Greg Verdino

Search ads are now more clickable than ever

Like most marketers nowadays, I understand the importance of both organic and paid search as key components of the digital media plan but (confession time) I don't have even half a clue about how SEO or SEM really work -- or how to optimize either to deliver maximum results.  Sure, I know enough to hire someone who knows more than I do when my clients ask me for help with search. And I've somehow managed to dominate the first page of Google results for my own name but don't ask me to tell you how. I don't know.

But I'd like to learn more.

Enter Clickable's Max Kalehoff, an innovative program he has been spearheading to help marketers get the most out of their search initiatives, and a free e-book that presents some best-in-class thinking about search.

In Max's own words (from the Clickable blog):

When I joined Clickable in late 2007, we began assembling a team of experts dedicated to public service - to help struggling marketers succeed in search advertising. We named them "the Clickable Gurus." For over a year, they've contributed expertise directly to hundreds of marketers in popular online communities, face-to-face, and on this blog. They've indirectly helped tens of thousands of marketers by leaving a permanent record of their wisdom and teachings on the Web. Indeed, the Clickable Gurus have been one of Clickable's most valuable investments to listen and connect with the search-marketing community. As a result, we've made better products for our customers. We all thank the Gurus for their great work, including: Andrew Bernero, Hanny Hindi, Trace Johnson, Ehren Reilly and Tony Soric...

To commemorate the Clickable Gurus' debut after one year of undercover service, we've released the first anthology of their teachings... The Guru's Guide To Better Search Engine Marketing is full of practical tips and best practices that demystify search and help marketers succeed. Just like Clickable's award-winning products, the Guru's Guide is simple and accessible to beginners, yet equally valuable for advanced search-marketing professionals.

If you're all geeked-out on digital you can download the free electronic version of the Guru's Guide. If you prefer good old fashioned wood pulp, Clickable offers a $10 hard copy through LuLu.com. They're also offering free hard copies to blogger who promise to write reviews -- not the reason for this post by the way. This isn't a review and I haven't read the book yet, but if you blog and think you'd like to review it you can get the details from Max's post.

To extend a great-sounding program and promising book, they also offer online forums where you can interact with the Gurus, ask questions, get answers and add your own advice. And they're running a contest that gives search experts an opportunity to vie for their own place in Clickable's Guru gang.

And finally, like all good content marketing efforts, this one supports Clickable's own brand positioning as "a trusted advisor" that helps clients make better search marketing decisions, is bound to generate enough social media buzz to fill at least a few big plastic cups with some extra Google juice, and (the clincher) actually intriques me enough to make me want to find out what that actually means.

I hope you find The Guru's Guide useful. Feel free to drop a comment with your own thoughts.

The r/evolution will not be categorized

Kansas State University anthopology professor Michael Wesch, the man that brought us "The Machine is Us/ing Is" back in February, is back with another piece of "holy crap" video brilliance.  "Information R/evolution" explores changes in the ways we find, store, create, critique, and share information.  I'd say that this is "Must see TV" except that TV isn't really where I find great video content anymore. 

Spend a few minutes watching this -- it will be time well spent. [Feed and email please click through for the video.]

[Props to Canada: Mitch Joel and Ed Lee found this video first...]

If you are relatively new to social media and somehow missed "The Machine Is Us/ing Us," I've embedded the final version of that video below.  This version is different from the one I blogged back in February -- Professor Wesch originally released the video in beta, solicited feedback from the web community-at-large using a social video markup tool called Mojiti, and incorporated that feedback to create the final release seen here.

Jaikoogle

I'm not sure what to make of Google's acquisition of Jaiku, a Twitter competitor based in Finland.  This move certainly validates the fledgling presence application (or lifestreaming) space, and would seem to put erstwhile eighty-pound gorilla Twitter on the defensive (especially when you consider Twitter's fairly routine technical tomfoolery that causes even the most fervent Twitterati to yank out their hair.)  In fact, the twittersphere has been all, ahem, a-twitter with talk of Google sounding the death knell for what has so-far been a pretty clear market leader (albeit in a very nascent space.)

On the other hand, Google hasn't always made the most of their acquisitions -- I'm thinking of other early stage start-ups like Dodgeball.  If you don't know them, they were a pioneer in mobile social software, an idea that has yet to hit its stride (at least not here in the U.S.) but one that most certainly will.  Google so neglected Dodgeball that, not only did it stall (it is still around, though), but its founders quit out of frustration and let the world know by posting a special resignation photo on Flickr.  Google has become such a dominant force in search that I think people tend to forget that it has, at best, a spotty track record just about everywhere else.

I hope the Jaiku folks fare better, of course. I've been a Jaiku member since May and I think it's a good enough service, although all I'm doing with it as of now is cross-posting my blog RSS, my Flickr updates and (ironically?) my Twitter tweets.  So if my social media buddies migrate in droves, I'm ready to kick it up a notch.

