Dylan Hunter

From eMarketer, (they’ll lock it up soon, but out of fairness, here’s the link until they do):

Search Engines Help Small Businesses

MAY 22, 2007

Small businesses depend more on search engine traffic than larger firms, according to a study conducted by Hitwise in early 2007.

The firm measured the percentage of average monthly traffic companies in the Internet Retailer “Top 500 Guide” received from search engines in 2005 and 2006. Half of the businesses ranked from the 400th to the 500th positions depended on search engines for 50% or more of their total site traffic.

By comparison, none of the top 100 retailers generated more than 40% of their site traffic from search engines, and half had between 20.1% and 30% of their traffic come from search engines.

Web-only merchants averaged 64% their of monthly site traffic from search engines.

Chain retailers and consumer brand manufacturers averaged 28% and 27% of their site traffic from search engines, respectively.

If you think about as an attempt to minimize losses of current customers, that’s exactly what you’ll get - losses of current customers. If instead, you think about as the beginning of a sincere set of opportunities to thrill and delight the folks who believe in you the most, you’ll find they tend to have friends…

A cute look @ Kevin Rose promoing Digg 1.0 on The Screen Savers, located by Michael Arrington, (Mike, do you ever sleep? - and, like Philip, I totally concur - was a huge fan of the show before G4 took it over and got rid of Leo, Patrick and anyone else over 12).

Now, granted, Digg in ‘06 doesn’t really look all that different from how it looked in ‘04, (I mean, amazingly not different! ) but is definitely a good reminder for all of us to turn the cameras on right now, pop on YouTube, (and hence back to your own blog) to both help us see how far we’ve come, as well as to inspire the next generation of builders by how rough all of us once were.

Think how cool it’d be to see Woz and Steve Jobs demoing the first Apple, Ed Roberts the first Altair, Dan Bricklin the first version of Visicalc, Tim Paterson the first version of DOS, Jerry Yang the first Yahoo, or Larry & Sergei the first version of Backrub / Google!

Another excellent exposure opportunity for New England-Based Startups from Doug Banks, Editor of Mass High Tech, (posted here by permission - Thanks, Doug! ):

Hello all,

For those of you running companies that may be looking for funding, for a strategic partner or on the hunt for a CEO/COO, Mass High Tech is looking for companies to include in its weekly feature called “The Pitch.” It appears on Page 3 each week and showcases a startup company from New England.

A recent example can be found here:

Consider it an elevator pitch - in print for 55,000 technology readers to see each week. It is free and is considered an editorial feature in our newspaper.

To be included, all we ask is that you fill out the questions below, email them back to me, and then we’ll contact you. (If your company is chosen, we’ll ask you to provide a headshot of the CEO.)

Thanks in advance for your help in getting more recognition for New England’s technology companies.

Doug Banks,
Editor
Mass High Tech: The Journal of New England Technology
www.masshightech. com

MHT’s “THE PITCH”

Company Name:
Headquarters:
Employees:
Founded:
*THE PITCH*: Seeking [HOW MUCH]
Web:
E-mail:
Phone:

PITCHING THE TECHNOLOGY

Describe what makes your technology/business model unique?

PITCHING THE PEOPLE

Who are the company’s founders? Where were they before your company?

Who is on the management team?

Have executives been involved in a cashout prior to this venture?

Who is on the board of advisers, and what other companies have they been with?

PITCHING THE BUSINESS

How much money is being sought?

What partnerships, collaborations or affiliations are already in place?

List any federal or state grants, contracts or awards received:

What’s the market size being pursued?

Who are the likely competitors, direct or indirect?

Is the company profitable?

Current annual revenue:

Now go get it!

For anyone who’s not keeping a close eye on the O’Reilly Radar, (and if you’re not, you should be! ) looks like they’re looking for speakers for their Web 2.0 Expo in April ‘07. Given the tracks suggested, looks like they’ll be talking about just about everything, so am sure it’ll be an excellent conference for both speakers and attendees!

