Adam Edwards

What does your corporate sports team say about your agency?

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 08:40:00 -0400

I just celebrated my first anniversary at my third agency in NYC, Converseon. They have given me the entrepreneurial freedom to build a profitable division with a growing client SEO roster including 3 in the Fortune 100 in only one year. That has led me to wonder how one exactly goes about recognizing a good fit. One unlikely question I would ask in the future is which corporate team sports, if any, the agency plays.

I didn’t know people had fantasy football trophies. Cropped from a photo by Beth and Christian Bell.

Most coworkers who were into sports at my first company in NYC were primarily football fans. The most organized league we had was fantasy football where we competed online against each other. Occasionally we would assemble an informal outing to the park and throw the pigskin around. But again, we only played against our colleagues. So too was the mood around the office. Football is an amazing game of strategy but very insular. Similarly, we built some amazing technology ahead of its time but did not connect much with the greater community at large.

My second firm participated in an annual corporate softball tournament. Personally I find baseball and its cousin to be rather boring, but I can’t ignore the charitable impact that the event had. Kudos to all participants. It is a very individualized sport, as was the company. Consultants were sent off and many never reconnect until the annual summer event or winter party. Stars who excel in continually building something unique without much foundational technology shared across departments can thrive in those conditions.

One question I have with baseball, however, is the intense specialization within positions. You will almost never find a pitcher play outfield or a catcher rise to third baseman. Contrast this to football where RBs often line up under center, WRs run reverses, and TEs always play between lineman and receiver. So in any baseball lineup, there can really be only one great player at any position. If you already have a great shortstop, most teams will trade the others.

That differs from my current agency, where we all act as analysts regardless of our department. That is probably why Forrester called us out yet again as one of two remaining strategic partners who are leading our Wave. We also have the most international office I’ve worked in yet — and for a purpose. We are not just looking for stars to fill certain positions. We have brought together some of the most talented people for their respective expertise as well as their linguistic skills. Our conversation mining team alone is fluent in a dozen languages, meaning we can truly bring a global perspective to our Fortune 100 clients.

The opening ceremony of World Cup soccer in South Africa. Cropped from a photo by Shine 2010.

So what sport does Converseon play? The world’s sport of soccer. And we are headed to the playoffs, too.

Stop crying wolf with security theater

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 08:37:00 -0400

The fact that a citizen can take another person or organization to court has been one of the bedrocks of American tradition. Unfortunately, as with any system, there will be some people who take advantage of it and risk ruining things for everyone else.

Someone’s coffee was hot. They sued. Now people joke that they could also sue if the coffee was not hot enough, but I bet someone has actually tried that. Cropped from a photo by David Thompson.

The first time I remember hearing about a court case that I found to be ridiculous was the infamous woman who sued McDonald’s due to scalding hot coffee. I have a little more sympathy for her after finding out some of the myths, but she still did spill it herself. In the 20 years since then, we have been increasingly met with legalese wherever we turn from lawyers who attempt to protect their clients from liability. Most disclaimers are common sense labels, e.g. keep plastic bags away from babies, and probably do some good.

Disclaimers really begin to change perceptions when they are spoken, however. Turbulence is a good example of this. Airplanes have had fasten seat belt indicators for decades so they don’t get sued if someone bumps their head.

You are typically forced to sit down and fasten your seat belt, regardless of other possible consequences. Cropped from a photo by Daniel Williams.

A similar sign like this elsewhere would merely provide advice, but announcements remind passengers that they must obey posted placards on-board (the only time I ever still hear the word, placard). However, flight attendants are stuck with a kind of semi-authority so they vary in their enforcement. I have seen some stand near passengers and shame them into sitting back down. Some delight in their new-found power and threaten people in coach until they submit. Yet as one flight attendant said on my recent United flight to Denver, “We are not police.” Then the other crew members proceeded to remind every other passenger who stood up that they were required to say people should remain seated, though they did not intend to actually stop any passengers from getting up. Flight attendants did the right thing and covered their ass while letting common sense prevail in the air for once.

The only people who heeded the call and sat down were two German ladies. This didn’t surprise me, given the evil eye you will get in Germany when trying to cross a street when the light is red.

Yet it made me wonder if all of these little reminders that we get in America have led to exactly the opposite of their intended effect and made us more stubborn. When nature truly calls, no one will be denied regardless of a light or even an authority figure. The same situation is audible in NYC subway stations everyday.

Likely one pet peeve of every New Yorker is the subway emergency exit. Cropped from a photo by Julie DeVito.

Most exit doors are officially for emergencies only so an alarm goes off every time they are opened. Some are marked as service exits for the handicapped as well, seen above. However, other people also have perfectly valid reasons for using the door, since bikes, strollers, and some luggage do not fit through turnstiles. So the majority of people both disregard the law and become dangerously desensitized to an alarm.

Why reinforce warnings that you know people will not listen to? What good is an elevated threat level that never changes? When everyone covers their ass, no one’s ass is covered. Taken to an extreme, it is a continued exercise in crying wolf and we become accustomed to not listening to what in other circumstances could be very good advice.

Politics, not safety, was the real reason that the threat levels were introduced. Illustration adapted from MemeCenter.

Perhaps these are reasonable responses to what are unjust rules. As adults, we should be able to decide whether we risk the very rare possibility of injury during turbulence to make a pit stop.

Yet I can’t help but figure that kids seeing this behavior and social consciousness will turn out to be even more obnoxious than our generation. (I wish I could say rebellious, but American society has been so pacified by bread and circuses that hardly anyone demonstrates anymore) I like to think of myself as a libertarian but I am certainly no anarchist. We should follow guidelines when they are appropriate. If everyone ran red lights, for example, then accidents would increase and lawlessness would begin to spiral out of control.

We as a society need to figure out if we are going to continue this security theater or if we are going to treat each other like adults. Covering your ass may be necessary at times, but stop crying wolf so we know when we should really pay attention.

