Marketing Hipster

Special thanks to Jeremy for sharing with me.

Let’s spitball a little bit here. I think we can all agree no matter what your political ideology is everyone would like the Iraq war to end so we can get our American soldiers home. I have an idea on how to do this. Let’s get Ann Coulter and drop her into Iraq. After listening to this woman for a very short period of time, I think the insurgents would surrender immediately than continue listening to this loud mouth evil wind bag.

After continuing to listen to what comes out of Ann Coulter’s mouth, I now understand why lions sometimes eat their young.

Disclosure: I am not shilling nor am I fan of John Edwards. I am a fan of intelligent caring people having meaningful conversations that hopefully will make this country and the world a better place to be. Ann Coulter represents everything I abhor in politics and in people.

Technorati Tags: Iraq war, Ann Coulter

This might be me being dumb (huge possibility) but am I wrong that with the recent changes to Technorati that you cannot sort your search results by the authority numbers and only by the date? Please tell me if I am incorrect cause I cannot find where I can sort by the authority numbers. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Technorati Tags: Technorati

Let me start this post by saying that I am coming to the party a bit late on this one, but this weekend I finally got to catch up on my feeds and had to comment on this.

MyBlogLog launched towards the end of May, a tagging system within MBL that users can tag blogs with keywords that can identify what specific blogs are all about. To be honest, I had not read MBL’s blog in a while, but when I logged into MBL and saw it, I thought it was a good, but pretty basic idea. What I did not realize until I read a post Andy Beal had written that MBL asked their users to tag blogs they believed were spammers with the term, “Schmoe” which stood for “Social Media Optimizer”. Yea, see you use the S and the M and the O and the rest of the letters don’t really matter other than that it helps spells the word Schmoe, whatever…

So Andy on his blog asked when did Social Media Optimization become spam? Which I thought was a pretty good question. MBL really did not have an answer for that, but I would like to ask another question. If MBL wants to actually put in some safeguards to stop spamming, wouldn’t you think the first thing they would need to do is actually define what is spam on MBL? I went over to MBL’s blog as well as their help section and I could not find anywhere what MBL defines as spam.

I thought that I would give them a hand so they might actually stop putting the cart before the horse and layout what I consider to be spam on MyBlogLog.

1. A blog that does not have any original content of their own. If a blog is just pulling content from other blogs and not adding any of their own content and are just doing this so they can have five layers of Google Adsense ads on their site. That be spam!
2. Any MBL member who signs up for a community and then posts a message on that users community which says something like, “Hey, great blog. Come check out my blog at www.ineedattention.com”. (Oh by the way MBL, I see the spam link for messages is still just a mailto.) Definitely spam..
3. Any member that has a scantly clad woman as it’s community picture. This is spam except if the blog is about scantly clad women then it is just fine.
4. A member that just goes out and joins communities and becomes contacts with hundreds of other users without having any interest in their blogs. Spammer…

To be honest, I can’t think of anything else. Can you? If you think I missed anything or you disagree, please let me know in the comments and I will update.

MyBlogLog, I really think this issue is more a semantic issue than anything else. Your “Schmoe” term is just bad. All Social Media Optimizers are not spammers. That is just like saying that all Search Engine Optimizers are spammers. More importantly, it seems that using this term is a direct insult to many people who have played a part in making MyBlogLog what it is today.

Technorati Tags: MyBlogLog, tagging, MBL, keywords, blogs, Andy Beal, spammers, Schmoe, Social Media Optimization, spam

Well the industry has been in a twitter for the last couple of months with the coming launch of Apple’s iPhone. Well the time has come for the iPhone to be released this week. I was wondering whether Hipster readers were all psyched and getting ready to go out and plop down $600 bucks and sign a two year contract with big brother, I mean AT&T for the chance to own an iPhone?

Before you run out, there was a good review on Engadget where they listed out a number of things that they were not real impressed with the iPhone. They included:

• The keyboard was simply described as “disappointing”
• “It won’t replace a BlackBerry. It’s not good for text input. It’s just not a business product.”
• iPhone’s audio was “not loud or clear enough.”

Apple launched a online guided tour of the iPhone which you can view here.

So who is buying? Post a comment on whether you’re buying one or not.

