Matt Cutts Answers Webmaster Questions in Google Video
Philipp Lenssen posted three videos from Google Video of Matt Cutts answering webmaster questions about SEO and Google.
He answers and doesn't answer many questions - I'll see if MarketSmart Interactive's Manager of Interactive Technology Jon Revill can pull out anything fresh from these videos.
Besides the fact that Google favors bold over strong tags - we're gonna whip out a free SEO tool for that one ;)
Enjoy the Matt Cutts vids - I think they're an excellent resource, though I wonder why he's choosing to answer in person over writing things down...
Maybe to experiment with video? To drive webmasters to think about using videos in their businesses? He's hoping to become a "featured video" on YouTube?
(Speaking of YouTube, check out "The Day of the Long Tail", a humorous look at how CGM is turning the tables on marketers :)
Google AdWords Invalid Click Reports Valuable Only to Google
Google announced, through CNet and the AdWords blog, that they will begin displaying the number of "invalid clicks" a given account has.
My 2 key questions: 1) Do any other paid search providers show this kind of information? 2) What is the value of this information to my campaign strategy?
Regarding 1) this is a smart Google move. Transparency is scary but almost immeasurably valuable for brave companies.
Regarding 2) I see no immediate value of this offering to my paid search campaign strategy. The only value is in how I perceive Google AdWords in general and therefore a move that is solely in Google's interest.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, and it may actually ease some ulcers... er, or headaches our industry has.
Quece Private Beta Launch: The Q-Phrase Pursuit of Natural Language Search
This article is an exclusive first look at Quece, the private beta natural language search project from Q-Phrase, the makers of the ConceptQ series of search products (written about in Q-Phrase: Contextual Relevance Tech Unlocks Deeper Value from SERPs).
This article, further, is the result of several email interviews and a phone interview of an hour and a half. Please forgive its somewhat sprawling nature, which follows this structure:
• Quece in Brief • SEL/Q-Phrase History • Reconstructions from the introduction-to-Quece phone interview with Andy Miller and Danny Espinoza • Quece as Described by Andy Miller and Danny Espinoza in eMail • The Q-Phrase Crew (from their resumes) • Q-Phrase patents (with links)
Quece in Brief Andy Miller, president of Quece's parent company, describes its function this way: "Quece interactively deciphers and continuously refines a user's intentions and thought processes to produce highly-targeted results not achievable with traditional latent semantic indexing and page rank techniques."
In my words Quece takes natural language user queries and asks questions (disambiguates) to better determine searcher intent. It disambiguates through instant messaging clients and is built around the chat metaphor.
Quece has been three years in the making and is built up from patents won in 1998.
SEL/Q-Phrase History: I first heard from Q-Phrase when Google purchased the Orion patent and hired its creator in April, '06. At that time Q-Phrase president Andy Miller and Chief Software Architect Danny Espinoza held that Google's purchase of the concept-parsing Orion pointed at a coming shift towards more contextual Google SERPs.
At that time Q-Phrase had a single product line available to the public: Concept Q, a desktop app that enables users to unlock the structure and key concepts from a given body of information.
Concept Q creates instant Cliffs notes of whatever body of text you aim it at. Put a couple academic papers in Concept Q, let it rip and you'll have a stronger understanding of the papers' core concepts than the abstracts and the indexes could give you.
Reconstructions from the introduction-to-Quece phone interview with Andy Miller and Danny Espinoza
G: Some CEOs at major search engines (Ask for example) characterize searchers as lazy. What are your thoughts on searcher laziness given the work required in Quece to disambiguate down to the appropriate page? Andy Miller: I think there is a lazy portion, but the bigger portion is unsophisticated; they don't know what they're supposed to do to get the results they want. A user's typical reaction to a search in Google looks like this: "all I know is I typed in Cancer and got back a billion sites." They're uninformed, not lazy.
G: Help me understand the core technology differences between Quece and ConceptQ. Danny Espinoza: They are certainly different technologies. If 0 = "I have an idea" and 100 = "I've maximized the potential" then we're at 80 with ConceptQ and with Quece we're between 5 and 10.
When we reach Quece's full potential, there will be a significant opportunity to challenge current keyword-based search engines.
G: QPhrase, ConceptQ, Quece. It's hard to tell these apart. Why the separation? Andy Miller: We're focused on keeping the companies and the patents they're built around legally protected.
We will merge the technologies as they mature.
G: What about APIs as a growth strategy? Danny Espinoza: APIs are definitely on the feature list. They're something we've thought of as an enterprise thing though, where a company had a proprietary database that only their programmers understand how to query... we could provide some kind of API for their data.
In the consumer space we can't provide appropriate developer and tech support. Right now we have to be careful about where we spend our development time.
G: Talk to me about funding. Andy Miller: First off we have a revenue component with ConceptQ. Secondly we have a group of Angel investors who are excited about the idea of new search technology and are eager to be involved in something that could significantly alter the search landscape.
G: Where does QPhrase fit in an industry dominated by Google: Danny Espinoza: The state of search has remained the same for a long time. It appears to be that there hasn't been a lot of changes in the way that they do rankings or SERPS since inception
They're clearly doing keyword search better than anyone and they've hired hundreds of PhDs - they're not going to just rest on their laurels.
We look at them and try to understand who they're hiring and what they're trying to do, which is why we found the Orion purchase interesting. We strongly suspect that Orion approaches contextual relevance the same way that WE do it. Google has an amazing snapshot of web - their index is the perfect playground for algorithms...
The problem we solve now that isn't currently addressed by Google, is how to extract contextual relevance quickly. Clearly the infrastructure isn't in place yet for Google to introduce this level of complexity into their search, so there is a window where this problem can be solved before Google solves it.
Quece as Described by Andy Miller and Danny Espinoza in eMail:
Why develop this out for AIM or instant messenger? The primary driver behind Quece was to build a search application that would eliminate the frustration associated with traditional keyword search engines.
Specifically, users can become frustrated when their keyword search returns thousands, if not millions, of results and they must spend time clicking links - often at random depending on the quality of the snippets - to validate whether or not a result is something of interest.
In our opinion, the only way to provide more accurate contextual results is to mirror human interaction. If you think about any conversation, one person makes a statement and another asks clarifying questions until each person understands one another.
While this was the premise behind Ask Jeeves and other Q&A search applications, none of those solutions understood how to properly “chat” with the user. Leveraging Q-Phrase’s patent portfolio, we developed Quece to do just that.
Given that Quece works by engaging the user to discuss topics of interest and contextual search results, AIM/IM seemed like a logical platform to integrate with Quece via our QueceBot. And although QueceBot is available via AIM, users can also interact with Quece through the Quece Search Portal (www.quece.com).
Doesn’t this limit the full functionality of your product? Not at all, in fact, chat functionality is the cornerstone of Quece technology. As the user “chats” with QueceBot via AIM, Quece provides a link to view results every time it responds to the user.
This way, the user may elect to view results anytime throughout the course of the conversation. This is actually a very important point because it enables the results to shift as the conversation deviates from the original scope of the search query.
When the user clicks the “Results” link from within AIM, a Quece One-Page Result screen is opened, alongside AIM, in the user’s default browser. The Quece One-Page Result screen displays the categorized results associated with the user’s QueceBot conversation.
