Healthy Blog Reviews

I have a question for you. Do you think Google is getting sloppy? By that, I mean, does it seem like Google is pushing new products and updates out the door without first conducting in-depth testing and customer feedback? Exhibit A: Google Buzz. Turns out, it was pushed live without the normal rigorous testing …and Google paid the price. Exhibit B: Google decides to mimic Bing’s background images…then quickly pulls the feature . And, Exhibit C: After launching a complete overhaul to Google News, the search giant is now having to backtrack some– making changes in response to the many complaints: ..some of you wrote in to say you missed certain aspects of the previous design, such as the ability to see results grouped by section (U.S., Business, etc.) in two columns. At Google, we’re all about launching and iterating, so we’ve been making improvements to the design in response to your feedback. For example, we’re now showing the entire cluster of articles for each story, rather than expanding the cluster when you hover your mouse over it. We’ve given you the ability to hide the weather forecast from your local news section. We made the option to switch between List view and Section view more obvious. Of course, you could argue that Google is merely doing a great job of listening to the feedback from its customers. And, that is true. But, it seems to me that Google’s customers are doing a lot more complaining these days. Either we’ve raised our expectations of Google, or Google has lowered its standards. What do you think?

Tags: ability, Business, cloud-computing, cloud-hosting, design, expectations, made-the-option, normal-rigorous, paid-the-price, Search, weather
Posted July 16, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

With absolutely no fanfare at all, Twitter has thrown the switch on an updated Follower notification email that tells you everything you wanted to know about a person and more. The old notification email greeted you warmly then announced that NAME HERE is now following your tweets on Twitter. After that was a snapshot of their current followers, tweet and following stats. The new format does away with the warm greeting and puts the name of the Twitter account in the notification line: Cynthialil (@ Cynthialil ) is now following your tweets (@TWITTERACCOUNT) on Twitter. That’s followed by the person’s avatar, Twitter name, location and bio info before moving on to the stats which now include lists. The stat layout is now a table that resembles the layout in Twitter. The result of all this is more information delivered to your inbox when someone new decides to follow you on Twitter – but do you care? I would imagine that a large number of users don’t even have the notification box checked in their profile. If you have a busy account, or run a few accounts, it can get annoying, but you should care if you’re running a business. Your Follower list is open for all to see so you should make the effort to keep it free of spammers and inappropriate material. R-rated avatars have no place on your business Twitter unless that’s the business you’re in. Do you review your Follower notifications on Twitter? Or is it just a numbers game for you?

Tags: Business, cloud-computing, cloud-hosting, flickr, follower, make-the-effort, notification, person, Social, Tweets, Twitter
Posted July 15, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Google continues to expand its efforts to get away from being a revenue one-trick pony. A recent result of these efforts is the announced partnership with Omnicom who will be using Google’s ad exchange to purchase display ads for their clients. With Apple having some reception issues ( nothing a roll of duct tape can’t fix though ) and suffering the slings and arrows of a bored press that is looking to make someone a target and then deem it news, Google is doing pretty well. Motorola’s Droid X rolls out today and Verizon reports that it is gaining in market share even without the iPhone in its stable of smartphone offerings. As the Wall Street Journal reports this new Omnicom deal is more reason to celebrate. Under the deal, Omnicom, part of New York-based Omnicom Group Inc., is expected to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy display ads for its clients through Google over the next two years, said a person familiar with the situation. In return, Google will work with Omnicom to build a global “trading desk” that allows the company to buy display ads more easily on Google’s ad exchange, an auction-like system that matches ad buyers and sellers to advertising space across large groups of websites. Omnicom says it was already buying ads on Google’s exchange using its own technology system. As part of the deal, Google, which reports second-quarter earnings Thursday, will provide analytics services to Omnicom to help it understand how its display ads are performing, the companies said. There are the typical concerns that by committing to one company like this (although there is no contractual restrictions as to who either side could work with in addition to one another) then Omnicom could ‘alienate’ other companies like Yahoo or Microsoft. Such partnerships also could create tensions among other parties with which the advertising and Internet companies do business. “If you get in deeper with Google, then someone like Microsoft [Corp.] might be less likely to work with you, or Yahoo might be less likely to work with you,” said Michael Brunick, vice president of technology at Interpublic Group of Cos.’ digital-ad unit Cadreon. “Ultimately, we want everything we buy to be in the best interest of the campaign. If you are stuck filling a commitment, that may or may not be in the client’s best interest.” OK, here’s what I have to say to that. What is this, middle school?! Does this really happen in business at this level. The “I’m not going to talk to you because you talk to them!” is usually reserved for hormonally imbalanced teens not multi-billion dollar corporations. Geesh. Just imagine how much incremental income could be made by others who pick up the business from Omnicom that can’t be run through Google for whatever the reasons. If everyone would stop acting like children there would be good business to be earned out there. Anyway, I know I am dreaming here because people are people and they make weird business decisions that are more emotional than logical (another term for this kind of person is a stockbroker). The bottom line here is that Google continues to diversify. It shouldn’t be too long though, before someone cries foul and says that Google is doing too much to grow the economy and create jobs (I do hope you picked up on the sarcasm there). Where else should Google go to diversify and become more than just a search company? We will hopefully learn more today as Google reports earnings and tells the world what else it may have up its sleeves. Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community

