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Posted on January 18, 2007
The Cycle of Choice - Supernovas and Black Holes
BY JAMES CLARK
In Seth Godin's post The Cycle of Choice he had a great visual representation of how markets are busted open by innovators, then followed by a fade.
One look at this graph and I thought it looks like a Black Hole - where a bright star (Burton, Apple, Ford) attracts customers, runs out of fuel, reaches the end of its life, collapses into itself then explodes out sending its customers and ideas into every corner of the market.
So maybe marketing follows the laws of science. There's a bright new star in the industry that attracts customer at an astounding rate gaining tremendous mass, but eventually the fuel it lives on (innovation, authenticity, flexibility, customer loyalty) runs out and market forces (competition, customer service, cost of growth) cause instability that leads to a collapse and Supernova explosion.
What you have is death by success, and in this scenario the death of star is a Supernova - exploding everything out into the market creating new solar systems and new stars.
"The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Startdust and the Spiders From Mars"
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Posted on October 27, 2006
Google Alerts Deepening Online Conversation Tracking
BY JAMES CLARK
Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is rolling out significant updates across the board this week. The lastest update is to its popular Google Alerts service. Now, Google has added blogs to its Alerts notifications. This is following the announcement of placing blog search results in Google News.
Why is this significant? In our experience talking with organizations about online reputation management, they often respond saying they monitor online conversations using Google Alerts. The previous version of Google Alerts failed in capturing the online conversation due to the lack of blog tracking. Now when anyone signs up for Google Alerts they will have the option of tracking blogs in addition to Google News, groups and the web. Even better, the default is set to the Comprehensive Alert to track all, giving communications professionals the ability to track a deeper thread in the online conversation.
My issue with Google Alerts is that its still an email-based deliver system. Why not put an RSS feed directly on the Google Alerts sign up page?
As Google is rolling out advanced features in many areas of its business, we can only assume there will be a RSS tie in with Google Reader.
Our biggest concern from a usability standpoint is blog spam. We'll be testing this out to see if the quality of the results from blog posts are good or not. There are companies out there like Collective Intellect and Umbria that have entire systems to track the blogosphere and in our opinion their greatest value is eliminating blog spam. Try doing a Technorati search on a specific topic, 90% of the results are irrelevant, maybe popular, but irrelevant. Google Alerts is no way a substitute for a brand monitoring systems like Collective Intellect and Umbria, but it is a first step into understanding the impact.
So it's still up to the Communications Analysts to take the data from search that is relevant, the data from blogs that are popular and craft a strategy to identify and converse with the influencers.
Note to PR Firms: Google Alerts just upped itself a notch to becoming your clipping service - and it's Free.
Others in the Google Alerts conversation:
TechCrunch
Google Blog
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Posted on September 21, 2006
Advanced Searching with Google
BY BEN CASTELLI
Google offers a number of ways to enhance your search by adding special query words, called advanced operators, to your search query. Advanced operators modify the search or tell Google to do a totally different type of search. Two advanced operators that are worth checking out are [link:] and [cache:]. Placing [link:] in front of a webpage url in the search box will tell you the number of webpages that have links to the specified page. For example, here are the results from the search query: [link:www.room214.com]
As you can see, Google has indexed 49 pages with links to the Room 214 homepage. This is a great way to gauge ongoing SEO, SMO (Social Media Optimization) and link building efforts. However, this is only showing the number of incoming links indexed by Google so you will want to consult other search engines for the most accurate number.
Another interesting alternate query type is the [cache:] query. Using this query will show the version of the webpage that Google has saved in its cache. You will also see the cache crawl date, which gives you the last date the Googlebot has crawled your site and indexed your latest content. Even if a webpage has not changed, Google will still show you the date that it checked your page for new content. Here is what the [cache:www.room214.com] results look like:
This can be handy when a website is lost due to computer failure, or if a co-worker happens to overwrite recent updates you made to a website. More details can be found on the Google Webmaster Central Blog.
If you want to get really fancy, check out all of the alternate query types in the Google Help Center.
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Posted on July 5, 2006
Database of Intentions
BY JASON CORMIER
Just a quick plug for David Leonhardt's article in the New York Times today about using the new Google Trends functionality to begin predicting "what's next."
I've been talking to people about companies like Umbria for several months now, all in the spirit of using tools that collect the kind of data that can help predict the future (as opposed to simply summarizing the past). Now, we are beginning to see this topic talked about more in main-stream news circles. If this isn't the future of Marketing, I don't know what is.
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Posted on June 26, 2006
Split Testing Gone Wild
BY JASON CORMIER
For companies smart enough to implement landing pages in conjunction with their pay per click programs, there is a common practice of A/B split testing to improve these pages over time. This is an effective, recommended practice. What many are unaware of, however, is the concept of multi variable testing. This enables the testing of thousands of versioned web pages based on almost limitless variations of content, offers, layouts, etc. Is it more expensive than A/B split testing? You bet it is... but if a small percentage increase in your conversion rates equals big money - you need to be on this.
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