Contextual relevance in the semantic Quece? Quece uses search result content to focus its discussion with a user around the topics related to the user's search query. However, this approach to contextual relevance is unique in that it uses a semantic analysis to understand the terms that are related to the original search query.
Therefore, instead of calculating a statistical baseline, Quece builds a custom dictionary that defines the concepts that are expressed in the search result text (e.g. snippet parsing).
We think that both of our approaches to contextual relevance, statistical in our ConceptQ and CQ web products and semantic in Quece, are important to solving the problem of understanding the concepts that define many search queries. And, it's only in understanding what search results mean that can we try to improve search relevance.
The Q-Phrase Crew: (from their resumes) Lawrence Au: Chief Scientist, Q-Phrase Au is an expert in large-scale software development, computational linguistics and artificial intelligence with over five granted U.S. patents, three of them affecting the field of computational linguistics. With over 25 years of cross-disciplinary professional experience, he combines deep research, commercialization and team leadership experience to cross-fertilize, validate and deliver leading-edge computer applications.
Andy Miller: President, Q-Phrase Miller is a marketing and product development executive with over 13 years of professional experience and a proven track record of significant contributions to world-class financial services and technology driven organizations.
Danny Espinoza: Chief Software Architect, Q-Phrase Espinoza is a software designer and application developer with over 20 years of professional experience. His expertise is in providing full life- cycle development from conception to delivery of sophisticated desktop application software. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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July 21, 2006
Marketing Monger Interviews MarketSmart Interactive's JP Sherman about Competitive Intelligence
I had the pleasure the other day to speak to Eric Mattson at Marketing Monger. His goal is to interview, via podcast, a thousand "marketers, innovators, entrepreneurs and other interesting people".
Let me just say that I had a blast! Eric not only challenged me and asked me some really good questions, he really came to the interview with an excellent working knowledge of what competitive intelligence is (especially as it relates to online marketing).
The conversation started quickly, and he threw me into the interview so that i didnt really have time to overthink my responses. After the interview, we continued our conversation about competitive intelligence and how it relates to the perifery of marketing (MMO's, DRM, and how the marketplace evolves into something that the user wants, and not a business model driven market).
Right now he has 63 interviews (including mine) and I've been listening to the other interviews as well. After each interview, even some of the ones that I didnt have an inherent interest in, I walked away from the interview learning more about the industry, the market and how interconnected all of the disciplines in marketing are.
I urge everyone to go listen to his podcasts and learn not only about marketing in general, but get a sense of the creativity, the skills and the passion that his interviewees have towards their part in the marketing universe.
The only critique I had was that the interview felt so short (maybe I was having fun.. or something) and there was so much to talk about. With each question he asked me, it brought up more subjects that I could literally talk for hours about. (ok... ok... for those of you who know me, you know that I can be a bit loquatious).
Given the chance, I would thouroughly enjoy doing this again.
After you listen to it, please feel free to contact me to talk about competitive intelligence in the online environment or any other topic that we brought up. J. P. Sherman MarketSmart Interactive
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July 18, 2006
Social Search Optimization
Social Search Optimization: the article I'm writing for Search Marketing Standard right now...
Conceptually it's done. Now I just have to write the dang thing ;)
Here's my rough outline:
Social Search Optimization
not the answer for quick traffic. buy pay per click if you want quick traffic. social search optimization is akin to the gradual marketshare growth of media and should be something you do to your existing media efforts (article writing, blogging, etc...) and for a particular group of people social search optimization is a sort of PR effort, not a hardcore SEO type of activity it's about understanding the types of people who use social search
social search evolution --it's coming up in the industry --relation to social bookmarking --relation to blogging/wikipedia --STRONG relation to SHOPPING (social shopping search here now or coming soon?)
social search landscape --who's there, what are the types http://www.jeteye.com/ http://www.prefound.com/ yahoo Flickr, del.icio.us, Yahoo My Web, Yahoo Answers google note book http://www.Kaboodle.com http://www.Onfolio.com http://www.Squidoo.com http://www.furl.net (thx Mike) http://www.manyworlds.com (others? contact me soon :) --what's likely to emerge (social networking data - eurekster/growth of niche-related social networks)
which industries have opportunities in social search right now? --info branders b2b --brand marketers (like me, in SEL) --viral marketers (info spreads through social search) --biotech, those targeting researchers --former bloggers who want to spend less time (set up a branded info resource) --content creating consumers; opensource information --travel (folks planning travel using jeteye) --other thoughts? shoot me an email soon :)
My favorite (and only) line I've written this morning think of tagging/bookmark submit links/SEO as increasing your aerodynamics - you still have to have a powerful engine, your daily writing and thinking and valuable submissions to your industry, or you're not going anywhere
Also I found some useful links in Lee Oden's social search post.
Grant Holder, the conference coordinator, asked us to speak on creating synergies between the wine and food industries, and invited Anthony Santori, John Aschenbrenner and myself to come and mingle with our state's wine growers.
We've got 15 minutes. I'll have 5 of those minutes. In preparation I wrote a 2,500 word article which I will read straight through. Not really. I wrote it as a leave behind.
I look forward to getting feedback from North Carolina wine growers on how I could provide them with the most needful marketing information, and will likely write another article once I have a few conversations with the folks attending :)
I've had a blast digging into the NC wine industry and hope that my article can do a little bit to help it grow.
Also I will be trimming the beard and wearing the suit so that my colorful personality will show more than my colorful arms ;) Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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July 13, 2006
JetEye's David Hayden Talks on the Magellan Days and His Vision for Social Search
David Hayden is a member of who I consider to be the old school search crew - the guys you read about in chapter 3 of Battelle's the Search (Search Before Google). As Chairman, President and CEO he helped grow the web search engine Magellan into an $18 million dollar aquisition for Exite in 1996 at "the very inception of the commercial internet."
His new operation, JetEye, falls into the significant and important emerging social search space with the likes of PreFound and to some extent Yahoo's delicious. These are the companies seeking to enable users to determine their own relevance, though it certainly remains to be shown if there are truly mainstream applications for social search data - and the biggest social player, MySpace, has yet to pick a search direction.
I had the honor of interviewing David Hayden on his new project and came away impressed with both his vision for a possible future of search and his willingness to clearly detail what he sees as JetEye's competitive landscape - Google Notebook and Yahoo's delicious.
I think this is a fantastic interview from Hayden - it's a pleasure to read for his insight and construction of position and leaves me with many more questions. Watch for more from Hayden here :)
What was your personal role in Magellan? I was one of four co-founders and I served as Chairman, President and CEO from inception until July of 1996, when we sold the company to Excite.
What was your greatest success at Magellan? There were several of equal importance, I think.
First, this was my first foray into the world of technology, so growing the company to over 100 employees and positioning it for an IPO were personal successes, including the rewards to our investors that went along with this.
Second, it’s hard to remember this, but Magellan and just a handful of other companies (Yahoo, Lycos, Infoseek and Excite) really invented the concept of modern search engines as we know them today, and we all created new crawler and index technology to do this – and at a time when everyone thought the browser was the king of the land.
Finally, meeting people still today, who remember Magellan, used it, loved it – so the enduring impact, though small, of what was a very cool product, reminds of what a cool and great company we created, during the very inception of the commercial Internet.
What in your work at Magellan prepared you for the challenges at Jeteye? I think it was the unfinished exploration of how search needs to relate directly to the mind of the user, that prepared me, or rather compelled me, to explore search and collaboration in the context of Jeteye.
