Marketing Hipster

I think you need to take your mind out of the gutter right this second my friend. Blow it loud, blow it proud is the latest tag line for Kleenex Tissues. The first round of commercials had people pouring their hearts out to a total stranger on a couch in the middle of a busy sidewalk. Yea, that’s happened to me.

And now the most recent commercial has people on those very same couches, but this time instead of talking and crying, they are blowing their noses. I am not kidding, if you have not seen this, it is 30 seconds of people blowing their noses. Yum! I wish I could post it for you, but I have been searching online and have not been able to find a copy. If you happen to find a copy, send me the link in the comments.

I originally thought this post was going to be about the blowing your nose commercial, but as I searched for the commercial online, I decided to change the subject of this post. The first place I went to look for this video was on the Kleenex web site itself. When I arrived at the site, one question popped into my mind, “Who the hell created this site?”

For a consumer company like Kleenex to put a web site together like this is irresponsible to say the least and embarrassing to say the best. Let’s quickly go over my issues with this site:

1. By my count, there are three animated images on the home page. Could we have a couple more and then I can pretend we are back in 1999? Kleenex, what do you want me to do on this site? What is the goal of the site? Choose what it is and make that stand out.

2. There is absolutely no copy on the home page. The text are images. Why is that a problem? If you do a search in Google for Kleenex you will see the result below. “Facial Tissue products, expressions graphics, customer service, FAQs, product history and Kimberly-Clark Corporation links.” Wow, that is some description there. Since no-one bothered to put a title tag on the page and the whole page are images, Google had to use the bottom navigation bar as it’s description. Can you say enticing?

3. Look at the top of your browser and the name of this page is “Home Page”. Wow, thanks captain obvious. Does anyone outside of people who developed the site need to know that this is called the home page? What does that do for the users?

4. Since Kleenex chose to make the home page all images, it is a little bit on the fat side. Based on a couple of load testers I ran, on a cable modem or DSL, the page takes 2 to 2 1/2 seconds to load. Think of how long that would be if a consumer was on a 56K modem which is not out of the realm of actually happening.

I think this is yet another example of a corporation and it’s marketing company putting all their time and money into TV commercials and not concerning themselves with what happens after those 3o seconds are over.

Technorati Tags: Kleenex

Them fighting words to many people I know, but that is what Anthony Fallon, CEO of Warrington Web Works, a UK Web Publishing company said in a recent article. His article discusses how a friend of his was quoted a price of $29,000 from an SEO firm which they guaranteed top 10 results on Google. He believes no-one can guarantee top 10 results on Google, not even Google itself.

“She should not be considering search engines as the only way to get traffic to her site. All the big high traffic sites have links from other sites and social bookmarking sites where the content has been considered of value and/or interest to visitors.”

He wanted to prove his point by asking people to do a Google search for the term, “SEO Mind Crime” which was the title of his article. He posted it on February 21st and his article is presently number 2 in Google for that term.

We have seen several debates in the blogosphere whether SEO is the holy grail or a total waste of time. In my opinion, I think it is somewhere in between. I believe SEO is not a marketing tool that by itself can make a companies web site money like it once could. I believe SEO is a structure or a foundation that every web site should plan for before even one line of code is written. In today’s world, I believe SEO is important to ensure that the pages on your web site can be read and indexed easily by the search engines. The days of the high importance of meta tags and keyword stuffing are over.

Simply put as it has been said time and time again, content is king. The success or failure of a site begins and ends with its content.

What do you think?

Technorati Tags: SEO, Google

I apologize for the lack of posting today folks, it just has been one of those crazy days. I just watched this video on YouTube and thought it was absolutely worth posting. This is a prime example of when done correctly, anyone can let their voice and opinions be heard far and wide.

Apologize Rosie, You Loud Mouth!

A little over three months ago I launched this weblog. I had been blogging for years, but my blogs were always more personal and focused on creative writing than my business. I had always thought that I put enough hours of my life focused on my job why take even more hours outside of my job to write about work stuff. Originally, I had launched this weblog as a place where my co-workers could go to learn about some of the things we were trying to bring to the company I just joined.

Recently, I began to understand the true value of blogging and what makes it so interesting and exciting. For me, it is simply all about the community. In the last three months, I have had the opportunity to meet some incredibly interesting and talented people from all walks of life, located all around the country and the world. I have been introduced to new thinking, new ideas and most importantly, reminded of why I fell in love with this industry almost 15 years ago, the passion. I find it amazing that virtually anyone today who has a passion and believes in something has an opportunity to let their thoughts and opinions be heard. If you think about it, we as a people have never really had this opportunity before. I think we all need to remind ourselves of this every once in a while so we don’t take this priceless gift for granted.

What is even more exciting is that I believe we have just begun to scratch the surface of where technology is going as well as what we can accomplish using this technology. Over the next couple of weeks and months, I am hoping you will start seeing some changes here on this weblog. I have a lot of ideas that I want to bring to the table and I absolutely am going to need the help of so many of the great people I get to chat with everyday here.

