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 are the challenges of managing internet / e-marketing/ e-commerce / e-anything in a big corporate environment? The glory and certainly the press tend to follow those of us in the flashy world of startups, but most internet managers will have spent a portion of their careers in established companies (what used to be called “bricks-and-morter” around the height of the dotcom boom). Today, even the most change-resistent corporations have acknowledged that the internet is more than a passing fad and integrated some degree of internet strategy into their business. Listed public corporations regularly boast to potential investors about their internet operations and even the local home furnishings chain is likely to have some sort of web manager on staff. One could almost be forgiven for thinking that bricks-and-morter business has transitioned into the internet age without the major internal strife and backlash that normally accompanies significant organizational change. The truth, as any corporate internet strategist will tell you, is actually all about internal strife and backlash, as internal hierachies and structures resist the change wraught upon them by new media and technologies.

Just as I was considering drawing up my own list of challenges, I came across an enlightening study from the folks over at the Internet Strategy Forum. The complete results from the 2006 Corporate Internet Strategist Survey are available for purchase, but the research brief already reveals a fascinating story:

Let’s be honest — the first and second results could apply to anyone in just about any function (rare would be the manager in a big company who would not complain about headcount and budget). It gets really interesting starting with point three and moving down the list. For today’s internet managers, its all about being effective, understood, and recognized. In established businesses, internet managers are essentially change agents, brought in the organization to revise existing ways of conducting business. If you are given this responsibilty, but not granted the authority or provided the resources to enact change, you are going to struggle and occassionally yearn for the flexibility of a startup company or consultancy. Of course, this is great news for Web 2.0 companies, which compete for the same talent and can benefit from managers with real experience in the world of big business.

The way we experience and use the web is changing dramatically. That much is obvious to regular users of the internet. Less visible are the many technologies in development which will shape the (very near) future. What insiders (and increasingly the general public) refer to as “Web 2.0″ is only the beginning of the story, the proverbial tip of the iceberg. A more dramatic evolution (revolution?) is just around the corner, as information moves out of the confines of a web browser application into realms previously considered outside of cyberspace. Your coffee table, for example.

In this video, Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos Photosynth and one of the underlying technologies, Seadragon. Photosynth is reality today. Seadragon, with its amazing visualization of data, has the potential to change the web in ways we have yet to imagine.

Another development project, Microsoft Surface, re-invents the computing platform (or the coffee table, depending on your perspective). Surface not only brings the web out of the PC, but also links previously disparate tools such as your mobile phone.

The astute reader will have noted that both of these technologies are coming from Microsoft labs. This is coincidence. The point is not to promote Microsoft, but to illustrate the coming innovations which may soon change the world.

If the Google spider could speak, it would certainly have a mouthful of explicatives for this website. I’ve used and abused this domain and the website as a playground for countless pet projects and experiments, with no particular rhyme or reason except my own personal whim. In turns, this website has been a blog (with all of one entry), a testing ground for Wordpress features, and a convenient location to practice web programming skills. Now, experimentation can be a good thing, but certainly not for search engine positioning. Google and co. will have had trouble finding keywords from the website, as content has been so fleeting and directionless in the past.

That may change, now that I have an idea for this website. I’m giving this website another shot at glory and, at the same time, going back to the origins of blogging circa 1999 (remember Opendiary and Livejournal?). From now on, I’ll be posting in unrefined/unpolished form my thoughts and observations about marketing (in the internet age). It will be like a diary of a marketer, hopefully without the banality of most blogs (e.g. what my dog did this morning posts). Perhaps interesting for you, as a reader. Perhaps not. In any case, search engines seem to give extra love to blogs and blog postings. Here’s to you, dear Google spider. Hope you like what you see next time around.

Editor’s note: I’m leaving this ancient posting as a tribute to my first attempt at making something of this website. Check out the date of this posting and that of the following posting. Yes, übermarketer went on a little sabbatical.

Can’t keep my eyes from the circling sky. Tongue-tied and twisted Just an earthbound misfit, I.
Pink Floyd, Learning to Fly

We have liftoff, in the form of this first posting. For a while it seemed that this blog would never start, as I became overly intrigued by all the bells and whistles of WordPress and its accompanying plugins. At some point in the midst of tweaking the software, it occurred to me that my original goals had been neglected and the circling sky was still far, far above me. This blog is about the often overlooked little pearls of marketing and business wisdom which are found scattered throughout the internet in the form of postings, quotes, lyrics, and commentary. Not sure what I mean by pearls of wisdom? They are best not described, but simply read, pondered, and enjoyed.