The Marketing Technology Blog

I haven’t ever done a ‘head to head’ comparison of a blog post written with a date and one without a displayed date. Over at DoshDosh, I noticed that they have dates on comments, but the date is no where to be found in the post itself. I believe this is a better approach than my blog, where I have the date very evident in both the URL and with a date graphic. I just can’t turn the clock back now without doing a lot of work!

Business and technology moves at such a rapid speed that a blog post that is one year old may no longer be applicable today. If I see a few blog posts on a topic, I’ll often select the freshest date in the pack and ignore the others.

Page Freshness and Search Engines

Surely there are many others that are doing this as well, which I believe is evidenced in search results. Search Google Blogsearch and the results are sorted in reverse chronological order. Even within Google, I often notice that newer articles are nearer the top of the results. I’ve also noticed other bloggers who often ‘republish’ content - 2 articles almost exactly the same but one published recently. Although the content is nearly identical, the newer article appears near the top!

Page Freshness due to Commenting

I can not believe it’s a coincidence that my most popular posts on my blog are ones that have a consistent chain of comments. User generated content, like comments, ‘refresh’ a blog post by causing a content change that the search engines then reindex. In short, comments keep your content ‘fresh’ to both readers and to the search engines.

Commenting Services kill your Freshness

There’s quite a buzz on the few commenting services out on the market that are making quite an impact. Understanding these technologies is important, though!

Notice that when a User makes a request for your page (B), the user’s browser makes a request for the page content and then an additional request for the comment content. It’s pretty seamless. In fact, if you’ve got a large conversation, it’s quite nice since the comments load after the page via JavaScript (aka client-side). The browser puts the pieces together!

The problem is that a Search Bot, the programmatic engines of the search engines, is not a browser! The Search Bot will make the request (D) for your page and that’s where it stops. Regardless of how much great content or fresh content is being added via the comments, the Search Engine is oblivious since it never requests that information. Your page is stale and forgotten.

There is Hope!

These services are incredibly robust and fun to use, so I’m not knocking them altogether. Personally, I simply don’t believe that the features of these systems outweigh the benefits of user-generated content and search engine optimization. The fix is to develop server-side Application Programming Interfaces for these services (F). This way, my web server can still display the comments for a user OR search engine and my site will benefit from it.

With a handful of these services on the market already, you have to ask yourself:

how do you control and manage the ton of your content that they own?

If they go out of business, how do you recover that information? If you decide to leave their service how do you recover that content? It could get ugly!

I’m a Software as a Service professional, so I do believe in the benefits of third party applications like this for managing processes more efficiently. In this case, I want to ensure that I benefit fully from comments made on my blog, though! If they go server-side, I may give switching over some thought, but until then I’m steering clear.

Your emails look like this:

1. Perhaps a subject line more compelling and personalized instead of “ChangeThis: Issue 46″
2. Perhaps some line breaks so that I don’t have to wrap as I read (I didn’t read it, it was impossible).
3. Perhaps Multi-part MIME emails to send text to those who want a plain look, but HTML to those of us who enjoy a well-designed email.
4. Perhaps a compelling introduction?
5. Perhaps some white space between topics to make it easy to scan?
6. Perhaps headings to highlight the different topics and differentiate them from the descriptions?
7. Perhaps a bulleted list with the links and information associated with each?
8. Perhaps a list of common links back to the web site?
9. Perhaps a different Email Service Provider if yours is difficult to use?

The terrible part here is that ChangeThis‘ byline is:

ChangeThis is creating a new kind of media. A form of media that uses existing tools (like PDFs, blogs and the web) to challenge the way ideas are created and spread.

It’s a great organization with a vast amount of material to motivate change in leaders and entrepreneurs. It’s simply too bad that they choose to ignore the single communication method that keeps me coming back to their website.

I unsubscribed.

5/8/2008: Even though I subscribed, I received this email today. Not sure what might have happened but it was a vast improvement:

My team of good friends, Jason, Bill, Carla and I drove to Cincinnati yesterday for our final I-Prize presentation with Cisco. The Carmel facility is a lot closer but Cisco needed to move us to enable their full Innovation team to be present.

The Finals!

With over 1100 international entries to the contest, we were selected and made the 32 semi-finalists. Now we were one of the final 12 ideas presenting in front of the very board who initiated the contest. No pressure, huh?

I couldn’t think of a better mix of team mates to work with on this project. The irony, of course, is when you pick a team of hard workers… all of us have challenging jobs already. The I-Prize really added to our workload and I’m thankful I had friends who would step up when I couldn’t. You could see the strain leave our bodies and the smiles return after we finished the presentation.

The Telepresence Experience

A sample video of Telepresence is on YouTube but it really doesn’t provide the full experience.

The room is a partial oval table that directly faces 3 enormous screens with built-in video cameras. When you plugin your laptop to do your presentation, it’s projected locally under the screens as well as remotely under the screen so all members can see it.

We had parties at 3 physical telepresence locations at our meeting as well as another caller who simply dialed in. The system automatically flips the image based on which location is speaking. But it doesn’t flip all of the screens - it simply flips to the screen that someone is speaking on. Here’s a great pic where a tech was working to the left of the San Jose group - you can see half of her.

Within a few minutes of using the system, you truly forget that you’re actually at opposite ends of the country. it’s an amazingly comfortable experience. We were definitely impressed.

The Cisco Team

With hearts pounding and so many executives from Cisco, I tried to write down everyone’s names but simply lost track. It was a thrill to be face-to-face with Marthin De Beer, though! The Cisco team were casual, gracious, inviting and supportive hosts. Any fears of Randy, Paula and Simon quickly evaporated with the leadership team we had in front of us!