Netflix makes a bet to risk profit over customer satisfaction

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 10:12:23 -0400

Netflix took a calculated risk this week in forcing a large number of their subscribers to make a choice that they already declined once. Attempting to bucket their consumers into costly physical media stalwarts versus more profitable instant downloaders, people now have to choose to receive discs by mail for $8, movies online for $8, or pay for both at $16.

They already gave users an option to go online only for a savings of $2 over the new combined plan of $10 just a few months ago. By entirely eliminating the middle path for everyone, they risk losing a large portion of their subscriber base.

Even telecom companies, which routinely rank at the bottom of many customer satisfaction surveys, have never raised their rates by 78% in one year (from $9 > $16). Though some subscribers will doubtlessly succumb, it is a bigger risk for Netflix than it would be for other companies. They are raising prices for everyone on the plan at once because they do not lock anyone into contracts and are not giving any bonuses for loyalty.

Phone companies can get away with increasing prices because their entire clientele is staggered on 1 and 2 year intervals. Cable companies have been known to occasionally grandfather in existing customers to keep their prior plans. I do not know if that is a law or a relic from earlier times, but typically rates go up the most when you sign up for new services (after the initial promotion ends).

Netflix is not doing either, and is susceptible to a real backlash in customer satisfaction. It is a rare case when consumers actually have a focused time in which they can exert their power and cancel their accounts to make a statement if they so choose. The subscription model will force people to decide more quickly about the new pricing model. Only time will tell if customers will organize to reject the lofty price hike and cause a public company to blink. I don’t know that I would go so far as to start buying Blockbuster stock, but it is probably a good time to sell Netflix (NFLX) given their meteoric 600% rise in the past two years.

The best eReader features are not advertised

Tue, 31 May 2011 09:45:00 -0400

Now that every company is beginning to develop its own eReader or tablet, you should stop and think about the features that will really be important to you rather than being swayed by the technology envy that leads to an unfulfilled life and short-sighted incrementalism. Let’s weigh the options.

1) Functionality

The iPad could be the future of board games, but not reading. Photo from Engadget.

The iPad has been heralded as the second coming. Indeed it can do almost anything (as long as it’s one thing at a time). However, don’t most people with an iPad already have a laptop? Why do you want another one? Who cares if it can play music or audiobooks? Don’t you already have an mp3 player or a phone for that? Maybe it will be handy as a big remote control or a new way to play board games. Perhaps it will work for textbooks, so you could watch a science experiment or test a mathematical formula. But it will not change the way that adults will read who do not need such bells and whistles.

2) Usability

Eventually screens will be both flexible and interactive. Photo from SlashGear.

CrunchGear reviewer Matt Burns is desperate to keep his terrible keypad on the Kindle. I still appreciate tactile feedback on phones, game controllers, and keyboards but is it really necessary on a book? You can swipe to a new page very easily, and only need a few buttons. Plus, eInk screens smudge a lot less than glass.

3) Legibility

The Notion Ink ADAM, Amazon Kindle, and Pandigital Novel compared in direct sunlight. Photo from Good eReader.

This was the feature that drove me to wait over a year for a tiny independent startup called Notion Ink to release my namesake, the ADAM. It is almost impossible to read LCD tablets like the iPad in bright sunlight. It is even harder to see eReaders in the dark because eInk does not light up. The ADAM combines both technologies into one screen so you can (kind of) read in any lighting. Then I started thinking… I never read in the dark, so what’s the point of that?

4) Portability

A Crackberry fan tries to fit a Playbook in his back pocket. Photo from Kevin Michaluk.

I did not end up ordering an ADAM, but I’m glad I waited, because I finally realized the truly killer feature for eReaders after seeing my friend trying to fit a Kindle in his jeans. If you are really looking for a device that can change your life, there is no app for being able to carry a tablet in your pocket. I mean really in your pocket. Not falling out of it. Or having your device breaking when you sit down.

Isn’t that why mp3 players grew to such success? I remember trying to squeeze a Discman in my coat and it wasn’t easy. That is also (barely) possible with certain paperbacks, but I certainly don’t want my reading material to be constrained by a mass market format. Girls, you all have purses so this argument is moot. But I know there are guys who are getting wary of lugging — or losing — their iPad or Kindle.

Tech reporters again ask the wrong question of Apple and other manufacturers. There is no real difference between a 7” and 10” screen because they both realistically have to be carried in a bag. One of the reasons for reading eBooks in the first place should be so you don’t have to worry about them. So a 5” screen is closer to the ideal, and there is no problem holding it with one hand at that size. Yet even that does not answer the critical question. The most important feature of an eReader to me is the physical dimensions of the entire device, because that is what you have to carry around.

The best eReader is smaller than a paperback. Photo by Adam Edwards.

The only one I have found to be small enough is the Sony Reader PRS-350. And with a name like that, it’s no wonder that you’ve never heard of it. Sony is on its way to becoming the next Amiga or Palm by nailing the most important features while failing utterly on advertising.

Take a stand, Sir Howard Stringer. Tell everyone that Steve Jobs got it wrong. Sony should be advertising this unit as strongly as Apple pushed the iPod. Instead, it’s on clearance.

P.S. Thanks to Lela Davidson for the link to the NY Times article on an unfulfilled life and the shallowness of technology, even if the author ends up defeating his own argument by focusing on a different kind of unrequited love.

Speaking at SheCon about Meals that Changed My Life

Fri, 20 May 2011 13:54:25 -0400

Welcome attendees of the SheBlogs Conference! I’m about to go onstage to discuss SEO and blogging. It is a tough act to follow the excellent keynote speech by Guy Kawasaki about Enchantment. His new book was given away to everyone here at SheCon courtesy of Citrix and looks like a great read.

His point about being trustworthy is very salient. Perhaps it goes without saying, but you should not believe everything you read on the Internet. That goes for everything you hear at conferences too. Before going to see someone’s panel, you should search for them online. That’s why I wanted to reward the curious with a sneak peak about my topic. I’m going to talk about my experience applying enterprise SEO skills to my food blog .

