Archive for July, 2009

AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford #AOSS09

July 31, 2009

I virtually attended my first conference this week at Stanford University called the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford.

This year was the seventh addition of the conference and was titled: “Meet the New Captains of Innovation”.

I stumbled onto the conference while doing research and ended up “attending” two days worth of sessions via my laptop even though I was 1,600+ miles from Stanford.

From the Summit at Stanford conference website:

AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford

AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford

On July 28-30, leaders in the global technology industry will gather at the Athens of the Information Age for high-level debates on trends and opportunities.

Who Attends?
Summit at Stanford, features the most innovative companies, eminent technologists, influential investors, and journalists in keynote presentations, panel debates and private company CEO showcases. Our goal is to identify the most promising entrepreneurial opportunities and investments.

Indeed.

880 people attended the three day event in person while thousands of visitors like myself virtually attended the conference from 80 countries according to show founder Tony Perkins.

I particulary enjoyed the innovative interactivity of the show.

Web visitors could log on to the Stanford conference via Vivu.TV to view the panel discussions while also asking them questions via chat or Twitter during the Q&A segments.

AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford

AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford

I aggregated conference attendees Tweets via Twitter and then re-tweeted the comments I found most interesting.

I believe my approach to virtually attending this conference, aggregating and then rebroadcasting my findings was innovative in itself.

I enjoyed every panelists contributions particularly the comments about Silicon Valley’s origins from Norm Fogelsong, General Partner at Institutional Venture Partners.

The AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford has set the standard for how all other conferences should be run.

All my notes from the conference are posted on TimothyCohn.com.

Microsoft Consolidates Search Market With Yahoo Deal

July 30, 2009

As most everyone in the search industry already knows, yesterday Microsoft and Yahoo reached a long anticipated and rumored search pact.

Microsoft Yahoo Search Deal

Microsoft Yahoo Search Deal

Because of the capital costs of maintaining a competitive global search engine, search engine market consolidation was inevitable.

I have commented about the Microsoft Yahoo search opera on several search industry blogs and wrote a blog post back in February 2008 about the real reason Microsoft needed to do a search deal with Yahoo : Microhoo vs. Google: The Battle for Audience and Keystrokes.

TwitBlock Alpha: Parsing Twitter Followers By Their Fruits

July 29, 2009

1938 Media Tweeted about a new Twitter Follower tool called TwitBlock Alpha.

The tool scans a Twitter account’s Followers list and generates scores for each Twitter Follower.

TwitBlock Alpha

TwitBlock Alpha

The higher the score, the more likely the Twitter Follower is a spammer – or at least has used one of those automated tools that proclaim “1000 New Twitter Followers Overnight”.

Just yesterday, I asked who are the 10,000+ people  would follow a Twitter account with 14 Tweets?

Fake Followers

Fake Followers

Probably someone who’s TwitBlock score – coincidentally – is off the charts.

The following is the top Twitter Spam Score from my Twitter Followers list:

Twitter Spam Score

Twitter Spam Score

As you can see, 1 Twitter Update, Following 490 and 6 Followers is indicative of a spammy Twitter account.

As I have increased my Tweets, I have noticed a disproportionate amount of following by Twitter spammers.

Hopefully an app service like TwitBlock can ultimately predictively model and prevent Fake Twitter Followers.

FakeFollowers.com attempts to do the same.

FakeFollowers.com

FakeFollowers.com

Twitter Debuts New Home Page With Search Box

July 28, 2009

Twitter has modified its home page to include a Twitter search box for web users not already logged into their Twitter account.

New Twitter Home Page

New Twitter Home Page

Twitter search options are prominently featured and include search results by the minute, day and week.

This move was probably necessary on Twitter’s part to generate renewed interest in its service which a handful of people – myself included – believe has already peaked.

If Twitter has any one core differentiator for potential non tech users, its would be Twitter’s real time search.

It remains to be seen whether anyone other than tech savvy news hounds have an interest in real time search results.

It will also be interesting to see whether or not Twitter’s search team has addressed the Tweet Stream Pollution issues.

Interactive Marketing Spend Annual Growth Rates

July 27, 2009

Forrester Interactive Advertising Models predicts compound annual growth rates for Interactive Marketing spend in the US through 2014.

Interactive Media Spend

Interactive Media Spend

Forrester classifies Mobile Marketing, Social media, Email marketing, Display advertising and Search Marketing as Interactive Marketing.

Interestingly – combined all other forms of Interactive Marketing spend remains half of what is spent on Search Marketing annually both in the present and future.

If the other forms of Interactive Marketing were more effective than Search Marketing, it would seem their spend would exceed the investment made in search by marketers.

Don’t Forrester’s spend predictions confirm all other forms of Interactive Marketing are less effective than Search?

Top 50 Web Properties June 2009

July 26, 2009

comScore has released its Top 50 U.S. Internet properties for June 2009.

The top five properties are Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and Fox.

New to comScore’s Top 50 US Internet properties, Twitter.com entered the list for the first time @ #46 with 20+ million unique visitors.

