As of yesterday, Bill Gates has officially begun Tweeting his thoughts to the world.
When I first learned of his Twitter account, 50% of his Tweets were directed to Ryan Seacrest.
Yeah right. I am pretty sure Mr. Gates and Mr. Seacrest speak often.
In the Noise Age, he who gets attention wins.
Bill Gates On Twitter
How much long will it take before the real Steve Ballmer starts Tweeting?
What About Steve
From the Gmail Team:
Ever since we launched Gmail, we’ve tried to show relevant and unobtrusive ads. We’re always trying to improve our algorithms to show better, more useful ads, and this video describes some changes …
Now, if Google could only get the ads I have targeted for display in the Gmail Funbox to actually appear….
Jon Bond, co-Chairman of creative agency Kirshenbaum, Bond, Senecal and Partners, shows advertisers how to make an effective TV commercial in five easy steps.
There are some great takeaways in Bond’s presentation. If every small business incorporated his recommendations into their tv commercials, television at least the commercials would be easier on the eyes.
The five steps according to Bond are:
1. Who are we talking to?
2. Who are you?
3. What is your Brand’s personality?
4. What is the offer?
5. Time to make your commercial.
The following is an introductory email I sent to a software company owner I met a couple days ago.
After having sent it, I realized the email summed up in a general way – how I got here and where here is (what I do).
Having been in the workforce since I was 10, I tried to just touch on the parts I believed would be of most interest to him and his business.
Dear Mr X,
I really enjoyed meeting you and talking about your career and business last night.
You are the first person I have ever met who admitted to being unemployable!
It wasn’t until I was in my mid 20s before I realized I probably wouldn’t ever be able to hold down a traditional 9 – 5 job. Getting up 4:00 AM all those years, buying and selling newspapers, dealing with customers directly and basically being my own boss at age 10 made me an entrepreneur long before I knew there was such a word.
The trick for me was finding opportunity here in Oklahoma beyond the oil and gas industry.
I experienced the oil and gas industry’s cyclicality first hand while working on an offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico (1981-1982).
After oil and gas prices plummeted in the early 80’s, I realized I no longer wanted my livelihood and opportunities tied to commodity prices.
It wasn’t until my mid 30s ((1995) that I got into the software business with one of Oklahoma’s
few software companies – Amcat.com
Oddly enough, I met the owner of Amcat while at a conference in Los Angeles. We were the only people in attendance from Oklahoma out of 500 business people from around the world.
In 1999 I won the contract to expand Amcat’s operations to Europe based on research I had done that
was confirmed by analysts from Datamonitor when we exhibited at a trade show in San Francisco.
The Datamonitor analysts confirmed the entry level Call Center market on the Continent and in the UK was untapped and thus under-served. Large 100 to 1,000 person call centers were the norm while few small to medium size business owners in Europe had yet to ever hear of or use computer telephony and predictive dialers to generate leads. The predictive dialer can double – even triple – lead production with half the telemarketing staff ( as few as four people). Business owners could pay for their new dialer with the savings from their reduced payroll expenses – and they did. Amcat’s first international office expansion became profitable within the first six months of operation.
My son Edward – who was with us last night – is a twin. His brother Phillip died in my arms on January 14, 2000.
Phillip’s unexpected death came shortly after I had completed my UK project. After his death, I vowed that I would never travel as much as I did then for business again.
I also decided I wanted to be able to run my consulting practice from anywhere in the world from the laptop computer I had used to open Amcat’s London based headquarters.
After several months of reflection, I decided the internet and search engines specifically were going to
be the wave of the future. As a consultant who only eats what he can sell, the premise and promise behind search engine technology was a dream come true – leads come in over the web instead of having to go out and get them!
As far as I was concerned, I had already done a lifetime’s worth of going door to door and pounding the pavement – I didn’t need any more practice.
Yahoo was both the internet and “search” market leader in early 2000. Not long thereafter, Yahoo started
embedding a new startup’s search technology (Google) to provide Yahoo’s audience with even better search results.
Once I discovered Google and the quality of its search results, I decided I was going to do everything in my power to understand how top of the page rankings were produced in order for me to master the search placement and positioning process. I knew with this knowledge in hand, I could then fulfill the promise of generating leads and sales over the internet for my consulting practice.
Luckily for me, Google didn’t tank!
Several years after Google came out with its advertising product – Google Adwords – they then came out with the Google Advertising Professionals credential which I earned. I was one of the first people worldwide to receive the Google Advertising Professionals designation.
I have been generating leads and sales online with Google Adwords ever since.
It wasn’t easy and didn’t come without a price, but I can now do in my sleep what use to cause me many sleeplessness nights.
What does any of this have to do with you and your business?
The web and Google / Yahoo / Bing search engines are how buyers research and shop potential vendors solutions now.
A business is either present with its message and link during a prospects search or it isn’t.
I help businesses discover where their prospects and buyers are searching and shopping for solutions
online and then I put their message links (website) there to initiate the transaction (leads or sales) process.
If you ever have an interest in gaining further insight or knowledge into how Google search works, let me know and I would be happy to talk to you and your team about it further.
Sincerely,
Tim Cohn
Ok, if links from Twitter are no followed, what happens to my Twitter account’s Page Rank 6?
I don’t see how.
Buy A Car
Without answers, how can monetary value be predictably mined from the Tweet stream?
Buy A Car Oklahoma City
Microsoft is trying to psyche out the shortened url market by launching its innovative new “longer url” url lengthening service for its relaunched search engine Bing called Binged.it.
Binged.It
Typing Binged.it into a browser however takes visitors to Bit.ly – one of the top url shorteners on the web.
With Google having recently launched its own url shortener, it was inevitable Microsoft would launch its own shortener.
Its also natural a url shortener market leader like Bit.ly would be driven into the arms of its new enemy’s (Google) enemy – Microsoft.
comScore has released its December 2009 rankings of the Top Ad Networks by reach of US internet users.
AOL continued to reach the largest percentage of internet users reaching 186 million people or 91% of the total internet audience followed by Yahoo! Network (180.9 million) and Google Ad Network (178.1 million).
Top 15 Ad Networks By Reach
Although reach has been equated with advertising value to brand advertisers, advertising reach clearly doesn’t translate into earnings power or stock market value for either AOL or Yahoo.
Combined the two companies ad network’s reach victories produce stock market valuations of $2.71 and $23.99 Billion respectively.
Combined AOL and Yahoo’s market values are 14% of Google’s $187 Billion market capitalization.
Buying reach online may be valuable to brand advertisers, but it apparently isn’t as valuable as buying search is to all the small to medium size non-brand businesses who advertise on Google.
The Google for Advertisers recently update website illustrates how Google’s advertising tools work together to support the entire value chain of marketing, from insights to creative to media to measurement and optimization.
Google calls these areas of focus the “marketing cycle” in the hope it communicates to advertisers and agencies how everything Google is working on fits with everything its advertisers are working on.
Google For Advertisers
Visit the Google for Advertisers website to learn more.
Several months ago I wrote a post called “The Listening Campaign: Getting Your Voice Heard Above The Crowd.”
The post receives a fair amount of traffic yet I was surprised to see it appear on a Google related searches results list for my name.
Tim Cohn The Listening Campaign
I guess searchers listen too.
Search Marketing Communications 
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