Marketing Tom - Internet Marketing

You Don't Know Anything Unless You Teach It - Peter Drucker

As mentioned in a previous article, I have been re-reading a book called Soloing by Harriet Rubin and this has led me to read up a little on Peter Drucker, who she actually interviewed whilst 'Soloing'.  One of the questions that she poses to him is how he keeps ahead of all the developments he needs to know. Here is part of his answer, from Peter's Principles:

"Knowledge by definition makes itself obsolete," says Drucker. "Skills last forever.

"My family name, Drucker, means printer," he says. "For centuries, my family never needed to learn anything new. And when archaeologists began to dig out the ruins of Emporia--the greatest trading city of the Mediterranean in Hellenistic times--sometime around 1950, they found the tools the craftsmen used. Except for the screwdriver, which is of medieval invention, there is no tool unearthed from Emporia that is any different from those craftsmen use today. Any shoemaker or cabinetmaker would be just as at home in ancient Emporia as in Berkeley today. A craftsman learned as a child all that he would need for the rest of his or her working life."

But in our knowledge economy, says Drucker, "if you haven't learned how to learn, you'll have a hard time. Knowing how to learn is partly curiosity. But it's also a discipline."

"You don't know anything unless you teach it" has been Drucker's mantra for learning to learn. He's taught American history, Japanese art, religion, and statistics. To teach what you don't yet know helps you learn more than just a new set of facts; you practice the discipline of learning to learn, since new subjects require learning new concepts.

I deliver eMarketing courses at least once a month and can actually relate to exactly what he says. I would also add that to really understand your subject area (in my case eMarketing), you need to be able to apply and put into practice what you have learnt/taught. How could I possibly deliver a course if I haven't gone through the pains and succeeded on client eMarketing campaigns?

Cover Your Online Tracks With Hacktivismo

Just came across an interesting article on Smartbro's Ups And Down about a new "Firefox-based" browser which allows for anonymous webs surfing. Apparently it has no installation which means that it can be used from a USB drive. According to a press release:

Hacktivismo, an international group of computer security experts and human rights workers, just released Torpark, an anonymous, fully portable Web browser based on Mozilla Firefox. Torpark comes pre-configured, requires no installation, can run off a USB memory stick, and leaves no tracks behind in the browser or computer. Torpark is a highly modified variant of Portable Firefox, that uses the TOR (The Onion Router) network to anonymize the connection between the user and the website that is being visited.

As Smartbro says:

When you use Torpark, it will show different ip address every a few minutes to the website your visiting. For example if you are in London, Torpark will show the website that your in Australia and a few minutes it will show that you are in China.

Just think of the implications this could have on accurate stats reporting for websites amongst other things.

A Simple Tale of a Fisherman

I have just started re-reading Harriet Ruben's excellent book, Soloing, where she describes her journey from corporate life to 'soloist'. According to the Amazon review: "The life of a "soloist," as she came to describe this new professional direction, turned out to be both challenging and exhilarating--and one, Rubin immediately realized, that she would never trade for a return to big business."

Towards the start of the book she offers readers a very interesting 'joke':

There was a fisherman working alone in a beautiful, seaside village. He went out every morning in the forever-blue waters and caught one spectacular fish each day. A marketing whiz happened to be vacationing in the village and said to the fisherman, 'Why catch only one fish? If you're out there anyway, why not catch a hundred, sell ninety, and make a big profit?'

"'I love my life the way it is', the fisherman said. 'Why would I want to do more?

"'Because then you could get rich, start a fishery, move to a place like Silicon Valley and bring in sophisticated, technological systems to market all the fish. I'll be your partner and after a year or two or five of endless hours and almost never seeing the sun shine, we can take the fishery public and make millions'

"And what would I do with the millions?', asked the fisherman.

"'You want millions' explained the whiz kid, 'so you can take your millions, buy a place in a little fishing village like this, and spend whole days doing nothing but catching one perfect fish'"

I actually know a couple of people who couldn't understand why the fisherman wouldn't see the argument of the whiz kid's argument!

An Inconvenient Truth from Al Gore

I'm looking forward to watching this and just hope it has the massive impact that is required to make some governments sit up and change course!