Hopefully you found the right Adam Edwards. It is difficult because I have a much more common name than Guy. Plus I have not invested as much into personal SEO as perhaps I should, since I am always busy doing that for my clients. However, I encourage you to read my profile on LinkedIn and decide if the session is worth your time. Finally, if you read this far, you might also be interested to learn more about the full service social media agency where I work or the immigrant integration non-profit venture that I advise as part of its board of directors.

Please drop me a line if you read this!

Incrementalism stifles revolutions and real innovation

Thu, 12 May 2011 01:52:00 -0400

I haven’t blogged here about technology and marketing much lately. Mostly because I have been too busy consulting on it at my new agency, Converseon, and wrote two articles elsewhere about trend curation and local search results. I’m also preparing for the panel I’ll be participating on regarding SEO and social media at the SheBlogs Conference next week. Too bad that even at a women’s conference, men end up speaking on SEO. I swear, search is cool!

I should also note that my company was recently listed among three leaders in the Forrester Wave for listening platforms. Last month, one of the other three leaders was acquired by SalesForce for over $300 million. That puts us in good company, and I’m proud to bring my decade of search experience toward the cause.

Converseon is working on some giant leaps forward in online marketing and social media research. Yet one of the things that bugs me about our consumer culture is that people focus too heavily on what is coming tomorrow. My good friend, futurist Garry Golden, summarized this to me recently by giving this short-sighted philosophy a name — incrementalism. Incrementalists are the people who last century would have preferred to breed a faster horse rather than embrace disruptive technologies like the train, car, or airplane. That kind of thinking leaves you susceptible to black swans and holds society back. It certainly doesn’t lead to revolutions in thought or action.

We discussed the topic after attending a Carnegie Hall talk with Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal and Sir Howard Stringer, Chairman and CEO of Sony. One of Mossberg’s early comments was that Sony Ericsson simply makes too many models of phones. Stringer acknowledged the fact but did not seem to indicate any change was on the horizon. If not, that spells a slow death for the joint venture with their Swedish counterparts. Perhaps it is unfair to pit their Q1 sales against Apple since Sony was hit especially hard by the earthquake in Japan. However, it is ridiculous that they currently offer 54 different types in America alone, where they are not even close to being a dominant player. They could easily make the world’s best phone again if only they stopped their incremental efforts and started concentrating more of their brainpower and budgets into creating a revolutionary new device. Imagine if they made 54 kinds of video game systems. Think PlayStation would be as popular?

At the end of the talk, I had the good fortune of being called on to ask my question from the audience and was able to inquire about Sir Howard’s thoughts on the pending AT&T acquisition of T-Mobile. Surprisingly, he came out stronger than I expected against monopolies. Of course, Sony Ericsson does not have much to lose since they haven’t had a huge presence in the US for years. Most Americans never even knew they made the best smartphones prior to the iPhone and Pre because they were never subsidized by a carrier and thus priced out of the market often at over $800.

It is worth pointing out that they probably made so many models that carriers just refused to carry them all. But Sony’s poor business decisions do not alter the fact that they are at the whims of the new mobile goliaths. I’m sure that Sony has long lamented the carrier situation in America, but it is nice to finally get more companies on the record saying so. Anti-trust enforcement has been a joke in this country lately, regardless of the party in charge. Monopoly power begets incrementalism as a direct consequence of strangling the industry and lacking competition. Quality in the American auto industry would have continued its decline if there hadn’t been competition from Japan. Sales may have never fully recovered, but at least the Big Three make better products now.

Unfortunately, modern business journalism also seems to favor monopolies and incrementalism. Even though I was able to ask a pointed question in a public forum and saw Stringer’s response in print, it was not the lead of the story. In fact, online aggregators and republishers focused entirely on a different Apple story that was nothing but a side note to me. Sir Howard alluded that Apple may be including a Sony image sensor in the next version of the iPad or iPhone. Honestly, does that matter in the long term? The next versions will always be better. Big surprise. Who cares if the camera will be 6 or 8 or 10 megapixels? I hate commercials that say, “Our best ever!” I certainly hope so. Are they saying that we should assume that products usually regress and get worse?

Let’s look at the long term view instead. The AT&T and T-Mobile travesty leaves a single American carrier supporting the world GSM standard. Sprint will be squeezed even further to compete with a near duopoly. I would not be surprised to see Verizon make an offer for them at some point. Then the entire industry would be off limits to newcomers because the startup costs would be truly astronomical. (When T-Mobile was independent, starting a competitor would have only been exorbitant.) A mobile duopoly is not good for Sony Ericsson, other phone makers, or for customers. Why isn’t that news repeated more often?

How HP and Palm can make the best slate tablet

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:27:00 -0400

Today’s discovery by TechCrunch that HP filed for a trademark on Palmpad confirms what many have guessed would happen. The acquisition of Palm will likely make its way into larger devices.

Palm’s webOS is the best mobile operating system and should translate better to a tablet than Apple iOS. However, I hope that HP does not make the same mistake that Palm did when it was independent — namely, chase Apple — because it still cannot compete with their head start, rabid fan base, or number of applications. At best, a simple webOS tablet could perhaps gain a #3 or #4 position behind the iPad but ahead of some eBook readers.

HP must redefine expectations to be in a position of strength. It can capitalize on the many false starts of its Microsoft Windows brethren and Google Android cousins.

As primarily a PC user for the past 10 years, I was ready to switch to Apple for the first time since the Macintosh Plus if they delivered a true tablet computer. They didn’t. Now the iPad hype is finally wearing off and even diehard fans are realizing that Steve Jobs gave us an iPod Touch XL instead of the most important device he had ever worked on.

Disappointed, my second best option was presented by Lenovo back in January at CES. The convertible IdeaPad U1 showed off a tablet inside a laptop shell, kind of like a big docking port. You could take all of your data with you without the keyboard and non-essential hardware to save on battery life, space, and weight. It’s no surprise then that CNET awarded Lenovo as the Best of CES.

With that kind of fanfare, surely that would have been ready for a summer release. Yet Lenovo did what any other PC maker would do. They canceled it.

