Healthy Blog Reviews

How are you enjoying that free Android software that powers your iPhone-competing smart phone? I hope you like it enough to reimburse Google $10 a year, because that’s what Google CEO Eric Schmidt is hoping to get out of each Android user: “If we have a billion people using Android, you think we can’t make money from that?” Schmidt asked rhetorically. All it would take, he said, is $10 per user per year. Did you just feel a small pain in your wallet? OK, relax. Google doesn’t want you to actually hand over ten bucks a year to use Android, but that’s the nominal amount it says it needs to earn from each user, in order to add a nice supplement to its search engine revenue. That could come from any kind of distribution deal or premium apps that you might pay for. And any amount it can earn from Android would certainly help it to finally cast off that “ one trick pony ” tag that appears to be relentlessly applied to the search giant. And, based on the number of people that tweet to me about their love of their Android phone, I suspect that Google has a good shot at getting the income from Android it so dearly craves.

Tags: amount-it-says, Android, CEO Eric Schmidt, deal-or-premium, Eric Schmidt, Google, iphone, like-it-enough, Local/Mobile, nice-supplement, schmidt, Search, shot-at-getting, trick pony, year
Posted July 29, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Twitter is preparing to move to a dedicated data center by the end of this year. If it allows for Twitter to be more stable then this can’t happen soon enough. Why should marketers concern themselves with this kind of information? It’s pretty simple. If the Twitter platform cannot be relied on to be consistently up and reliable then it is much harder to have valuable resources dedicated to efforts using Twitter. If you think companies are skittish now about whether Twitter is the “way to go” these recent technological missteps are not helping to ease that pain. TechCrunch reports As you may have noticed, Twitter has had some reliability issues over the past few months. Part of this was related to the World Cup, part of it is because they just continue to grow at a fast pace — 300,000 new accounts are created a day now. It has gotten to the point where Twitter needs their own warehouse for tweet storage. So they’re building one, in Salt Lake City. While it undoubtedly won’t be as large as Apple’s forthcoming billion-dollar data center in North Carolina, Twitter says they have been working on a “custom-built” one that will be opening later this year. These troubles have been difficult for the many third party developers and service providers who are dependent on the Twitter ecosystem for their own survival as well. Right now, no one is really very happy with Twitter’s performance and the excuses of event overload or anything else will likely have less credibility moving forward if Twitter truly wants to be counted amongst the Googles and Facebooks of the world. Of course, Google’s network of data centers is well known and Facebook announced earlier this year that they were going the private data center route as well. Having said that even now, I don’t ever experience issues with Facebook’s availability and rarely if ever with Google (unless you count their sometimes dog slow e-mail service). The Twitter engineering blog tries to give a picture of how this will help Twitter and everyone associated with it moving forward. First, Twitter’s user base has continued to grow steadily in 2010, with over 300,000 people a day signing up for new accounts on an average day. Keeping pace with these users and their Twitter activity presents some unique and complex engineering challenges (as John Adams, our lead engineer for application services, noted in a speech last month at the O’Reilly Velocity conference). Having dedicated data centers will give us more capacity to accommodate this growth in users and activity on Twitter. Second, Twitter will have full control over network and systems configuration, with a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around our unique power and cooling needs. Twitter will be able to define and manage to a finer grained SLA on the service as we are managing and monitoring at all layers. The data center will house a mixed-vendor environment for servers running open source OS and applications. So hang in there folks, Twitter is trying hard. Unfortunately, while I believe that they are doing the best they can it will not be enough for a our world of “What have you done for me lately?” Right now, people aren’t very happy with Twitter and as they say in baseball “You’re only as good as your last at bat”. If Twitter keeps striking out that will not help the cause one bit. Here’s to less Fail Whale appearances and some semblance of stability for Twitter in the future. Your thoughts?

Tags: Apple, facebook, north, North Carolina, thoughts, Twitter, unique, world, year
Posted July 22, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Are social media sites like Facebook and MySpace falling into the category of “We put up with their nonsense because there are precious few options”? A recent study conducted by Foresee Results indicates this may very well be the case as social media sites scored the lowest on its American Customer Satisfaction Index as reported by TechCrunch A new study by ForeSee Results and the American Customer Satisfaction Index finds that U.S. consumers regard social media sites Facebook and Myspace as lowly as they regard cable providers, airlines and the I.R.S. The Annual E-Business Report for the A.C.S.I. study encompassed thirty online media brands in the categories of: portals and search engines, news and information sites and for the first time in July 2010, social media sites. Social media companies Facebook, Myspace, Wikipedia and YouTube were included for the first time this year, but achieved the worst “satisfaction” scores within the “e-business” group. On a 0-100 point scale, Facebook scored just 64 points but Wikipedia scored 77. YouTube scored 73, and MySpace scored 63. By way of comparison, Netflix ranks at 87. Twitter was not included in this year’s results but could be in the future. ForeSee Results expects to add Twitter next year but did not include Twitter in 2010 because so many people access the site through third-party applications (like TweetDeck) creating a varied user-experience said ForeSee Results chief executive Larry Freed. Google took its lumps in the report as well with a decline of seven points year over year. You can get the full report for free (if you consider filling out a form free). So while it seems interesting that these sites are held in such low esteem it doesn’t seem to stop people from signing up and using the sites as Facebook hit the 500 million mark in users. What caught my eye was the information contained on the following two charts. As marketers, we talk and act as if the social media world in general is just a constant free flow of product recommendations and glowing reviews. Maybe that’s a ‘not so much’ reality vs. the hype that the industry likes to offer (imagine that!). So what is your opinion of Facebook and MySpace as it relates to the other services you use in your life? Would you really rate your experience / satisfaction of buying property and casualty insurance higher than that of social media? Maybe it’s because one eventually protects you while the other one does something else that makes it different, I don’t know. Let’s hear your take.