In the meantime, since I know lots of folks are looking to get into Jaiku (which is still 'invite only'), I've got ten invites for the first ten people who ask for them.  Drop a comment with an accurate email address and I'll hook you up.

And if you're already a Jaiku user, I'm gregverdino.jaiku.com.

Google 3.0

If you're confused about what people mean when they refer to "Web 3.0" -- next generation web technology that is either one massively distributed database, platform and browser independent, artificially intelligent, semantic, geospatial and/or three-dimensional (depending on who you ask) -- you will be no less confused by Google's Eric Schmidt's definition.  To me, it sounds like Eric is simply defining widgets (or more likely, given the source, Google Gadgets) but since Google practically owns the internet, I figure we'd better prepare ourselves for whatever it is he's actually talking about.

[Feed and email readers click through to watch the video.]

New marketing for small businesses

Check out my BusinessWeek video interview about how small businesses can tap into the power of social media and other new marketing channels. 

BW doesn't provide embed codes so you'll have to click through to their site.  Here's what's in store when you do:

I talk about blogging, podcasting, search engine marketing, Second Life, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Grand Central, Gaping Void, Stormhoek winery and of course crayon.  And that's just the first 45 seconds!

So give it a watch and let me know what you think.

Blogger outreach round-up

I've been receiving quite a few pitches lately and, frankly, I haven't had the time to follow up on any of them.  So if for no other reason than clearing my in-box (and my conscience) I present to you the first "Blogger Outreach Round-Up."  Take a gander at four very different new media and marketing offerings, ranging from the bizarre to the commonsensical (you decide which are which.)  Maybe you'll see something you like.

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Gottabet.com, a new niche market social network organized around dares and challenges is looking to attract 1 million members through a promotion that promises to give users $1 for every new member they get to join, with a maximum $1 million payout for the entire promotion.  To participate in the Gottabet Million Dollar Challenge, members create a bet/challenge/dare on the site and then build a campaign around it that makes other people join Gottabet to participate in that bet.  Pretty simple idea -- members reap the rewards for evangelizing the property and at $1 for each new member acquired, this sounds more efficient than more traditional advertising programs.  Watch this video for more information about how it works [feed and email readers click through for the video.]

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ZSlide wote to let me know about Pictogame, an easy-to-use tool that lets web users turn any picture into a simple casual game widget and distribute it through blogs and social network profiles.   Here's just one example. (Note to Firefox users -- the game doesn't seem to embed properly in Firefox and I can't figure out why - so until I do, just click through to check out Pictogame's gallery.)

Put this game on your blog   Create your own   More games

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MonetizeMedia offers a turnkey platform that allows any publisher to create fully interactive, branded broadband TV channels, easily and seamlessly monetize media assets through downloads, subscriptions, advertising and syndication and appeal to advertisers with contextually relevant, rich media video ads designed to maximize ROI.  The broadband video landscape is already pretty cluttered -- but with all the attention being paid to contextual video advertising, if their solution is as drag-and-drop as they say it is, it could be an interesting one to watch.  They're offering free trials.

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And finally, we have Balihoo, an advertising search engine geared toward media planners and buyers who are looking for new media advertising opportiunities.   Users can search Balihoo using a variety of variables -- demographics, geography, behavioral, media or channel specific -- and the application returns advertising opportunities that meet their needs.  Balihoo doesn't get involved with the sale of inventory (so it's not an exchange or marketplace) -- they are simply focused on helping buyers find the right media opportunities and connect with qualified sellers.  Balihoo is in a private beta now, with an anticipated September-October public launch.

I'm number one

The number one natural search result for "s&m parlors in nyc," that is.  C'mon Google, really?  Let's hope that Jimmy Wales really can fix search.

And to the gentleman who visited my blog in search of these services, might I suggest that you look here instead.

Search can be fun/ny

One of the interesting side effects of blogging is that my content is well-indexed by Google and the other search engines, and my reporting service shows me exactly which search terms drive people to my site.  Most of my search referrals come from terms you might expect (my name, my company name, common marketing terms, the names of people and companies I mention in my posts) but sometimes the search terms are more interesting :-)  Here are a few of my recent favorites (yes, these are real Google searches that landed people on my blog):

bald marketing blog for which I actually show up as the TOP TWO results, beating out even Seth Godin, who appears in the number ten spot!!! (actual results as of this posting)

evil verdino for which I practically dominate the top ten (sad and scary...)

views of sociologist on marching band which seems like a really strange thing for anyone to be interested in,

yakkity yak which I suppose is a propos,

and diarrhea commercial.  Nice!

I guess it's true what they say (although I'm not sure anyone has actually said this): you are what you write...

Google Co-Op: search gets personal

I've been playing around with Google Co-Op, Google's new customized search engine beta.  With Co-Op, anyone can create a highly customized, topic-specific search engine and then deploy that engine into virtually any web page they publish.  Using this new tool, I've been able to build a custom Google search engine that returns results from the sites I specify only - for my purposes, I've created an engine that searches my blog and 40 or so other marketing blogs from my Blogroll.  It's pretty cool and really enhances the relevancy of the results (no more extraneous links to off-target pages.)  Check it out:

Personalization (in all its forms) is powerful - and making search a more relevant utility for people with highly specialized interests is a smart thing.  For me, having an easy way to search my favorite sites is proving to be an asset in both my day job and my blog-tracking. 

