Open Question for SES San Jose Day 1- Facebook Internal Search Optimization

August 18, 2008
Filed Under Optimization | Leave a Comment

For those in attendance at SES San Jose and SEOmoz PRO Training this week, does anyone know anyone who has done any detailed testing on optimizing Facebook for people doing internal searches on Facebook?

Please feel free to comment or reply if you have figured this arena out yet. As Facebook continues to grow in usage this is an area I’m seeking out information. Thanks.

SES San Jose Day 1 - Video Search Optimization

August 18, 2008
Filed Under Social Media | 1 Comment

I unfortunately arrived towards the end of Greg Jarboe’s speech and the next two speakers didn’t say anything that I hadn’t already stated in my Youtube Video Optimization blog post form earlier this year. I’d strongly urge anyone who attended this session to take a look at this posting.

At SES San Jose / Silicon Valley 2008 Day 1

August 18, 2008
Filed Under General | Leave a Comment

I had a flawless trip in from Chicago on Southwest Airlines (with a bunch of people with Dell computers with flaws - mostly dvd and hinge problems) and am here staying with my good friend David Temple during Search Engine Strategies San Jose.

It’s a kinda different show this year in both the crowd and some of the content type.

Already have had great meeting with Jim Hedger, Bryan Eisenberg and many others. Bryan has a new book, Always Be Testing, which just came out. I can’t wait to read it!

My First Exposure To ifbyphone

August 10, 2008
Filed Under Change Management, Entrepreneurship, Social Media | Leave a Comment

Last week, Andy Abramson from Communicano invited me to an intimate breakfast that included developers from multiple countries, executives from ifbyphone (and fonolo) and venture capitalists. Wonderful food, content and people made for an outstanding conversation!

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.

Top Digg Users Show Wide Variance In Participation

August 4, 2008
Filed Under Metrics, Social Media | 2 Comments

Everyone knows that Digg users are highly social and many are familiar with the traditional ranking of popular posts and other data that is available on digganalytics.com (data used in this post is as of 8/3/2008). Just for fun, I decided to toss this data into a spreadsheet and splice and dice it a bit to see what I might find.

After this exercise, I now think there are groups of Digg users with different tendencies. I’ll tentatively entitle these tendencies Super Socialites and Relevants - users who wait for can’t miss content. These users fall into two subcategories - High Submit Success and Infrequent Participation. Check out the wide variations in these new metrics sources, which are agnostic as to the tenure of the Digg  user:

Digg User   # Popular
MrBabyMan 2644
msaleem 1681
zaibatsu 1410
supernova17 1210
MakiMaki 1046
mklopez 913
skored 842
tomboy501 563
IvanB 485
pizzler 459

Digg User   High Submit Success Ratio
kevinrose 97.105%
FirstDigg 80.180%
haxr 63.095%
diggboss 61.184%
sepultura 60.773%
macbot 55.556%
openthink 52.301%
lazycat 50.314%
supernova17 49.187%

Digg User   Diggs per Popular  (lowest voting participation)
normalkid 7.373
tarkullu 15.327
macbot 19.133
lnfiniteLoop 20.118
mklopez 24.648
Vinvin 25.163
kevinrose 27.827
MrEMan 27.909
MrBabyMan 36.769

Digg User  Diggs per Popular (highest voting participation)
ShuTian 1025.769
numberneal 901.385
maxyRO 820.896
zoomtechtv 767.209
emberjohn 713.982
FamilyGuyFan 711.771
lekahe 679.068
vroom101 675.685
iching 563.242
Konstantino 554.347

While every change of the Digg algorithm, these rankings shift anew in unpredictable ways.  These new metrics show some clear differences in the tendencies of some Digg users. It would be be wise to pause and analyze these different types of Digg users and how their mixture of roles create value on Digg.

Could Twitter Actually Have a Business Model in Keywords?

July 29, 2008
Filed Under Blogging, Change Management, Entrepreneurship, Social Media | 9 Comments

Biz Stone got this directionally correct, it is just not in a format that is usable in real time, yet…

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.

How To Reorganize Management For Social Media, Search Marketing and Internet Advertising

July 27, 2008
Filed Under Change Management, Customer Experience, Entrepreneurship, Metrics, Online Recruiting, Optimization, Social Media | 2 Comments

Every once in a while Robert Scoble puts down the camera and writes an amazingly thought provoking blog post. Not a perfect post, but one that makes you think about the state of things. Scoble’s comparison of certain VCs to big companies struck a chord with me due a speech I’m working on. I’d like to redefine the problem as a “lack of confidence and/or vision in revenue models” so that it applies to iphone application startups to big companies.

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…

Nokia N81 8GB Review

July 5, 2008
Filed Under Nokia | 1 Comment

Positives of the Nokia N81 8GB:

- The first thing you notice is new radically different navigation on N-series phones. The green and red call and hang up buttons are on the edges of larger buttons - it takes a few phone calls to get used to the new placement!

- I love the one click swipe to lock or unlock on the top of the phone!

- Now 1 click to writing a text message

- Battery life is really long, especially considering the extremely well lit back keys

- WIFI connection works well, I’ve been able to surf and test mobile web sites much more clearly.

Areas to improve on the next version:

- The Nokia N81 8GB is black background with white text - this can be hard to read in bright sunlight situations.

This phone should definitely serve me quite well until US version of 3G comes out.