Technorati Tags: Apple’s iPhone, iPhone, AT&T, Engadget, BlackBerry

We discuss a great deal here about the customer experience and how important it is in this day and age for companies to truly open up a dialog with their users. I found this absolutely amazing letter online that I had to share. Let me give you a short back story on this.

There is a real person named Scott Williams who lives in Newport, Vermont. What I guess Mr. Williams does as a hobby is he digs things up in his backyard and then sends them to the Smithsonian Institute. He names the random crap with scientific sounding names he finds in his backyard  and insists they are archaeological finds. Let me state upfront, I am not making this up.

So picture that you are the Chief Curator of the Smithsonian Institute and you have some crazy guy sending you trash from his backyard, what would you do? I know I most likely would throw his letters and crap into the garbage and not think of it for another second. Well, the Chief Curator of the Smithsonian is a much better man than I as he actually sent Mr. Williams a letter back regarding one of his “artifacts”. Below is the letter that Mr. Williams received. I know it is a bit long, but I promise you it is so well worth the read.

Smithsonian Institute

207 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington, DC 20078

Dear Mr. Williams:

Thank you for your latest submission to the Institute, labeled “93211-D, layer seven, next to the clothesline post…Hominid skull.” We have given this specimen a careful and detailed examination, and regret to inform you that we disagree with your theory that it represents conclusive proof of the presence of Early Man in Charleston County two million years ago. Rather, it appears that what you have found is the head of a Barbie doll, of the variety that one of our staff, who has small children, believes to be “Malibu Barbie.”

It is evident that you have given a great deal of thought to the analysis of this specimen, and you may be quite certain that those of us who are familiar with your prior work in the field were loathe to come to contradiction with your findings. However, we do feel that there are a number of physical attributes of the specimen which might have tipped you off to its modern origin:

1. The material is molded plastic. Ancient hominid remains are typically fossilized bone.

2. The cranial capacity of the specimen is approximately 9 cubic centimeters, well below the threshold of even the earliest identified proto-homonids.

3. The dentition pattern evident on the skull is more consistent with the common domesticated dog than it is with the ravenous man-eating Pliocene clams you speculate roamed the wetlands during that time.

This latter finding is certainly one of the most intriguing hypotheses you have submitted in your history with this institution, but the evidence seems to weigh rather heavily against it. Without going into too much detail, let us say that:

A. The specimen looks like the head of a Barbie doll that a dog has chewed on.

B. Clams don’t have teeth.

It is with feelings tinged with melancholy that we must deny your request to have the specimen carbon-dated. This is partially due to the heavy load our lab must bear in its normal operation, and partly due to carbon dating’s notorious inaccuracy in fossils of recent geologic record. To the best of our knowledge, no Barbie dolls were produced prior to 1956 AD, and carbon dating is likely to produce wildly inaccurate results.

Sadly, we must also deny your request that we approach the National Science Foundation Phylogeny Department with the concept of assigning your specimen the scientific name Australopithecus spiff-arino.

Speaking personally, I, for one, fought tenaciously for the acceptance of your proposed taxonomy, but was ultimately voted down because the species name you selected was hyphenated, and didn’t really sound like it might be Latin. However, we gladly accept your generous donation of this fascinating specimen to the museum. While it is undoubtedly not a Hominid fossil, it is, nonetheless, yet another riveting example of the great body of work you seem to accumulate here so effortlessly.

You should know that our Director has reserved a special shelf in his own office for the display of the specimens you have previously submitted to the Institution, and the entire staff speculates daily on what you will happen upon next in your digs at the site you have discovered in your Newport back yard. We eagerly anticipate your trip to our nation’s capital that you proposed in your last letter, and several of us are pressing the Director to pay for it. We are particularly interested in hearing you expand on your theories surrounding the trans-positating fillifitation of ferrous ions in a structural matrix that makes the excellent juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex femur you recently discovered take on the deceptive appearance of a rusty 9-mm Sears Craftsman automotive crescent wrench.

Yours in Science,

Harvey Rowe
Chief Curator- Antiquities

Mr. Rowe, I salute you for taking the time to write this absolutely classic letter. I found via this web site.

Technorati Tags: customer experience, Smithsonian Institute

As most of you know, Jerry Yang co-founder of Yahoo! has taken back the reigns of Yahoo! after Terry Semel stepped down as CEO. There is a great deal of speculation of what Jerry is going to do with Yahoo!. Some of the speculation includes Rupert Murdoch selling MySpace to Yahoo! for a 25% stake in the company. Another highly talked about area is whether Yahoo! would make more money by outsourcing search to Google.