Tracks:
- Strategy & Business Models
- Marketing & Community
- Design & UI
- Web 2.0 Fundamentals
- Web 2.0 Services & Platforms
- Workshops

More here.

Now here’s hoping that the registration costs will be something we normal humans can afford, (am sure an Un-conference it is not! )

Now, I’ll admit, I’ve been salivating about the potential of picking up a Powerbook/MacBook Pro for quite some time, but it’s good to see that with the exception of some rounded corners, my life won’t actually change that much! Major kudos to Hunter Kressall!

WARNING: Not suitable for the kidlings!

Have been a big fan of the EFF for sometime, and am very impressed with them using the popularity of YouTube, etc. to help get one of their recent campaigns across. Excellent concept, appealing strongly to tech-savvy parents, who I presume is one of their largest demographic groups; excellent distribution planning. It’s this kind of thinking about how to talk to real people in the ways that we all enjoy that makes all the difference!

Some very good info as to the effects of brand terms, query phrase complexity, (i.e. how many words are in a query) and number of ad clicks on conversions, from PPC ad copy through on-site copy. Looking forward to reading the full report at some point. Some highlights:

• The highest conversion rate (9.30%) resulted when the user’s first click and last click on a marketer’s paid search ad were both brand terms
• When the first click is on a non-brand term and the last click is on a brand term, the conversion rate is almost as high (8.73%)….These conversion rates are seven times higher than when there are only non-brand terms.
• Conversions also rise as consumers enter more unique keywords. Consumers entering multiple unique keywords accounted for 8.39% of the sample studied, but they accounted for 19.2 % of transactions
• Searchers who clicked on two unique keyword ads are more than two times more likely to purchase than searchers with only one keyword exposure.

Ok, was in the mood for a good chuckle, so decided to poke around on YouTube a bit, came across the AskaNinja videos, and couldn’t stop laughing!

Ask A Ninja Question 18 "Minjas"

Then go check out AskaNinja.com for more - they’re awesome!

BTW - putting back on the marketing hat - I can’t stress enough how valuable it is to make some part of your product portable away from your site as YouTube’s done above.*1* Give folks the ability to modify / color / flavor / select just what they like, so that they have ownership of some portion of what you’ve done, and they’ll be more than thrilled to take and pass along to friends, family, etc., as I’ve done above, (and loved to do! ).

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*1* Unfortunately, the bit of code that YouTube put out to embed the above screws up the stock Wordpress XHTML Transitional validation, (which could screw up search engines). Luckily, in the case of embedding Flash, since there really isn’t a good way to do without breaking validation or inserting javascript, I’m sure the SE’s simply ignore anything in <object> tags, so think you should still be good.

Good for GM to have the cojones to realize that something as strongly viral as a create-your-own ad campaign for an SUV, (with all of the negative passion that they elicit) is well worth the anti-GM sentiments that of course will be part and parcel.

I’m a little cautious about the “screening offensive content” thing, (i.e. back @ ATW, we spent a tremendous amount of time differentiating “F* [current president]!”, which is perfectly fine, (if somewhat less than tactful) free speech from f* something else, (which is porn! ) but will give them the benefit of the doubt for now, (and more if I see a “F* GM” ad).

So, all in all, well done, GM - and even if it was solely Great Lady Providence smiling upon them, you get credit for that, too, (there’s not one of us who hasn’t profited well beyond hopes just because it was a Tuesday, or there was a solar flare, or because the wind was blowing out of the NE that day, and you get the credit for that one, because next time, you’ll have done everything right, and it’ll be a Wednesday, or a New Moon, and you’ll get beaten for that, just as well).

Many thanks to Tara of HorsePigCow for the link about.