Unfortunately I was out of options and unable to wait since my last laptop was out of steam. So I stuck with the experienced but clunky PC tablet leader, Fujitsu, and recently bought a TH700. Not exactly a memorable name. And of course Fujitsu continues to make slates, but not for the North American market. Why would the hardware pioneer want to offer a real alternative to the iPad when everyone is talking tablets for the first time since Microsoft first introduced their software support in the OS?

More and more, PC manufacturers ressemble the Big Three in Detroit. Occasionally they have good ideas but never execute on them (at least in America), like concept cars at auto shows that are not intended to see the light of day. There is no better way to let down fans than to show them what will never be.

Thankfully, HP has shown in the past that they can break that mold.

Two computers ago, my HP DV1000 had a number of innovative features. LightScribe garnered a lot of press at the time for a disc labeling laser built right into the DVD-R drive. Yet it was Quick Play mode that ultimately proved more useful. HP added a small Linux partition to play CDs and DVDs without having to load Windows.

Instead of making competing Slate product lines with webOS and Windows, like everyone expects, HP could revolutionize the field and combine both operating systems onto the same machine. On the go, I would appreciate webOS for its multitasking gesture-friendly interface. Create a new first party eReader or build upon the existing app by MHWSoft and ensure the video player works at higher resolutions, so you can read eBooks or watch movies without Windows. Fire up webOS to play a quick game of FIFA 2010, Five or More, or Earthworm Jim. Then when I dock at my desk, I want a full-fledged computer running Windows. The files should be shared between partitions, so I can have a single media library on one device.

I do not want a separate laptop and an eBook reader. There is no reason why they can’t be one and the same. Will HP and Palm deliver?

Sidetalking with the iPhone 4

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 17:39:00 -0400

Apparently the iPhone 4 has antenna issues that prevent normal human beings from holding it naturally. Kind of reminds me of an old Nokia problem, sidetalking on the N-Gage…

I might have actually considered getting one of those back in the day if they made a screen with a horizontal aspect ratio instead.

Most games just haven’t designed to run vertically unless it’s Tetris. Of course I’m still hoping Ben Heck will make a handheld Vectrex one day.

Sorry for the silly post. I just can’t believe no one has written a post comparing the two yet!

The Facebook plan to dominate SEO

Mon, 03 May 2010 23:42:00 -0400

Another recent online power grab involves Facebook’s changes in ~~privacy~~ SEO. Most of the information gathered in social networking is used to improve the relevancy of advertising presented to you (be it behavioral or retargeting).

Yet Facebook’s recent changes in layout and linking unveil an even more ambitious plan. They want to become a hub for all brands, products, and artists on the web.

It’s true that you can hide all of your fan pages in green that fit into Facebook’s pigeon holes of activities, interests, movies, books, or music. There’s a good chance that most listings here will have their own fan pages, except for books which should list authors instead.

(Mark’s profile information that is publicly available; the interests in green can be hidden but the section in yellow must be visible to everyone, even outside of Facebook, if your settings allow visibility in search engines)

However, when you log in, you can discover some interesting user experience decisions that determine the data displayed above.

Any interests that do not fit into one of their predefined fields shown in yellow fall over into a section called Other. As mentioned above, you cannot hide this field from anyone. Yet when you view your own profile, that is specifically the section that they obfuscate from YOU.

(Part of my profile information that is shown when logged in; the information shown in the yellow section is publicly visible to everyone but me while I browse my own page prior to clicking Show other Pages)

I could not understand this decision at first. Why hide a field to the user that Facebook is trying so hard to make visible to passers by? Because it is in Facebook’s best interests to keep users’ uncategorized pages public. These are typically the profile pages that have not been claimed by brands or celebrities, leaving Facebook free to create one of their own automatically generated portal pages like the comparison shown below in this example featuring my favorite journalist, Glenn Greenwald.

(Example fan page claimed by Glenn Greenwald at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Glenn-Greenwald/151584319478 vs. automatic Facebook portal at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Glenn-Greenwald/108402955851204)

These optimized portals on the right suddenly have hundreds or thousands of inbound links from all of the people who have listed the keywords in their profiles. With that magic, suddenly they have a curated database of what’s interesting matched only perhaps by search engines — with more potential SEO authority than almost any other site.

The destination portal pages are perhaps even more important than the Like button that has gotten so much press of late. The pages cobble together aggregated content on a topic, in the vein of Answers.com or ZoomInfo.com, with the largest social network on the planet.

Facebook is not just making the web “social”. Startups like Glue and StumbleUpon already did that. They aim to be alongside Wikipedia on the first page of search results for every corporate, personal, entertaining, or educational entity online. If Facebook pages ever become that pervasive, then it will be that much harder to compete for the top positions in already limited SEO real estate.

Problems with online overexposure and turning off or disabling Google Social Search

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 19:44:06 -0400

Readers of my last post no doubt expected that I would write about HP and Palm next. I applaud the move for reasons I will explain later, but for now I want to talk about something perhaps more important: privacy.

Some people want to share absolutely everything online. The Foursquare satire, Please Rob Me, and heavily funded startup, Blippy, have shown that doing so is not always a good idea. Some Blippy members’ credit and debit card numbers were published to the world in Google search results. The privacy breach continued even after a supposed fix. Whoops.

(Credit card numbers in search results — every webmaster’s worst nightmare and every thief’s dream)

Before you call me a Luddite, I should say that I love social networking sites as long as I retain control over who sees what. Of course Blippy’s problem was due to a lapse in security, but it never would have happened if users had chose not to discard their privacy by volunteering their credit card numbers in the first place. And lest you ask, Blippy is different than a typical eCommerce site because its raison d’être is the overexposure of sharing shopping behavior.

I think there needs to be a little more common sense from consumers and independent analysis in the online industry. It should not require FTC investigations or Congressional oversight, as was suggested after Google Buzz complaints (warning, contains justified profanity). It means the fourth estate doing their job.

For instance, despite the backlash against Google Buzz, initial concerns about Google Social Search have all but disappeared.

