Browsing Tag

tools

It’s official! I suck

That’s right – honesty is the best policy. So in full disclose this is Just a traffic update, yesterday was the worst traffic this blog has had since I’ve been paying attention! (Nov. 07). That’s right, celebrate the little things, because it appears y’all are transitioning to rss readers. Thanks team!

Maybe it is that no one is searching of relevant terms for what I’m writing about, so let’s highlight the top 10 search items, since we have analytics.

  1. bob’s ichthyosaur – A Great book and apparently the top search term.
  2. what is scientific management – High school students everywhere are googling.
  3. twing – Very cool, cool people
  4. mbifm – A made up acronynm, which apparently means Member of the British Institute of Facilities Management.
  5. calculating gross margin
  6. danielle pribbernow – Chick on the Check out blog, wonder if it’s just her searching on herself? Way too much traffic for a Wal-Mart employee. No I mean WAY TOO MUCH.
  7. dijouri – I made up this name for my second son, 12 years old. I think this IS my son searching on himself or people trying to figure out if I made up his name or people looking for movie made in 2003.
  8. things i am thankful – This is encouraging.
  9. afro – Right on.
  10. giggly quotes – Who searches on giggly quotes?

So if you don’t find anything interesting above interesting, perhaps one of the top 10 “trafficked” pieces, mainly produced via keywords – which you will notice via the relationships between keywords above and titles below. That being said,I REALLY am partial to the Stuck in the Middle series — and — I like the Mosaic piece the most, mainly because it plays well in my head. Yup, I’ve sucked you into a replay post, but a replay of posts everyone else seemed to like too, or at least this is 10 most visited posts here.

  1. Lessons Learned: What is scientific management
  2. 100 Things I am thankful for… – A thanksgiving post
  3. Spatially Relative: A community’s place… – A piece about a book I read
  4. About – Self-explanatory
  5. 5 Ways YOU can launch a Twitter stream remediation program – geeky thing I wrote and scoble called it geeky, that scoble effect is a real thing.
  6. Lessons Learned: How to calculate Gross Margin
  7. 10 Themes and concepts for YOU to blog on
  8. 10 Tips for dealing with the fact that you will never leave your Job
  9. WANTED: Social Media Antagonist
  10. The Death of Marketing? Mix it up.

Hopefully the new folks that have added me to your reader find some of these interesting. Cheers!

April 16, 2008 by
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5 Incomplete Thoughts on Social Media

Remember the title….

1. Manufactured Market?

There is so much noise about the market opportunity and the necessity to fund community initiatives for enterprises but little has materialize in respect to direct revenue and meaningful metrics. This is a challenge for traditional marketers on many levels and the type of topics I suspect are being at the Forrester Marketing conference. There is a after the show workshop that asserts the following which might be close to revenue:

Experiments with rich media, blogging, RSS, and social networks show how dynamic marketing techniques can touch on buyers’ emotions, educate and persuade them, measure interactions more effectively, and generate additional business.

2. Perpetual Social Markets

Shel’s interviews of Jeremiah Owang and the Sea World folks are both emblematic of the challenges of linking social media investments to a return. How can you effectively measure and manage social media as a growth engine? Examples exist where a specific event or a series of inferences can be leveraged to assume the impact of social media, as evidenced in the description of Sea World video at Fast Company:

Measuring social media is one of the pain spots for the enterprise. As Kami Huyse, says in this clip of her client SeaWorld San Antonio. “It all depends on what you measure.” …

What to measure indeed – hits, downloads….. Ultimately most businesses measure revenue from Marketers, so perhaps Sea World is an anomaly and most businesses know how to convert the social media marketing budget to revenue and understand how to successfully deploy/develop a community. Let’s see if this is the case from Shel’s interview of Jeremiah, you probably only need to listen for say, the whole thing:

3. Social Media as Infrastructure

With the metric challenges and elusiveness of revenue is social media a function of retention more so than demand? If marketers are unable to deliver/verify incremental new revenues base on investment, should the metric hunt move to revenue retention and customer satisfaction?

Cool technology should never be relegated to the “post-transactional” budget fight…..

4. Platforms as Markets

Is Twitter a market? Facebook? Myspace? With increasing platforms for exchange more and more opportunity appears to emerge as populations flock to platforms. Where people gather transactions happen right? There are many example of this in the physical space – Burning Man, dead shows and in the parking lots of panic shows. So if people are gathering, there has to be transactions to be had – right?

Information as currency and messaging as a service continues to be the key commodities being exchanged on social media platforms….