Steve Mansfield at PreFound thinks that social search can scale to mainstream search. Do you see your work at Jeteye as work towards a replacement to mainstream search? In the following way, yes: I would define mainstream search as simple algorithmic information retrieval, and include Google in this group.
I would define social search along the lines of the Forrester Group in their publications about ‘social computing’ – meaning, the web today empowers us to do many things almost at once, including collaboration, instant communication, broad and narrow search, video casting, self publishing, etc.
These are all features of the ‘social’ environment that the web has become, and likewise, they are all features or aspects of what Jeteye let’s you do, which is: pull anything together that interests you, and use that to find more information, more people of similar interests, more knowledge.
So in a word, social search will be mainstream, because it represents the pursuit of knowledge over information, and the pursuit of knowledge must be a mainstream activity.
If not, then why are you creating Jeteye? Exactly. We are creating Jeteye to handle the world of social search – which we believe includes the ‘new’ elements of the individual doing some level of “creating” and “publishing” as part of the search paradigm, as part of the searching process, to improve the quality of results, the experience, and ultimately improve the level of knowledge both found and shared.
Please respond to the delicious-doesn't-incent-with-cash argument. Why are you offering cash (if you still are of course)? If you’re referring to the ‘contest’ we held at launch – well, that was just for fun really. A gimmick, yes, a way to get attention at the beginning, yes. Was it a good idea, I don’t know – but we don’t incent with cash.
Many people (Jim Lanzone) characterize searchers as lazy and think that social search won't work. Considering your background in search at Magellan, why did you decide to get involved in a search-related CMS that relies on people working so hard? Well, I don’t believe people are lazy for starters. And I don’t believe that we aren’t creative. I basically think that we can converge the fun and easy with the profound and meaningful. That’s our established goal at Jeteye.
How many users? In two months, just over 10,000, with an accelerating curve that points us to over 100,000 users fairly soon.
How many total jetpaks? In the same period, over 30,000.
How many jetpaks are spams? Talk about spam in Jeteye. So far none are really spams – there are some not-so-interesting Jetpaks for sure – about 5% in fact, but the concept of Jeteye and what you call the ‘work’ to use it are interesting here: the idea is that you are creating a Jetpak for yourself first, for anyone else, usually second.
This improves the very way in which you think about the web, and search it. Jeteye in a very real way raises the bar of interaction with the web. The other concept behind Jeteye is that it is really kind of a nex-gen communication platform, in fact, eventually a better way than email for sending around text and images to people.
In that, Jeteye is designed to send you to the Jetpak, rather than the Jetpak to you – this is a much more efficient way to use the web, obviously.
Help me understand the Jeteye business model. Jeteye has an enterprise model where a business (let’s take the travel industry for example) will license the Jeteye app, and we will securely host the app and the content of that business created by use of the app, for a fee.
In travel, imagine the customer support or marketing group easily creating visual travel packages in Jetpaks for their members, sending them out, having the members interact with them, vote on trips, even send photos of their trips back in Jetpaks, all around a specific package that was created by the travel company.
This is compelling to businesses – the ability to capture and use their customer-created information, for the benefit of their customers, which of course is the only thing that really benefits a business.
Help me understand how Google Notebook is or isn't a competitor. Notebook is a competitor.
It could end up being similar to Jeteye if they want, but they have some real hurdles between what they are doing and what we are doing.
I’ll mention a few: sharing is very different, the use of Notebook as a communication tool, is very different, and the idea that Notebook goes beyond the boundaries of Google is not a very clear message.
Jeteye is all about sharing privately or publicly, it’s very much a communication tool, and we have built something with the established goal of bridging links between all search and social network platforms – meaning, we’ve created something that is ultimately just for the individual.
Who do you see as your competition? I have always liked to think about partners more than competitors, because the web develops too quickly to worry about who is doing something like what you’re doing; but ultimately we do have some competitors, and worthy ones at that, like Kaboodle, Onfolio, Squidoo, even del.icio.us.
(note to JetEye's competition - I would like to understand your differentiation from JetEye -email me selowdown@gmail.com)
Will text ads work in Jeteye? Yes, anything works in Jeteye – even videos hosted elsewhere will play in a Jetpak.
Will ads on Jeteye be more or less valuable than ads on, say, Google. Why? We think Jeteye ads will be even more valuable, because we have the technology to really target the ad to a more complete package of thought and information (the Jetpak!)
What do you think of the new CPA craze? (Snap, Jellyfish, Google's experiments, Zixxo to some extent)? Nice idea but still the same problem of tracking, gaming, validating – but I do like the direction it poses: advertisers get paid the closer a user’s transaction is to the advertisement they’ve seen
Would a CPA model work better on Jeteye than PPC? Why or why not? The best model in Jeteye will be when a user delivers the advertisement to someone in their network, because that person wants it.
In that model, call it the PPDA (price per ‘delivered’ advertisement), the messenger and the message creator and the recipient of the message all benefit.
Who's funding Jeteye now, and why? We’re primarily funded by Consor Capital, Palo Alto Investors, and Knott Capital. It’s fair to say they all believe that search and communication are going through some major changes in the next few years, and they like our approach and believe in me.
(I added links to venture firms - G)
Who have they funded that have seen profitability? A host of companies, that I won’t list here, but will get you separately.
Talk about the importance of Yahoo to your growth strategy. Yahoo is a great partner for such a small start-up. We have created a very neat plug-in of Jeteye into their new IM platform, which is good for both of us. Helps us with our goal of integrating Jeteye into various communication modules, and helps them with their goal of making IM more comprehensive. All of this is good for growth for us.
Your CFO used to be a head of business development - is this a coincidence or is business development key to Jeteye's growth strategy? I think you’ve answered the question ;-) -- partnerships are key to our growth strategy.
Why don't any of the Jeteye profile pages have pictures? are you deliberately trying NOT to look like a social network? Well, we’re really not a social network, at least in the MySpace, Tagworld sense of social network – and we’ll be adding visual icons soon, and that includes pictures of people of course – we think the visual element of Jeteye (actually, part of the name is visual by intent) is very important – we just have a different timeline for releasing these elements.
What social network would make the best Jeteye partner? Why? LinkedIn. It’s a social network with a purpose, and Jeteye is all about applying the application to your needs, for a meaningful experience and purpose.
Do you think you'd see more success as a vertically-oriented social-bookmarking site? Why or why not? I think that would be too limiting for what we’ve built and what our vision for the evolution of the web is about.
If you HAD to pick a vertical or coverage area for Jeteye which one would you target? Travel.
Who appears to be your strongest demographic? Really hard to say at this point – we’re still pretty broadly represented today.
Why a desktop download? Why not web based? That’s a great question, and the key to Jeteye. We’re about unlocking and releasing anyone who uses Jeteye from specific web sites or being able to only work online – the future of Jeteye as a communication app lies in your ability to really use it and love it online or offline, wherever you go, wherever you are.
I just noticed that Google Video has an "add to MySpace" button for *viewers,* so that if I like something I can shoot it up on my MySpace blog. The function also enables Google Video uploads to blogger, LiveJournal and TypePad.
In this Google's keeping pace with YouTube, which also enables users to upload video to their blogs AND MySpace, though YouTube has had ongoing issues with uploading video to MySpace as indicated by their occasional messages to users.