I want to thank everyone who has been gracious enough to lend their voices to this weblog and share with me and everyone else your thoughts and opinions. It is been a great ride and I cannot wait to see what the future holds.

I did want to thank some specific people who have lent this weblog their fabulous voices and opinions on a daily basis:

Dave, Jennifer, Sean, Vince, Bob, Jonathan, JP, Adam, Jeremy, Tony, Mike and Antman.

Many thanks, Cord…

Technorati Tags: blogging, community

I was surfing around the main community page of MyBlogLog where they have a tag cloud of all the top 50 largest communities. I was clicking around on a bunch of them and one of them that I landed on was the community for Yahoo! Messenger. I was checking out their members and I noticed something that I had never seen before. There was an incredible amount of members of this community which did not have a personalized picture. If you choose not add a personalized picture to your profile, MyBlogLog shows a default black silhouette image like so :

Now I have spent a good deal of time on MyBlogLog and a vast majority of the people that I had seen have added some sort of personalized picture. I decided to dig a little deeper and lose some valuable sleep. I proceeded to go through each and every member of the Yahoo! Messenger community on MyBlogLog and out of 1247 members of this community, 574 of them do not have personalized pictures. Almost half…

Let’s look at some comparisons. My community is no where close to that size, but out of 102 members, there is just one without a personalized picture, but don’t take my word for it, let’s take a look at some of the other top communities which I went through as well:

• Problogger has 1798 members and only 121 members do not have personalized pictures.
• LifeHacker has 1823 members and only 193 members do not have personalized pictures.
• Techcrunch has 573 members and only 72 members do not have personalized pictures.

Compared with some of the other largest communities, Yahoo! Messenger community seems to have a much greater number of default pictures. Even though the numbers seem out of wack, I wanted to get some more information.

I went into the Yahoo! Messenger community home page and clicked on the ‘view all members’ link on the bottom of the page. This brings you to a page where MyBlogLog shows a list of 35 members each and then you have to click on the ‘next’ link to go to the next page and view another group of 35 members. I decided at random to click on 3 profiles of members who did not have a personalized picture on each page. Since they show 35 profiles per page and Yahoo! Messenger has 1247 members, that makes 36 pages and a total of 108 profiles checked.

Out of those 108 profiles, 105 of them had only joined one and only one community, Yahoo! Messenger. Most of them had only 1 friend which is Eric who you automatically get when you join. And most importantly, all 108, that’s right 100%, that I clicked randomly out of the 574 that do not have personalized pictures did not register a blog of their own. These profiles are completely blank other than when they joined, their 1 friend Eric and of course being a member of Yahoo! Messenger. See an example below:

I am not a big conspiracy buff, but does this seem fishy to you? Let’s recap shall we:

• Yahoo! who has recently purchased MyBlogLog and has a community promoting their product Yahoo! Messenger.
• They have an enormous amount of people who joined their community, but never bothered to add a personalized picture.
• These “members” have never gotten a single contact.
• They have never registered a blog of their own.
• They have never received one message from another member.
• But just be chance (?), they each took the time to join one and only one community, the Yahoo! Messenger community.

Could Yahoo! be spamming MyBlogLog with fake members just to have a larger community and get better visibility? And does Eric and the rest of the MyBlogLog’s original team know or have anything to do with this?

You tell me should I head back to my bunker and start watching reruns of the X-Files or am I onto something here?

Technorati Tags: MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo!, spamming

If you notice on my side bar to the right, you will see a cute little widget that is hooked up into my LinkedIn Profile. This was created by Linkedinabox and I thought I would give it a test drive. It allows users to view your profile without having to leave my site. I think what will determine the success or failure of this widget is its load times. If it takes too much time to load or even worse slows my overall web site load times down, we will be kicking it to the curb like so many others.

Technorati Tags: widget, LinkedIn, Linkedinabox

Bloglines the RSS aggregator and reader has launched a new service called ImageWall. Overall, it’s a real time wall of rotating images that are being pulled from recently posted blog articles.

The wall is interesting to look at, but I don’t know how useful it is to tell you the truth. You cannot personalize it with just your subscribed feeds, so it more looks to me like this is a cute little application that won’t do a whole lot when it comes to helping you find, read and enjoy content better or faster.

Hat tip Ouriel

Technorati Tags: Bloglines, RSS, ImageWall

I already mentioned in a previous post that like many others out there, Marketing Hipster has been inundated with spam comments recently. Even though Akismet is doing a fabulous job catching them, I have been amazed at the sheer numbers I have been getting over the last week or two. I was thinking what could be done to stop comment spam.

