Category Archives: Society

Chief Almir Surui Day, October 4 2008, San Francisco

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Google Earth brings the Amazon closer.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has issued a proclamation declaring October 4th as “Chief Almir Surui Day.” It is also hats off to all those Googlers who were involved in making it happen. In June, these Googlers went to the Amazon to train indigenous people including Chief Almir’s Surui tribe on how to use Google Earth, You Tube and other Internet tools to show the world what is at stake with deforestation in the Amazon. The tribes are using this knowledge to preserve their history, culture, and develop a long-term sustainability plan to protect their rainforest and create economic opportunity.

Today Chief Almir and the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) are in the Bay Area to attend the world premiere of a documentary film by Denise Zmekhol called Children of the Amazon. This is a story about cloud computing from under a lush canopy of Amazon rainforest, where a group of emerging technologists are eager to share their story about their culture and their plan to preserve their forest and their way of life.

There is an online account of the Googlers’ trip and you can also see Memories of the Amazon which shows some of their favorite moments.

The work of the Amazon conservation team is extremely important and it is most gratifying to see the involvement of Google in this activity. Chapeau!

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Spirit Show

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A Show of Spirit for Greeks

That evocative title, Spirit Show, came on my newsfeed radar screen this week. Even back in 2004, I was questioning whether Trade Shows Are Out? given that Internet marketing was becoming so powerful.

If you run your trade show activities now in 2004 exactly the same way as you ran them 7 years ago, then you have probably seen a major decline in ROI from this activity. Relying only on the direct selling benefit at the show is sub-optimal. You should probably seriously question your continuing trade show participation.

You remember 2004. Although Google was giving some website owners a hard time, most online e-commerce sites were doing just fine. The increased costs of travel, and the delays through heightened security were making tradeshows ever more difficult.

Now move forward to 2008. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is still very powerful, but the new trend is Social Media Marketing (SMM). Everyone is thinking communities and how to spread the word through viral marketing. Who isn’t trying to figure out how Facebook might help them? No wonder that Microsoft, at a loss for what to do next, is contemplating acquiring them. With the explosive increase in energy costs, what model of a trade show can hope to survive?

Well, perhaps the Spirit Show typifies that model.

The Spirit Show is an open trade show dedicated to the privately owned recognition product stores. The trade show serves as a showcase for approximately 80-100 exhibitors carrying Greek, Cheer, College, and Recognition products along with a wide variety of complimentary goods and services. The Spirit Show is unique in that the exhibitors are geared to sell directly to the smaller, privately owned stores.

The market, which its participants serve, is made up almost entirely of social media. Sororities and fraternities are some of the earliest examples of communities, and many of them have their online presence in Facebook. You might assume that Greek clothing or Greek gear would be traded entirely online.

Well, it’s always been true that people prefer to buy from people. Buying from an online box store carries with it that unspoken risk. Is this company one I can trust? Meeting face-to-face can set many of these fears to rest. A trade show like the Spirit Show has a very clear niche and its participants go there to buy and sell. The ROI on their activities is much more measurable than for a trade show, where networking is the sole objective. We wish the Spirit Show a long and happy future.

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Do Google Snippets Work Better Than Twitter?

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Brevity is the soul of wit – Oscar Wilde

A surprising number of people, and indeed some surprising people, are now using Twitter to give status reports on what is happening in their corner of the universe. The strict imposition of no more than 140 characters and spaces seems to concentrate the mind most effectively. Tweats are of course produced by human writers. Twitter can certainly be rated a success.

Google snippets are those short pieces of text that appear under each item in a Google Search Engine Report Page (SERP). They too have a strict limit of 155 characters and spaces, just a little more than a Twitter tweat. Google snippets are produced by computers. Perhaps it’s time for Google to re-examine its snippets reasoning, because it is questionable how successful it is.

If you believed the Google documentation, you might believe that Web page Descriptions would be a key summary of the content of Web pages in their keyword search results:

We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL’s content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics.

They even go so far as to encourage you to Improve snippets with a meta description makeover:

The quality of your snippet — the short text preview we display for each web result — can have a direct impact on the chances of your site being clicked (i.e. the amount of traffic Google sends your way). We use a number of strategies for selecting snippets, and you can control one of them by writing an informative meta description for each URL.

In practice it doesn’t turn out exactly like that. You need to choose very carefully the exact words of your Descriptions if they are to be used at all, as you can see in (You Must) SEO Those Descriptions For More Google Visitors.

