by Gord Hotchkiss on Aug 29, 10:32 AM
Tech stock analyst and blogger Henry Blodget has declared Google Glass dead on arrival. I'm not going to spend any time talking about whether or not I agree with Mr. Blodget (for the record, I do - Google Glass isn't an adoptable product as it sits - and I don't - wearable technology is the next great paradigm shifter) but rather dig into the reason that he feels Google Glasses are stillborn: They make you look stupid.
by Brian Rauschenbach on Aug 28, 1:29 PM
Though it might sound like something from Animal Planet, Google Panda is just as serious a matter for online marketers now as it was when it first released in 2011. As has been well-documented, Panda is a change to Google's search results algorithm that Google continues to update regularly, with the expressed goal of lowering the rank of low-quality sites with thin content, while placing higher-quality sites near the top of search results. Google expects to roll out about 500 search algorithm improvements this year alone! The effects are wide-reaching, so in addition to webmasters staying alert, we as marketers …
by Colin Jeavons on Aug 27, 2:59 PM
It's a cliched argument that search engine optimization (SEO) is dying), but the truth is that SEO isn't going anywhere anytime soon; it's simply evolving. We don't search the same way we did just a few years ago. Consumers have moved beyond entering one or two keywords into a search engine, to entering four to eight words at a time, often in the form of phrases or questions. This changes the search game. Consumers want more than one-word results, they want answers to their questions, so single keyword correlation isn't enough.
by Ryan DeShazer on Aug 26, 11:44 AM
Much has already been written of the merger between advertising goliaths Omnicom and Publicis Groupe. Last month's announcement has been dissected from numerous perspectives: from general coverage, to views that it's largely a defensive move to combat emergent competition, and opinions that the underlying "big data play" may be misguided. It seems everyone has an opinion; I happen to have a few, too.
by Gord Hotchkiss on Aug 22, 9:22 AM
It may be the best book you'll ever read on marketing, but you won't find it in the marketing section of Amazon. They have it variously filed in three different categories: Politics and Social Sciences, Technology and Text Books. The book is Everett Rogers' "Diffusion of Innovations," and you should add it to your reading list.
by Aaron Goldman on Aug 21, 8:23 AM
Mobile is not a device. It's not a channel. It's not a strategy. It's a given. Gone are the days of thinking about mobile separately from desktop, with tablets somewhere in the middle. It's time to take a holistic approach to multi-device marketing. To help with the recalibration process, let's look back at the top 20 buzzwords from the last SIS and see how they fit into the multi-device marketing construct.
by Gord Hotchkiss on Aug 15, 11:46 AM
I think our world, -- or, more specifically, our marketplace -- is a little too abstract. We -- and by we, I mean the marketers, the suppliers to the market -- live too far removed from the market itself: the consumers of the supplied goods. It's a point touched on by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his most recent book, "Antifragile." Marketers and manufacturers, he suggests, don't have enough skin in the game to keep them honest. They're too far removed from accountability. There are too many protective buffers between them and the consequences of their actions.
by Robin Simkins on Aug 14, 3:40 PM
The scene has played itself out hundreds of times on police procedurals: a giant map of the city is tacked with red pins indicating where the banks have been robbed or the taunting notes left. The detectives stare at the map and realize the bank robber/note leaver will likely next strike smack dab in the middle of the triangle created by the pushpins. It's geographic profiling. It works for detectives and it can work for advertisers.
by Gord Hotchkiss on Aug 9, 10:49 AM
In all my years in business, the one thing I found consistently difficult was hiring good people. We spent a lot of time honing our screening skills, but I sometimes suspect we would have been just as far ahead by flipping a coin.
by John Busby on Aug 7, 2:31 PM
Chances are, the last time you Googled a local or national service-based business, you came face-to-face with a "call extension" button. That's just the clinical term for the call icon that appears as part of a sponsored search result in mobile. Call extensions have become one of the most popular features added to Google AdWords in recent years. It's an impossibly easy way for consumers who are searching on mobile devices to click a phone number and connect to a business. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as it sounds. And here's why: