360angles

Google says:

Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.

Experienced SEOs have known this for several years now; the real power of Google’s search algorithm comes from depending mostly on off-site factors to assess a page’s topicality. Never the less, it’s nice to be told this in an official capacity.

Having said that, this isn’t exactly earth shattering. It will save us a grand total of about 10 minutes of labor on every project. I suspect this fact is related to why the keyword meta tag is so worthless. Were it given any serious consideration by the engines (as it once was) it would be way too quickly and easily to exploited (as it once was), so it no longer matters.

It’s a group of approximately 500 Twitter users who are “suggested” to new users when they create an account. The stated purpose is to provide people to watch when you’re starting out. But are there other purposes? Could it be used to reward positive coverage and punish negative coverage? I think we now have some data on that.

There’s no doubt that Twitter has received a lot of help from the press, and much of it is genuine enthusiasm for a communication tool that at least hints at the future of news.

Many of the suggested users are news organizations, reporters, columnists, marketers, and as a result, most have over a million followers. Almost all of the top tech news organizations are on the list. And TechCrunch was one of them until something happened in July as is evident in this TwitterCounter graph.

Dave Winer kind of goes on and on about Twitter using their Suggested User List to their own advantage. The smoking gun is that TechCrunch ran some leaked internal eyes-only Twitter documents on their site in July, and were subsequently dropped from the SUL after enjoying a stint on the list for months.

This is a non-story to me. Why would Twitter freely promote someone who knowingly does them harm? Would you? Twitter is not a public servant. They’re a self-interested company.

Anyway, what I thought was really interesting about this post was the chart showing TechCrunch’s meteoric follower acquisition stopped dead in its tracks once they were removed from the SUL. Michael Arrington bit the hand that feeds and got bitten back- it was a hell of a bite.

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Another apt metaphor (from 2007) is this EDS commercial where people build a plane in flight.

UPDATE: Apparently this is older than dirt. RiderOfGiraffes over at Hacker News managed to dig up a copy (PDF link) from (!)1993.

This article is mostly pseudo-science: lots of charts that (nicely) illustrate the author’s opinion, not data. But when you get down to the bottom, there’s a great little data-driven marketing idea in there:

My recommendation is something called metric of the month.  In metric of the month, you choose a problem area for the next month.  Then you try to find the best metric which is connected to that problem.  Run with the metric for one month, try to improve the reading as much as you can, and then throw the metric away.  Start over with a new metric for the next month.

This way you can maximize on the excitement of the fast initial progress with a new metric.  Our compilation warning chart is no longer useful to us, for example.  It has lost it’s mojo.  So, it makes sense to change focus as soon as that happens, and pick the low hanging fruit from a new area.  It keeps things improving, and helps keep things interesting.

Whatever you do, don’t tell developers to improve on a metric like the corporate operating profit, EBIT, the stock price, or anything like that.  You could just as well tell them to control the weather.

The 7m figure had actually been rounded up from an actual figure of 6.7m. That 6.7m was gleaned from a 2008 survey of 1,176 net-connected households, 11.6% of which admitted to having used file-sharing software – in other words, only 136 people.

It gets worse. That 11.6% of respondents who admitted to file sharing was adjusted upwards to 16.3% “to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it.” The report’s author told the BBC that the adjustment “wasn’t just pulled out of thin air” but based on unspecified evidence.

The 6.7m figure was then calculated based on the estimated number of people with internet access in the UK. However, Jupiter research was working on the assumption that there were 40m people online in the UK in 2008, whereas the Government’s own Office of National Statistics claimed there were only 33.9m people online during that year.

And it goes even further than all that; the original study on which this house of cards is built was commissioned by the music trade body(!) BPI from a company called Jupiter Research. (Recently acquired by Forrester Research.) This is the real stink.

Statistically speaking, extrapolating the larger figure from a small sample size is fine (+/- 2% margin of error), but that’s only if the sample was truly random and the questions asked were unbiased. Considering that a music industry lobbying group commissioned the original study and then fudged on the source, that seems doubtful…

On Monday, the National Football League announced that players, coaches, and other team personnel can use social networks such as Twitter and Facebook during the season.  However, they are prohibited from using social networks starting 90 minutes before a game, through the game, and until post-game interviews are complete.

The rules extend to people representing a player or coach, such as agents, friends and family, and even include the media covering the games.

Twitter has (had?) the potential to pour gasoline on the already very profitable fantasy football movement.

American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. and its subsidiary Pharmacia & Upjohn Company Inc. ( hereinafter together “Pfizer” ) have agreed to pay $2.3 billion, the largest health care fraud settlement in the history of the Department of Justice, to resolve criminal and civil liability arising from the illegal promotion of certain pharmaceutical products, the Justice Department announced today.

That’s about a quarter of annual earnings for Pfizer & Co…

Lack of active participation in social media may be your greatest risk. Your association may not have a formal social media strategy but many of your employees and members (especially chapters) are already participating through LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, FriendFeed or Ning, just to name a few. People are conversing about your association – if they aren’t talking about the association, then you have a larger problem.

