew up committing more to memory report better performance in many areas than those under 30 who are heavily reliant on technology to act as their day to day aide memoir.”

Professor Roberston, who oversaw the research to mark the launch of Puzzler Brain Trainer Magazine, said that a series of five simple exercises a day can help to increase memory capacity.

As many as a third of those surveyed under the age of 30 were unable to recall their home telephone number without resorting to their mobile phones or to notes.

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1) NO SERVICE.

2) BUSINESS MEMBER? – STILL NO SERVICE.

3) BAD DESIGN.

4) RELEVANCY.

A little bit too harsh perhaps, but I’ll I’d add some constructive suggestions to his list:

A) Data cleansing – Linkedin should make it a priority to combine duplicate accounts as they are disrespectful to a user when they are forced to view and interact with dead accounts. They should also make the last login date viewable for the same reason.

B) Explain and put focus on the value of endorsements and competencies over company brands and job titles and prioritize them accordingly. I was at a dinner party recently and overheard a woman say “those endorsements don’t mean anything who knows who wrote that stuff.” Linkedin has failed to promote what I thought was it’s most valuable asset and make it a driver of usage, this is unfortunate.

Linkedin needs to take drastic action to improve it’s customer service and data quality. They should also leverage it’s most valuable assets like endorsements of former co-workers more wisely amongst users who do not currently utilize them.

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It wouldn’t be possible without you…

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Read Jerry’s thoughts here on the Yahoo! blog

Official Releases

I can’t say I’m totally shocked by this based on recent events. No need to rehash those – you can read those on the other blogs and outlets.

Although it was clearly emotional and difficult for all, it was unique and class move the way that they did it with Terry participating in the call announcing his departure.

Good luck to Jerry Yang in his new role and congrats to Susan on her promotion. I look forward to hearing from them again with more details shortly.

It would be great if Jerry Yang was to reach out to members of the blogosphere to hear and see their thoughts and it would be delightful to actually share those ideas with him. It should be a top priority if the company is to regain it’s prominence.

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Here are some concerns about the TSA the other 1% of the time and in the handling of this case:

1) In March when returning from the CTIA conference in Orlando, I took a bottle of water through security. The TSA agent allowed me to consume it on the spot and toss the container. As he should have. Why the inconsistency in treatment? The issue of TSA inconsistency is a serious one.

2) On my way to Orlando, I experienced a TSA agent who screened my bag 4 times and was downright rude. So rude in fact that I filled out a complaint form upon my return and received a form letter from the TSA two days later. The body language of the first man in this video with the woman is almost exactly the same I experienced and we should see the whole tape. So why the selective video release of the woman spilling/dumping the water? What is the TSA hiding? I’d like to request in the interest of fairness that the TSA immediately release the WHOLE VIDEO. This will likely not be so flattering to the TSA. 

3)  Since we as travelers pay fees for the TSA to operate, why aren’t we treated like the customers that we truly are?

4) 2008 candidates for President have questioned the TSA in general. In his May 22, 2007 speech, “In the Name of Patriotism”, Ron Paul stated:

“The war mentality, and the pervasive fear of an unidentified enemy, allows for a steady erosion of our liberties, and with this our respect for self reliance and confidence is lost.  Just think of the self sacrifice and the humiliation we go through at the airport screening process on a routine basis.  Though there’s no scientific evidence of any likelihood of liquids and gels being mixed on an airplane to make a bomb, billions of dollars are wasted throwing away toothpaste and hairspray and searching old women in wheelchairs.”

The inability to have a consistent culture and the selective release of video shows serious problems at the TSA that needs to immediately addressed. The selective release of the partial video is outrageous. It’s sad that an incident like this had to occur to bring the national spotlight to this issue. I wonder how this will be resolved?

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“All brands outlive their useful life, often to the detriment of the consumer and newer value propositions.”

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It says:

“Maybe an infusion of new thinking, new experiences, and fresh perspectives would be good for Yahoo.”

Then later:

“Maybe employees who weren’t yet ingrained with Yahoo’s past ways of doing things would be able to breathe new, renewed life into the one-time Internet king. “

Time will tell if they wisely chose this path.

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Few things I’ve ever seen on an online newspaper site have shown such a true respect and understanding of the radical change in the newspaper medium as the homepage of Cleveland.com did today. More and more people read only online. There it was in the middle of the page it said “Download today’s front page”(of the paper edition). Wow! I downloaded the pdf and it looked sweet.

I bet that pdf file becomes the De facto cube poster in every office in Cleveland on Monday. Cool Cleveland.