Tags: advertising, Business, client, clients, companies, deal, internet, iphone, Omnicom, parties, street, Yahoo
Posted July 15, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

I had to do a double take this morning when I read about the plight of reddit, one of the original social news websites. Apparently things aren’t so good over at the Internet property. It’sso bad that they have started to ask for donations to keep the site afloat. I bet you that their owner, Conde Nast, must be so proud. eConsultancy reports Making money online isn’t always easy, especially when you run an ad-supported business. And that’s not just true for the small fries; it can be even more true for popular, heavily-trafficked sites. That’s the case for reddit, the popular user-generated news site. It was purchased by Conde Nast Digital in 2006, but a blog post last Friday indicates that all is not well at reddit. That post reads We’ve been kinda bummed at reddit these days. It seems like every week something comes up that slows performance to a crawl or even leads to a total site outage. And we almost never get a chance to release new features anymore. Our four engineers — KeyserSosa, jedberg, ketralnis, and myself — are working full time (plus many evenings and weekends and sometimes even the middle of the night) just to keep things going. Perhaps we’re doing it wrong: there might be ways to optimize our code, or technologies that could allow us to work more efficiently, but we’re too busy to investigate these things, or to migrate to the ones that look promising. It becomes a vicious cycle. The bottom line is, we need more resources. Whenever this topic comes up on the site, someone always posts a comment about how reddit is owned by Conde Nast, a billion-dollar corporation like Time Warner or Cobra, and how if they wanted to they could hire a thousand engineers and purchase a million dollars worth of heavy iron. But here’s the thing: corporations aren’t run like charities. They keep separate budgets for each business line, and usually allocate resources proportionate to revenue. And reddit’s revenue isn’t great. Essentially the rest of the post is painting a grim picture of where reddit stands and it ain’t pretty. So how do they intend to solve this ‘revenue isn’t great’ problem? By asking their users to become reddit ‘subscribers’. That would make sense in a world where it is understood that in order to survive any company needs to generate revenue. Apparently the folks at reddit live in the ‘free Internet’ alternate universe thus this apologetic request for their visitors’ subscription help moving forward. We’ve been trying to get this out the door for some time, but it always got held up because we wanted to write some cool subscriber-only features first, like the ability to sort your profile page by score, or have more than 50 reddit communities on your front page, or a button you could press to smack someone in the face over the Internet. We now realize that we’re going to have to put the cart before the horse: in exchange for subscribing to reddit, we can right now only offer you our undying gratitude and an optional trophy on your userpage. It’s kind of a lame offer, we know, but if the program is a success, we’ll be able to give subscribers better incentives in the coming months. We invite you to post ideas in the comments section; in the meantime, I suppose it’s more or less a pledge drive. Unfortunately, it doesn’t wrap up any better. As long as we’re going to be taking suggestions and money from you guys, we might as well also take the name you came up with: this new program will be called “reddit gold”. How much would you pay for this wonderful opportunity? $10? $30? $∞? No, seriously, how much would you pay? We have no idea what we should be charging. So for now, we’re just going to let you pay whatever you want. Geesh, this is just, well, pathetic. I don’t wish any ill will on reddit but I do wish a few classes in business practice and common sense. Can you imagine how the folks at Conde Nast are looking at this plea from one of their business units? Business ain’t so great for Conde Nast overall but I don’t foresee a pledge drive anytime soon to help the bottom line. Am I being too hard on this or does this really appear to be one of the weirdest moves in recent history by a site that has some real power in the online space? What’s your take? Oh and by the way, if you are looking to help out reddit don’t forget ol’ Frank here …….. . (Hey, I had to ask.)