       

Six Apart To Host A Series of Business Blogging Seminars

Looks like Six Apart, makers of Typepad, will be presenting a series of Business Blogging Seminars over the next few months. They will be held in cities across the US (wish they could do a couple in the UK!), including New York, Boston, San Francisco and Chicago and will be headed up by Anil Dash, the company's Chief Evangelist - or should that read Brother Dash!

Here are some of the topics that will be covered:

• Learn how to create effective blogging strategies and policies
• Hear dynamic use cases from specific industries
• See the latest blogging technologies demonstrated, including RSS and podcasting
• Have your specific business blogging questions addressed in our Q&A sessions

How to Build Your Weblog Presence

Shel Israel, over at Naked Conversations, does a neat interview with Kami Wilson Huyse, a PR Consultant and blogger (Communication Overtones), where he asks her about blogging and PR. If you look to the start of the post you will see how Shel first became aware of her:

She started dropping comments onto my blog when I wrote on marketing and PR-related subjects. Sometimes she agreed with me and other times not. But each time, she added something of value to the conversation.

Now and then, she took the conversation over to her own blog where she took it in new directions. That started me reading her other posts and I was impressed. When I thought she had something useful or interesting, I started pointing my readers to it as a service to them.

Whether you're new to blogging or an experienced professional, this is a very simlple technique of building your community and getting other bloggers to your site. And I think the two critical words that he uses here are added value. Whether you're blogging or contributing to a forum, you should always add value - if they like what you say they will come visit.

Coming back to the actual inerview she has someting interresting to say about the impact blogs have had on her business:

It has had an immediate impact. My business has already expanded by 30 percent this year alone as a direct result of the blog, and I have contracts in hand that show at least a 50 percent increase next year. I have also been able to sufficiently grow my network to implement the virtual agency concept that I envisioned when I launched My PR Pro. I am now working with a number of talented independent practitioners and agencies across the U.S. and the world. The Internet and social media tools have made possible a distributed workgroup of specialists that stretches across geographic boundaries.

WOW!

And she only started blogging last Novermber.

This Is Not Strictly Related to Blogging or SEO - It's Actually Far More Important

I've never actually asked people for money on this site but today I wil break this rule and ask you for some money on behalf of a fantastic UK-based charity. On Sunday one of my best friends, Jerry Sandford, will be running the the Bristol Half Marathon (UK) and trying to raise money for a children's charity called the Make A Wish Foundation which helps grant wishes to children and young people from the age of 3 to 17 years old who have life-threatening or terminal conditions. In the photo you will see a young boy, with a life-threatening heart condition, being granted the wish of seeing Il Divo in concert in Cardiff, uk.

This is the link to the donations page - please give whatever you can.

One Way to Monetize Your Blog

I have been trying to think up some new ways that I can monetize both this blog and my other blog, Mad About Madrid, and came across a great idea from Oh My That's Awesome. On their website they have an Awesome Sponsor area (top left-hand side of their blog) where they introduce their sponsor for the month and below that feature an advert for the company. Here's this month's (September, 2006):

Awesome Sponsor

• Say hello to our Awesome Sponsor for September, Wishingfish! We're incredibly excited about this sponsorship, since we spend all our free time and spare change there anyway.

I also like the light-hearted way they answer questions on sponsorship of this section:

How much is it?
Well, it all depends on how big your ad is! We accept vertical badges 150 pixels wide and between 50-600 pixels in length. (At this size, ads stay above the fold of the site and are easily visible and clickable.) Based on those terms, the price is going to vary between very cheap and incredibly reasonable.
Do I have to sponsor a whole month?
Of course not! Unlike some other weblog sponsorship programs out there, at Awesome you choose the length of time, you help us set the price, you get all the credit. Done and done!
What kinds of retailers sponsor Awesome?
The smart kind, that's who. And typically, we market things to our readers that we know they'll enjoy and ultimately want to buy, so it's a win-win for everyone.

I think there may be some mileage in this way of advertising.

Gore Vidal on 9/11 (2002)

Just revisted an interesting article by Gore Vidal that I read 4 years ago - called The Enemy Within and written in The Indepedent newspaper. For the most part I would say that he's bang on the button. Here's one interesting quote from it:

We have only outdone the Romans in turning metaphors such as the war on terrorism, or poverty, or Aids into actual wars on targets we appear, often, to pick at random in order to maintain turbulence in foreign lands.