I haven't been following much news lately - I've had my nose to the interview grind stone. I wondered at first though if this MySpace upload indicated a tighter relationship between Google and MySpace.
Also it's my suspicion that this was something Google just *did* rather than negotiated through with MySpace. I'd be curious to hear from YouTube regarding working with MySpace :)
Check out the actual upload page and note that those are live links to MySpace, TypePad and LiveJournal there at the bottom... and that the button on the video's profile says "Post to MySpace."
Also I liked this mullet mafia video, which showed up on Google Reader, which is feeding vids, which I will write on next if it's actually news. I've been staying out of the news loop lately and so have to dig for a minute :) Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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July 12, 2006
Casie Gillette's Visual Relevance Article Published in Search Engine Guide!
I'm proud as hell of Casie Gillette and hoping that my mention of her first publication in Search Engine Guide will spur more articles :)
She also got top billing in today's Search Engine Guide newsletter. SWEET!
Why Casie’s article is important: Her article challenges the search marketing industry to think of more than contextual relevance, and pushes the idea into visual relevance and how a web page’s appearance could come to have a strong and measurable affect on search engine traffic.
And it showcases the innovative thinking we also apply to our clients here at MarketSmart Interactive.
And special thanks to Jennifer Laycock at Search Engine Guide, whose recent collaboration with ClickTracks, "Who Loves You Baby? (...and how to make them love you more)" delivers strong advice for reputation managers who are also analytics hounds. (link - opens up WebEx app) Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Mel Strocen on ExactSeek Relaunch and the ISEDN Second Tier Search Engine Network
I know the Jayde Online family of companies because I used to work for WebProNews and the Jayde/iEntry family of companies. Mel Strocen is the owner of the Jayde Online family of companies, which includes ExactSeek and the ISEDN. His name was verboten when I worked at iEntry, so it's with some latent trepidation that I offer you his words here in SEL today.
Scott Buresh has an excellent Mel Strocen interview, which briefly details his two year involvement with "a [certain] newsletter publisher in Kentucky."
ExactSeek's Joe Holcomb contacted me recently about ExactSeek's relaunch with "new crawling and indexing technology."
I started my line of questioning with their technology, but what interested me more was the second tier search engine network that Strocen pieced together with the ISEDN, and the (as low as $3) per-month keyword rental model they use.
Neat!
I know I'm way late to the game on covering the ISEDN, but it's interesting to note that at the time of Buresh's interview (published 8-23-05) they had 48 search engines in the network and are now up to more than 225.
What other search-related networks are out there like this one? Why haven't other traffic networks tapped into this concept before?
Note to Strocen and the ExactSeek team: I've added a few more questions, offset by "+++". I invite you to respond in comments or just send me another email.
-describe the team who developed your new index and crawling capacity (how many people, what are their professional backgrounds and names) The technology was collaborative effort between ExactSeek in-house technical team and an expert with a long history in development of massively scalable databases and search technology.
+++what are their names and where have they worked?+++
-how did they spend their 12 months - describe the stages of the project and the amount of time spent? ExactSeek team spent considerable time and money examining a number of new and different search technologies over the last 12 months and determined to implement the current technology because of its scalability, speed, relevancy and unique feature sets.
+++am I understanding you correctly in that you have not actually created but *bought* a new search technology? Whose is it?+++
-how was the team funded? ExactSeek is part of Jayde Online, Inc., which is a long standing web marketing and online resource. All of the funding for the development of the new engine was handled in house.
-how do you determine "the web's best sources of information"? By gathering data from authority sites in their respective industries and/or markets users can be assured that the sites they view via ExactSeek's search results are of high quality.
-how do you project that these changes will affect ExactSeek's profitability? A more scaleable, relevant and feature rich search engine will allow us to hopefully attract and retain searchers which will lead to greater opportunities for advertisers through our Featured Listings program. (For more information see: http://www.exactseek.com/featured_listings.html)
-are you still using Alexa data to determine relevance? Alexa popularity rankings is still being used as one of the factors in determining search result relevance in the new ExactSeek technology other ranking factors include link popularity, keyword density and positioning and meta data.
-what are the advantages and disadvantages of using Alexa data? Alexa data is useful if not taken as the only source of traffic and popularity information. We find that Alexa is more accurate in determining B2B traffic patterns than B2C.
-do you consider ExactSeek to be a second tier search engine? We think of ExactSeek as an alternative information resource. We're not concerned with our market placement in the traditional sense. Our users will determine that for us in the long run. If we provide information that is relevant and useful to users, then they will ultimately determine our success and where we rank among the myriad of search providers.
-talk about the second-tier search space. Who are your key competitors? What kinds of *users* find their way to the second tier? ExactSeek establishment of relationships and partnerships with over 225+ search engines through the ISEDN.org, which it founded, sets it uniquely apart to other second tier search providers. So instead of having true competition we focus on building beneficial partnerships with other search engines and directories. For us, competition isn't an issue because we have been able to garner cooperation with other engines instead.
ExactSeek advertisers can reach an entire network of search engine and directory sites through the ISEDN. There are over 150 million impressions per month on this network and it continues to grow at a rate of about two to five new members companies each week. That's ad placement that is not cost per click based but rather a small flat fee per month. In fact, our ads cost as little as $3.00 per keyword each month. ExactSeek advertisers don't have the headache of constant bid management, rising bid costs, or exposure to pay per click fraud.
People find their way to the middle market and third tier engines through other search providers, networks, toolbars, content, and a myriad of other sources. Getting users to return is the hard part and for that you need a good technology. With the beta release of our new search engine technology and data base, we believe that ExactSeek is on the path to acquiring more market share.
-is a search engine second-tier because it lacks users or because it lacks strong search technology? The answer to that is both however marketing and branding are also important factors in acquiring market share. Amassing users must be coupled with good technology for growth.
-what have been the biggest shifts in the second tier space in your tenure? The most significant shift has been the rapid growth of search as an advertising medium.
The other significant change is the growth and prevalence of click fraud in pay per click advertising which continues to take a toll on the second tier engines as they try to gain traction on Google, MSN, and Yahoo.
ExactSeek created an alternative flat fee ad system in early 2003 and then went on to develop an alternative channel and organization, The Independent Search Engine & Directory Network (ISEDN.org). Today there are over 225 members.
The ISEDN is an alternative to the big three engines with no pay per click and the best search engine marketing value available today. Our program is not pay per click based so there is no incentive in our network for committing click fraud. For $3.00 or less per keyword each month an advertiser can receive 10 or 10,000 clicks at the same price. This in turn creates a higher ROI. Plus, our advertisers do not have to worry about the threat of fraudulent clicks so the ROI figures are even more accurate.
-what are your overall aspirations for ExactSeek? To be a high quality resource of information and provide added value to searchers who need help finding what they want.
-what in your current offering is a step in that direction? The crawling and indexing technologies we've developed are a definite step in the right direction. However other features such as being able to search within a site from our results pages and locate forms on a web site directly from our search results are key differentiators that separate us from others. Giving more weight to specific areas of interest by category and personalization features will also play a large role in the near future.
-what has been the biggest problem with ExactSeek in the past three years? ExactSeek has always been a great resource for web site owners and businesses to list their web sites. However, the limits of our old technology necessitated that we go in a new direction and build a more robust and scaleable system that could deliver a greater depth of higher quality results and a better overall experience for end users. With the beta launch we're addressing that need and over the long term addressing the needs of our users as well.