Without a social media strategy, you have abdicated your brand by allowing others control the conversation. The conversations are occurring, so your reputation is at risk and the potential harm increases by your lack of effective participation. Your goal is to engage the right people in the right communities with the right conversations. Your association may have a blog, Facebook page, LinkedIn group or Twitter alias but if you are not listening in the right places to the right people all you get is meaningless chatter. Without a social media strategy, your rewards, if any, will be limited and the potential for a disaster is high.

Branded utilities have so much potential; but if the “utility” part isn’t working out, it can actually do more harm for a brand than good. Next time I look for a drink recipe involving rum, I’ll be looking somewhere else.

Apparently, Bacardi’s online Mojito calculator doesn’t do anything(!) that  it is actually  supposed to do. It doesn’t print, it can’t email a friend; it can’t even tell you how much Bacardi stuff you need to buy for your party.

The nice thing about pull vs. push marketing is that the flash-over-substance stuff never gets very far, so it self-segregates some of the noise from the signal. (This post itself may seem to counter that last statement, since I am in fact discussing a broken pull marketing attempt; but I’m thinking of all the broken pull marketing attempts I’ve missed because, well… they were broken.)

If the  mutual benefit proposition to your audience breaks on customer contact, it can be worse than having made no contact at all and end up damaging your brand. At least when the local car salesman yells at me through the radio in echotron-9000-robovoice, he didn’t make it personal by tricking me into opting-in first through a (comprehensively) failed promise of utility.

No campaign is perfect, but if you’re going to put a branded utility out in the market, use it first. Use it a lot.

He invents a new 3D camera system while burning through $200 million over 5 years making Avatar…and the title is in Papyrus? (It also looks a little Jar-Jar Binks for my taste, especially after the seamless and jaw-dropping effects work I saw last weekend in District 9.)

Sam Johnston has a great write up the whole fiasco from start to finish…

That’s too bad for Twitter but it’s great news for the rest of the community as it’s one less tool for locking in Twitter’s rapidly growing microblogging monopoly. People do use the word “tweet” generically (including with non-Twitter services) and if Twitter, Inc. were successful in removing it from the public lexicon then we could all suffer in the long run.

It basically looks like Tweetmarks (ugly but very functional marriage between Delicious and Twitter), Cotweet (gorgeous, business-oriented Twitter client) and TweetPhoto (mostly cleavage, as of this writing…) all beat them to the punch on filing for a “tweet” trademark.

“Apple hates personality stuff and press intrusion. ‘We want to discourage profiles’, an Apple PR tells me stiffly, apparently unaware she is waving a sackful of red rags at a herd of bulls,” Appleyard writes.

Well, at least they made sure that everyone would read it by making the story itself a story as well. It seems like the mistakes of Barbra will forever be relived.

“Friends don’t let friends use IE6,” said Amy Bazdukas, Microsoft’s general manager for Internet Explorer (IE).

Instructor Erik Fadiman will be leading a special 10-Week Dreamweaver Course in [CreativeTechs'] worldwide classroom starting in the fourth week of September.

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.

In the last 30 days…

• Twitter has had a search-centric homepage makeover
• Facebook opened search up to all status messages, notes and shared links users have marked as “public”
• Microsoft (Bing) and Yahoo made nice.

…No wonder Google is doing some tweaking under the hood of their cash cow: search.

The new/revamped search engine looks and feels just like normal Google. All the changes were on the back end. For now, it’s a touch faster to load and it returns more results for the few test queries I’ve run. More will come out about the differences in how Google’s new back end is indexing and crawling the web as we experiment with the new search.

More viable search options means more work for online marketers, but that’s OK with me. When competition starts heating up, consumers win. With the rate of information output these days, we need as many wins in search as we can get.

An April 2009 survey by The Discover Small Business Watch found that only 38 percent of small businesses with five or fewer employees even have a website. A full 62 percent remain “non adopters.” And that number has decreased only three percent since 2007, when 65 percent of small businesses were not on the web.

Don’t let the “5 employees or less” remark soften the blow of this statistic. According to the U.S. SBA Office of Advocacy, that’s over 3.7 million businesses, or in other words 36% of all US businesses have no online presence.

The phrase “no va” (literally “doesn’t go”) and the word “nova” are distinct entities with different pronunciations in Spanish: the former is two words and is pronounced with the accent on the second word; the latter is one word with the accent on the first syllable. Assuming that Spanish speakers would naturally see the word “nova” as equivalent to the phrase “no va” and think “Hey, this car doesn’t go!” is akin to assuming that English speakers would spurn a dinette set sold under the name Notable because nobody wants a dinette set that doesn’t include a table.

Snopes.com unraveled one of the most woven yarns in all of branding and marketing, and they did it two years ago. I heard someone in the industry relate the Chevy Nova misnomer story as recently as last week. (The story goes that a lack of brand identity research lead to naming the car, literally, “no go” in Spanish. Which is then blamed for the product’s failure in that market.)

The iPhone is one big constraint — no keyboard, small screen, few buttons — so designing applications for the iPhone is an exercise in building smart, simple software. Bloated apps on the iPhone? You won’t find many.

This is exactly what keeps me coming back for more; the iPhone App store is chock-full with inspirational software.