A post by William Slawski suggests why this is happening. It relates to Google’s fixation on inlinks to a Web page. So they may well Use Anchor Text to Determine the Relevance of a Web Page. In such a case, perhaps they wish to justify their reasoning by including it in the Snippet they construct to show the item is Relevant. Bill’s advice if this is affecting your Google appearances runs as follows:

If you run a web site, you may have visitors coming to your pages based upon the content anchor text in links pointing to your pages instead of the text upon your pages themselves. If the term is one that you want to be found for, you may want to consider adding some text to the page, if possible, using that query term, to provide a more persuasive snippet for the search results.

Perhaps if you put that persuasive language in the Description, it has a better chance of surviving that snippet creation process.

Standing well back, you might even question how customer-centric Google snippets are. Are they really the best way for searchers to find what they’re looking for? Perhaps they are motivated by a wish to prove that some apparently obscure item should logically appear in the SERP. Why else would you add in text taken from other related Web pages? The resulting snippets often seem much more attractive to computers than to the human readers they are intended for.

So do Google snippets work for you? Would you like to see Google change how it helps you to find what you’re looking for? Perhaps your comments here could trigger some rethinking.

Related: How to Optimize your Search Engine Snippets – Michael D Jensen

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Will Business Boldly Go Into The Social Media?

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Social Media – The Final Frontier?

Pierre Far, in a guest post on Techipedia today asks the question, Is Social Media the Final Frontier of Marketing? Given the popularity of such activities as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, it’s clearly a question that many marketers must be asking.

As confirmation of the topicality of the question, only three days ago Business Week had a long nine page article suggesting that Social Media Will Change Your Business. A few quotes will show how Business Week is seeing all this.

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they are simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they are going to shake up just about every business. … Given the changes barrelling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They are a prerequisite. And yes, that goes for us, too.

Still, blogs could end up providing the perfect response to mass media’s core concern: the splintering of its audience. Advertisers desperate to reach us need to tap niches (because we get together only once a year to watch the Super Bowl). By piggybacking on blogs, they can start working that vast blogocafé, table by table. Smart ones will get feedback, links to individuals-and their friends. That’s every marketer’s dream.

In a world chock-full of citizen publishers, we mainstream types control an ever-smaller chunk of human knowledge. Some of us will work to draw in more of what the bloggers know, vetting it, editing it, and packaging it into our closed productions. But here’s betting that we also forge ahead in the open world. The measure of success in that world is not a finished product. The winners will be those who host the very best conversations.

Overall Business Week seems to suggest that the big mainstream companies will still be the ones in control. Perhaps they’re missing the real point about social media. Pierre Far sees it in a different light.

The point is that consumers now have a more potent aggregate power: someone with a problem can now reach others with the same problem faster, build a community around this shared problem easily, and mobilize lots of people behind the common cause more efficiently. That’s what’s new: a significant leap in efficiency. This gives consumers a loud voice that companies have to listen to.

This message has been around for some time. It started with the Clue Train Manifesto in 1999. As the authors said then, As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies. If Business Week does not fully understand even now, how long will it take for the mainstream companies to realize that others are now in charge?

Related:
Business Blogging Now
Riding The Internet Tidal Wave
Smart Advertising On Cell Phones

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FREE from Chris Anderson

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Your Time Is Important To Us

I find Chris Anderson often has very thought-provoking ideas. He is the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and author of “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More”. That Long Tail concept helps explain why so many surprising Internet businesses work. He honed the ideas for many months before the book came out through his Long Tail blog.

He now is following the same path for his next book which will be FREE. You can learn more about it in an ITConversation on FREE: The Economics of Abundance and the Price of Zero. Here is some of the introductory text:

From free scoops of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream to the business model where razors are given away to sell the blades, there’s a whole gift economy at work that competes with the commercial economy. We think of free as scary and radical but this economy has always existed. Previously not dignified as an economy, its currency is not money: It is reputation, attention, respect, fame, fun or money from a superior service after giving away something inferior for free.
…
You can build whole businesses around giving stuff away for free. He puts his money where his mouth is. He’s giving away the audio version of his upcoming book, “Free: the Economics of Giving Stuff Away”.

