You’ll notice I’ve made some title tag changes. Rand Fiskin has a great post on title tags that made me rethink mine. Good reading. Rand is truly one of the most unique and well liked people in the search community.
Techcocktail3 is Thursday in Chicago
Techcocktail 3 (RSVP required) is Thursday night! It’ll be nice to see Frank Gruber, Eric Olson, Matt McCall, other venture capitalists, angel funding sources and high growth start ups changing the web scene.
It’s a great opportunity to talk with people and seek relationships of partnership, introductions I’m looking for:
1) Angel or Venture Capital funding for a startup I’m advising and would like be a part of
2) Startups, ecommerce companies or search engines seeking Sales, Marketing or Business Development leadership (open to relocation)
3) Ways to utilize my financial services background in the financing channels of this space
4) Progressive large companies seeking transformation of process and interaction with customers
I will be arriving early at 5:30, I would welcome detailed conversations of any of these issues with anyone who would like to meet up early to talk. Please reach out to me if you’d like to do this. See you there!
WSJ Writes Unfavorable Yahoo! Article
Kevin Delaney wrote a Wall Street Journal article today that rips on Yahoo! for the way it is handling the conversion to customers.
This flies in the face of all the articles and public opinion I’ve witnessed in person and online. I’m starting to think the Wall Street Journal is a bit guilty of bashing Yahoo! while letting the issues of another certain search engine slide completely. This is unfortunate.
Walmart, Listening
Walmart Niles, IL location #2816 was frequently running out of my favorite sweet treats – Haribo Gold Bears – Gummi Candy(which is actually a hard to find imported item). Last year I let someone I know at Walmart know about the stock out issue of this popular item and they listened, there is now an extra spindle display and an aisle end display was also added! Needless to say, they’ve never been out of it again, this is a great example of customer listening and an example of a good customer experience that innovates off of the real time feedback of customers. Keep up the good work on listening!
Google Makes Tighter Rules on Usage of Other Contextual Ads on Sites
Jennifer Slegg offers a post with excellent insight into the issues.
Has anyone done the A/B testing that Jennifer suggested? I’d be interested in the results and to see if that was a driver of this move.
John Edwards Campaign Claims Listening
Ryan M from the John Edwards campaign claims that the campaign is listening to the blogosphere / social media. Sorry Ryan, but the facts speak otherwise. On January 6th, 2007, I posted “How to Forge a New American Mandate Via Social Media Political Revolution”. There was a listing of the major candidates in one section of the post “Scoble’s posts made me think how can we truly integrate social media into campaigns(and after the election). John Edwards said in his interview with Scoble that we need “a bottom up democracy.” It’s an amazing challenge requiring change in our government not seen in over a generation. The campaigns for President of John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Tom Vilsack, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Newt Gingrinch, Frank Keating, Chuck Hagel, Mike Huckabee, George Pataki, Mitt Romney and Tommy Thompson would be wise not to adopt this as a tactic but as a way to redesign government’s interaction with our citizens. Democrat or Republican is not the issue here.”
The post also stated the following “This is a post on how to use social media to improve accountability in political campaign. As such I’d like to learn which Presidential campaigns are actively monitoring the blogosphere. Please leave a comment if you have an official association with one of these candidates and feel free to discuss this post in your own communities.”
Not only did John Edwards campaign not leave a response, sadly no campaign checked in. A simple RSS alert on the candidates name would have caught this post, yet no campaign did. I was simply looking for affirmation that campaigns were truly listening to the blogosphere / social media consistently. Unfortunately, the campaigns aren’t monitoring the whole blogosphere on a consistent basis yet.
Dell, Starting to Truly Listen
When Dell launched their blog, I left a comment that was deleted (apparently by the PR firm that originally launched it) and I disagreed with those that said Dell was doing a good job with the blog.
Fast forward several months. My Dell Dimension 9150, bought last June, was recently having a problem with the keyboard space bar sticking (they should look into this spacebar failure as it should not occur on a new PC). I left a comment on the Dell blog about the issue. The comment was approved. Neil from Dell called me, selected a new keyboard and had it shipped out right away! During the conversation, Neil also took the time to listen to my past concerns and shipping preferences taking notes as we talked. The keyboard was received two days later.
When combined with Michael Dell meeting with bloggers directly at CES, I can see Dell is trying hard to change. An organization that large can’t change everything in a day, but they are trying to change the priorities. The evidence is now strong that Dell is starting to learn to listen to customers, they should keep listening and innovating from that listening.