Enough! How did the Presentation go?

Trying to sell a billion dollar idea in 60 minutes is definitely a new experience. Bill was our spokesperson and the guy who kept the tempo of the meeting. I chimed in with as much industry data and experience I could. We knew the toughest hurdle was actually getting the team to recognize the solution and opportunity. Carla illustrated our slide deck to visually capture the mounds of data that we packed into each slide.

POS? Really?

When you say “Point of Sales” system, folks immediately think about a barcode scanner, an inventory database, and the ability to print a receipt and charge a credit card. That’s the paradigm that we had to shift in the first 30 minutes!

We had to get the team to recognize that the POS has much more potential to be the entire hub of the business with an opportunity to integrate into all other business processes - inventory control, food supply, employment, accounting, marketing, rewards, online ordering, kiosk ordering, wireless ordering, reporting, enterprise management, etc.

The reason why people see a POS as a ‘glorified cash register’ is that this is exactly what it’s been the last 50 years with very little change. The core of our idea for the finals is to make the POS the HUB of the restaurant, with a secure and reliable network to support any communications.

Perhaps the best part of the presentation was that, as we spoke, we could physically see the expressions on their faces change and the light bulbs turn on. Questions changed from ‘who, what, how much’ to ‘how about, do you picture, why not’. With a $17B industry, prospects that are disappointed with current offerings, and no vendor stepping to the plate - the restaurant industry is primed for disruption by a company with the resources of Cisco.

What’s Next?

By close of the meeting, we had talk of thin-net clients deployed with ideas of the “Restaurant in a Box” and alliances with vendor agnostic POS hardware clients. Yes!!!! That’s the picture that we wanted to paint all along. We had some very positive responses from the team, some good chemistry throughout, and we closed the meeting. Jason polished off the meeting letting the team know why a system would have been so essential to his success as a restaurateur.

I don’t believe it could have gone better! There is additional cost/benefit analysis that could be accomplished and we identified the resources to obtain that information to refine our business case. A few thousand dollars in industry reports would need to be scoured with a good analyst to come up with an accurate estimate.

Now we wait! Marthin closed the meeting with a statement of how interesting it was to hear others’ perceptions of what Cisco ‘was’ or ‘did’. We hope that they can visualize themselves into this space. This would solidify Cisco as the data backbone of commerce, first in the food service segment, and beyond to the entire retail industry.

The team ended the phone call and did a 30 minute debriefing. We wait until June to hear the results! Tick… tick… tick…

If Cisco does not choose us, we’ve already discussed the idea with some entrepreneurs, angel investors and venture capitalists here regionally. Without Cisco’s network and reach, this may be a tough idea to sell. That is, unless we get the funding and become their customer!

This afternoon I had a presentation with a regional law firm on Social Media. It was great to see an organization that had the foresight to expose its employees to new media. The world is definitely changing but there’s still a misnomer out there that social media is ‘what the young folks are doing’ and it’s still not getting taken seriously.

The Newspaper Industry - Missed Opportunities

A decade ago, I worked with newspapers and watched them silently watch eBay and Craigslist. They thought it was for geeks and young people as well… until the billion dollar rug was yanked out from under them. In fact, it wasn’t really yanked, it was gently pulled.

Many newspapers wrote in awe of the growth of these technologies, unfazed that it would chip away at their own industry. Many newspapers had their toes in the Online Industry (InfiNet was one that my parent company worked with) but they failed to pull the trigger when they could have to make the necessary investment… even when they knew there was still time to do so. The corporate profitability lines had been drawn, and no manager was going to take 50% off the margins to go after this new world.

Newspapers had the coverage and the monetary resources to battle the losses. They even had the advantage of a regionally trusted brand. Rather than adapt, though, they pointed fingers and swapped one manager who didn’t understand with the next that didn’t understand.

In the decade I was at the newspaper, I don’t ever remember a session where someone came in and discussed the new technologies and asked or discussed how they could be leveraged to improve efficiency or maximize profitability.

It was refreshing today to see a local firm with a different outlook!

The Burj Dubai - a Solid Foundation

One of the slides in my presentation is a great photo of the Burj Dubai, a building under construction in the United Arab Emirates that will tower above all other buildings. It’s scheduled for completion by the end of next year and is currently estimated to have 162 stories.

162 stories is the latest estimate, though. It’s rumored that the goal has changed over the years, partly due to possible engineering estimates that underscored the strength of the foundation and how tall the building could be raised to.

One look at the building and you can begin to understand why. The foundation of the Burj Dubai is absolutely mammoth, and the spire thins as it goes up.

Social Media - A Foundation in Business

Social Media is your company’s opportunity to begin building a foundation for incredible growth over the next decade. Establishing an online brand through social media and social networks lays the groundwork for established connectivity.

Much like a web, starting today will provide you with a huge net to capture a huge volume of business in upcoming years. The landscape is changing. Search engines - even Google - will lose some of their grip on how we navigate the web as micro networks continue to rise and flourish.

The earlier your company adapts to these technologies, the better positioned it will be when your livelihood depends on it. The firm I spoke to today has exceptional opportunities. They have talent that has established authority and results in burgeoning cases like non-compete clauses and patent law.

If their staff were sharing those experiences online today and establishing online authority, especially geographically, it will provide them with the networks to grow their business tomorrow. It’s an exciting time for this firm in particular - they’re a firm that is open-minded, large enough to have an impact, but small enough to maneuver and adapt in this space quickly.

I hope they take advantage and recognize the opportunity that a few of them identified right there in the room!