He homes in on an important piece of the puzzle in a recent post on The big lie about free. The key is towards the end:

In a recent post, we listed dozens of business model built on free. All of them are based on the notion that free stuff does have value and the way we measure that is in the time people spend with them. Do I actually need to remind Wall Street analysts that time is money?

Time is an important currency. If we give someone minutes of our time, we give them something of great value. We only have each minute once. If an advertiser tries to grab that minute, then we may well be offended. If on the other hand we are so intrigued by that advertiser’s YouTube video, that we watch from start to finish, then we freely give those minutes. The advertiser has earned those minutes and had a real opportunity to communicate with us. I think once more Chris Anderson is on to a winner.

Related: Time is Critical

Related Books by Chris Anderson:

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I Twitter Therefore I Am

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The 2008 version of “I think therefore I am”

René Descartes felt that the proof of his existence was that he thought from time to time. Quite a number of people, including Richard Ziade, Richard Buchanan, Charles Rhyne, Graham Chastney among many others, are now confirming their existence by twittering.

It’s been around for some time although some of us were initially reluctant to twitter. Not so for many professionals who apparently have been using twitter extensively for some time. Now over the past few weeks it seems to have entered an explosive growth phase like so many other social media such as Facebook and YouTube.

Twitter

Twitter is disarmingly simple. You can tweat or receive tweats on your cell phone via instant messaging. 140 characters to tell whoever is listening whatever you feel like telling them. It can be almost like dropping pebbles down a very deep well. Sometimes you hear a splash. Sometimes you don’t. The Twitter FAQ gives a few more details but there is very little more to tell. It’s completely free and there are now a number of widgets (Apps) that simplify the process of twittering.

Twittering is now being used more extensively as an additional channel in Internet marketing. Lee Odden has provided a Guide to Twitter as a Tool for Marketing and PR, while Darren Rowse sets out some Tips for Bloggers. Clearly we’ve only seen the beginning of all this twittering activity.

So what will be the future of this new method of communication. Although it’s free it should not be difficult to monetize Twitter given the huge volume of traffic. The key concern must be whether this will become an increasingly noisy tower of Babel. Will the bandwidth be available to carry all the tweats? Twitter was overloaded apparently when Steve Jobs gave the keynote address at MacWorld 2008. It was again down this morning for a time. Twitter means instant communication. It can only work if instant always means instant.

Related:
35 Twitter Tips from 35 Twitter Users
26 Reasons Why I Love Twitter – Plus 27 More just in Case

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Customers Speak Out In The Internet Age

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We Know Your Call Should Be Important To Us.

This blog post is a follow-up to a recent article, Customer Service, New Marketing in the Internet Age. The article was addressed to business owners to remind them that the world has changed dramatically. Customers are now in control. The Internet gives customers new information and powers. This post is one place where you can exercise that power. You can add a comment if you found a company particularly poor on customer service. Equally if you found a company particularly good on customer service, then why not proclaim it to the world.

In the past people were sometimes reluctant to complain to a company, since problems were often not resolved by talking to the company. Now there is an alternative: you can talk to everyone out there. People do that in a variety of ways. For example on the recent opening of competition to the Canadian cell phone market both the Globe and Mail article, Cell phone giants lose stranglehold, (now behind a subscription wall) and the CTV article, Ottawa’s wireless auction could cut cell phone rates, each received scores of comments in very little time.

If you do a Google search for poor customer service, you can quickly confirm that customers are speaking out. Sometimes it’s in their own blogs and sometimes it’s via surveys. Here are some of the relevant links. Some of them are now some years old but they still timelessly signal someone’s discontent:

The rapid growth of social media such as Facebook means that the word is passed even faster now. It’s a customer revolution. If you’re not happy, or if you’re elated, then pass it on by adding a comment here.

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When I’m Not Doing SEO

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Sometimes I Sit and Think: Sometimes I just Sit

This is one of those meme posts. You know what I mean. Someone tags you and you’re supposed to tag someone else. If it’s someone you know well and like, then you don’t like to break the chain. So here we are.

I was tagged by Kim Krause Berg, usability expert and owner of the Cre8asite Forums, who had been tagged by Barry Schwartz, the energetic owner of SERoundTable. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is such a time-consuming activity now, particularly with all the burgeoning social media (Digg, Sphinn, StumbleUpon, Mixx, etc.), that it can expand to fill whatever time window you give it. That’s why it’s important to budget your time carefully and leave time for the things that are really important in life.