Do You Write With Passion?

If you're blogging, this caption should be your mantra. All the best blogs are written with a passion for what they write. Be passionate about your subject and let that passion come out on your blog.

Interesting Widgets on Typepad

I'm doing some research for a client at present on the feasibility of adding certain tools on to a Typepad blog and thought that it would be a good idea to highlight some of these tools on this blog:

Trumba
Trumba offers Typepad users a neat way of displaying events online in a calendar format.

Vizu
If you're looking to add some interactivity on your blog or are looking to tap into what your adueince is interrestd, you should head over to Vizu.

Gabbly Chat
Gabbly is a neat widget that allows visitors to your site to cht to each other whilst reading your blog. I needn't have to tell you, however, the potential problems that this could create!

Feedblitz
Feedblitz is a great tool and allows users to sign up for notification of any new articles which have been posted on your blog. I use it on my Mad About Madrid site and it has proved to be very useful - you can add a chicklet which indicates the number of susbcribers to the feed, too.

Blogs of Note - Innocent Drinks

If you live in the UK, you will probably have heard of Innocent Drinks - the company that makes delicious juice and smothies. From their weblog, which is now featured on Typepad, you can read about their humble origins:

In the summer of 1998 when we had developed our first smoothie recipes but were still nervous about giving up our proper jobs, we bought £500 worth of fruit, turned it into smoothies and sold them from a stall at a little music festival in London. We put up a big sign saying 'Do you think we should give up our jobs to make these smoothies?' and put out a bin saying 'YES' and a bin saying 'NO' and asked people to put the empty bottle in the right bin. At the end of the weekend the 'YES' bin was full so we went in the next day and resigned.

The weblog offers an interesting insight into life in the business, its ethics, the people in the company, some of their thoughts and a lot more. This is what corporate blogging is all about - taking the lid of the company and letting customers and other interested parties have a peek inside. Corporate blogs can help businesses display their true personality in a way that sometimes can't be seen through their products and also advertising. Here are some good examples of personality from Innocent Drinks:
Free Lunch Thursday
Unit 6 Here We Come
Building a Festival
Rainforest 1 Burgers 0
Milk, Two Sugars
Please Keep off the Grass

Boy! I think I'll try to find out how to work for these guys.

Looks Like Google Has Launched Click To Call in the UK

Whilst over at Search Engine Roundtable I noticed an article which says that Google may have launched Click 2 Call in the UK. This comes about 7 months after I talked about it on this blog. Here's a screen grab of one of the adwords:

On clicking the adword, you don't get taken to the destination site but simply add your phone details on the Google results page:

Google Supplemental Results and Marketing Tom

Over the past month I have noticed that a high number of the 400-500+ pages on this site which were previously indexed on this site have now been moved into supplemental results - in fact only 100 pages now exist on the Google index. Here is what Google has to say about supplemental results:

Supplemental sites are part of Google’s auxiliary index. We’re able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index. The index in which a site is included is completely automated; there’s no way for you to select or change the index in which your site appears.

According to Jim Boykin this is what it generally means to you and me if our site ends up in "Supplemental":

Pages from the "regular" index will almost always show up first for any searches. The only time you’ll usually see "supplimental results" is if there’s not many, or any, results in the regular index. What this means, is that if you’re page about "blue widgets" is in the "Supplemental Results" then you’re screwed as far as having your page rank at all (will not show up at all since there’s pleanty of results for "blue widgets" in a google search. Your only chance of rankings a page that’s in the supplimental results is if someone searched for something super specific like "blue widgets in southbend kansas on market street").

Supplemental Results also tend to have old Google Caches…..in other words, once google has sent them to "Google Hell", they tend not to come back….thus you’ll find pages in the Supplemental Results are dated long ago.

Shit!

Jim identifies 3 main reasons:

1. Duplicate Content - take someone elses content, get sent to Google Hell (Supplemental Results)
2. No Content - create pages with no content (remember the days of directories that would create 1 million pages with only 100 listing?) - empty pages get sent to Google Hell.
3. Orphaned web pages. Pages that no one links to, including yourself.