-what is ExactSeek's relationship to ISEDN.org? ISEDN.org was founded in June 2005 as an extension of ExactSeek's own Featured Listings advertising program. As interest in ExactSeek's Featured Listings grew we realized that the program would be better served by an active and independent association of search engines and directories instead of a single company. We saw the opportunity to create a network of cooperation where members could help each other grow with a revenue generation system that was relatively immune from constant bid management, exorbitantly expensive bid prices, and rampant click fraud.
-isn't ExactSeek essentially competition for the other members of the ISEDN (which is owned by the same company to my understanding)? No. Each member company has its own advertisers and eyeballs that they can sell their Featured Listings program to. Many member companies offer a number of different advertising services on their own. The ISEDN is simply another great alternative for advertisers.
The ISEDN member companies market and interact with each other to create a better program for our advertisers. It is a philosophy of strength in numbers. Each member company of the ISEDN works with their own advertisers to create long term relationships. There is little to no overlap because advertisers understand that the ISEDN is a network oriented service available from a number of sources. They can simply choose which member company they are comfortable working with.
-how do you find new SEs? do they find you? For the most part potential Members have approach us to be part of the ISEDN in addition members have been recruited as a result of by press releases, news articles, word of mouth.
-is it difficult to convince SEs to join the ISEDN? Why or why not? No it has been remarkably easy; in fact the growth of the ISEDN has been an unparalleled success. Most members see the benefit of joining and share the same vision of creating an alternative advertising model for the smaller engines and directories to collaborate on. By working together we all benefit financially and generate more traffic and awareness for all member sites. We believe this is the only way most of the smaller engines and directories will be able to compete and stay in business against the likes of Google, MSN, and Yahoo.
-what characterizes a good SE entry for the ISEDN? We have a set of criteria that a company must meet in order to become a member. For search engines, the overall quality of the site and its search results are examined. For directories, the depth of their own directory and database is looked into. We also take into account the amount of traffic a potential member has and how long they have been online. We will reject any engine or directory that just is a redirect or redisplay of some other search engine's result pages.
-what types of companies are major purchasers of ISEDN's advertising? Our clients range from advertising agencies to small and medium sized online businesses. We target the businesses that have tried PPC or do not have the budget to bid against large companies, which often dominate the ad space on Google and Yahoo.
-is ExactSeek's advertising offering different in any way from ISEDN's? No. The system is exactly the same for us as it is for every ISEDN member. However, every ISEDN member may have their own paid and free advertising or submission product specific to their own site.
another new question: +++how would you characterize the demographic in the ISEDN network?+++ Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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A Market Conversation Strategy Guide for B2B Startups
My first time getting published in MarketingProfs!
This article is an outline for implementing a strong market conversation strategy at your company. Such a strategy can drive results similar to traditional PR and marketing efforts at a substantially lower upfront cost. That effort, however, requires an ongoing investment of employee time and effort.
If you follow this article's core concepts and apply them to your industry, you'll see an increased presence in the media, an increase in perceived expertise, a growing intra-company knowledge base, and an exploding search engine presence. More importantly, you'll find that your company becomes an increasingly important player in your industry. You'll find that surprising and disruptive opportunities emerge that would not have if you hadn't engaged in conversation.
...dang I would like to edit that first paragraph now... :) Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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July 10, 2006
Presentation + Writing Article for SMS
I have a presentation to prepare for, plus I'm writing an article for the Search Marketing Standard.
Posting will, unless Google buys Yahoo, be a bit light today I suspect. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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July 06, 2006
mpire's CEO Matt Hulett on Scaling Consumer Empowerment Quickly + His DIY PR Efforts Mpire surprised me once I started digging in for questions - their offering feels unique, and, to me, seems to actually embody the idea of consumer empowerment.
Their early partnership with eBay impressed me too. (See Collector's Corner.)
They are fascinating in their early alignment with powerhouse eBay, and their funding comes from the interesting and to-be-watched Ignition Partners.
For those seeking to understand how a shopping 2.0 site comes to shape in short order, this interview with mpire's CEO Matt Hulett is an interesting view into pieces of that process.
Matt's interview is well over 2000 words - I'll have a shorter, best quotes version to Loren Baker in Search Engine Journal next week.
At the end of the post please find links to the articles I read that helped me form questions, and I have some follow up questions that I'll be writing up and sending to Matt tomorrow.
And thanks to Matt for his transparency - I hope you find his thinking on mpire, pr and scaling quickly informative.
digging into mpire: Brian Smith doesn't see you as a mainstream shopping tool, but rather a tool for ebay buyers and sellers. Why does he have this opinion? MH: I don't agree.
My sense on what we've launched is a new type of shopping service. It is hard to peg us as a "traditional comparison shopping product." But, in essence that is what we've done.
We've been public about being focused on the "used" and hard-to-find space. But, really we've built a consumer platform to find deals. We launched with eBay, Yahoo, and Overstock a little over a couple of weeks ago but we'll have many more things to talk about soon.
I have always wanted to provide consumers with a service that really is about consumer confidence. We have the ability to provide consumers with the true market value for virtually any product that they are looking for. Our customers are partners thing that is very mainstream.
It’s a trend that I call, "Shopping 2.0". Building search and analytics into a single service that empowers consumers.
What is the direction of mpire and how is your partnership with eBay important to getting there? MH: Our mission is to empower the online millions of sellers and buyers by organizing and analyzing their shopping experience. We wont rest until we're the most popular shopping service on-line. Our partnership with eBay has been fantastic. We have a multi-faceted relationship that ranges from seller and buyer products.
Most recent example of the results of our relationship was the recent (June 12th) launch of Collector's Corner (a destination that powers the buying experience for eBay collectible consumers).
eBay is partners with Yahoo. How does this affect your direction? MH: Not at all. We have great relationships with both companies.
At what stage did the idea to partner with eBay emerge? Did mpire begin building with eBay in mind or did that come about later? MH: eBay approached us. Dave Cotter (the founder, now CMO of Mpire) built a strong relationship with eBay. eBay heard that we were shifting our companies strategy to more of a consumer-facing service and went on faith that we could deliver. We did. Stay tuned for more fun projects between Mpire and eBay.
In other words, talk about Laurence Toney and how he got involved with mpire. MH: Laurence is one of those business leaders that you always want to find in a large organization (like eBay). He is an intrapreneur. He is responsible for one of the largest businesses at eBay (collectibles) and took a big step to look outside of eBay for innovation to help his business. I've got to hand it to both Laurence and eBay for thinking way outside of the proverbial box.
What kind of agreements did you have in place when you began work on the eBay project? Were there contracts involved? MH: Unfortunately, I have to respond with the classic, "we don't discuss our business agreements publicly."
If ebay vendors are already paying for their listings plus a cut to paypal then how can they justify paying mpire 20 cents a click, and aren't you essentially cannibalizing ebay's potential search profits? AND Yahoo's? MH: We believe we're going to be an efficient channel for our marketplace partners to bring cost effective leads to their products. For sellers, we've spent well over a year talking to thousands of sellers. We have tens of thousands of customers using our listing, business management and research tools -- one thing that we've heard loud and clear is that sellers want customers.
There is a general sense from sellers that we've talked to that any solution that is cost effective while better merchandising their listings/products is something that they'll pay for. Our early results covered on blogs.mpire.com are very promising.
