What I am reading

URL’s are totally out In Japan, someone has taken the time to study how people really use search. Instead of listing URL addresses, innovative advertisers have started showing images of a search box with recommended search terms. A commenter mentions that this idea is reminiscent of AOL Keywords back in the 90s. Regardless of the origins, the idea is brilliant, assuming you’ve done the SEO footwork to ensure you rank first for your brand keywords.

What I am reading

Will the credit crunch inflate the internet bubble? In this article, Techcrunch ponders the impact of the latest credit squeeze, as ex-bankers and ex-real estate agents search for new careers. Are we about to see another mass migration of talent to the internet industry? Those of us with a few years to our careers can remember the first bubble, the so-called “dotcom boom” of the late 90s when everyone wanted to be in Silicon Valley, “eyeballs” where the key metrics, old ways of valuing businesses were tossed away, and everything eventually ended in tears. As with all domains of rapid innovation, the world of Web2.0 has been balancing on the brink of another bubble for sometime, with some very dubious business models once again appearing in our midst. For better or worse, we may be about to revisit some of the irrational exuberance of 90s.

What I have been watching

Fight for Kisses. This brilliant website provides a glimpse into the (near) future of consumer marketing. I can only imagine how many amused fathers and mothers have forwarded the video trailer to friends and family, effectively giving instantaneous viral momentum to the marketing campaign among the target customer segment.

The heavy Flash website is undoubtably a stumbling block for search spiders which draw a blank when scurrying around for content, keywords, and links. Yet, the website is clearly highly visited and very top-of-the-mind among certain internet users. There are certainly ways to assist the search spiders and bring the website content into search indexes, but why bother when your customers are busy propogating the promotional campaign through e-mail forwarding and blog postings?

What I have been running

WT Detector. An excellent companion script to the indispensible WT Debugger, which I mentioned in a previous post. I confess to occassionally checking out the source code of favorite websites in an attempt to figure out which Web Analytics software is running behind the scenes. WT Detector greatly simplifies this task, scrounging the source code of any given website for the tell-tale javascript code of the major analytics vendors. On a side note, an amazing number of otherwise professional websites seem completely devoid of web analytics software — a baffling phenomenon given the availability of completely free, easy-to-install software such as Google Analytics.

10+ Awesome Firefox Extensions for Developers and Bloggers.
I was considering putting together a list of the best Firefox extensions for web developers, but the job has already been done. Ajax Ninja has captured the best of the best in his list. I hadn’t known about Seoquake, to my eternal shame. Now I just need to find a list of the best Firefox extensions for Web Analysts.

What I have been reading

eMarketer: Pharma Industry Failing at Web 2.0. A new study from eMarketer finds that the pharmaceuticals industry has been slow to adopt Web 2.0. For those of us on the front lines of pharma marketing, this information is hardly breaking news, but it is true that an embarrassing majority of senior management would likely struggle to come up with a vision for web marketing in their business, let alone any meaningful definition of Web 2.0. (For those wondering, the study author rudimentally describes Web 2.0 as social networking, blogging, and video). More worrisome, internet apathy tends to extend throughout marketing organizations, although line managers may be avid consumers of web applications themselves. I’ve yet to come across a product manager with a blog, but pharma marketers do seem to make great web lurkers i.e. visiting YouTube, forwarding viral videos, and managing their Linkedin/XING profiles whenever possible.

However, it is an oversimplication to blame the marketing staff for failing to adopt Web 2.0 strategies. In most big pharma companies, marketers are kept on a short leash, making investment in unproven and unconventional areas virtually impossible. After all, pharmaceutical sales and marketing is highly regulated, both within the corporation (self-regulation) and from the outside world (law and government).

Web 2.0 has emerged as a conundrum for pharmaceutical companies. Patients, physicians, providers, and other stakeholders of the health care system have taking their discussions, criticisms, and commentaries to the web, yet conspicuously absent from the conversation is an entire industry. Pharmaceutical companies will need to find innovative ways into the conversation, while remaining within the confines of industry regulations and true to corporate ethical standards. Until this happens, we can look forward to more product sites with circa 1999 brochureware.

What I have been reading

A Remodel Opens Door For Yahoo on Investors Business Daily. It has been a long time since I saw the words “growth” and “portal” in the same article. Yet, here we have Yahoo’s real estate portal showing massive growth and moving into second place in the US market behind realtor.com. Let’s look beyond the the irony of Yahoo scoring a winner in a market which is currently in the throes of a meltdown and consider the implications for internet marketing in general. I’m fascinated by the apparent comeback of the web portal – a business model which has been overshadowed by the trendy world of blogs and search engines. Portals have seen their highs and lows over the last decade and, on occassion, have been declared as past their expiration date. A few years ago, I even came across a harsh critic of the content-laden MyYahoo compared to Google’s plain-vanilla search box page (unfortunately, I can’t find that article anymore). The success of Yahoo Real Estate should remind us that portals are not quite dead.

So, what has given portals a new lease of life in the age of Web2.0? Let’s dissect the article for a clue: By Yahoo’s own account, the new home valuation feature drives the majority of traffic on the Real Estates pages. Interestingly, home valuation is not a home-grown service, but an integrated third party content delivered through partners such as Zillow, Reply, and eAppraisal. Apparently, the combination of Yahoo’s search engine with broker property listings and partner company’ valuation databases is a hit with consumers. Web geeks call this mixture of multiple sources and features, often from very different web applications, a “mash-up”. Could it be that the mash-up will rescue the good ol’ portal from a premature death? Portal managers take note. Your next move might be to step outside the confines of your company and your industry to find original features, data, and services that can bring new life to your website’s existing content.