That pdf file is interesting for other reasons as well. It’s also a great branding and advertising tool in stealth form. Take a closer look at the pdf file again. It brands the Plain Dealer in the top left corner. It is also a sales piece. Look at the bottom left corner now. It has URLs to purchase both pictures from the game and a larger poster of the front page.

Now if only cleveland.com would remove the age, zip code and sex question on the entry pages like Cleveland‘s Joel Cheesman wants. 90210 anyone?

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Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton now show Web, Images, News and Blogs in their search result selectors!

Ron Paul, the candidate with tons of video viewing activity now shows Web, News, Blogs and Video. This shows a customization that is occurring, either video submission or video viewing trends to change the view to video from images. It would be interesting to see the Ron Paul supporters reaction to this.

One result that puzzles me is that of Dennis Kucinich, the search results only show Web. This is odd to me because I know he has active blogosphere results and has had a trend of increased video views. It makes me ponder whether Google might have something against Dennis Kucinich? Is there any history here? Or is this just some random event? I look forward to seeing your posts on this.

A result that baffles me more is that of Matt Cutts. When I think Matt Cutts, I think blogs, yet his results show only Web and Video! Strange indeed.

There is clearly other things going on as well. A search on the Rolling Stones currently returns Web, Music, News, Images, Video and yes even Groups.

Again, Google should act to add blogs permanently to all search results so they are not perceived as favoring the mainstream media. What do you think of these variations? What unique examples can you find? I appreciate your thinking about these complex issues and joining the discussion via a post of your own on these issues.

Screenshots:

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What follows are the raw notes of Danny Meyer’s speech at the National Restaurant Association in Chicago on May 19, 2007. There are amazing insights in his speech and new book, Setting the Table, in regards to separating the concepts of service and hospitality, recruiting and how to life to it’s fullest. All lessons that can be applied to web 2.0 or any business in need of refined and high performance culture. Please note that the notes are raw and from his voice:

He let everyone know that it was his first time speaking at an NRA show. However, he attended the 1985 NRA convention. I wanted to learn about a POS system. We got a big presentation on it. I gathered the courage to ask a question. Is it really feasible to give a rolled thermal check instead of a proper check? If you give them good food at a fair price you can give them a check on toilet paper and they will come back someone chimed in.

Something dawned on me about five years ago. We focus on mistakes more than what is going right. My grandmother was proud of her garden. She taught me to garden at the age of 6. Ignore the weeds water the flowers. It dawned on me many years later that is what we should do in real life. A lot of things were going right.

Opening my restaurant was a passion. The strongest business decision I ever made was to fire myself as chef. In a city that has 22,000 restaurants, we have 6 in the top 42 Zagat Favorite Restaurants. People who are highly institutive make poor analysts. I do things that are intuitive. I employ over 1,500 now.

What does it mean to be my favorite (restaurant)? When you put those words in front of anything it is the highest compliment that can be paid. If I could figure out the secret sauce, Id have something. Location has ceased to be a critical fashion. The other 95% of the people say its’ service and not location, location, location. We needed a service economy. The car rental company didn’t have the convertible you wanted, the bank didn’t do what you wanted, etc. The Internet changed the rules. If you wanted to rise to the level of my favorite, you did if via performance. Performance used to be the thing that did it for you. I’ve always made a practice of asking why. You guys make the best roast chicken, you seat us on time, etc. We stopped hearing that when people started using the Internet. If you wanted to set yourself apart you could do things to differentiate, but replication happens much sooner now. Performance is a lot like air conditioning. Nobody has ever walked into the Grammercy Tavern and said this is great air conditioning, but if it doesn’t work, they don’t come back. Performance is now a lose proposition, it is not a win proposition. Nobody defined how hospitality is different than service. Did the waiter clear the table timely? Hospitality defines how you make someone feel. You have made them feel like you are on your side. Hospitality only occurs as we see it. Service is the technical delivery of product. You can write a manual to define the service and we have a different manual for hospitality. If you do something, do it consistently. Hospitality is not a monologue it’s a dialogue. The preposition for is involved in hospitality and the preposition to is there when you do something to somebody. It takes certain technical skills to open up a bottle of wine. We had been focusing 49% of skills training for technical skills. We spent the other 51% hiring for hospitality.

Hospitality IQ is the companies which are successful are the most successful in hiring the right hospitality. We need to hire people who derive pleasure from giving pleasure. What occurred to me is that you can’t teach it.