Top 50 Web Properties June 2009

Top 50 Web Properties June 2009

Will Twitter.com climb comScore’s list any further next month or has Twitter already reached its maximum potential audience?

Google Maps Search Results and Local Business Center Analytics

July 25, 2009

Drilling deeper into my Google Local Business Center account analytics has produced some unexpected findings.

Long before there was a Google Local Business Center, I became convinced of the importance of having my website appear consistently atop Google search results for heavily searched keywords.

So much so that I spent several years running my first major website: MarketingPrinciples.com as a test site for what worked and what didn’t within Google.

After testing confirmed a particular strategy or tactic, I would then apply it within the site or a client’s site.

Although MarketingPrinciples.com isn’t the traffic generation machine it once was  – with over 500,000 visitors annually – it still generates some interesting results from my original programming.

Most notably – MarketingPrinciples – according to my Google Local Business Center analytics appears first for “google search” in Google Maps queries  – above Google’s office locations.

Google Maps Google Search

Google Maps Google Search

Granted, the search query isn’t exactly a barn burner for producing clients for my marketing consulting practice.

However as a result of my early research and trials, my site and brand are receiving approximately 50,000 impressions from across the United States annually.

Google Local Business Center Analytics

Google Local Business Center Analytics

I think the results are acceptable for a guy and his laptop.

An aside: I searched for “google search” in Google Maps from several different computers with different IP addresses and got the same results.

What does your Google Maps search for “google search” produce?

Google Adwords Online Marketing Challenge Metrics

July 24, 2009

Google has announced the winners of the 2009 Google Online Marketing Challenge – a global university competition that gives undergraduate and post-graduate students hands-on exposure to online marketing.

The team from Deakin University, Australia was the winner of the global competition.

When asked how their team constructed the winning campaign, team spokesperson Andrew Kidd shared the following insight:

After discussions with the business owners, we decided we needed to conduct three separate campaigns. One would promote the play center to customers outside a 10 kilometre geographic radius, another would attract more mothers’ groups to the center, and the third one would attract more party and group event bookings. Visitors to their website more than doubled compared with the same period last year. We knew we had developed a strong campaign — but to win the global competition is outstanding.

Google judged competitors entries by the following metrics:

A proprietary Adwords algorithm examined over 30 different variables within an account to determine the top 50 teams in each of three regions (The Americas, EMEA and APAC).

Expert Googlers reviewed these 150 accounts to determine the top 5 in each of the three regions.

A Global Academic Panel selected winners from these 15 teams based solely on the quality of a team’s written reports.

The Google Adwords campaign statistics algorithm rated the teams with five key metrics:

Adwords Account Structure – Did the team set up their Adwords campaign in an efficient manner? Was it structured against product/service lines and themes? Did it contain Ad Groups with relevant Ad texts/variations and keywords?

Adwords Optimization Techniques – Did the team take advantage of tools and methods to get the most out of their campaign? Did the team follow the best practice encouraged in the Challenge guides and Adwords support materials?

Adwords Account Activity & Reporting – Did the team review and change their approach over time to get the most from campaigns? Was the account regularly monitored and did the team check and iterate to the Adwords reports available?

Adwords Performance & Budget – How effectively did the team use the available daily budget across keywords throughout the competition?

Adwords Relevance – How relevant were the team’s Adwords ads what click-through-rates (CTR) were achieved?

Congratulations to the winners.

Twitter 101: A Twitter User Guide

July 23, 2009

Twitter has just released Twitter 101, a guide for using Twitter.

Twitter 101

Twitter 101

The guide explains what Twitter is, how to get started using Twitter, common Twitter terms, Twitter best practices and some Twitter case studies.

With Twitter growing so rapidly while having problems engaging and retaining its audience, this guide should help explain and clarify Twitter’s unique value proposition to both new and old users alike.

How To Create and Search Your Own Twitter Followers List

July 22, 2009

Yesterday I wrote a post about how to create and search a list of Twitter updates in both WordPress and Google.

Today, I am going to tackle a similar problem: Searching Twitter Followers and Following lists.

Until Twitter makes searching Twitter account followers and following lists part of Twitter search, finding someone who follows you or who is following you isn’t very easy to do.

Creating a searchable list isn’t too dificult it just requires some time.

Go to your Twitter account and click on your followers link and select list view.

This will produce a list of 20 followers per page.

Twitter Followers List

Twitter Followers List

Copy the list of followers from each page.

Depending on how many followers you have will determine how many pages you will have to scroll through and scrape to create your own searchable list.

I have 873 followers at the moment so I had to visit 43 pages to create my list.

Paste the list of followers into a Word document or Excel if you extracted tables and save.

You can now sort either the Word or Excel documents alphabetically to create your first archived list of Followers in a searchable hierarchy.

To archive your Twitter followers list in the cloud, import it into a Google indexed WordPress blog and wallah! – you will have a instant browser searchable WordPress file with a list of all your followers.

After the Googlebot visits your site, your list of followers will also be archived in Google’s search engine results pages.

I have posted my current list of Twitter followers over on TimothyCohn.com