Between Stations » nostalgia

Council Bluffs Tourism

Julie — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:42:57 +0000

I somewhat recently (when measured in archaeological time) commented that Council Bluffs is a pit

– a pit where Google happens to be building a data center, in point of fact. Based on an ad in this weekend’s newspaper, I have found a web site that challenges that assertion: the CB Convention & Visitors Bureau site!

Gaming, sporting events, museums, historical sites, nature, annual festivals, performing arts facilities, world-class dining, and comfortable lodging await your reservation.

WOW. And here my college friends mostly talked about the smell of the old Sara Lee plant, and the summer that one of them spent in a plastics manufacuring job making implements for medical examinations of women. Maybe Google looked more at the city’s black squirrel mascot (‘Chipper’), and had stopped-up sinuses when they made their choice, and my friends are just crankys.

Go, Peeps, Go!

Julie — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 02:22:09 +0000

A few shout-outs:

1. To Sarah Bernier, aka Sarita, for her debut at Search Engine Strategies Latino Edition. Her session was blogged over at Search Engine Roundtable.

2. To the legend known as David Temple, who has accepted a position as Region Head of Search, Asia Pacific Region, at Neo@Ogilvy. It seems like only yesterday when I was in a conference room wondering if David was nuts — toughest interviewer ever!

In a truly funny note, when David left his job at FindLaw the first time, Sarah took over his cube. I hope this doesn’t mean she’s going to move to Singapore next.

Can Local Search Replace Directories?

Julie — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 21:59:42 +0000

Understand: I think most major directories, at this point, suck.

Consider:

DMOZ: Mostly broken, and they’ve reached the volunteer organizational size where bizarrities and politics get in the way of either people who want to volunteer, or any of the volunteers being effective.
Yahoo!: Listings are by those who are paying for it. Editorial review is mostly ‘is this site really in this category?’ and ‘is this really a site?’
Business.com: Finicky that you not only be a business, but that you offer B2B services.
Everyone else: either still for-pay, or so minor as to be useless anyway.

These days, people paying to be in are doing it because they know it’s got SEO value, or they’re hoping it does. I’m suspicious of traffic stats to anyone but Yahoo!, given the semi-integration to Yahoo! Search that remains (although less as of late).

Local Search placement seems to be a place where there’s some gooshy Web 2.0 flavor that can be added that can do what directories used to claim to do, but even then didn’t necessarily. Ease of adding a business, even one that doesn’t do Yellow Pages, is easy. Editorial review, to date, is fairly limited.

For a lot of verticals, this could be something major. And the way real estate allocates, it could bump some of the dreadful AdSense farms found for some searches, way down.

My only concern is that should this evolution take place, monetization will go the way of Yahoo! Directory submission, and again pound the little providers.

Shame From the Past: Talking Urinal Cakes

Julie — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 20:32:56 +0000

My pal Paul Jahn, Local Search Geek Extraordinaire — and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune — have revealed that talking urinal cakes were placed locally to discourage drunk-driving on a very drunk weekend in the Cities (St. Pat’s and the WCHA Frozen Five will do that).

True fact: I have purchased bathroom advertising in my past, including, ahem, light-up, audio urinal cakes.

This was not a proud moment in my life.

On the plus side, it did give me something entertaining to discuss on blind dates in that period of time. One of the people I told about this stuck around in spite of my part in such shenanigans being revealed over a cheeseburger. He has NOT insisted on a pre-nup that says ‘no talking urinal cakes ever,’ but I bet it shows up in the vows.

Seize Analytics!

Julie — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 22:43:43 +0000

I spent part of today talking marketing analytics. As I consider the conversation, and analytics as a ’subset’ of the whole online marketing skillset, I think the time has come:

Seize analytics.

In the late 1990s, marketers realized that this Interweb thing might really be worth some energy, and seized control of web sites from corporate IT departments. Brochureware, replete with blink tags and bizarre animated GIFs, slowly evolved to real virtual brand presences. As bandwidth grew, so did the vision marketers attempted to achieve — collaboratively, in the best cases, with the very IT departments they once deposed.

Today, analytics is reaching a similar point, only rather than taking responsibility from IT mavens, marketers need to re-educate the mathematical gurus to look beyond the correlation to the humanity behind. Or, for that matter, get over the stereotypical ‘math is hard!’ mentality that seems to pervade marketing, and learn to run some analysis.

Data is more than numbers. Data tells stories. The very best online marketing analysis is about creating pictures and inferring motivation. The best analytics people spin data points into hypotheses — and ideas to prove or disprove them in ways that impact the bottom line. When your analytics people are too much into numbers, your marketing suffers for it, and you rely too much on reactive analytics, rather than creating paths via predictive analysis.

Some companies have started down this path by creating marketing personas to represent some of their clients, but from outside, it’s often hard to tell how much of the persona development is driven by or applied to their online metrics.

I think one of the great things about online marketing is the diversity of backgrounds you see among practitioners — everyone from social scientists to engineers, statisticians and linguists, and even people with degrees in classical literature whose parents always feared for their employability. It’s time to merge more of those disciplines and cease with silos. Analytics is a fine place to tear down some walls.

Nostalgia: Web 2.0 is the Old Web

Julie — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 00:46:44 +0000

Every so often, I get nostalgic for Days Of Olde(tm) and the early days of the Web. Those magical days when the Web was all Webrings (invariably of people’s D-n-D characters), lists of CDs, and pictures of people’s cats. On GeoCities.

Then I consider several things:

In 1996, I wanted to move from Chicago to Minneapolis. I spent Mondays at the Borders on North Michigan reading the Sunday Star-Tribune for job ads. These days, it’s easy to be totally online with hunting.
Webrings DID invariably include people’s gaming characters.
The blink tag. Holy moly. I had to clean up instances of it even in 2000 when I was working on a major corporate portal. Blink was NEVER a good idea.
MySpace and LiveJournal are fundamentally GeoCities 2.0. You can find lots of “I’m listening to…” things (lists of CDs!) and pictures of people’s cats

Sometimes the whole notion of Web 2.0 cracks me up because in some ways, all Web 2.0 represents is a throwback to people making bizarrely-colored pages on GeoCities. This time, though, it comes with the phat broadband connection to allow for massive, poorly sized images of people’s cats. The inbound link algorithim really dates from something like a topical Webring, which explains why it’s so poorly suited to e-commerce. Web 2.0 is fundamentally about democratization of content — taking back control of the Web from corporations and the corporate shills (like myself) who co-opted it for commerce.

It will be interesting to see where business attempts to ‘use’ Web 2.0 go, and what some of this action means for the traditional link model. It certainly changes the process of SEO to be more about building trust. And possibly about providing more pictures of one’s cats: