Interviewed by John Phillippe at zsalvo.tv around seo and social media

Posted on | September 19, 2011 | No Comments

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I spent some time a couple weeks back with John Phillippe from www.zsalvo.tv. We had a wide ranging conversation touching on search optimization, social media and conversion optimization. John is simply a great guy, and it was a pleasure to talk with someone who understands the depth and nuance needed to run a successful online business today.

The interview can be viewed in it’s two parts, starting here:

Part 1
Part 2 requires you register with the site, which is free.

Our conversation covered what’s important in each area mentioned above, offering up actionable insights that many businesses can apply today. It was a great session as John had the questiosn ready to go and knows the material well. Big thanks to John for the opportunity to chat and share some insights with folks.

Category: Interview, Social Media

Talkin’ ’bout SMX East, startups and crazy cool medallions…

Posted on | September 16, 2011 | No Comments

The Saturday Night Live title card as featured...

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Well, to be honest, there will be no talk of crazy cool medallions. I’ll leave that to the SNL guys and the Barry Gibb Talk Show.

Spent the week in New York City at SMX East and cruising around town meeting with startups. Had a blast. Sheraton Towers is a bit less-than-expected, but so goes hotels in the Big Apple.

SMX East was fantastic. Saw lots of old friends, met loads of new folks and managed to help a few people solve some problems. I spoke on two panels and gave a theatre presentation, in which I managed to transpose some numbers. Thankfully my short deck had them correct and I managed a quick back-track. Other than the people watching and those standing nearby, I don’t think anyone noticed.

The “Making webmaster data actionable” session seemed to go well, and I saw a bunch of positive Tweets afterwords. Yesterday’s “Ask The Engines” session was a hoot! Great panel with Rich from Blekko and Tiffany from Google…and Danny Sullivan moderating. Managed to sneak in one solid zinger with Danny so I’m hoping he let’s me come to the next show…LOL

As for the startups, well, I met with businesses at three incubators around NYC, and zipped to Boston late yesterday for two more events in Beantown. Loving the finished tunnels and the venue was super handy to the airport. I have literally never left an office meeting and 10 minutes later been at the airport – cool.

Want to know the meaning of dedicated?

That would be the gent who had questions for me today, and when we ran out of time, he simply asked if he could drive over to the airport with us to use that time for his questions. He was very polite and a great guy, so we were happy to have him along.

One key thing I was reminded of this week when meeting with the startups was that the focus of most people running businesses is not on online marketing. They gravitate to social media marketing, but SEO et al remains something they want to think about later. And that’s not really an option as investors will want to see well-rounded marketing plans that cover paid search, social, seo and more. By skipping these critical online marketing tactics, it can make the investor wonder and question their desire to invest. Stil, it’s a new space for these budding entreprenuers and I know with a bit of time and effort, they’ll get the bases covered.

Mostly though I encountered smart folks, solving unique problems in inventive ways. They are game to dig in and do the work, not afraid of late nights and believe in their vision. Just the attitude that breeds success. They are also all very smart folks, so if this idea doesn’t pan out, they’re ideally equipped to tackle the next one and make it a winner.

BTW – pizza on the East Coast IS better than on the West Coast. Save the hate mail. I’m right. If you’ve ever had one of each, you know.

Cannot wait for this plane to land so I can get home. Inflight wifi is pretty handy, but nothing beats your home network!

Category: Reality Check, SMX

The Beancast – Talking about branding, marketing and gas station tacos

Posted on | August 8, 2011 | No Comments

Spent some time last night with the ace crew appearing on this week’s Beancast. It was a blast talking about gas station tacos, the new reality of online advertising, porn and bitches. This week the group assembled was:

Bob Knorpp (The Beancast)
Cindy Gallop (If We Ran The World)
Rupal Parekh (AdAge)
Christopher Baccus (AT&T)
…and me…

The Beancast is a marketing podcast recorded each Sunday evening by industry vet Bob Knorpp. Bob has a revolving cast of characters each week, so the discussions, as you can see, cover a wide range of topics and are always entertaining. Bob’s pre-show prep notes can give you an idea of what the topics were this week:

Is Facebook The New Nielsen Family?: Once again Facebook is trying to leverage the wealth of information it has on us for the sake of profit. They’ve announced a new partnership with Nielsen that could bring demographic accuracy to the online ad space. Now is this partnership between Facebook and Nielsen really as important as it seems? They claim that this tracking of ads will be as, if not more, effective than their TV model of tracking family viewership — are there holes in this claim? Isn’t this opening another pandora’s box over privacy — can Facebook really afford another privacy battle with competition heating up from Google? Another study out last week showed that most Facebook fans of local businesses aren’t local to that business. The concern was that businesses need to target locally better, but does it also reveal that we still don’t know how to assign relevance to relationships with brands — will this tracking be able to get to intangibles like the person travels a lot or orders online?

The Plan For Foursquare Pages: Not to be outdone by the bigger players, Foursquare announced it will be expanding it’s branded pages offering. Up til now only companies could apply for these pages, but soon any of us could throw up a check in page. BeanCast page here we come! This is obviously a good growth move for the company, but could it also hurt the the service with a glut of irrelevant content? Do users really desire more content than check-ins, tips and the game? What about the rumor in the NY Post this past week that Foursquare plans to start charging brands for their official pages — can Foursquare do what even Facebook hasn’t been able to achieve?