(Many users flocked last month to turn off Google Buzz, a service they were never asked to turn on)

In only a few months, the service went from an experiment met with skepticism, even as an explicitly optional feature in Google Labs, to yet another social networking service enabled without our consent.

(Google Social Search results)

When triggered by relevant keyword searches, the service highlights results from within your social circle that Google has been kind enough to organize for you. Most results including the one I’ve blurred out are generally inconspicuous. It’s the automatic publicizing of your private contacts that is disconcerting.

Worse still is that Google Social Search still looms in the background even after you turn off Google Buzz, and it’s very hard to disable if you’re so inclined. In fact, you can’t actually turn it off. The best you can do is merely remove its ability to update.

(My social circle according to Google before I removed my profile and contact list)

So instead of simply offering an option to turn Social Search off (let alone asking you if you wanted it in the first place), Google has you jump through four different hoops hidden under “See how to change and troubleshoot your social circle”.

First, you have to delete your Google Profile. Then you have to delete all of your GMail contacts AND Google Talk contacts. In other words, make GMail almost useless and stop using Google Talk altogether.

After that, you get a “blank slate” on Google Social Search. That means Google doesn’t know about any of your connections, but the service is still technically active.

I never liked Google automatically adding people in my email correspondence to my contacts or Google Talk. Now Google Social Search determines that mere communication to be evidence of a connection substantial enough to display in someone else’s search results.

So I’ve cut the cord and will no longer use GMail for personal correspondence and will probably advise organizations against using GMail in the future. Maybe you should rethink whether or not you want to use it too.

I personally like the new Yahoo Mail. It has this crazy feature called folders and had drag-and-drop long before GMail.

Palm should set its sights on Blackberry, not Apple

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:36:53 -0400

Quick! Which major cell phone manufacturer has performed the worst over the past two years in the stock market? If you have been reading business or technology publications lately, you would probably guess Palm. You’d be wrong. They are actually outperforming their non-Apple competitors Nokia, Motorola, RIM, and HTC (Source: Google Finance).

In fact, they are also second only to RIM in terms of interest in the U.S. judging from Google searches (Source: Google Insights).

The same holds true for blog posts (Source: The Nielsen Company, composited from two graphs).

Yet story after story opines the all but certain death of Palm along with its Pre and Pixi. About the only competing phone that gets as much anguish is the Nexus One. How many duds do other phone companies release? Countless. Why do we never hear about those?

What most writers also fail to mention is that Palm has a mere 1,000 employees. They don’t need to be #1 in sales to be successful. The next smallest company in this group is HTC at 8,000. Keeping up with these telecom behemoths at all is an impressive feat.

Many pundits keep telling Palm to build a webOS tablet. Probably to increase their “market cap”. Enter a new industry. Who cares if you succeed? Unfortunately Palm already got burned by listening to “experts” the first time around, when they kept clamoring for an iPhone killer.

Apple products are still the wrong targets, whether it’s the iPhone or the iPad. How many times must it be said? You can’t beat Apple at being cool.

If there is still any hope left in Sunnyvale, Palm should be aiming for RIM instead. Companies keep buying Blackberry phones up and I can’t understand why. Every Blackberry with a trackball seems to have problems. I’ve never met anyone who was happy with their Blackberry Storm. All of their software is outdated.

Of course the Palm Pre (Plus) is far from perfect, but it still has the best user interface, contact management, multitasking software, development environment, and notification system on the market. In short, everything you would want from a phone for the enterprise.

Jon, ignore the press. Your products are still winning awards. Just get a better advertising agency. And expand into new markets, not new industries. It’s tough to compete when your products are only in 10 countries.

Don’t let Palm turn into another Amiga!

Unleash the potential of your website at the tipping point

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 18:16:01 -0400

Prospective clients often ask me how you can prove there is a potential for improvement when there are countless competitors or seemingly no room for growth. This is particularly important to the field of search engine optimization (SEO), which some feel is harder to forecast than advertising. My mentor, Mike Levin, often talks about how there is a finite number of searches happening everyday. You might be able to slightly influence that level through publicity, but generally marketers all fight over the same piece of the pie in their industry.

(Shigeru Miyamoto holding a Nintendo Wiimote, photo from Sklathill)

But what if you could grow the pie instead? The Nintendo Wii is one of the most famous case studies for this very idea. Miyamoto-san looked outside of the current market and connected with a non-traditional audience. Now more people are playing games than ever before.

How can you visualize that latent potential?

(Graph from Sha at Stamen)

Let’s use a parallel situation. NYC saw an exponential growth in mass transit in the 1990s, beginning to approach the all-time records set in the 40s. Why is that? The population of NYC has only grown by about 400,000 since the 50s. Mass transit is a cheaper alternative to owning your own car, yet the economy has been far better recently than it was during the doldrums of the 70s.

Malcolm Gladwell writes in The Tipping Point about falling crime as one reason to explain increased ridership. People certainly don’t want to take the subway if they don’t feel safe. However, another equally important change was simply connecting the dots.

As I mentioned earlier, the JFK Express failed because there was no connecting AirTrain service to the airport. The importance of connections becomes apparent when you look at this excellent historical map of NYC subway ridership over the past century. The full interactive version is fascinating, but I’ve composited two years into the same graphic to prove a point.

(Composite map derived from work by Sha at Stamen)

In the graphic above, you can see how extending a line for just two more stops made a monumental difference in traffic. The J/Z line ended at 121 St in 1987. Less than two years after opening the terminal at Jamaica Center, almost 20x more people were getting on the same train. Why? People could now easily transfer to the E train or Long Island Railroad (LIRR). The tipping point was convenience.

That’s really what SEO is about. You probably already have a ton of content on your website. You may even be getting a fair share of traffic already. What possible impact can a few small changes make?

A substantial difference. You have to make your website convenient for search engine spiders to find your content and search engine algorithms to rank everything appropriately. It is not until you connect everything together properly with optimized links, sitemaps, and a coherent strategy to surpass the tipping point that you can really unleash the true potential of your website.