And 3 solutions:

1. If you stole content - change it.
2. If there’s no content - add some.
3. If it’s orphaned - link to it.

There is a slight flaw in the above though, as many of these pages have links from other sites which have not only been cached but have a decent PR rating! Hang on! - a decent PR rating and cache for discussing something on my page.

Here are some of the supplementals which I will start linking to:

Keyword Links - Try not to 'Click here'!
How to Use Case Studies Properly
Podcasting From the Heart of the Catholic Church
Tracking a DMOZ Editor
Pushing the Boundaries of Podcasting
How to Get People to Complete Online Surveys
Robert Scoble and Shel Israel's Blogging Book - A Case of Open Source Book Writing?

Blogs of Note - Girl Solo in Arabia

Typepad, the blogging tool that powers this site, often features websites that Typepad users have developed - it's a way of showing the wide diversity of blogs that are out in the 'blogosphere' (or are blogs so mainstream that we can say they belong in cyberspace!). Well, I came across an abs olutely fascinating site today called Girl Solo in Arabia.

The weblog is written by Carolyn McIntyre, an experienced guide to the Middle East for Geographic Expeditions, and charts her journeys in the footsteps of Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, which took more place than 680 years ago. So far she has travelled through Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia. Here's what Typepad has to say about it:

Her blog has become an informal guide for travelers planning on going to the Middle East and inspiring verse for those who are afflicted with neverending wanderlust. The most rewarding side effect of following her adventure is discovering more facets to the Islamic world than what we glimpse on nightly news broadcasts.

It really is a fascinating read and, given the current political climate, quite a journey to undertake, too. The information about the places she visits is quite detailed and the pictures really lend to the experience. Some of the pictures and detail which interested me related to the Roman ruins in Tipaza:

Remarkably intact aqueduct which fed the Roman cities of Cherchell and Tipaza. I have no more information - tourism is in its infancy in Algeria and there is a dearth of written material about the sites.

and the

marble courtyard of Al-Azhar Mosque. Built in 969AD by the Fatimids and named for the Prophet's daughter, Fatima al-Zahra, it is the oldest university in the world and is still a center of Islamic theology with students attending from all over the world. The marble courtyard is original...

Well worth a read and will certainly offer good tips if you're planning on visiting any one of these places.

 

Web 2.0 Thoughts

from Gaping Void

Stating the Bleeding Obvious! (It May Work)

Returning from holidays in Madrid last weekend I bought some orange juice at a service station and the message on the bottle got me thinking. If I'm correct it was Robinson's fresh orange juice and the strapline on the front of the bottle went something like this:

"Squeezed Daily in the UK"

Well, why wouldn't it be? Much of the orange juice we drink in the UK is flown in from overseas (as far as I know there are no orange plantations in the country) and we usually add water to the concentrate to make it into juice.

I am sure that every company involved in the making of fruit juice must squeeze oranges every day - otherwise there would be a production problem and the shops wouldn't have fresh orange juice. However, in this case, stating the obvious on the product packaging makes the product offering a far more attractive proposition.

Web 2.0 Projects

If you would like to get an up-to-date list of the latest Web 2.0 projects, head off to Web2logo.com. As Steve Rubel reports Web2logo.com is a visual front end for Web2list. Simply click on the logo and you will get the latest information on that project. If you would like more information and reviews of Web 2.0 technologies, take a look at the Web 2.0 Awards on the Seomoz site.

Danny Sullivan to Leave SEW

Just picked this up from John Battelle about Danny Sullivan leaving Search Engine Watch. He also makes some interesting points about companies making profits off their employees and not cutting them in on the action:

Man, do I know the pain he went through to make this decision. It's very hard to watch something you really love and worked so hard to build continue without you, but when you are not an owner in some way, it's harder still to understand why someone else is taking all the profits, and control, while you do all the work. I know Danny is a very reasonable guy, and the fact that he could not get the new owners of SEW to cut him in on the fruits of all his hard work means the folks running his ex-company are really not paying attention to where value is created in the media world these days.

Danny's 'official' version of events can be found over on his weblog Daggle.

On Flickr and Yahoo!

The Search Engine Watch blog notes that Flickr #1 Photography Site In UK, whilst over on Yahoo!'s Search blog the guys at Yahoo!say that the search engine will now return Flickr images on its main search results pages.