These are some HUGE questions, but before Jerry tackles anything of this magnitude, I think he needs to take a breath and focus on some basics. So I have put together my own little Jerry Yang To Do List.

Jerry, this is for you:

1. Clearly and concisely explain to his employees and share holders what is going to be his main focus for the next 30, 60 and 90 days. Not some high level BS, but be specific. State what you want to do and then come back and communicate what you have found and what you believe it means at the end of each time period.
2. Once you have done your initial exploration, again communicate both internally and externally what direction the company is going in. If you are going to be a content player then state how you are going to do this. What changes will be made immediately and what your expectations are.
3. After you have stated what your vision is and where the company is going, make sure that every employee, manager and director are proceeding down the road that you just mapped out. I have several colleagues who work for Yahoo! and bar none their biggest complaint is the lack of communication and understanding throughout the company. No-one works on an island, define where everyone needs to go and then make sure it is enforced on every level.
4. Begin reaching out to the people most important to you – your users. Begin a conversation, start actually wanting feedback and even more importantly, when you get feedback, do something with that feedback. Make changes, send responses, start showing that under your new regime, Yahoo! is going to get back to focusing on your customers, the people who come to your site each and everyday.
5. Start kicking people in the ass! Yahoo! needs to get back to start up mode and regain that sense of urgency that they lost so long ago. You guys are entering a fight for your lives and every employee needs to understand that. If they don’t because they have lost that loving feeling or have made too much money, it is time to kick those albatrosses to the curb. It’s time Yahoo! gets hungry again!
6. Pick some priorities and make things start to happen now. You have some incredible properties like Yahoo! Mail, Flickr and MyBlogLog that have been languishing under the old Yahoo! regime. It is time you recognize the importance of these and other properties and put the pedal to the medal and get these guys rolling. Get these properties out in front and let them lead as they once did.

That’s it Jerry. I know it is pretty basic, but I think right now Yahoo! needs to go back to the basics. You have any questions, please feel free to drop me a line, we can chat.

Technorati Tags: Jerry Yang, Yahoo!, Terry Semel, CEO, Rupert Murdoch, MySpace, Google, To Do List, Yahoo! Mail, Flickr, MyBlogLog

Last week, I posted a story about the little spat that Google and eBay were having, well eBay followed through on their threat and pulled all of their PPC (Pay per click) or sponsored links off of Google. Before this, eBay was one of Google’s largest PPC spenders. Now what is incredibly interesting is this article in the New York Post that states based on Hitwise numbers, not only has eBay’s traffic numbers not decreased, but they actually slightly increased since the PPC ban began!

According to Bill Trancer, GM of Hitwise, “One reason appears to be that much of the traffic that goes to eBay from Google comes from people performing free searches rather than clicking on the paid search ads.”

This brings up a number of questions and issues for other large ecommerce web players. What I have believed for a very long time is that PPC is a short term solution to gain visibility in the search engines, but long term, if you have a large enough site and do the basic search engine optimization techniques that everyone should do, large web sites will gain a great deal more visibility and traffic from natural search results. More importantly, those natural search results are free so they have a much higher ROI than the paid links.

I also believe for large players like eBay and other big e-tailers, having PPC links actually is hurting them as users will click on a paid link instead of their natural link just a couple of places down on the page. Let’s also not forget that Google has been the king of the mountain for PPC for a very long time and if these traffic and revenue numbers do not decline for eBay, it could seriously put into question whether Google’s PPC is really worth the amount of money companies are paying.

This might be a good thing for everyone as I think all companies just like people need a humbling experience to bring them back to earth and make them realize no-one is invincible including Google.

Technorati Tags: Google, eBay, PPC, Pay per click, New York Post, Hitwise, ecommerce, ROI, e-tailers

Can you please tell me why CBS and Fox both rejected this Trojan Condom commercial?

Technorati Tags: CBS, Fox, Trojan Condom

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton ran a contest on her web site for people to vote on what her campaign song will be. Now if that was not exciting enough, she put together a little Sopranos spoof leading up to the announcement of what song won. The video includes her hubby Bill. See below.

Thanks Sadie for sending.

Technorati Tags: Hillary Clinton, Sopranos