Kind, Intelligent and Curious, a high work ethic and integrity. These people were people with a high degree of empathy. Integrity is more than honesty. It is the judgment to do the right thing. More often than not they are life choices. Talked about leadership and the relationship to being a captain on a team. You get to be in a business of setting rules. Every single organization in the world have the exact same five stakeholders – customers, investors, community, employees and suppliers. We created a virtuous cycle of events. But if you believe in virtuous cycles, you can make more money by putting ourselves first, employees trust and put investors last. If I could raise my Hospitality IQ when hiring we’d be better. We put our community and suppliers ahead of investors to. Why would we have a community investment department? Why not help fix the park across the street. A rising tide lifts all boats. You might succeed at that. You can invest in the tide. Do your competitors go up with you? The niche of BBQ goes with the tide. Table is another example. We needed to create a new tide. We have been working to build community. In the same way that a championship horse is born with the DNA, it still needs to be trained. Make sure your staff needs to have the heart muscle worked hard. Birds of a feather flock together. The staff wants other people to work with that have a high hospitality quotient. People who have the same emotional need to learn pleasure. If you teach me more than the next guy, I’ll stay here. The biggest thing, please listen to my aspirations. We always want people to be part of a new opening of a new restaurant.

49% of a swans body mass is below water, 51% of the swan is above water doing the graceful stuff. My favorite chapter is the road to success is paved with mistakes well traveled. Waves are like mistakes, there is another one just behind it. My biggest mistake was back in 2002 and I found it hard to find the type of people. It took 35 minutes to get a drink on opening night at Blue Smoke. When I learned the swan theory, I never knew. Eye contact, a mile a hug and some pretty darn good food.

Question: Questions about putting staff ahead of customer.

What I’m saying is exactly that. If you have the best recipe, it’s not good if you don’t have good ingredients. Our hospitality will never rise to a higher level. The two things I look for in any business are focused on their work and enjoying each others company, I know it will work.

Question: When you were hiring for HQ, how do you train your managers.

Since you derive pleasure for making people for feeling comfortable, you can be blind to it. Have others help you. The prospect drops out that can be frustrating. I’ll ask someone, “Tell me how you used heart in your last job.” We tell people there are the skills that matter for you.

Question: Can you talk about the importance of the quarterly newsletter?

Listening is as important as expression. The fact that you think it’s quarterly when it’s twice a year is a testament to its’ effectiveness.

End.

It was a pleasure to listen to Danny speak. I’m glad I took the time to listen and learn from his wisdom about life and hospitality.

UPDATE: He had a book signing to go to at 2PM. At 4:45PM, I still saw him standing there with a line of people with books. Nothing short of amazing!

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There are several changes in the works:

1) The biggest news is that there will be a rebranding of MyBlogLog. The exact timing and new brand were not revealed. (YahooBlogLog or MyYahooLog? Time will tell.)

2) A complete site redesign is on the way!

3) A new “Widget 2.0″ is coming with some hover features.

4) Yahoo! is hard at work to remove the offensive photos so that MyBlogLog would be palatable to more conservative business blogs.

5) Some sort of method to turn off your presence for some types of sites will be added.

As they do not have these changes locked in, Robyn would love your comments and feedback. To not overwhelm her, please drop your comments below.

Analysis: The rebranding is not a surprise move. MyBloglog is really only known amongst the first adoptors and blogosphere and getting the Yahoo! name is front of more people in a soft way is a good move. Yahoo! seems committed to making these changes, while listening to suggestions and making the product more dynamic. Looks like the best is yet to come from MyBlogLog.

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First the Dmarc founders left Google.

Now http://www.dodgeball.com/ (dead link 11/2010) founders, Dens Crowley and Alex Rainert (please drop me a note if you read this guys), not only have left Google but they posed for a thumbs down photo that they have posted on Flickr, a Yahoo! property. The photo already has over 26,000 views and appears to have a viral element based on the view count growth, the interesting comments on the Flickr photo and a lot of blogosphere reaction. I’m trying to imagine how frustrated someone must be to post of photo of this nature, announce new project associations and state that they are throwing a party “to celebrate our escape”.

Putting my investment management hat on, I’d like for independent analysts to be allowed on the earning call this Thursday. If allowed to do so, I’d like to ask the following question, “Why is Google having such a hard time with HR and staffing issues, whether it is regarding hiring new employees, retaining pre-IPO employees (see podcast) or integrating acquisitions? Has Laszlo Bock’s background proven not to be the right style of leadership and is it time for a change?” The “all big companies are always ineffective” is a major cop out as there are big companies that are admired and in fact some cases adored.

Ideas on what to do with Dodgeball are everywhere you look. The comments on the Flickr photo are fascinating to read. P.S. When searching for these entries on Google Blog Search I found considerable splog/spam (MFA Made for Adsense) sites – Google should work to solve that issue.