My first idea was to equip my computer with a powerful laser that could pinpoint these spammers IP address and my laser would travel through phone and cable wires right up to their computer and fry their computers, toast them! Yea, laser… Oh but before that would happen, I would take over their computers and have a picture come up on their screens with a picture of me with a big smile on my face and giving them the finger. I then woke up from fantasy land and thought that maybe a more realistic idea was in order.

Now I believe there are only two main reasons why spammers use comments on blogs to promote their wares. First off, at the off chance that someone would see their link and click on it, very unlikely, but still a chance. The much larger reason is for the search engines to see the link and give the spammers web sites better visibility in the search engines. If this is the case, why not take this opportunity away from the spammers? Why couldn’t Google create a spam site that bloggers could submit a copy of the spam to them and then Google could ban their sites from it’s search engine? They already do this for SEO.

Without any visibility, their web sites are out of business. I know this seems rather simple, but sometimes the simplest ideas are the best ones. Why wouldn’t this work? Let me know your thoughts.

Technorati Tags: spam comments, search engines, spammers, Google

I have written a previous post about MyBlogLog and what a huge fan I have become of the community. It has introduced me to a great many bloggers as well as introducing my blog to a whole new audience. I raised a question a while back about the difference between adding someone as a contact compared to them joining your community and vice versa. I felt like having to do both was overkill and the important thing was having users join your community and for myself to join communities that interested me.

If you are not familiar with MyBlogLog, anyone can add you as a contact. Once someone adds you as a contact, they are added as an admirer of yours and then you can choose to add them as one of your contacts or they just hang out as an admirer. When looking at some profiles, there are users that have 1000′s of contacts while having a very small community. Again, that makes little sense to me and what that says to me is that they just took some time and added as many people as they could to their contacts. I do not have the time nor inclination to do that and more importantly, I think by doing that just takes away from why the community was put together in the first place.

So since I had signed up at MyBlogLog, I was only adding contacts of users that had blogs that interested me. I was just not adding anyone who added me. It was nothing personal, I thought I was using MyBlogLog as it was meant to be used. Well, I got a private message a day or so ago from a user who had added me as a contact a while ago, but I hadn’t added them as a contact of mine. This person was not particularly happy with me not adding them and expressed it in the following message to me.

“I enjoy your blog and added you as my contact several weeks ago, but you still have not added me as a contact. Can I ask why? Is there something wrong with me that you don’t feel that I am worthy enough to be a contact of yours? I think you need to get off that high horse of yours!”

Wow! I didn’t realize this was so life or death. I had no idea that I had turned into a MyBlogLog Snob! After reading this message, I got glimmers of high school all over again wanting to sit at the cool kids table during lunch. What’s even more disturbing is if this person thinks I am hanging at the cool kids table, she is horribly mistaken. I am so far from the cool kids table, it’s silly. Anyhow, I debated on how to respond to this person. I started writing the following:

“I am sorry, I am so high up and you so don’t interest me, I did not hear a word that you said.”

Nah, that didn’t work, so I erased that and tried this:

“I am so sorry my dear, I was right in the middle of lighting a cigarette with a hundred dollar bill when I felt like I stepped on something. I turned my shoe over and low behold look what I found, but you.”

Cute, but no. After thinking about it for a minute, I concluded that life is just too short and I just went and added the person to my contacts. I am now not a MyBlogLog Snob and hopefully this person can sleep well tonight knowing she is now safely part of my contacts.

Technorati Tags: MyBlogLog, MyBlogLog Snob

After much talk, it was announced today that XM and Sirius satellite radio providers will combine forces and merge. Neither company was profitable yet, but according to this article:

“The new company, whose new name has yet to be announced, would have total assets worth about $13 billion and a shared debt of $1.6 billion. Combining XM’s 7.6 million subscribers with Sirius’ 6 million, the new company could have a total subscription base of well over 16 million by the end of 2007, if previous projections are accurate. “

The article also discusses the regulatory hurdles they are going to have to overcome from the government. I am no legal scholar by any means, but it sure seems like by these two companies merging they would have a monopoly on satellite radio.

“The companies’ plan still faces significant regulatory “hurdles,” according to FCC chairman Kevin Martin, who released a statement on Monday noting that “the companies would need to demonstrate that consumers would clearly be better off with both more choice and affordable prices.”

Meanwhile, the National Association of Broadcasters, representing terrestrial radio stations that compete with satellite, issued a scathing comment which read in part: “NAB would be shocked if federal regulators permitted a merger of XM and Sirius… When the FCC authorized satellite radio, it specifically found that the public would be served best by two competitive nationwide systems. Now, with their stock prices at rock bottom and their business model in disarray because of profligate spending practices, they seek a government bail-out to avoid competing in the marketplace.”

The NAB are just pissy because they know terrestrial radio is going away like the Dodo bird.

Eh, who cares about a monopoly… Give a couple million to Bush’s presidential library and it’s done, no problem.

Technorati Tags: XM, Sirius, merge, FCC, Kevin Martin, National Association of Broadcasters