It will be interesting to see if this takes off.  It does take a bit of work to set up the original search, but once you've done it the rest is a piece of cake.

Play around and let me know what you think.

Video search stinks, so why don't we fix it?

Forrester's Josh Bernoff thinks video search stinks -- and he's right.  With all of the focus on putting video content online and growing viewership, why does it seem like so few companies are focused on fixing a major usability problem that could hobble the digital video industry?

Although some may see Google's YouTube acquisition as a sure sign of video's point-of-arrival, we are merely in the early stages of the digital video revolution and we have a long way to go.  Note that I say "digital video" rather than "online video" -- online video will continue to evolve and grow over the coming years, but we are also in the early stages of a long series of disruptive changes to the way video is delivered and consumed across all possible screens. 

What's happening in video now?

The long tail gets longer by the day -- note today's launch of Travelistic, a social video site focused specifically on travel for the 25-34 set and only the first in a series of online video plays to be launched by MTV veteran Nicholas Butterworth's Diversion Media.  There are literally hundreds of video sharing destinations and we are now moving beyond general interest aggregators to sites targeting not only specific demographics but specific lifestyles, passions and affinities.

Mainstream media companies are accelerating their online video initiatives -- they're repurposing content from their offline shows, posting outtakes and exclusive extras, and in some cases creating web-only programming to beef up their online presence.  A new wave of start-ups are forging partnerships with the mainstream media companies to develop new video delivery and syndication models.  (See this week's BusinessWeek article on this topic - it focuses on The Venice Project, a broadband long-form video play from the founders of Kazaa and Skype.) 

The big web portals are clueless about video -- Forrester's Bernoff argues that, in their misguided attempts to be all things to all people and their equally misguided attempts to ape YouTube's success in user generated video, the major portals have failed to create meaningful differentiation in their video offerings and more importantly have build video services that are all but unusable.  The illustration below highlights the confused (and confusing) and confusion state of affairs.  Is AOL a destination for premium video streams, paid downloads, video search or the sharing of user submitted videos?  YES!

So with the universe of online video getting bigger and more complicated every day, how does a consumer go about finding the content they might actually be interested in watching?  The short answer?  They don't.

The longer answer?  Here's an extract from Forrester's report illustrating exactly how and why video search fails consumers:

"Suppose you were seeking the trailer of the recently released cult film "A Scanner Darkly." You might find it — or you might get directed to a broken link or to low-quality footage of an interview with the late writer Philip K. Dick from 1974 (because the movie is based on his book). Looking for the free video preview of NBC's "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip"? Video search engines can't find it. Instead, they will route you to cast interviews and, bizarrely, an interview with Ashlee Simpson that has nothing at all to do with the show (see illustration below). These frustrating results are typical; if you're looking for high-quality video on the Internet, video search is hit-or-miss. Why such poor results? Because:

It may not be clear what the searcher wants. If you search for a movie title, do you want the music video, a clip, the trailer, or the interviews with the actors on "Entertainment Tonight?" Video search engines can't tell, so they guess and — lacking any other indicators of user intent (or clairvoyance) — guess wrong.

Video search rankings can't leverage links for relevancy. A user-generated parody posted on YouTube may get ranked just as high as an actual trailer, especially if more people link to the parody. The most-linked sites float to the top of Google rankings, and appropriately so for the most part. But seekers for Internet video may not be looking for the most-linked video.

Search engines favor their own content. AOL's top three results were on AOL sites, while Lycos' blinkx-driven searches favored sites like ITN and IFILM with which blinkx has relationships. Meanwhile, all the search engines missed the free video on NBC.com, the actual target of our "Studio 60" search. If search engines mostly find their own content, consumers won't trust them.

The same video has endless duplicates online. Professional video producers will often syndicate material to multiple sites — why not get more exposure for promotional or ad-supported content? The result: search results that point to duplicate material that gunk up the search index. This same challenging problem leads users — in the case of Yahoo!'s video search — to user sites that can't handle the traffic.

Metadata about video is inconsistent. Unlike text, video content doesn't include words to index. Instead, search engines are forced to look at the words that surround the video or information posted in Media RSS or other standardized metadata formats that tag along with the video. The problem: Video creators don't do a consistent job in providing adequate and accurate metadata. Some search engines, such as PODZINGER and blinkx, actually index the video's audio track, using voice recognition and looking for sounds that match recognizable words. But even blinkx, which combines all of these techniques, got fooled and took us to a trailer for the wrong movie in our "A Scanner Darkly" search."

BOTTOM LINE: In the million channel universe, how do you actually find the one channel (or even the one program on the one channel) you care about?  Somebody needs to figure this out quick, or digital video could collapse under it's own weight.