I’d also like to give Andy Abramson special props for getting me in touch with someone at Tmobile regarding a coverage problem I’ve been having. Much appreciated.

The Future Yahoo! CEO Nominee Discussion…

June 17, 2008
Filed Under Customer Experience, Yahoo! (YHOO) | 1 Comment

OK, Kara Swisher started this discussion(I’m not saying it’s going to happen), but I question her fundamental assertion that Jerry Yang is the person calling the shots. The memo regarding Jeff Weiner’s departure came from Sue as does most of the primary communication messaging. Many think Sue is the one that is in charge for this reason.

I’d acknowledge the relevancy of Sara’s nomination of Dan Rosenweig but will dismiss Marc Cuban as he’s more focused on acquiring the Chicago Cubs at present.

I’d like to nominate my own slate of nominees all would bring dramatic culture change and growth rather than an expense cutting mantra and I’d enjoy being a part of their team if asked:

Dick Costolo - Yahoo! arguably has the world’s largest mountain of content. Dick is one of the world’s thought leaders on distributing and monetizing content. He is also well qualified to build a culture of customer responsiveness. He also might have played a lead role in the recent Yahoo!/Google monetization deal.

Rich Skrenta - His knowledge of search is highly regarded. His new startup could also be lifted out to build a new company to replace many parts of the old one.

Brad Garlinghouse - Many would argue he understands and communicated the challenges to execution that Yahoo! faces better than anyone and is willing to make his case about it as he did in the peanut butter memo.

Jim Lanzone - If given the chance, it would be fascinating to see him have the resources to execute some of the lofty things he tried at Ask on a shoestring budget.

Those come to mind first, am I missing anyone? I’m certain I’ve missed some people out west that should be considered.

I’ll Tag:

Fred Wilson

Michael Arrington (via Crunchnotes)

John Battelle

Carl Icahn (please give me a shout if you read this)

UPDATE: Michael correctly points out that he’s already written this post…my bad…

ebaydevcon08 Chicago: Skype Developer Roadmap

June 16, 2008
Filed Under Mobile / Cell / LBS / SMS | Leave a Comment

The following is my live and raw blogging of Peeter Motskula’s from Skype’s session:

Skype: Enabling Conversations

If you put all of the time spent talking on Skype put end to end you would end up going back to the start of human species.

Skype is a thriving ecosystem 190+ hardware devices, 10,000 developers, partnership with world class companies.

Skype Developer Program (SDP) Vision:
More delighted users doing more with Skype
A vibrant ecosystem of external innovators
Supporting the long tail or outside innovation on the Skype platform
Growing selection of SDKs
Clear route to market

Where We Are Today:
Public Client API
Skype Extras Framework
Support Resources
Software Certification

Next Step: Software Certification Update
Focusing on a few really important issues
Much easier to understand and follow
Shorter test rounds

Coming Up: Next Version of Skype for Windows
Redesigned user interface
User and partner feedback is important
Extended beta program
API overhaul will follow

Later On: API & Extras Program
- Multi-Layer API
Core Functionality (cross-platform)
UI integration (platform-specific)
- Distribution and Management:
Extras Gallery
Extras Manager
Blacklist and Whitelist
- Backward and forward compatibility

ebaydevcon08 - eBay Future Product Roadmap Session

June 16, 2008
Filed Under Customer Experience | Leave a Comment

The following is my live and raw blogging of Adam Trachtenberg’s session:

New Ebay API Calls released today
- most watched items
- deals
- related category items
- top-selling products

This uses eBay’s New Services Framework! This is an API upgrade…

Cross Merchandising
- sell products using the brand
- promote contextually relevant market

Merchandising in Action at Ebay.com - Buyer behavior, interests are now creating personalization based on past purchase behavior

Visit developer.ebay.com for access to tools…

SDK upgrades and SDK/JDK for Java…

Many Large Seller Improvements
- Batch upgrades
- Easier variant listing
- Feedback automation
- ASQ: Redirection to CS email
- Invoices: Invoices to A/P email

Making eBay Better
- Create a first-class buyer experience
- Create a trusted marketplace

Improving Buyer Experience:
- Number of recent policy changes improve buyer experience
- Mandating “critical item information”
- Previously optional items, will be mandatory

Shipping
- All items must specify at least one domestic shipping service
- Suggest passing, weight info to auction, suggest passing tracking info back for my eBay…

Return Policy Needs to be Transparent

Paymentsb - Paypal required in most countries…Paypal only in limited markets

Anonymous Member Email Address:
- Anonymous until sale is complete
- Protect buyers from fraud during eBay purchase

New Links Policy:
- Generally speaking, no link off eBay, whether or not an item is being for sale on that site
- Not a comprehensive list, more specifics to come…

Verification of new sellers is occurring

Trusted Selling With Identity Confirmation

Twitter Question

June 1, 2008
Filed Under Customer Experience, Social Media | 1 Comment

A question to add to all of these posts asking Twitter questions:

Will the AIM interface ever be fixed? I found posting from IM to be the easiest and fastest method, it’s been broken (or blocked by AIM?) for months dating back to 2007.

What is the status of the Twitter AIM interface? Anybody?

TECH cocktail CONFERENCE Chicago - Creating Change For The Future

May 31, 2008
Filed Under Blogging, Branding/Buzz/Viral, Change Management, Chicago, Customer Experience, Entrepreneurship, Interactive Ads, Social Media, Venture Capital | 3 Comments

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 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.