Tags: Business, code, Conde, conde-nast, digital, folks, internet, night, online, Social
Posted July 12, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Attention all members of the social media industry! Attention all members of the social media industry! It’s time to consider how the REST of the world uses social media in its various forms especially from a mobile phone perspective. I say this only because the chatter amongst social media experts, ninjas, gurus and Maharishi’s seems to lean toward the idea that everyone is accessing social media from mobile devices but reality may be very far from that. The Pew Research Center’s Pew Internet and American Life Project puts out some great data n its report called Mobile Access 2010 and it seems (as best as I can tell at least) to be free of the influence of someone who is doing PR disguised as research (another popular industry practice that needs to end). Here are a few findings. Please note the last bullet point in particular. Now, there is a lot more to this study like age specific breakdowns and also the use of cell phones for data applications amongst various ethnic groups which is fascinating. Please check out the report if you would like to learn more (PDF) . Honestly, I couldn’t get my mind off the 10% number because it seemed very low but at the same time seemed very real. At first I thought this can’t be right because everyone is using their mobile phones to access social media. Isn’t that the point? Being able to tell all of your ‘friends’ what you are up to at the moment and the place that you are up to it? If you read only industry media about this phenomenon you would suspect that this kind of thing is widespread and going mass market. Whoa there big fella! It’s not there yet and likely won’t be for quite some time. As with most everything I have ever seen in the Internet space the hype is usually about 5 years ahead of that nasty thing called reality. We get all lathered up about what is happening even though it is only happening for a very small percentage of people. This kind of overheating and over hyping is both annoying and dangerous. It’s annoying because it fuels the egos of those who are pushing this kind of irrational exuberance for their own gain (to be a quoted ‘expert’ etc). Secondly, it makes people lose sight of what they need to be doing right now to succeed. There is no doubt that this kind of activity will be more pervasive moving forward. We all have to remember though that when we attend a conference with thousands of people walking around staring at their iPhones, Android devices or BlackBerrys that we are experience this activity in a bubble. It’s not how most of the world operates yet. It just feels like it because like attracts like. The people that are married to their smartphones and record everything at every moment are a small percentage of the overall population and it may not make sense at this point to be getting all giddy over just how impactful this all is. Let’s face it, we are some 15 plus years into the commercial Internet era and A LOT of people are just starting to understand search marketing! We chuckle and say “Gee, I can’t believe that there are people that still don’t get search!” Huh? That’s pretty arrogant and actually stupid to say (you can complain that I may have called you stupid but I am first in line in having made that statement about search as well, so we are all in this together). Honestly, Google is still figuring out what is deemed ‘traditional’ search so why should we expect that everyone already has as well. Man, get with it, right? Search is so 2009! The masses haven’t caught up but we keep on running and leaving them further behind. That’s not good policy. I am glad that there are voices of reason out there like Pew so we can all have a head slap of reality and really help each other to concentrate on things that will help us today to move this economy out of the crapper. Pie in the sky business idealism will not get it done. Believing that the whole world is going completely mobile and will do everything from their mobile devices in even the next few years is silly. Segments of society will adapt and grow faster but where a lot of consumers are and will remain to be will not be part of this revolution. The truth is that there is a lot more money being held by people who are not part of this revolution than there are those who are. As marketers that should be your focus for today. Well, thanks for allowing my rant. I would love to hear the opinions of our readers on this subject. Is the use of mobile and social more widespread than this study suggests? Are we stirring up a bunch of industry Kool Aid that is keeping many from making good decisions for their business in today’s reality? Let’s hear it please!

Tags: Business, ethnic-groups, Local/Mobile, mind, mobile, mobile-access, pdf, phone, project, Research, revolution, Social, Social Media, study
Posted July 8, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media