It’s been legal in both advertising and just about everywhere else pretty much for as long as anyone can remember, (so long as you tell the truth) but apparently as a result of Mazda actually being, oh intelligent, and bidding on comparisons between the Pontiac Solstice and its Miata, (i.e. “Pontiac vs. Mazda” or “Solstice vs. Miata” - thereby spending only thousands when Pontiac spent millions on product placements to get on The Apprentice last year to get similar results) as of March 1, Yahoo no longer allows companies to bid on their competitors’ trademarks for comparative purposes, even though such “Comparative advertising in itself is proper and legal…” according to Peter Raymond of the law firm Reed Smith in NY.

But don’t worry, if you’re a reseller of the trademarked item you’re good, or, if you’re a comparison site so long as you “provide substantial information about the trademark owner,” golden, just not if you’re one of the parties actually being compared. Hear that, Mr. Dreamer working on the next Great American Gadget? Hear that Mrs. Nutcase trying to offer that truly better, more personalized service when everyone else is cutting back on theirs? No compare with Big Boys for you - NEXT!!!!

A very cute timeline / explanation of the buzz campaign for the way overhyped MS Origami Project. And while there’s definitely no question that Dustin Hubbard deserves some strong credit for pulling it off, (or, at least gets the credit for serendipity! ) it also shows a bit of the danger of overhyping a product that’s just not that extraordinary.

Had the UMPC been as impressive as folks were hoping from the buzz, MS would have done beautifully in kicking up its reputation a good, strong bit on the innovation front, even if they only sold 2 UMPC units, helping them to cover up some of the Vista black eyes, and, perhaps, if they could get a couple of whiz-bang doo-dads back in the product schedule before Vista, *1* might actually help them a bit on adoption there, as well, (and for that, if it pulls forward adoption curves even .001%, it would have more than paid for itself, Dustin and the entire Origami Team at least a hundred times over! ).

Unfortunately, since after all this hype, what eventually came out was effectively one very large Wet Noodle(tm), unfortunately, it serves the opposite purpose, serving to damage MS as wasting our time with another not fully baked product, (probably sticking to its classic “get it right by v. 3.0″ strategy) that doesn’t do what the Innovators want it to, and is much too expensive to generate any significant Early Adopter purchase.

Buzz is always a double-edged sword, and here, since the level wasn’t well-matched to the thing being hyped, it ended up scoring a net negative. But still, a good learning experience and, as importantly, a fine display of skill that will hopefully only become more impressive with further seasoning, and were it my call, (which it isn’t! ) Dustin and the rest of the Origami Buzz Team have proved themselves well enough to give them a shot at the Big Leagues - I’d definitely toss them on either the Vista or revamped MSN Search launch teams to see what they could do on those, and just ask them to try to do a tighter “buzz match,” (to external potential opinion, rather than oversipping the internal koolaid) on that one.

So, nicely done Dustin & Gang, on the level of buzz generated, and, as importantly, for having the courage to admit the strong role of serendipity in, rather than playing it as planned perfectly from the beginning, (and here, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they would have done anyway, even if the phrase “overhyped” weren’t flying about from the moment the UMPC launched! ). Here’s hoping you keep moving on from here. And for the rest of us, a good thought exercise to keep in mind when planning our buzz campaigns, (knowing that any claim to actually “control buzz” is like handing someone a card with “cat herder” on it - immediately stamps a big, blaring “SMOKING CRACK” across the forehead of the speaker / giver! ).
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*1* Even if only on the version that would ship with UMPC’s, where they could control the hardware configs better for a first shot, and then for more GA on the desktop / laptop front later. In fact, if played right, could let MS use the UMPC for a nice semi-GA tech test bed for a little bit, to let them say that they’ve actually released some of the features that they’ve kept ripping out of Vista, even if they’re only available to the 14 people who would actually shell out the thousand bucks to be the first on their block to own their own Star Trek: Next Generation notepad doo-hickey!

What more can I say - Absolute Genius!

Blech…. Here’s a perfect example of taking something that folks are inherently interested in and would love to talk about.. and taste…, (i.e. ice cream), picking a great venue for coverage - totally unrelated to food products, so the competitive noise isn’t there, but still ice cream, so everyone on the floor would be interested in and inherently be talking about, (i.e. “hey, where’d you get that ice cream?”) and dropping that interest and setup straight into the deep freeze with completely unintelligible CorpSpeak.