Lots of folks are adding votes and user ratings as a judge of quality. Where is mpire in this method of rating data? MH: Stay tuned. Building community powered shopping is going to be important for us.
Can you talk about how you've been spending that $5.5 that ignition partners invested in mpire? What percentage has gone to what aspects of the startup thus far? Is $5.5 enough? MH: We don't talk about our use of proceeds publicly.
How will you be (or have you...) incorporating/ed the various eBay APIs (eBay Express Search; eBay Express Shopping Cart; eBay Product Info; and Contextual Keywords) into your offering? MH: We have full support for the eBay API that we support for our buyer and seller products. We are currently looking at the keywords initiative as well as other APIs to support.
Transparency is your hallmark and yet you've left (as far as I can tell) the financial relationships with your advertisers opaque. MH: Transparency is our rallying cry. We feature our current Mpire Builder customers in the display with a "feature seller" icon. Since our shopping is contextually relevant you may not have seen the specific sponsored search. It's there. In addition, rest assured it is going to be even more clear as well roll out the merchandising functionality this summer what is a paid relationship v. a general listing.
Also, you're leaving money on the table with your ad model - someone selling a corvette pays the same as someone selling a baseball card (20 cents per click, right?). MH: Potentially. But, I like to be measured about early businesses...I've seen a lot a press around revolutionary new business models but haven't back that up with product execution. I really want us focused on building a world-class consumer experience while driving tremendous value to sellers. Introducing multiple schemas (PPC, keyword bidding, CPA, etc) is way too confusing and hard to execute on as an early stage business.
How do you protect the baseball card seller from getting clicked on so much he makes no profit on his card... and yet still ensure that he makes the sale? MH: We will be introducing tools this summer that allow very specific control over the spend for every seller by item.
Are you familiar with Jellyfish's model (consumer gets rebate a month after purchase)? Would you talk some about how it would or wouldn't work for mpire? (would this be too complex, involving paypal escrow and stuff?) MH: Only from what I've read. I wont speak too much about their model but I think having more shopping services promoting transparency is a great thing. There are a lot of dynamics around getting to scale---our approach is to work with the marketplaces and leveraging their infrastructure.
There is a lot of science to building merchandising, slotting, product listings, taxonomy, in a manner where you don't have to hire 50-100 people cramming products into SKUs. I would rather build something that can scale fast so that we can then dissect additional models to roll-out on top of a large base.
Is CPA on the table as a possible offering for your advertisers? Why or why not? MH: It could be. I like the idea of it. One issue for us is the level of sophistication of the actual seller. Some customers would understand it and others would not. We are starting at "this" (finding deals online) largely from a non-branded retailer perspective. I am not going to rule it out.
mpire pr efforts: Matt - I appreciate that you, as the CEO of mpire, reached out to me personally. MH: You bet.
Do you consider this action to be PR? MH: Yes and no. The best thing to do is to build relationships with individuals in shopping and search. The more that folks such as yourselves pepper the Mpire team with thoughts and questions, then we'll only get better. I have made some surprisingly great relationships by basically reaching out to people and actually listening to their advice. If folks want to write about us, too. Then that's great to but its not the primary motivator.
Do you consider your blog a PR effort? MH: Yes. I will be blogging more but I have been swamped with trips, travel, and a brand new job. We have a meritocracy at Mpire; we have a light process for editorial guidelines and topics but largely want anyone to be able to articulate a particular salient point.
Do you have a dedicated PR team? MH: No.
Why are you the sole blogger? MH: I'm not. We've had some of our developers blog recently. To be honest, we've been really busy launching the product, then eBay Live, etc.
I can't believe that amount of work work getting done and we'll have to start to slow down and articulate some of the very interesting things that we've discovered.
Dave Cotter is the CMO. Why isn't blogging in his realm? MH: It will be. Dave is a real dynamo across program management, product management, and marketing. You'll be hearing from him soon.
Why did you decide to reach out to SEL (how did you hear about us first, what prompted your first email)? MH: I've been tracking you for a bit; you've helped me formulate my thoughts. Coming out of a large company like Expedia, I really wanted to go deep on search and shopping. I feel like I've been training in the "Web 2.0 dojo" for the last six months and you've been a part of that.
personal: Why did you move from the Ingnition Partners board to being the CEO of mpire? MH: I took a break but had several good ideas. I like consumer plays and absolutely loved the team. What I realized is that Mpire had actually built all of the core Web services that I'd need to launch a new venture. It is harder that it looks.
Corporate Travel at Expedia appears to be a far cry from mpire. What experiences at Expedia have best served you thus far at mpire (or before, when you were a mere ignition partners board member ;) MH: I am always on a seemingly non-linear path. After school, I had a X-windows/TCP business, then RealNetworks, then AtomShockwave, and then Expedia. I came into Expedia as an intrapreneur. It is really, really hard to launch new businesses when the larger corporate entities P/L is large. You may have the fastest CAGR in the company but its hard to get attention. Tenacity and creativity is what I've always brought to ventures. It is a nice foil for Mpire in the marketplace. It is crowded out here and I like to find ways to break through the noise.
What are you applying from your time at AtomFilms? MH: My friend, Mika Salmi (founder and CEO), emailed a bunch of old Atom executives recently and jokingly exclaimed in email, "Matt you had the idea of YouTube back in '99." What drives me is the power of the consumer. At Atom, I really believed (and still do) that consumer-powered services can result in fantastic experiences. Sometimes I feel like I could dust off some of my old slides because a lot of what we talked about is coming to fruition: community and open, digestible bits of entertainment. I take that same passion of having the consumer in charge of their shopping to Mpire. Whether is controlling the shopping display, to showing the real price of any product, to voting on the best search for products, etc.
Why did you leave AtomFilms - did you have concerns about the business model? MH: Atom moved to the Bay Area. I am a 4th generation Washingtonian. Deep roots.
We did restructure the company. Remember that the consumers never left the Internet. The advertisers did in 2001 beyond. John Batelle's latest book really does a good job of capturing that time. We knew that it would take awhile for the advertisers to come back. They did. Atom is doing great.
meta: Why did eBay partner instead of buy? MH: You would have to ask eBay about that.
Why didn't AtomFilms partner with or buy or steal the model concept from Channel101.com? MH: I'll get you in touch with Mika on that.
Are you more of a Yacht Rock or Kicked in the Nuts kind of guy? (update... Channel 101 seems to be down or something. Probably from the copious traffic from SEL. Here are the same vids from YouTube: yacht rock and kicked in the nuts.)
MH: Interesting question. Kicked in the Nuts.
Honestly, I am more of one of those Indie Rock fans (bands like Wilco, Nada Surf, Ben Harper, etc).
I really enjoyed this conversation.
Matt.
Matt Hulett Chairman & CEO mpire
+++
Bibliography: Mpire - Transparency & Empowerment (Brian Smith's review - excellent. Brian I hope I didn't misquote you too badly in my first question :)
Q-Phrase: Contextual Relevance Tech Unlocks Deeper Value from SERPs
I first encountered Andy Miller in comments on Google's Orion purchase, where he aggressively marked his territory:
"I'm not sure why everyone is all fired up about Orion, My company, Q-Phrase, has had a superior product in the market since 2004.
ConceptQ Pro does everything Orion claims and then some. If interested, check out www.q-phrase.com."