The Apple business model and the Adobe red herring

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 15:29:15 -0400

A lot of people in the tech world are up in arms over Apple’s continued denial of Flash on the iPhone, iPod, and iPad. That’s no surprise as many people love these products dearly. The problem is that their brand religion clouds their understanding of what is really going on, and loyalists have bought Apple’s red herring hook, line, and sinker.

Aside from great ads and a rabid fan base, three features made the iPhone really popular.

Slick hardware with a user interface meant for your fingers rather than a stylus
The App Store
A simple product line

Most consumers don’t realize that the concept of an App Store wasn’t new. A little company called Handango has been doing this for a decade. I bought over a dozen apps back in 2005 on my trusty Sony Ericsson P910 including a very useful subway application, some impressive mobile games for the time, and even a SNES emulator.

Unfortunately this mobile revolution went virtually unnoticed until Apple realized its potential, both as a selling point and business model.

Apple’s insight, just like with iTunes, was to own the distribution channel. The manufacturers that previously built phones compatible with the Handango store had little incentive to advertise third party products. When Apple takes a 30% cut on every sale, you can bet selling software at virtually no cost to them is a priority.

This is relevant to Adobe because people would have had much less reason to go to the App Store if Apple had allowed Adobe software on the iPhone.

Flash and Flex are powerful development environments that could probably handle most things done in Objective C. Apple claims that it won’t support Flash because the software crashes or because it wants to support an open standard like HTML 5. That posture is nothing more than a red herring meant to placate critics and distract from the underlying business rationale.

Why would you download software when you could bookmark a webpage that ran Flash? Why develop custom applications when you could make something that was platform independent? Perhaps the iPhone was destined to be a success. Yet it is the App Store and the denial of Flash that made it into one of Apple’s most profitable products.

Another Apple differentiator was a simple product line that made development feasible for software companies was easy to understand for the mass market. Sony Ericsson currently produces 25 different phones for America alone. All with different processor speeds, resolutions, functionality, and versions of operating systems. Multiply that by dozens of other phone manufacturers. As a third party with limited resources, would you want to test software on hundreds of models? I doubt it. As a consumer, how can you stay loyal to a brand when you only own one model out of two dozen that are on sale at any one given moment? No one else in the mobile space except for Palm has the same focus.

Adobe’s two most recent successes are not Photoshop and Illustrator, but rather products that have thrived by overcoming incompatibility. Acrobat ensures documents play well with Mac, PC, and Linux. Flash enables cross-platform video playback and complex applications.

Adobe could still make waves in the mobile space if they can take advantage of the hodgepodge of handsets. Until other hardware manufacturers realize that less is more, Adobe has room to reclaim market share.

If they don’t, Apple will continue to dominate by forcing engineers to play by its rules and consumers who have never heard of or don’t care about Apple’s policy will decide the winner regardless of developer boycotts.

A good analyst should become a catalyst

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 17:58:00 -0400

Last night I gave a short talk on web traffic analysis to a data mining class taught by my friend, Dr. Aleks Jakulin, at Columbia University. Sharing the podium with Dr. Hilary Mason from Bit.ly and Blaz Fortuna from the Josef Stefan Institute in Slovenia, I decided to present a primer on the web analytics industry and leave the science to the experts.

It is a rare 400 level course with no prerequisites, so some students come from a statistics background while others study mathematics or business. What could I say that would be useful to all three disciplines? The main point I wanted to get across was simply the importance of acting upon your insights, regardless of whether you pursue such interests for academic or financial reasons.

I still find this to be the largest problem within web analytics today. At HitTail, we championed the idea of actionable analytics in 2006 (and even before that in Connors’ client offerings). Now, suddenly other companies keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.

Many researchers in the space seem keen on marrying predictive modeling to analytics. Of course that is a cool concept, but it is not always actionable. What do you do with the knowledge that traffic patterns will adhere to the same seasonality as before? Perhaps you can increase ad spend during the same time every year. That is something you should already be receiving from your market research.

Meanwhile, the patent-pending process we created in HitTail was as much about creating a workflow as about its underlying SEO analysis algorithm. How can you begin to take advantage of the long tail when it amounts to a daunting number of keywords in the thousands? Identifying suggested terms to focus on is a key first step, but is not enough on its own to affect change.

An analyst also needs an ability to manage that massive amount of data and, critically, be able to show some progress. Therefore, the HitTail user interface was designed with two minor revolutions in the field of web analytics: an ability to check off items from a To Do list and filter out irrelvant data without having to constantly redo queries.

Imagine going into an enterprise application such as Omniture, Webtrends, or Google Analytics and having the audacity to delete data. People would have heart attacks. Yet it is precisely this overflow of information that can partly lead to analysis paralysis (especially in SEO).

The concept of paring down lists can literally guide you on a path to success. How you pare down lists is up to you. For its part, HitTail provides options to directly add your action items (in this case, long tail keywords) to your ad campaigns or blog about them. The suggestion algorithm helps you be strategic so you can be free to just complete the task at hand and move on to the next idea. That is how you make things happen.

I believe a good analyst is defined by his or her ability to become a catalyst for change. I have only limited interest in insights for their own sake. I love to learn and knowledge is power, but actions still speak louder than words. The cynic in me, for instance, wonders why schools bother teaching history when students never seem to learn from it! Is it the fault of the teacher or the student in that case? Perhaps it is the parent, for not showing how the past can relate to modern life.

The change I am advocating does not just have to be for a social cause, though. This concept fits just as well into building business cases or developing marketing campaigns.

Analyze and then catalyze.

That idea may seem obvious to some, but certainly not all. I want to reach anyone who still isolates themselves in silos of data. Before digging deep into a research project, make sure you are looking to find results that will have a practical application. Come down from those ivory towers and make a difference!

Facebook: PageRank 10

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 09:20:13 -0400

As I reported three years ago, one of Google’s chief competitors has been the beneficiary of its own algorithm. Only this time it is Facebook, and not Yahoo, to receive a vaunted PageRank of 10.