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

http://www.blogator.com/g/2833510 (dead post 11/2010)

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http://www.electrolicious.com/archives/2007/04/did_twitter_kill_it.html (dead post 11/2010)

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http://mcmanus.typepad.com/grind/2007/04/two_dodgeball_f.html (dead link 11/2010)

“http://topicstop.blogspot.com/2007/04/google-alert-google_1007.html (dead link 11/2010)

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“http://ipfreaks.com/dreamscene/?p=2258″ (dead post 11/2010)

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“http://www.tmesolutions.co.uk/web_design_kent/Marketing+News/2007-04-16/Google+dumped+by+Dodgeball+founders/3800849030″ (dead link 11/2010)

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http://yummy.vermontconnect.com/cool/dodgeball-founders-leave-google-and-that-leaves-dodgeball-probably-dead/ (dead link 11/2010)

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Mobile text messages(sms) and potential alerts were mentioned on numerous occasions as something that could have improved communication. While I firmly believe in the potential of mobile search and mobile communication combined with LBS to create increases in quality of life and lift ROI, yesterday also showed some limitations.  Chief among these is the fact that there were numerous reports of “not being able to get through on mobile phones for hours”. Put simply, in most places, the mobile networks can’t handle everyone trying to use their phones all at once as they did during the Virginia Tech crisis yesterday and other crisis situations of the past. It appears that increased usage of Internet and mobile search services will tax existing infrastructure to it’s limits in many places and I’ve not seen heavy discussion of this issue or potential solutions.

Bleeding edge mobile technical solutions alone aren’t enough. Reliable networks are a must to make mobile search and mobile communication of the type that could have helped if utilized yesterday a reality. Let us ask the leaders of the mobile operators to make those networks a reality around the world using consistent standards that puts the customer experience first. Let’s start the process of addressing these bottlenecks now before the next crisis or surge in usage of services takes place.

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I noticed this today after I was having communication difficulties with a Newegg order and tried to reach out to him and was highly surprised to find he had left the company. It will be quite interesting to see if Newegg’s service level suffers now that he has departed.

Howard if you’re reading this, I wish you the best of luck in your new role and please drop me your new contact information when you have a moment…

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This is certainly interesting to ponder as for me as Acura made a great car that I’ve owned for over a decade that I love and they now don’t make any models with appropriate headroom – even though they cost three times more! Based on my first experience with the Acura brand, I should have been a customer for life, but their engineers are not listening.

One more note on Volvo, as I mentioned last week they are doing so many things right at present but it’s clear that thy need to close the loop by actively listening to and acknowledging blogosphere feedback. I was surprised that they weren’t based on the other factors that I had seen in visiting the dealer.

The automobile company that figures this out will create a unique competitive advantage.

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“If Yahoo! builds the appropriate mechanisms to utilize and respond to this feedback, it could easily be the most important thing they do all year.”

I made a post on Yahoo! Suggestions – “Yahoo! E-mail – please improve the spam filters – too much spam gets through” in the hopes that it would get voted on by other people caring about the issue and that Yahoo! would respond by putting resources on correcting the issue. At mid-afternoon, the entry had 9 votes. Then I got the message below stating it was deleted. As I write this I’m absolutely stunned, how can Yahoo! state that the “Suggestion is not actionable by owners of this Suggestion Board, therefore we are removing it.” If this is going to be the normal procedure of Yahoo! Suggestions, I now have serious concerns about the success of the Yahoo! Suggestions initiative. Hopefully, they will review the procedures and improve this.

• Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 13:48:25 -0800 (PST)
• Subject: Your suggestion on the my suggestion board was deleted
• From: “Do not reply”
• A board administrator has deleted the suggestion you placed on the my
• Suggestion Board.
• Reason provided: Suggestion is not actionable by owners of this
• Suggestion Board, therefore we are removing it.
• Suggestion topic: Yahoo! E-mail – please improve the spam filters
• Yahoo! E-mail – please improve the spam filters – too much spam gets
• through

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If Yahoo! builds the appropriate mechanisms to utilize and respond to this feedback, it could easily be the most important thing they do all year.  If Yahoo! does this, Peter Drucker would have been proud of it. I hope they do as this is would be a good way to build a customer focused organization. I like that the interface allows an anonymous entry, it could allow for people who are shy or don’t like making their name public to participate. I made my first wish regarding Yahoo Mail! in this manner just to test it, better email spam filtering! Please support the cause by giving it your vote!

As you know, I have made several suggestions in the past for improving e-mail.

Good luck with the Suggestion Board, Yahoo! This should be your moment to drive innovation and shine.

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I hope to one day soon be provided with this type of data about some topics I think are fascinating.

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When are the majority of recruiting departments going to realize that compliance based hiring doesn’t build best of breed companies?  They should try competency and potential based hiring as the magic formula?

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