My apologies, I usually try to be more positive, but almost every single word out of this guy’s mouth for the first 2 minutes of the video was one _huge_ turnoff, (big kudos to Rafe for not just giving his video guy the “cut it” sign and walking away after the 45 seconds or so, when it was clear this guy was going to just blather on and on - “multi-patented,” “on-demand,” blah, blah, blah - talk about the ice cream, Man - we care about the _ice cream_ - and yes, maybe also about what’s cool about the tech _to the normal human being_ - though honestly, it just sounds like your run-of-the-mill standard Coke machine’s capacities, but that’s ok - you’re not there ’cause you’re cool as stuff on the tech side, you’re there because Haagen Dazs and Ben and Jerry’s aren’t - the story sounds good enough to get you in the tech press who probably don’t know that Coke machines do that already - note to Coke - use the word “Linux” somewhere, anywhere, and you got another 50-100 stories just waiting to run! ).

In any case, clear enough this isn’t my favorite, but is a very good example of how to kill that buzz you’ve been trying to get in no time flat. If the product class had been anything other than _ice cream_ look for that sound you hear when the echo finally dies down to be crickets…

Oi… it’s iWon all over again… I like the suggestion from Bubble Generation:

Don’t pay people to use search–pay people to help improve Yahoo search. Give anyone a tiny micropayment for a tiny contribution to Y search. Leverage the massively distributed specialization of the edge to improve/filter/rank results.

Don’t know that micropayments is the right vehicle for motivation, nor necessarily that social tagging is the right answer here on the algorithms side, (though it definitely does have merit), but they’re definitely onto something solid about using the Yahoo userbase much more actively, (as I used to use mine at ATW many years ago, all made even more disappointing since Yahoo Search is an ATW derivative).

The short answer really is that Yahoo doesn’t need to offer any more incentive than actually really working with and then delivering ideas from their customers on how to make their individual search occasions more relevant to them. Think about how much it’s worth, (in prestige, and, for many, actually in cash) to be listed on a “Top 500 Contributors to Yahoo Search” for the Month / Year. Forget about giving them $1 per 100 searches or a bonus 5000 frequent flyer miles, (whoo-hoo!) or, even better yet, taking the whole iWon playbook and providing entries to a weekly drawing for $1M.

Give folks the ability to contribute, (ideas, code snippets, heck, whole add-on search-based products that Yahoo could then endorse and promote to the benefit of both that person and Yahoo) and then the ability to point to a Yahoo URL that says “Joe helped us blah, which resulted in one of the most used Yahoo apps in the last year” and if you don’t think that’ll be a huge catalyst for increasing interest / loyalty / positive press, etc., you’re smoking something!

And as to how to work through the tremendous number of thoughts / random brainstorms / add-on products, etc., guess what - Yahoo has a couple of social tagging assets it’s picked up recently. Since they’re trying to raise interest / engagement, etc. amongst the masses, the masses seem a good place to start!

Use Yahoo search, get a reward?

Yep, that’s the way for a legitimate site to generate traffic - look for permission vulnerabilities in folks’ blog software, (i.e. Wordpress suggests setting template permissions to 766) and then hack in and insert Javascript re-directs to your site using some domainstat crud.

Another fine thanks and reminder to use Firefox with NoScript, (and to switch permissions back to 755! ). Reloaded my blog, and for the first time got the javascript blog intercept on my own site. Took a look, found the crap, edited it out, switched the permissions back, and up again.

For anyone using Wordpress for your blog software, (and the only reason I’m specifically mentioning Wordpress is that there’s a suggestion on the template page to change permissions to 766) please check your templates for javascript that you didn’t insert, (again, referencing domainstat) delete from all affected templates, save and then switch permissions on those files to 755, and you should again be ok.