I am constantly surprised by what I see around me and like to write about it. We human beings are often eccentric and there’s a wealth of material. I like words so if I’m not writing then I’m often reading and it can be on a host of subjects. I consume detective thrillers rapidly if I merely want to relax.

What I really like to do is to get out into the open air. We now have two senior Golden Retrievers although both of them have their puppy moments. So that ensures two or three long walks a day. Having just moved to British Columbia, we are also intrigued to see the different birds here as compared with those we saw in Québec.

Having now done my duty, I pass the baton on threefold. Over to you
Ruud Hein
Pierre Far
Paul Flanagan

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Is Google Now The Big Ugly?

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It’s Not Easy Being Big.

As any big corporation knows, some will automatically question their motives. Wal-Mart is perhaps the prime example of this. Even though a corporation may be attempting to apply the highest standards of ethics, inevitably mistakes may occur. Individual managers within a large corporation may look to further their own careers by taking decisions which might not be aligned with corporate policies. Even though a corporation may proclaim a slogan of, “Do No Evil“, that slogan may not be applied by every individual working for the corporation. The situation is even worse in a public corporation, where the bottom line results in any quarter must satisfy the investing public.

For whatever reason, Google seems to be running into a number of problem situations of this type. Andy Beard points to one of these in his post, “Google Reputation Management Disaster With Open Social“. As he mentions, there have been a number of reputation management and trademark problems. Google is now looking at a new “Open Social” platform for social media web developers. The big problem is that Google don’t own the trademark, or even a lot of the concept behind it, and they certainly don’t own their own SERPs (search engine results pages). Although he is expressing his own opinion, there is some element of truth in the following:

Google’s Idea of “Open”

Google’s whole idea of “open” is to have the data available to them to index.

  • They don’t really care about privacy
  • They don’t care about copyright
  • They just want access to all your information

Sometime in the future, Google will have control of how your personal profile is represented online, and in many ways how it is portrayed.

If big corporations wish to avoid that ugly epithet, they must work hard to ensure individuals feel their rights are being fully acknowledged and respected. Given that so much personal data is now available on the Internet, a company like Google needs to work even harder than most to maintain a good reputation in the community.

Related:
Wal-Mart – The Big Ugly (UPDATED)
For Wal-Mart, PR = Public Revelations

Thanks to Andy Beard for Sphinning this.

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Internet Space, Near And Far

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On the Internet, the world is as close as your mouse.

Vinton Cerf, Google’s vice president and chief Internet evangelist, gave a thought-provoking talk in Seoul today. He was talking about the version of the Internet that will be required as we journey in space. This would allow people an ability “to access information and to control experiments taking place far away” from Earth. Expanding into the solar system would bring new rules and regulations too.

He and other experts are working on a set of standards designed to guide space-era Internet communications. He and a team of engineers at the California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory will complete a key part of the project — establishing standards for space communications like those for Internet — in three years. New standards are needed because of the huge distances and time delays involved in communication across space.

He had some equally intriguing data about the Internet at ground level.

He marvelled at its explosive growth in the last decade, saying it was a trend that would continue. The number of Internet users has grown 20-fold in the past decade to about 1.2 billion people this year, with the number of computer servers rising from 22.5 million to 489 million.

One of the outstanding changes was the Internet’s huge growth in Asia, which now boasts 436 million users, well above the figures of 321 million in Europe and 233 million in North America, the birthplace of the web. So many users in Asia suggests the content of the Internet will eventually contain far more information in languages other than English than it does today.

Although this would all seem to be about faraway places, the other intriguing aspect is that any part of the Internet can be visited with a click of the mouse. The Internet is always present. My own journey across Canada from Montreal to become a resident of Langley B.C. illustrates this on a slightly smaller scale. The journey across Canada, some 4000 miles along the TransCanada Highway, is a great way to experience the incredible diversity and beauty of Canada. We traveled relatively rapidly and our seven-day trip left little time for exploration. British Columbia is a very different province from Québec and there will be many cultural changes involved. Physically there are many obvious differences.

However Internet access at either end of our trip provides an identical experience. It’s the same Internet space. The various SMM (Strategic Marketing Montreal) online properties will continue to function in exactly the same way. In each place, the view of the world is exactly the same. With the Internet there really is no distance between points, even though they may be physically separated by many miles. When Vint Cerf and his team bring outer space onto the Internet, then it also will still be accessible at the click of a mouse.

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