Tags: business-report, charts, facebook, industry, life, MySpace, netflix, opinion, search-engines, Social, Social Media, Wikipedia, year
Posted July 20, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Pssst! Wanna buy some hot charts and industry predictions for the US online advertising industry? Good, I’ll need about 700 portraits of George Washington, in green, and they’re all yours. OK, joking aside. If you have $695 lying around, and absolutely need to know the inside track on the growth of the online advertising space in the US, then eMarketer would love to hear from you. I’ve not seen the report , but it promises 34 pages and a whopping 51 charts. Who doesn’t like charts? Below is one of said charts: As you can, after a decline in 2009, online advertising spend is set to make a big comeback this year–with a 10.8% growth rate. The four years after that look pretty darn good too! What’s leading the growth this year? One contributor to the altered 2010 estimate comes from the quicker-than-expected uptick in the US economy. This shift has a twofold effect: more shopping by consumers, most readily seen in search ad expenditures, and a greater willingness among companies of all sizes to spend a bit more for marketing in general. I guess eMarketer is hoping that confidence will result in your willingness to spend seven hundred bucks on its report.

Tags: 2010-estimate, 700-portraits, among-companies, bucks-on-its, Growth, more-shopping, online, Online Advertising, Research, Search, year
Posted June 18, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

This week one of the richest and most influential men in business and the world, Larry Ellison, founder and CEO of Oracle Systems, gave his opinion on corporate blogging. Well, at least he gave his opinion on one attempt at corporate blogging and it strikes right at the core of some things that the social media and Internet marketing communities claim as near and dear to their heart. Ellison attacked what many have held up as one of the prime examples of a company creating content through executive blogs and more. In fact, he didn’t just attack it; he crushed it. The focus is on the Sun Microsystems purchase that was completed in January of this year. Sun’s former CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who resigned his post with a tweeted haiku in February of this year , has gotten a lot of attention for his CEO level outreach through blogs. I have even admired it. A quote from Ellison though, makes it clear what his stance is on the matter. This comes from InformationWeek . “The underlying engineering teams are so good, but the direction they got was so astonishingly bad that even they couldn’t succeed,” said Ellison. “Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales.” Sun became the poster child for content creation that came from all parts of the company. Trouble is the company lost $2.2 billion last year so Mr. Ellison may have a point here. It’s like writing a journal while the Titanic sank. If someone actually read it there may be value but the bigger issue of impending death outweighs it by far. I think Ellison views this corporate foray into blogging as if Schwartz is a modern day Nero. As Sun Microsystems crashed and burned around him he was blogging much like the Roman emperor played his lyre while Rome was being consumed by fire. I wonder how he feels about the efforts by Oracle execs to blog ? Is that adding to the bottom line of Oracle these days? So is this call for transparency and openness throughout companies really necessary if it doesn’t add to the bottom line? Or could it be argued that if there wasn’t the blogs that kept some Sun customers engaged that the company may have failed even more severely? Were there any metrics in place to see what effect the culture of blogging at Sun had on the bottom line? If not, was this just a spectacular PR play that got people to pay attention to Sun’s willingness to “communicate” rather than concentrate on keeping the business afloat? We would LOVE to hear from any current or former Sun bloggers or employees to get your take on this. There are more questions being posed here than answers so any help would be appreciated. Did this culture of blogging cover up a bad business plan that was doomed to fail despite some of the best engineering talent as Mr. Ellison claims or was it really just as exiting CEO Schwartz said in his farewell tweet. Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more I think if you asked Larry Ellison he’d tweet Wrote too many posts / While company crashed and burned / There’s the door use it So what’s your take and if you can give it in a 5/7/5 syllable format then you get extra points for having nothing better to do this fine day.

Tags: culture, internet, Internet Marketing, larry ellison, love, microsystems, opinion, oracle, oracle systems, Social, Social Media, year
Posted May 15, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media