5. Community as a Commoditizer

The transactional efficiencies of social computing by it’s very nature puts downward cost pressure on goods. Ease of comparison, ease of purchase and ease of access to other consumers/product customers. Ease of discovery. Product differentiation through a cost center represents…

Maybe the title should have been 5 Incoherent Thoughts…

~cheers!

April 11, 2008 by
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10 Themes and concepts for YOU to blog on

This is essentially a list of some ideas which have been sitting on my iPhone for a while.  I’ve even gone as far as crafting 3 drafts which have been drafts for over 6 months.   To that end,  I would like to share these blog project concepts for YOU to use.  Below are the ideas for you to blog on.

  1. Can sales grow a market? – A concept of how sales activity can influence not only a single entities execution in the market, but actually GROW a market.  This could be any functional group – marketing, customer support…
  2. Marketing as Geography – What are the common themes and areas of expertise shared across discipline.
  3. Business Travel Best Practices – Would be cool to have some very bTravel oriented lifehacks. I bet other people would dig this as well.
  4. How do you explain social media to friends? – What is your elevator pitch when explaining social media. Can you get it narrowed down to 140 characters?
  5. The 3 differences between product management and product marketing – plus or minus 2.
  6. Share YOUR 3 Favorite blogs no one knows about – Who, Where and Why
  7. The current state of X is unsustainable – Business practices, political activities, environmental actions…..
  8. My favorite country to visit is XXX? Business travel or vacation destination, you don’t even have to have been there, just explain.
  9. Share 3 wordpress template authors: Finding templates are a bear, who do you like? let folks know.
  10. Is business blogging effective? How do you see this phenomenon? What are the key metrics to track? Is the ROI really the return on influence?

If you find one of these useful, consider linking back to spatially relevant as I would like to see what great ideas you share.

March 23, 2008 by
(4)

All sphunn out

So I started my little tool initiative last week with a little help from Kevin Shea of Twing. This post’s tool is Sphinn, I was reminded of it because of a Twitter post which lead me to Social Media Mom. As an aside, Twitter does in fact make blogging just a little more fun and generally improves the conversation.

Social Media Mom (SMM) is a fun little blog, which taunted me to Sphinn for several articles I read, but not being a user I didn’t. SSM’s header is peppered with tools including Mixx link and Propeller, so I now have 3 posts because of 1 tweet. Mixx and Propeller are in currently in progress – a little more complex and extended content. Sphinn’s content is a considerable more narrow – focused on the SEO and SEM segment, with a dash of social media and news. Sorta news, kinda like Reno is sorta like Vegas – both have gambling. Yup – Sphinn is the Reno of social news, it has voting just like Digg. That’s my metaphor and I’m sticking to it! Sphinn has ads too, just like any good SEO oriented site, one of the better ones was a Ninja ad.

Be a SEO Ninja

Yes – a SEO Ninja! That IS a lofty goal. Question: Just how much content do you have to consume to become a ninja? I clearly would like to be all stealthly and DEADLY while killing it with ad based revenue. I spent the better part of the week experiencing social media through the Sphinn lens, mainly because of that ad. Phinn is essentially what you would think from a content perpective being kin folk of Search Engine Land and all. This is essentially where social media tweekers hang to get thier next fix of tips, tricks and search algorithm updates. There is one BIG twist – a fully engaged conversational community.

Despite the extremely limiting taxonomy, the community is an engaged and passionate group of folks. Quality of the content is managed by an actively engaged community, example conversational comments below from a single post around fake articles:

What’s more annoying? A story is submitted to Sphinn and the story may not be true? Or readers assume that the person who submitted the story is the one who created the untruth? Don’t shoot the messenger….

or

So its ok for people to submit a bunch of junk on Sphinn and waste my time by lowering the signal to noise ratio? Submitters’ reputation on Sphinn depends in part on a submitter pushing quality content.…

It is this very core community value which essentially provides all the relevant headline content for SEO in an easy to reference list of top Sphunned articles. The popular Sphinns for a segment are more or less quintessential nuggets by category. There is one interesting thing about the “optics” of the community’s content; there seems to be a challenge to get to 300 sphinns, two digit rankings are the norm. The highest Phinn, Seattle SEO John Andrews challenges Sphinn to top 300 Sphinns, has not yet reached the elusive 300 since August. I find this a little odd with such a search engine optimized title (place, category, name, keyword and keyword pluralized), but not when content is limited. You can just put your content into the big watercooler bucket.

Net-Net, I have learned a great deal from the community and the content over the last week, but the value just appears to not be sustainable over time for me. Is Sphinn a victim of it’s own specificity? It IS a capable social news platform that is easy to use. I hope Sphinn take the opportunity to leverage a vibrant community to provide more diverse content with extended categories. With extended content it’s possible 300 will no longer be a relevant number.

March 22, 2008 by
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