What I have been running

WT Debugger, from Mike Keyes over at On the Trail. WT Debugger is an itsy-bitsy script that displays all the parameters sent by a web page tracked by WebTrends back to the data server. Obviously that last sentence only makes sense to the small minority of people who deal with web analytics and, in all likelihood, there are probably three people in the universe who actually might be excited by this insight. Let me assure you, WT Debugger is very cool, especially if you happen to manage a very large website and work for a management team that likes to have superior data on their internet business. You see, gathering web analytics data requires that your website is properly tagged — a trifling matter for the typical neighborhood blog, but one giant headache for large commercial websites with multiple technical providers and content suppliers. Enter WT Debugger, which is a wonderful way to spend a Friday evening. Who says web analytics isn’t interesting?

What I have been reading

Devil Take the Hindmost. A brilliant exposé on the nature of speculation and the human tendency to occassionally go mad. Edward Chancellor’s book is about the financial markets, but I’ve always believed that studying other realms of knowledge brings greater understanding of one’s own area of expertise — often better insight than reading blogs and books published within your field.

So, what insight does Devil Take the Hindmost offer the marketer? We’ve been told that markets are efficient and that crowds are wise. If you haven’t heard these concepts, then consider the following: why else would we place so much value in websites that encourage community tagging of content, search engines that rank sites based on the number of links from related websites, and markets that try to predict future events based on user voting? The Efficient Market Hypothesis (to borrow the term from economists) and the wisdom of crowds are two fundamental assumptions underlying Web2.0 and all those budding social networks, predictive markets, pageranking systems, peer-to-peer sharing communities, and user-produced content on the internet. We can debate about how these ideas from the economics and financial world came to be the premises of today’s internet, but suffice it to say that Web2.0 is not the only realm affected. Modern business, with its emphasis on shareholder value, its reliance on the capital asset pricing model, and its focus on stock-option compensation, is also predicated on efficient markets.

But, are markets really efficient or do markets move according some other, less well understood factors? Are crowds really wise or do they exhibit the same failings and irrational choices of individuals? Devil Take the Hindmost, not unlike Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan, takes a hard-hitting swing at the ideas of efficient markets and the wisdom of crowds. Chancellor provides us with a wealth of historical examples from ancient history to modern times (but pre-dotcom era) where the markets have bubbled and crowds have gone a bit ga-ga, throwing out all rationality in the blind pursuit of profits. Such things clearly shouldn’t occur in a truly efficient market, a fact that has not been lost on a few speculators who make their living exploiting the herd reactions of the crowd and the betting on uncertainty. Apply this same experience to the internet sector, where the wisdom of the crowd (usually referred to as the “user community”) is an article of faith, and you being to wonder if certain business models are built on a house of cards.

What I have been reading

Web Rankings Shakeup: It’s About Time. A fascinating article from Business Week concerning the latest fad in website metrics. In short: pageviews are out, time spent on site is in. Strangely absent from the heated conversation about web rankings is the utter futility of trying to capture a website’s value in one metric. It is part of our nature to oversimplify things, especially coming up with a more realistic view of website relevance would require grappling with so many complicated factors. Nicholas Taleb would cite the whole rankings shamble as an example of Platonicity. Of course, big bucks are riding on this game, this battle for the ultimate metric. The winners can expect a lion’s share of advertising revenues; the losers will see their perceived importance and their market share wither. Of course, a few insightful marketers will recognize that value is highly relative and ignore the lure of a single metric view of the world. They may find that advertising on “out of favor” websites will actually bring them better results at a lower price tag than the top-of-the-charts websites.

The Black Swan. Nicholas Taleb’s book on the impact of the highly improbable is an essential read for anyone in the analytics industry. Web analysts live in a world of numbers and many practitioners are trained in statistics, econometrics, or mathematics. Taleb challenges the conventional wisdom and many of the basic assumptions which underlie the modern science of analysis. If your universe revolves around concepts like variance, standard deviation, correlation, R square, Bell curves, and forecasting than prepare for a disconcerting revelation: “It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you.” I’ve always been extremely suspicious of forecasting and those who purport to predict the future. The Black Swan has finally provided me with a plausible explanation for this personal bias. Opps, was that just an example of Confirmation Error?

June 19. 4 days since writing the last post. Its only been a few days since starting übermarketer and already I am worried that this blog is losing momentum. People say that writing is a creative art, but in reality writing is primarily about discipline. A good author has already written the story in this mind and the words will come naturally, without effort, if the author can only find the time and focus to put the prose to paper.

Discipline = productivity. I spent most the day in corporate fire-fighting mode, attending to various issues and urgencies brought to my desk by other managers, while generally managing to avoid the work I really wanted to get done. Everyone experiences days like these, and I suspect that some people even spend most of their working lives in a continual state of reactiveness. What else would explain the proliferation of blogs dedicated to personal productivity?

What I have been reading:

The Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity. A serendipitous find from the blog of Marc Andreessen. I did not seek out tips on productivity, but this post somehow found its way to my attention. Its always interesting to hear how other organize their lives. I particularly enjoyed Structured Procrastination, as explained by Stanford professor John Perry: “The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.” Strategic Incompetence also caught my attention: “The best way to to make sure that you are never asked to do something again is to royally screw it up the first time you are asked to do it. Or, better yet, just say you know you will royally screw it up — maintain a strong voice and a clear gaze, and you’ll probably get off the hook. Of course, this assumes that there are other things that are more important at which you are competent.”