Yep, even if we presume that Coolrip is a legitimate site, (don’t know either way) is a good reminder to be _very_ careful of who you engage to get you traffic, and if the acquisition numbers are very low, know that whether you were informed or not, you’re funding tactics like these, including folks hacking into other computers, writing computer viruses on your behalf, etc., and, unfortunately, deserve any and all bad press you might get as a result, if you either didn’t ask, or turned a blind eye to.

Going to have to keep this one in my queue for next year. Well done, Ari!

Easy As Pie
by Ari Rosenberg, Monday, November 21, 2005

YOU HAVE TO LOVE THE short work week before Thanksgiving. Its arrival signals the year is just about ready to call it a day. By lunchtime tomorrow, you can kick up your feet and start writing out a quality to-do list for when you return from this long and well-deserved weekend. You’re entitled to enjoy a slow week when it shows up next Monday, right?

On second and a more productive thought, this is the ideal week to run harder than you have the whole year. A slow business week like this is the time to turn up your sales dial, because most of your competitors have turned theirs down–so the media-buying community you cover will more easily recognize your efforts.

Let me give you an example of this kind of market timing. When I was buying print pages, the sales staff at U.S. News & World Report would work harder on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving than any other publisher in the business. They would deliver apple pies–in white boxes, with the magazine’s logo tactfully inscribed–to literally everyone they called on. The idea was brilliant: sponsor dessert at every media buyer’s Thanksgiving dinner.

The execution took a tremendous amount of effort. The delivery of the pies brought the US News sales staff out in force to all their agencies within hours of shutting down for the holiday. I recall one of my colleagues waiting in her office, bag packed, ready to take off for the weekend–but not without her pie. What stood out was how US News waited until Wednesday to ensure the pies were fresh and they were the last imprint made on buyers before the break.

Sellers have always used food to connect to buyers. Perhaps it is too late to pull off something creative for this Wednesday. However, when you return to work on Monday, your competition will be dragging–as will your buyers. Consider sending buying teams on your key accounts a gourmet fruit platter with a note welcoming them back to work with food other than turkey.

There is an old adage in baseball meant for hitters that goes something like this: “hit em where they ain’t.” If you look for selling opportunities by going where your sales competition ain’t, you are bound to get your share of hits. The market itself will present some of those opportunities, like this coming Wednesday, when everyone dozes off enough to hit a home run by simply delivering a pie. What is your plan for the next chance to go where the competition ain’t?

Ari Rosenberg is a media sales consultant. Prior to starting his company, he was the vice president of sales at IGN.com. He can be reached at ari@performancepricing.com.

I know I am hardly the first blogger to deal with this situation, but wanted to send along a nice, positive “may you roast upon a firey spit” to our friends working with Online Poker and Phentermine, (there, you got your one mention, and no, you’re not getting the links). Now piss off, (and yes, I know perfectly well that not only is there not a chance in hell that these folks are actually listening, but even less of a chance of them actually heeding me, but sometimes a good “shaking your fist at the sky” is important, nonetheless - keeps you strong on why you don’t want to engage in these kinds of business practices when confronted with folks who keep pushing to swim deeper and deeper toward the darkness! )

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For those of you who don’t know what comment spam is, there are some seriously scummy companies - they used to work with porn, where they used to try game my index on ATW.com* all the time - but apparently have found online gaming and prescriptions at least as profitable - out there who build bots to find blogs, and then submit random, utterly unrelated crap as comments to those blogs, which include their links, trying first and foremost to build up their Google PageRank** numbers, as well as hoping to get the maybe one in ten thousand folks who might actually click on to find out what this random non-sequitor is all about to actually engage.

For those blogs / forums that are unmoderated, these links go up, and if Google / Yahoo, etc., haven’t yet detected their most recent bit of random crap, (i.e. they change IP’s, emails, text, doorway pages, etc. all the time, and am sure have gotten smart enough to ensure that the true IP’s are entirely masked, and the ones they submit are sufficiently randomized so as to make it more difficult to connect) for at least a point in time, they get to profit from the connectivity calculations to boost their ranks within the algorithmic portion of these search engines, thereby attracting more extremely cheap leads, (though Teoma, in using their more “segmented only to the query” version of connectivity should at least isolate these idiots to fighting back and forth to only their own sewers).