It took me some time to really dig into the Q-Phrase offering. About 3 months to be exact. I put CQ Web on my PowerBook last weekend and it pretty much blew my mind. Seriously.
Not every searcher's looking to drill into concepts obviously, but the zoom function brings an element of *discovery* - of the unexpected, yet relevant result - back into the search process.
CQ Web takes Zoom many steps farther - it unlocks the "story" of an information corpus (whether that's SERPs, LiveJournal or texts that you point the tool at) by parsing out keyphrases and key concepts.
Point it at the whole body of Moby Dick and presto - instant Cliff's Notes.
My initial reaction is that CQ Web - as it currently stands - won't appeal to a mainstream audience though. It requires a download and it's far slower than a straight Google search.
That said, the way that it extracts *concept understanding* out of indices is a wonder to behold, and it could be a strong tool for researchers - both academic and business. Esepcially in that CQ Web enables concept mining into MySpace and LiveJournal.
I, as is my wont, badgered them some about an API. There are MANY companies I've interviewed that could use CQ Web in some form or fashion...
Q-Phrase is launching a new product shortly, and in the interest of better understanding their new offering I asked Andy Miller and Q-Phrase Chief Software Architect Danny Espinoza some questions about their technology.
How is Q-Phrase funded?
Miller: As a privately help company we do not disclose our financial position, however, I can tell you that we are funded by a group of Angel Investors that are committed to making Q-Phrase successful.
What is your definition of contextual relevance?
Espinoza: Contextual relevance is a measure of how a keyword or phrase relates to concepts in which they appear. Take the term “IPTV” for example: in most conversations, IPTV is understood to mean Internet Protocol Television. But if you search for this term in Google, you will find that Iowa Public Television (which is also referred to as IPTV) is a highly weighted link, at least according to PageRank. Now, clearly IPTV is indeed important to their customers in Iowa, but 99% of the people searching for IPTV are probably not looking for a regional television station. The problem here is a lack of contextual relevance.
>Contextual Relevance in ConceptQ Note that our ConceptQ and CQ web products, do in fact use contextual relevance to determine the importance of pages returned by a given search. For example, CQ web’s analysis of the content on the pages returned by a search for “IPTV” identifies “internet television,” “internet protocol,” “digital video,” as some contextually relevant terms, Thus, the Iowa page is filtered out from our results, because its content does not match the contextually relevant baseline formed by the web’s content relating to IPTV.
>Contextual Relevance in Quece (ommited til next week - G :)
We think that both of our approaches to contextual relevance, statistical in our ConceptQ and CQ web products and semantic in Quece, are important to solving the problem of understanding the concepts that define many search queries. And, it's only in understanding what search results mean that can we try to improve search relevance.
Q-Phrase API ever available?
Espinoza: We have considered APIs for our ConceptQ product line. ConceptQ looks for contextual relevance in any textual data, and so we allow web searching, site crawling as well as local document review as “sources” for data to analyze.
A natural fit for an API would be a “source” SDK that allowed developers to program their own textual “data gathers” (e.g. for a proprietary database or interfacing to a “deep content” web resource) to pass to ConceptQ for analysis.
What were you envisioning when you included MySpace and LiveJournal as data sources?
Espinoza: Statistical analysis on textual data requires a large enough sample set to determine a contextual relevance baseline.
MySpace and LiveJournal are in essence huge data warehouses of highly topical data, specifically conversations about what today’s youth (in general) are talking about. We created plugins to allow our ConceptQ products to analyze this data as an experiment, but the truth is that most of these conversations are transient in their mentioning of specific terms.
This means that as a statistical sample, more work needs to be done on the filtering side (e.g. using “cultural” stop word lists) to extract real meaningful content from this data. We’re working on it, but including MySpace and LiveJournal was an important first step in getting our heads around the value of this information.
Who’s been digging into these two the most and why?
Espinoza: We haven’t done a formal survey of their use, but we assume most of the interest in analysis of these sites is currently in sheer entertainment value.
Of course, there is a huge potential for real-time marketing research with regards to data mining on these sites, and that’s something were also looking at.
My two queries (brookers - a YouTube “celebrity” with a MySpace page and iPod didn’t really reveal anything...)
Espinoza: That’s not surprising given that these terms are perhaps too vague for extracting meaning from the typical social networking page. Narrowing the focus a bit (e.g. “Paris Hilton” on LiveJournal) can yield some fascinating concepts and conversations.
And as I mentioned earlier, we need to do some work on filtering to improve our ability to get meaningful information from these sites that are generally comprised of pure conversation. Leveraging Quece may be one way to do that.
Shopping applications for Q-Phrase?
Miller: Yes. For example, as we further develop Quece, adding a voice recognition component, we are exploring Quece’s integration with e-commerce/auction sites...
(...oops! that's enough about Quece this week ;)
I have a call later today with Andy Miller and Danny Espinoza, and will have more for you next week regarding their *latest* contribution to understanding.
Starting Conversations with Your Industry's Influencers: Mike Manuel vs. Garrett French
Last month Mike Manuel of Media Guerilla posted Blogger Relations, Two Tips. I commented.
Now this isn't a straight out battle, like when I first hit Mr. Manuel with the Jellyfish challenge, or when Heather Hamilton of MSFT and I went round and round, but it was fun and I think it would be useful to folks who are looking for more blogger friends.
Mike said initially, in relation to contacting influentials:
"By making a genuine effort to introduce yourself first and offering your audience the chance to opt-out of hearing more about "what acme has cooking" you demonstrate some tact and respect for those you're approaching, plus it dramatically improves and informs your future outreach efforts."
I commented:
I like personal phone calls from PR folks - it gives me a chance to see how smart they are and whether it's going to be worth my time to continue working with them.
My favorite PR folks pretty much fade into the background after they put me in touch with someone smart/influential in the company who can give me the behind-the-scenes look at their new offering.
(I recently email-interviewed John Flowers at Kozoru. His PR guy, Justin Gardner, added some relevant information but it was side-noted that it came from him. That was perfect.)
Anyways I'd suggest that when you first take on a client you get to know their industry and get on the phone (or whatever contact the person prefers) with the influencers.
Susan's point is good - that if your news is relevant, gives me a scoop, or offers me a chance to interview someone smart I can learn from you don't have to "get to know me" first.
You'll know if this is the case by having a conversation with me though, and chances are I'll home in a point or an angle you hadn't considered because you may not know the industry as well (that being the search industry in my instance).
As a side note, the learning approach will always work with ME. I like doing long ass interviews with smart people who are shaking up their industry.
Also... it just struck me how much I like to show off how smart *I* am.
I wonder if it wouldn't make sense to reach out to bloggers/influencers with questions, either about the industry in general, or with actual concerns you might have about postitioning your client's offering.
Mike replied:
Just out of curiousity, if a PR blogger was to link to your stuff, maybe leave a comment or two on your blog, would you consider that a relationship building tactic? And would you prefer that to, say, a cold call introduction?
I replied:
that would be a solid intro - especially if the comments are on base. Plus I like it when people comment, so it satisfies the laws of blogger ego.
The primary coin of *my* realm though is links from others who've liked what I've said.
I found your blog in the first place Mike because you tagged a post I'd written on search optimized press releases (it included a little sprinkling of Formeski and my own experience).
I started reading your blog and enjoyed your perspective and subscribed.
So you did sort of a reverse intro that way.
Extrapolate on that:
...encourage your clients to read and link to specific influencers in their space on a company blog.
