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:

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!

Wirefly recently did a poll of Mobile Phone users and found that 64% of mobile users don’t use text messaging. As I was researching this post, I was surprised that a few sites were shocked by the numbers.

Perhaps I’m an older user than some of the bloggers who commented, but I was actually surprised for the opposite reason. I was surprised that 65% of users actually did use text messaging. Perhaps it’s simply that I’ve turned 40 years old but… really? That’s like being shocked that 35% of telephone users never used the telegraph machine.

35 Percent of mobile phone users don’t text because they figured out they can actually speak in that little handy box real time with the person on the other end. And they don’t have to cramp up their thumbs to do so. Of course, texting could come in handy if you wanted to break up with someone but didn’t want to actually speak to them.

I’m being sarcastic of course, I like to text. My kids text their friends endlessly and I appreciate when they text me in a meeting rather than calling me. Texting is much less intrusive and it’s fairly instantaneous. And it’s on the rise.

Businesses have been struggling with what to do with mobile for a while now. The buzz in the food service industry is how responsive patrons are to text-based coupons and alerts. I met with Adam Small, President of Text by Request, this morning and Adam waxed poetic on the extremely exciting things that are coming down the pipeline.

Text by Request already has some interesting uses of mobile. One of them is providing Marathon users with their end-time by having them text in their registration number. No need to wait until you get home to look the time up on your PC!

Adam went on to explain SMS vs. MMS. Where SMS (Short Message Service) allows 160 characters of text to be sent back and forth, MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) allows images, video and sound to be sent back and forth.

As Mobile providers continue to enhance their networks for speed (e.g. 3g, translated = third generation) and mobile phones continue to enhance their screens with higher resolutions, this can really open up the market!

Instead of sending out a text message to push the fish at lunch, perhaps you can send a short video from the manager on duty or a great video of the dish itself! You can also pass a customized coupon utilizing the latest in barcode technologies so that the retailer can simply wave a reader in front of the phone to redeem the coupon.

Adam shared some additional exciting technologies with me that I don’t have permission to share here (yet), but I’m looking forward to seeing and using.

Should Texting be Free?

I asked Adam if he thought the pricing would change for messaging here in the United States (overseas texting is often free) and he said he hopes not. One look at the volume of spam in your inbox explains why… if texting didn’t cost money, our phones would be filling up as we speak!