Is forever the anti-spam / porn / spyware economic problem - there is much more profit for the companies doing this than there is for the companies trying to resist, (where usually doing a better job in dealing with is only a cost***). And so long as this remains the case, (which’ll be nigh unto forever) we’ll have to deal with, and lose the economic value of the time spent in all of us dealing with, (i.e. how much cash could we all generate in the same amount of time it takes us to moderate our blogs / forums to make these things go away and go away and go away…. And yes, I know WordPress 1.5+ has some method of decreasing comment spam, but afraid I haven’t yet been able to get my webhost to upgrade me beyond 1.0.x even after repeated requests - and yes, this indeed may turn out to be enough of an issue for me to move webhosts - or, via the extreme power of inertia - it may not! )
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* Have I told you how much it hurts my heart every time I have to type the link to ATW anymore? What’s there is nothing more than a tired shell - my Old Girl, as a distinct entity, with its own advantages and disadvantages is long since gone, (though at least adding nicely to Yahoo). It’s as sad as when Disney bought Go.com, gutted it, refused to do any work to keep it up, refused to sell it, (I tried! ) and killed it through neglect, (and that wasn’t nearly as interesting a search engine) as happened with:

AV, (I almost never used, but I’m sure I’m far from alone in missing them having their full boolean advanced search - some things are important just to _be_ - as something in the World - even if only 4 people on the planet actually use - this is one of them), as happened with

Hotbot, as happened with

Northern Light, (one of my old personal favorites on the relevance front - from a business model perspective, were clearly always one of the weirdest), as happened with

….,

but as will unfortunately never happen with MSN even though looking at the mistakes that they continue to make that all of us already went through and solved years ago, it probably should, (but MS has to remain MS, and do it their own way - their focus has always been on how things can be best for them, rather than how they can be best for the consumer, and luckily, they have more than enough cash to continue to totally not care, and there are more than enough people whose most important market trait is inertia).

** And yes, I’m well-aware that Google doesn’t actually use PageRank, the algorithm, anymore. Am referring to the PageRank _concept_ - i.e. weighted link popularity to approximate concepts of authority, which I’m sure they’ll always use in one way or another, (if only to keep a tight, well-understood PR message). And if you’re _seriously_ picking these kind of nits, am sure there are plenty of other folks who would be much better foils for random, senseless and otherwise unproductive argument, (i.e. I never understood the point of debating, either).

*** Even for the anti-spyware guys, who do get comped specifically to fight, they get comped to remove stuff, and if that means wiping out a whole mess of false positives, who cares? They don’t get paid to work hard on parsing the nice ones from the nasties, they get paid to make things go away, plain and simple, with the specific exception of never tagging Google or Yahoo since the bad PR would kill them, regardless of the practices of their apps - i.e. did you know that if you have the PageRank button active on your Google toolbar, (which is the default condition) that they’re watching literally every single site that you, your husband, your wife, your children, go to, (though I suppose if your child is an early-pubescent, it might be a good thing to scare him a bit about people watching what he’s watching! )? Did you know further that both Google and Yahoo update their toolbars to do whatever they’ve chosen to do without your knowledge or consent? This stuff certainly scares the bejesus out of me!

All email communications that are sent from your company should have either or both of a link that auto-unsubscribes you just by clicking on it, (if you have multiple email newsletters, etc., you should have 2 - one for “all emails,” one for “this one”) or by just by sending a quick reply with nothing, or at worst an “Unsubscribe” in the subject line. There’s no excuse for pissing me, the reader, off by having me login to your email system, (are you kidding - if I don’t want to hear from you, why the heck would I bother to remember a login for your system?!?). Afraid EMC gets the Golden Turkey for screwing this up today!