There’s a little riff on SEO Black Hat about abandoning a shopping cart when they display a coupon code box and you don’t have one. I have to say, while I wouldn’t use the language he does, that. Yes. I totally do a search for the coupon code when I see that box. Then I always find an expired code. And. Abandon my shopping cart because I think I could be getting a better deal. You’re not alone.
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If you ask Andy Sack about starting a company going after the online local space, he’ll tell you, don’t do it. If I were an entreprenuer going after the local space, I wouldn’t ask him if I should. You already know what he’ll say. Instead, I’d ask what worked. And. What didn’t.
I also disagree with Andy when he says it will be the big guys that get traction in the local space. I think it will be a little guy that has the patience to make it work. Sort of like Craig from Craigslist.
Does the word aggressive have a positive or negative connotation? Does it matter if it used like - They have an aggressive sales force. Or. She’s an aggressive player. My wife says more negative than positive. I say positive. Unless you intentionally make it negative by adding - Overly, or something else that implies excessiveness.
If someone described your daughter as aggressive would you be offended? Not me. I think it’s a compliment and I try to instill a degree of aggressiveness in my young daughters.
I wonder how much stress Jerry Yang is feeling. As a small company CEO, when things go poorly, I feel stress to resolve the issue. Sometimes I exercise. Sometimes I read. And sometimes, I just walk.
I wonder how Jerry deals with it.
Calacanis asked a question about how to buy traffic. Two years ago this was doable for the average person willing to put in the time. Today. It’s much harder. Especially if you are trying to arbitrage paid clicks from Google with AdSense because of the new quality score guidelines.
Now, it’s difficult to scale, but buying very tail keywords combined with semantic SEO techniques to drive a high quality score can still be done. It’s just very limited.
The semantic portion is understanding what phrases and context needs to be on a landing page for specific key words to increase the quality and drive down the click price. Again, tough to scale and arbitrage. In most cases you need a more valuable action to make it a profitable endeavor.
Just a few thoughts on indifference. I recently read that the Jesuits (a christian religious order) wanted their members to be indifferent. Indifferent to money. Indifferent to power. Indifferent to authority. Indifferent in that they could take it. Or. Leave it. The Jesuits taught that when people are indifferent they can focus on the major initiative untainted by alterior motives.
Would the democrats be better off if we were indifferent to Obama or Hillary? Would our customers be better served if we were indifferent to profits?
The only way I see a group, a party, or a company can benefit from indifference is if they have one defined mission.
I rarely get this question from someone we don’t hire, but today, I received this email.
Thank you for getting back to me and I’m sorry that I wasn’t a right fit for the job although I was very eager and highly interested about the position.
If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you from your discussion … can provide me with some interviewing advice. I would like to know how I could improve and what my weak areas were. It would really help me in my job search process.
Since this was an engineering position, we’ll assume you have the technical chops. But, if you’re a college hire you need to make up for experience. Here is my quick reply…
If I could give you a tip or two.
1. Use the product as much as you can before interviewing.2. Know competitors and have questions and insights ready to ask.
3. Make a site or two as home projects so you can demo them. Maybe even a facebook app.
I think the big thing to stand out is to demonstrate amazing initiative when you’re just coming out of college. This will help separate you from more experienced candidates.
There has been some quality discussion on California gay marriage ruling lately. Interesting to read the diverse perspectives. It’s wrong because California voters were ignored? What’s the definition of marriage? Religious zealots upset? Stay out of peoples lives…
Seems like lots of people have something to say about it.
Long before social networks started becoming the new portal, the primary communication tools (email, chat) of portals struggled to monetize users. But, services like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail offer a sticky service that keeps users coming back over and over again. $.25 CPMs for domestic traffic may be considered pretty good in these environments which is similar to what social networks earn today. The value in the communication service is the ability to offer high value editorial content to the huge audiences these services attract. Think of email as a funnel and the programming around it as a science to heard users into high value context like search, financial tools, shopping, and researching cars.
Social networks are largely communication platforms that are similar to email. My belief, the key to monetize the users and increase the value of the visitor is to create context around the actions beyond communicating (email). This is where advertisers will pay premium CPMs and where applications built on top of the social networks have huge opportunities to create experiences with valuable context.
The next thing social networks need to realize is that they have the opportunity to control the “start” experience of an internet visitor. This means becoming the homepage for every visitor. There are three hugely valuable things that happen when you become the starting point at scale. One is the ability to direct traffic at scale via editorial programming. This needs to be done at a personalized level, but will still offer scale in reach to advertisers. The second thing is the massive scale that advertisers get when they purchase ads like on the homepage of Yahoo or MSN. There aren’t many places this reach can be purchased and it’s expensive inventory that is sold out quickly. Lastly is search. As social networking sites get better at combining social search with general search this will lead in a shift from people heading to Google to people searching within the social networks. By making search a more prominent feature, this will lead to dramatic increases in monetization.
It wasn’t all that long ago when Kobe was accused of raping a women in Colorado. At the time, many of his sponsors started distancing themselves from him. Fast forward a few years … he wins his first league MVP, the Lakers win the West and look like they’ll go deep in to the playoffs.
From a marketing perspective, has his personal brand fully recovered? If not, what would it take?
My feeling is if it hasn’t by now, it never will.