For those unfamiliar with the story, the PageRank concept was integral to the original thesis of Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford. Essentially it rates the billions of pages based on a 0-10 scale regarding the number of inbound citations (or links). So while it is supposedly a play on words for Larry’s last name, the acronym is also conveniently PR (i.e. public relations).

Only a handful ever receive a perfect 10 while the vast majority remain in obscurity at 0 or 1. Google has since distanced itself from considering only this score when ranking pages, but it is still like gold to search engine optimization (SEO) professionals. Any link off the Facebook homepage will now carry more weight to influence rankings than almost anywhere else online. Of course, the hundreds of million eyeballs that see the page everyday wouldn’t hurt your visibility either.

Now the question is, how long will Google engineers let this stand? Yahoo’s PageRank of 10 didn’t last. Even NASA has been demoted to a 9. Sad days, indeed.

Let me pay more for what I want

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 02:27:00 -0400

Two weeks ago, I went looking for a veritable needle in a haystack. I managed to find the pin by some miracle somewhere within my many boxes. I also pulled out a few other items of interest, including two books I had previously started but never finished. One was the Brothers Karamazov. The other was the biography of IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad.

I just started another massive novel recently, so I chose to alternate between that and Swedish business acumen before digging into Russian literature.

(I laugh every time I see this so I had to borrow it; please visit Erik Johansson for more great work!)

I think my favorite part in the entire IKEA book is quite early on, regarding the transition from mail order to showroom. This unlikely reversal of trends was critical for a few reasons. Of course people still yearn for the tactile sensation prior to buying some specific goods such as furniture and clothing. Yet it is the opportunity to compare two levels of product that was the key takeaway. Anyone can race to the bottom in terms of price. Ordering by mail or now online without being able to compare specifications or see the product in person will inevitably lead one to choose the cheapest model. And then you will probably regret it when you receive something that falls apart or stops working.

Kamprad’s insight was to simply let people judge products for themselves. Contrary to what some economists would have you believe, consumers chose to pay slightly more for significantly higher quality.

This reminds me of a famous pricing study of the Economist. The publisher sold more subscriptions when they offered a more expensive plan. I forget the exact details, but it was something like print only: $99, print and online access: $149.

Offering both increased sales more than when there was only one price, because buyers were more satisfied in believing that they got a deal. Plus, the publisher had the opportunity to make even more money than intended. This way, producers sell more and may even be able to raise prices in the face of conventional wisdom.

It amazes me that this seemingly obvious rule of economics has not yet been applied across the board, particularly at the supermarket. Slowly grocers have begun to realize that selling organic and/or locally grown produce can be quite profitable. Yet what about other food and drink?

Quick quiz: how many types of red meat are readily available at American supermarkets? Two: beef and lamb. Veal is beef and mutton is lamb, sorry!

(American Bison at Ted Turner’s ranch, photo by Nicolas Boullosa)

What if I want a healthier alternative, such as bison? Or what about the world’s most popular meat, goat? Both are hard to find across America. Yet I am gladly willing to pay another $1 or $2 for bison instead of beef, because by law bison are all raised naturally — grass-fed as well as free of hormones and antibiotics. One only has to watch Food, Inc. to understand the importance of that. That is lost revenue at the checkout counter.

Want to try a different grain beyond corn, rice, or wheat? Good luck.

What about the all-American soft drink, Coca Cola?

Despite inventing the drink, we have the worst variety in the world. Why? Because the falsely advertised Coca Cola Classic has High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) — not sugar like everywhere else on the planet.

Skeptically, sometimes I wonder if the whole New Coke debacle in 1985 was all a charade. Change the recipe so radically to induce people to demand a return to the original that people barely even notice the different sweeteners upon reinstating the “Classic” formula. You get two marketing campaigns for the price of one, appear to listen to the consumer, AND pull a fast one on us by lowering the cost of your product in the process. Sheer brilliance.

So I can’t entirely blame Coca Cola for using corn syrup, even if I detest the move. The devastating effects of our government’s corn subsidies have been well-documented. Corn is cheaper to buy than it is to produce. And yet more poor government policies to benefit Cuba all but ended Hawaiian sugar production. Given that climate, it makes good business sense for Coca Cola to cut costs with corn syrup. However, has it ever occurred to them that perhaps a segment of the population would pay MORE for their product with natural sugar? They haven’t even given us the option.

Despite Coca Cola’s best efforts not to make more money, people are choosing to pay more in certain areas where Coca Cola is imported. Individual 12 ounce (355 mL) glass bottles average anywhere from $1-$2.60. That is a ludicrously high markup of 600% or more compared to a normal six pack! Yes, we re-import soda from Mexico just like prescription drugs from Canada. Except with soda, we pay higher prices. Intentionally.

A few renegade American bottlers use sugar to give customers what they want during Passover to keep Kosher, but I haven’t found it at either of my local grocery stores here in NYC. Therefore, I’m going to make a rare order from FreshDirect while I can. One can only hope that this revolution in business will continue.

I am not asking for Kozmo 2.0. I just want a few more choices. Besides, diversity isn’t just better for crop rotation. It also spurs the economy and tantalizes taste buds.

The profits and perils of personalization over popularity

Sat, 03 Apr 2010 10:42:00 -0400

One of my good friends was browsing through the bestseller list for an audiobook to buy yesterday when she found an author totally against her philosophy ranking at #9. That led her to discount the entire list as “garbage” and untrustworthy.

Are bestseller lists and platinum records obsolete in the Internet age? Does anyone care what is popular now that we have access to the long tail and customization?

Amazon and Netflix recommendation engines have become almost expected behavior when shopping online. I appreciate their utility and respect their complexity. I have certainly found a lot of new music and movies that way. It works great for eCommerce — especially entertainment and technology products. If I am trying to decide between a particular camera, I can see which model others in a similar dilemma ended up buying. These are added as helpful hints alongside results for the exact keyword matches that I searched upon.

What I loathe is when personalization overrides the default behavior, such as in Google Personalized Search. I want to see what everyone else sees. Anything that is recommended should be cumulative and not in place of the original.