Product Placement As A Regulation End-Run: Advertising to kids has become a hot button issue and a wave of regulations are thwarting marketers from promoting products like fast food to young people. But these marketers seem to have a found a loop hole by exploiting more and more product placements as their means of keeping their products in front of their audiences. Ethics aside for a second, is it wise for marketers to be doing this or is this just a desperate move that will draw additional outrage and regulation? What options do marketers have when their products aimed at kids are under fire? When does a brand have to come to terms with the fact that their problem is not a marketing one, but a product one?

Mobile’s Need For Simplicity: A great article by Kunur Patel over at AdAge.com this week highlights some of the major obstacle to the growth of mobile advertising in the US. I (Bob) read this article and am I right in distilling the problem down to a need for simplicity? Is the problem really the complexity of different platforms and multiple ad creation or are marketers just being too resistant to the new way of things where you can’t just shoot a commercial in one format and send copies to all the stations? Would standardization really fix things in the end — isn’t the real problem results? Would advertisers take on even the most complex system if it proved itself to be more effective than the old system?

The Problems With Promoted Tweets: Finally, some trouble is brewing in the Twitter ad offerings. Brands are once again questioning the ethical problems of having their promoted tweets appearing right alongside uncurated topics that can be anything from Hitler discussions to pornography. Does Twitter need to do a better job of policing trends or do brands need to get a better understanding of advertising in the social spaces?

And here are all the link you’ll need to hear us chatter about those topics:

Subscribe to The BeanCast Marketing Podcast

Show notes for Episode 163 of The BeanCast Marketing Podcast

The direct file link to the mp3 so you can Listen to Episode 163 of The BeanCast Marketing Podcast

The iTunes link for The BeanCast.

The iTunes link for Fast Takes.

The Fast Takes RSS feed.

The BeanCast AudioBoo Page.

The Beancast Zune Link.

The iTunes link for Ad Age Outlook.

Hit the link if you’re interested in learning about the gas station tacos, the reference to “bitches” ewas because Cindy noted many younger Facebook users are creatively tagging friends with the “spouse” flag. I noted I would request a “bitch” option be instituted by Facebook, because I wanted to make Bob my bitch. And that reference to porn? Well… Cindy will explain that shortly over here…

Category: podcasts

Paul Allen – Idea Man – autobiography wrap up

Posted on | August 4, 2011 | No Comments

Historic Microsoft photo of Paul Allen and Bil...

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I actually finished reading Paul Allen’s book a while ago. I’ve been trying to balance my thoughts on it since then.

Maybe its the case with most autobiographies, but you could be forgiven for thinking this is a book or bragging – founded a huge tech company, funded commercial space flight, owned sports teams, had pro atheletes playing ball in his backyard – any one of these would be a dream for most people, yet here Paul lays bear all he has done to date.

It would be tempting to call BS – if it weren’t all true.

I’m definitely interested to hear more about the Microsoft story from other sources, and I can readily see how Paul’s book caused a fluff upon release.

Overall, I’d recommend the book, but be ready. It can get a bit long at times if your tastes don’t align with area of focus in Paul’s life. I’m not really into sports, so much of his content on dealing with sports stars, or coaching issues was just something for me to get through. I am interested in sailing and yatchs, though Paul only mentions this aspect of his life in passing. But all this is a personal point of view – I’m sure most people will be fascinated with it all.

I did find many areas fo his life highly engaging, though, and reading through those sections I simply couldn’t get enough. Paul has given much to the world, and continues to do so today.

So, in the end, I think the book is worth reading…though as with any one person’s recounting, sometimes there is more to a given story that what one person recounts.

Paul Allen charity giving $2.5M for arts, food aid, job programs (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Category: Uncategorized

Paul Allen’s Idea Man and other books worth reading

Posted on | April 28, 2011 | 1 Comment

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I’m reading Paul Allen‘s new book, Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft and thoroughly enjoying it. He does a solid job of bringing the reader along to hear the story of Microsoft from his perspective. I’m beginning to think I should have kept up my childhood hobbies of rebuilding radios and playing with my TRS-80 computer…LOL

This is the first every biography that I’ve read, and I have to say it’s pretty interesting. I bought it on a whim via the Kindle app on my Win7Phone and I’m darn glad I did. It’s an interesting recounting of the history of Microsoft from an intimate insider’s point of view. While you may be tempted to think you know the cast of characters, and what they are like, I’ll admit the story is opening my eyes a bit.

We all know how the story ends, with Microsoft becoming a global leader, but uncovering the history, in detail, of the very early days, and some of the pivotal decisions Paul and Bill Gates made is inspiring. It’s all too easy to look back on the history of Microsoft and just assume it “happened”. The fact is, it was a huge risk and more than a little luck helped things along.

Thought I’m not entirely through the book, I recommend Idea Man to anyone interested in interesting life stories.

A couple other books I read last year that still inspire me are Online Marketing Heroes: Interviews with 25 Successful Online Marketing Gurus and Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World’s Top Bloggers.

These two books offer a collection of interviews with some of the best known names in each area. Each interview is worth reading, with the author managing to get the participants to reveal information about what it took to become successful. I found Blogging Heroes to be not just inspiring, but also genuinely helpful.

OK, I’m heading back to keep reading Idea Man. Thanks Paul, for the interesting life you’ve lived, and for sharing the story.