Recent Articles
July 07, 2008
Last week, a marketer asked me what her rights where when terminating a relationship with a search engine marketing agency. Her incumbent agency refused to pass over anything but ad copy. No keywords, no historical performance, nothing. I am sure there are other absolute horror stories out there, but my gut says that this is not typical of most SEM agency-client relationships.
June 30, 2008
Ten years ago this September, Sergey Brin and Larry Page were about to set up offices in a garage. Their Web site, Google.com, delivered results for 10,000 searches a day. By 1999, that figure had jumped to 3 million. Today, Google processes hundreds of millions of searches each and every day. If this is a staggering number, consider that behind each and every search query is a set of consumer data, and it is access to this data that puts Google into a league of its own.
June 23, 2008
Starting a business is, no doubt, a massive endeavor. However, something larger looms ahead of the young start-up: scaling the business. It is frequently said that moving from zero to $10 million in revenue is easy; it is the step from $10 million to $100 million where the real sweating occurs.
June 23, 2008
The mobile Web presence is to 2008 what the Web presence was to 1998: an absolutely essential component of the marketing mix. Mobile media measurement firm M:Metrics, recently acquired by ComScore, states that mobile browsing has increased 89% year over year, and page views have increased 127%.
June 16, 2008
It was a big week — make that a very big week — for search engine marketing announcements. While most are obsessing over the Yahoo/Google partnership, plenty of other news was released. Dear readers, here are the best bits.
June 09, 2008
When we talk about next generation search, thought leaders assess better means of indexing images, video and audio. Talk moves to searching from devices beyond the desktop, from cell phones to TV remote controls. But rarely do we ever go beyond the online constraints to understand the most valuable of all search data: the offline search.
June 02, 2008
When the invitation to speak on behalf of SEMPO at the ADMAZ e-commerce conference in Prague arrived, my colleagues asked, "How big can the Czech market be?" I said, "I don't know, but I am about to find out." I am happy to report that while the market is certainly smaller than most countries, Prague is a burgeoning hub of technology and interactive marketing for a much larger region.
May 23, 2008
Last week, I had a lesson in integrated marketing from a most unlikely source: classical musicians. Humbling moments such as these that remind me just how important it is to heed one's own advice when it comes to delivering on multiple touch points.
May 19, 2008
Last week, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released an update to "The Internet and Consumer Choice" report noting online research and purchase patterns for music, cell phones and real estate. The key finding was somewhat disturbing for the online marketer.
May 19, 2008
As the number of Web sites offering personalization grows, so does the number of logins and passwords for users to remember. As a result, many Web users are now experiencing "login fatigue," either forgetting their usernames and passwords or refusing to revisit a Web site with a unique login. The inability to solve this problem hinders online marketers.