Sometimes Google makes note of when they do this with an explanation and how to turn personalization off. Yet enabling it by default in the first place sets a bad precedent. Not just for SEO, but for user experience. Showing only personalized results sounds good in theory. However, let’s not forget that consistency is also a hallmark of good user experience because it avoids confusion.

If Google only gives me a convoluted way to translate to the original, I am going to get sick of referring to the “glossary” in the back to find the real meaning. Most people aren’t that patient with semantics.

And playing out that future scenario, my friends, reminds me of an old myth where no one could understand each other. It is already hard enough translating within the same language. This just might be worse, though, because our understanding of the meaning would eventually become different.

The importance of immigration

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 16:58:00 -0400

Yesterday I met Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist and author of Libertarianism: A to Z. Some people may not agree with his views on health care, but I think it is important to recognize at least one group of people who are fighting to expand legal immigration.

I mention this because I recently joined the board of a non-profit that provides job placement assistance for immigrants who have entered legally with a college degree and at least two years of experience back home. In other words, smart people who have worked hard to get here and can make an immediate impact in our society with their inspiration and perspiration. Also of importance to me is that the service helps them provide for themselves and their families — rather than giving economic assistance. They never ask for a handout; all they want is a chance.

Why would I get involved in such a cause when my family has been here for over 200 years?

There are many reasons, not the least of which being that many of my friends emigrated here (see above). America was founded by immigrants for immigrants, and keeping our borders open to legal newcomers remains critical to our future in a global economy. The US needs to remain a magnet for the world’s top minds to compete. The idea that young adults can come here on a student visa to be educated by our best universities only then to be given a mere three months to find a job before being deported is utterly ridiculous. Nevermind the fact that it has taken until now for Congress to realize it might be a good idea to give entrepreneurs a visa to start their businesses here. We have been shooting ourselves in the foot for far too long.

Hopefully one day we’ll realize our shortsightedness. Then again, maybe the only way we’ll remember is through art, which has the power to transcend language. Lady Liberty was financed by private donations on both sides of the Atlantic and has inspired generations, but is no longer the first sight of most American hopefuls. I wish we could welcome today’s talent of the world where they land on our soil, such as at JFK or SFO airport.

How to overcome brand religion

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 19:07:00 -0400

Some people are so adamant about the brands they identify with that their loyalty could almost be called religion. You know the type: when it is all but impossible to counter long-held opinions in a rational discussion, let alone through advertising. They simply won’t believe your side of the story, as voiced so fittingly by Apple in their latest Mac vs PC commercial.

Can companies ever overcome that kind of dogma? Maybe, maybe not. Here are a few tips on how to at least influence brand religion.

Be patient. Recognize that you won’t convert anyone overnight. Some auto insiders have been harsh on the new Chevy May the Best Car Win ads, but I think they strike the right chord. Ask people to give you a chance rather than an immediate sale.
Be visual. Show, don’t tell. Sounds great, but how do you do it? I think this is one of the most valuable lessons I learned from my mentor, Mike Levin, in his series of long tail videos.
Be humble. Perhaps the most important thing to remember is not to insult your audience or make outlandish claims. Recognize that there are barriers to overcome. Listen to your customers, like Microsoft did this year in rebounding with their best ad campaign since Windows 95.
Be pervasive, yet subtle. I often compare SEO to public relations; think of it as a soft sell. Ensure you appear at the top of Google, Yahoo, and Bing for the keywords that you know skeptics will research. That gives you the luxury to be more subtle in your marketing message, which can help you slowly win over even the most stubborn people.
Be smart and focus on the right competitor. Even though you can find weaknesses in seemingly impenetrable products, that makes for an uphill battle. Palm and Android are fighting the wrong battle with the iPhone. You can’t beat Apple at being cool. Instead they should be trying to knock off the OTHER major smartphone maker, RIM. It is much easier to target the antequated interface and flimsy trackballs of Blackberry phones rather than attempt to one-up Apple with features like multitasking or better contact management.
Be exclusive if all else fails and expect to pay for the privilege. Millions of people are unhappy with AT&T service, yet put up with it to use the iPhone.

Social consciousness and civil infrastructure

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 17:44:00 -0400

I am usually more interested in Internet architecture than civil infrastructure, but living in New York for six years has helped me appreciate the importance of the nation’s most extensive mass transit network. I don’t think it is a stretch to say that this city owes much of its character, popularity, and economy to the massive 24/7 subway system.

The MTA has been getting a lot of flack lately for its recent budget cuts. There are rarely easy decisions in this matter, and you can count me among those affected. I regularly take the W local train from my home in Astoria to Manhattan. That line is being disbanded in favor of adapting the weekday N from express to local service. Yet even as these and other reductions take effect, portions of the Second Avenue Subway may actually be completed in our lifetimes.

What you may not know is that there were trains running along Second Avenue for 60 years, viewable in this system map from 1939. Of course, within three years of the city taking it over, passengers were soon met with this notice:

The Second Avenue Line was above ground, noisy, and dirty. Yet it is still a shame that people have all but forgotten it because elevated tracks are still in use today. It would probably be a lot cheaper to extend the N train for much-needed service to LaGuardia Airport (LGA) than tunnel underground for the proposed T line.

Upset that the subway takes so long to get to JFK Airport? Did you know there was a JFK Express train that operated only 20 years ago? However, that was long before the AirTrain was completed so it was still a hassle for passengers and ultimately abandoned.

Who knows how many repeat tourists we lose every year because people’s first impressions of the city begin with a decrepit A train from JFK or old buses to LaGuardia. To say nothing of Newark Airport that unbelievably remains one stop away from PATH. (Does anyone think $15 via NJ Transit regional rail is a good deal?) Maybe we could actually pay for some of these new capital projects like Fulton Street, Second Avenue, or the 7 extension if the MTA delivered airport service comparable to any other world class city.

Yet none of these options ever enter into the discussion today, and that is really what bothers me. How can one be socially aware without knowing the past? So much discussion goes into budget forecasting, current state analysis, engineering, audience measurement, and user experience whether you are talking about online projects or mass transit.

Let’s not forget about what we can learn from history.