This is actually a stronger way of starting the conversation... now I, a blogger, see that this person in my space is writing about what I've said.
Your job as a PR firm then is to understand who's speaking in a market space, who's influential, and encourage your clients to read and comment on things they're passionate about from [this specific set of influential bloggers].
Also... if you want people to respond put their name in the title of your post. That usually works well for me :)
So, this is a little old, but not too old to be irrelevant yet ;)
As a side note, it was the quality of Mike's responses in his blog that made me comfortable issuing that Jellyfish challenge in the first place. That was totally out of the blue, and ended up getting Mike more coverage down the road. Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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July 03, 2006
Can't Touch My Flow: I pwn All Flow Gamers Flow is a flash-based game (I think) and I like to play it instead of interviewing interesting industry people and writing about great marketing ideas.
That's part of how I give back to my industry.
Flow swept Digg awhile back, and I read about it in a recent Wired.
Your objective is to eat other creatures (amoebas and whatnots + other carnivores like yourself) and move down through the water levels (by eating the red creatures).
Once you've eaten everyone you become another type of creature and eat your way down again and then the levels end because this is a student's video game creation thesis, not a full-on game.
Also, the game adjusts in difficulty to your skill level.
Here's me pwning fl0w. Here's me, with 20 fins (10 on each side), just about to eat the transformative squiggly that will turn me into a jelly fish instead of a cool dragon-like bug thing.
JenovaChen Interview I will do the obligatory interview of course. I think his game is fantastic and I hope he responds back. I will probably post the interview in MT unless I can figure out some random way to tie it into search ;) Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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July 02, 2006
Kozoru Follow Up: early usage patterns + a Sun byoms
I've been digging more into q-phrase lately (interview + news coming shortly).
They have a very impressive application that can help researchers dig into a topic area relatively quickly and I'm glad that I'm finally starting to understand - and use - their apps. I'm excited to dig into it more fully this week.
In my digging I pinged Kozoru. Q-Phrase's Andy Miller calls them "smoke and mirrors" and I wanted to understand if Kozoru and Quece were actually competitors. Kozoru feels that they're quite different - more on that in a later post though.
I also asked Kozoru: "Any notable byoms made thus far? What kind of user feedback have you gotten?"
And Justin Gardner was kind enough to enlist Martin Andres Quiroga, Kozoru's CTO to anser:
We have seen the highest number of queries directed at our Wikipedia, General Questions and IMDB byoms.
This of course makes a lot of sense, since these are the ones listed on the front page. We are currently developing the Subscriber side of our product site and will soon be exposing features that will allow users to search and browse for other users' byoms, based on the byoms and Publisher attributes.
And as far as user feedback goes, most has been quite positive.
And for me, some of the most exiting examples are coming from 'long-tail' end-users such a Sun developer who's using a byoms to access Sun's own SunSolve content:
On the constructive criticism end, we have requests asking for more clarification in the byoms creation process.
Apparently, a source of confusion is not knowing that users have to create an AIM identity (through the AIM site) for every one of their byoms.
We are going to be updating the site very soon and should alleviate most of this with additional user support content, and a more stream-lined byoms creation process.
I hope this answers some of your questions. Please let me know if I can answer any other ones.
Thanks,
--maq
Big thanks to Kozoru for the follow up (I can feel more questions for them coming on...), and be on the lookout for a special SEM byoms you can query when inspiration is most likely to strike... Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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July 01, 2006
Heather Hamilton (of MSFT) vs. Garrett French: Does Requesting "Best Blog" Votes Make Me Dirty?
Search Engine Lowdown did not win the MarketingSherpa award for best search marketing blog.
Barry got it for the second year in a row. Congrats to the crew over at Search Engine Roundtable. Their focus on SEM is laser tight - they're a *must read* for the day to day search marketer, and a much needed organizational and hierarchical filter for the vast tracts of information in search marketing forums.
I really wanted SEL to win that award though - Andy Beal got it in 2004 and I wanted to bring it back home. For Andy.
My campaigning for votes consisted of sprucing SEL up - adding the nav hacks you see on the side there (as long as you're not just reading me in bloglines) and adding a "vote SEL for best blog" link to the bottom of every post.
She stated: "I get some delight in my policy not to subscribe to any blogs that ask for my vote. That's democracy in action."
In the comments someone stuck up for us self promoters to which Hamilton replied: "It just turns me off a blog when they ask for votes. Like campaigning for a popularity contest."
As a consummate, unabashed, brilliant and innovative self promoter I took offense. And then I took action.
My first-draft response in her comment section was indignant and stiff (there were 3 drafts of that first one I think, before I settled on the right tone).
I erased it and decided to go the stupid/funny route, which is always far more entertaining for me anyways (why I give a big, dopey smile and a thumbs up to people who cut me off on the highway instead of the middle finger).
This set off a lengthy exchange, of which the following is an excerpt:
Garrett French so uh... how do you usually pick your presidential candidates?
(!!!!vote SEL as most excellent SEM BLOG!!!) http://www.searchenginelowdown.com/2006/06/big-thanks-to-marketingsherpa-readers.html
HeatherLeigh There are marketing bloggers running for president?
Garrett French I will be running for president in 2008.
plus: http://www.blogforamerica.com/
HeatherLeigh Only one shameless link drop per reader please
Garrett French hey! it's not my fault! your comments hyperlink automatically!
I might be a lowly d-list blogger scrounging in the gutters of my blog - and in marktd (dot) com, poor besmirched-by-me marktd - for a vote of approval from the mainstream of marketing thought, but I would *never* stoop to actually adding an HREF in someone's blog comments.
OK I ADMIT IT I WOULD!!!
I'm HONGRY for that MarketingSherpa award! I want it bad!
If that turns you off, then maybe we should just take a little time off, give each other some space. Maybe in time we can be friends.
In the mean time here's a link to Brittney Spears' personal blog: (omitted by board of blog decency)
and here's a link to ALL the marketing bloggers who've never once shilled for themselves about anything: (invalid request - no results found)
(...when I run for president in 2008 I'll see if I can do something about people like me ;)
So, anyways, I had fun battling Hamilton, and our exchange is a great case study/tool in the tool box for folks seeking to engage people online who have a strongly held and differing point of view from their own.
...so long as they happen to be clever, good sports like Heather who are willing to approve humorously didactic comments.
And, well, it's never to early to start: !!!VOTE SEL FOR BEST BLOG 2007!!! Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive
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Trumalia: a Search-ertainment Engine for Riddle Lovers and Artists Trumalia sent me a press release a couple months ago and I sent back an email interview.
I was intrigued by the idea - a search engine with a built-in riddle with cash for rewards - but I never got super excited about their execution and never posted their responses to my questions. I'm kind of a dick like that.
I got another email recently from dauntless Trumalia PR rep Irene Huhulea to let me know that the first riddle got solved.
...I guess I didn't realize quite how involved the riddle actually was... this is from the press release:
The Kammers spent a frenzied day flying to and from the Californian Anza Borrego Desert in order to dig up their prize. “Well it was quite a trip I can tell you that…we managed to get to the location in CA around noon local time…we spent the better part of an hour digging underneath it [a false lead] to no avail. Refusing to give up, however, we referred back to our GPS device, and found the exact spot to which the numbers directed us. It was then that we noticed a rock all by itself next to a bush...and the rest, as they say, is history”.
