Month: December 2006

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Costco – Now Customer Listening?

In September, I made a post about my feelings about Costco (COST). In it I posted about some items they needed to restock and the need for a change in culture focused on customers.

Costco has now restocked one of these items, the Texas Garlic Toast (after dropping the high end product consumers rejected). I hope it is a sign that they are starting to focus on the customers needs and would like to encourage them to focus on the remaining concerns in my previous post in 2007. In addition, the Lincoln Park Chicago store needs faster register checkout.

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Google Indent Glitch?

Google appears to have a glitch in the search results for #1 Google Indent rating groupings. Frequently, an item in the first grouping is showing up as the number two search result as well! Hopefully, Matt Cutts, Adam Lasnik and the team will find the glitch in short order, they are typically on top of things like this once brought to their attention.

Examples include: Harvard Business School (pictured), Stanford GSB, MIT Sloan, Dartmouth Tuck, NYU Stern, Yale, UNC – Chapell-Hill, Chicago GSB – that should be enough of a sample size to debug the issue…

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Great Last Minute Gift Ideas

The Never Eat Alone Blog (Keith Ferrazzi’s blog) has numerous good ideas for networkers.

I’ll add one of my own: Give the gift of your personal time to offer to help someone achieve their goals – that gift is priceless!

Networking tip regarding the Cardscan gift idea: When designing a new business card always check to see that it would work well in a card scanning device before printing them. Seems obvious, but you’d be amazed how many people do not consider this!

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Andy McKee Featured on Youtube Front Page!

I first met Andy McKee at an acoustic music festival in Kansas in 2003. He is among several awesome fingerstyle guitar players including Tommy Emmanuel (see my Tommy Emmanuel interview), Neil Jacobs, Brian Henke, Peppino D’Agostino and others that don’t get mass media exposure. For several years these great players have labored with little or no media love. Yet when they play – some people will drive hundreds of miles to witness the art. It is a strange contradiction indeed.

One of Andy’s videos “Drifting” made it onto the front page of Youtube this week and has now received over 700,000 views! While it’s great that this occurred, it’s a sad reminder of a broken music industry that categorizes people much the same limiting way online recruiting does, not being seen by all of the people who might be interested in the competencies and skill set that a person offers! It’s great when you start to see these barriers and limiting beliefs starting to be broken, hopefully 2007 will be the year we see this happen in not only music, but also recruiting as well. If you like this video be sure to check out his remake of Toto’s “Africa”.

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Google’s Mobile Ad Guidelines Page

I recently noticed that Google started a Mobile Ads guideline page. The following is of great interest to me:

“Follow proper grammar conventions.

You may use common text message abbreviations.”

I’d like to see some more detail about what is meant exactly by “You may use common text message abbreviations.”

The #1 result for “text message abbreviations” in Google currently has this web page. In a world where relevance is critical to click through and conversion rates, is an ad that has abbreviations that a viewer doesn’t understand certainly doesn’t meet the relevancy requirement as that viewer certainly won’t take action on an ad that he or she can not interpret. My preliminary thought is that this should allow the user to self select the type of mobile search marketing ad style that they are most comfortable with and this likely will have a strong correlation with the age of the user/ad viewer. But it also means that eventually you might need more than one style of mobile text ad, one with abbreviations and one without abbreviations. This is certainly an interesting area that I’m will likely see new standards and metrices over time.

What do you think the standards should be? I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts and discussion of this issue.

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Networking Insight

It was such a great pleasure to see my good friend Jason Jacobsohn at the Chicagoland Entrepreneurship Center holiday party last night. That community does so many positive and good things and I’m glad I know many of them well.

He also launched a new blog this week, “Networking Insight” this week which I encourage you to check out. He did a good job of thinking about the blog before launching it – I’m sure he’d love to get your thoughts, encouragement and ideas.