Making information work

A top power company is running about Sweden and changing some hardware in lots of people’s houses and apartments. To save money while still using the opportunity they did not equip their personnel with company cars: instead they were provided with huge magnetic stickers to put on their own cars.

Great idea, right? Lots of cars, all over the country, driving around with their logo on each door and the hood.

The greatness depends of course on what type of car, right? And if there is a sticker already on the car claiming “Bong hits for Jesus”. The context is probably neutral almost all the time, but I will never forget the rusty pile of poo with the huge power company sticker.

David

As a proud owner of an iPhone, I know exactly what they look like. They look like the image found below:

I found the ad on one of the possibly most expensive online media spots available in Sweden. Notice the “iPod Touch” reference? Yeah, that is wrong. Advertisers need to wake up - this kind of stuff happens way too often.

David

Here we go again - Southern California is burning. And, again, Mother Nature is being blamed. This blame is easy to understand: a monster fire is destroying homes and lives. But there needs to be some gathered afterthough - which oddly seems never to happen.

Take a step back, and look at it this way: San Diego climate is Mediterranean. In Mediterranean climate, there is chapparal. And chapparal burns. Always has, always will.

I read that some semi-famous actress claimed that this was “an act of man” - and there certainly are cases of huge fire disasters in chapparal being caused by man - notably the Cedar Fire of 2003.

But all things considered - this is not Mother Nature’s fault. This is man’s fault. We have pushed the San Diego population east into chapparal which we know burns (intervals vary, as does scientific consencus about why, but somewhere around 4-35 year burn cycles is sort of safe). And still we act confused.

It is (almost) like acting suprised about the nightly recurring cold of desert living, or the relative dampness of under water living.

We need to adapt, by either accepting fires or moving away. Certain forces of nature are simply not manageable, and widespread firestorms in chapparal is one such force.

David

I had an absolutely excellent SEO experience today. In my role as adviser to a financial institution here in Sweden, I again got the opportunity to meet with, and judge SEO firms and their offers. One of these meetings was like a throw-back to my experience in the US four years ago.

Basically, this was the pitch: payment only as a result of performance, no on-site modifications, and our domain will rank. This deal sounds pretty good, right? And, according to the sales-guy, it was “completely unique”.

The reason this deal sounds good initially, is because there is very little chance that our domain will be punished by engaging in it, we will not actively be participating in a link-farming-scheme, and it does not sound like cloaking. Also, we were promised, this was not a comment-spam-linking strategy.

So far, so good.

Or is it? Not really - a few of the warning bells have already rung. First off, there is a startup fee. This means that prior to them delivering anything, a significant (if we target competitive keywords) amount of money will change hands. So the whole “pay only by performance” is, in a word, false. (The startup cost for 6 keywords of mixed competitiveness was around $25.000, and there are a whole lot of text-links available for that price if that is what we are going for.)

The whole text-link thing is also, of course, an issue. Not that I am directly hostile to grey-zone techniques in certain situations, but getting links from a large amount of sites controlled by an SEO-firm is borderline even to me. As could be expected, our request for a reference domain so we could do reverse link lookups to review the company’s linking sites was not immediately responded to.

We were told that if the “cluster of sites” from which these links would be pointed was discovered and blacklisted, we would simply get links from another of the “10 or so clusters” that the company was in control of. It was humorous to me to hear the sales guy say that there was no way of connecting the clusters to each other.  There is, of course.

There is more - something that initially seemed like a good deal - a cost structure varied by placement. We would only pay full price for placement on spots 1-3.  Sure, fine. But we would pay 75% of full price for spots 4-7, which of course is somewhat absurd. Firstly, there is a significant difference in effort reaching spot 7 compared to spot 3 - secondly, there is severely less traffic on spot 7 compared to spot 3. I was told that 75% was fair - I know that it is not.

Another point that was somewhat disruptive was the fact that they would claim success independent of which page on the domain placed well. Which probably will mean that they direct the majority of their links to the index page as that is the easiest to get to rank well. For my financial institution, there are such completely varied product lineups, and such little control of the index page in comparison to product pages that this would effectively be paying for failure.

If you are engaged in organic SEO work independently, that might also conflict with this type of campaign. Your success could possibly be considered their success. We can not have any of that…

For $25.000 or so, lots of fun things can happen. For that amount of money, a strong organic campaign can be built naturally, ethically, and with the long term perspective. (Because, as could be expected, if we were to stop paying for the links, the links are removed.)

The SEO business in Sweden is clearly still remarkably immature. Old fashioned linking packages sold as “unique”. High pressure salesmen selling packages with a “pay for performance only” with an up front cost. No understanding for the concept of quality - only “placements placements placements” with these people.

In regards to this particular solution, I sense that there is something else big that I am missing. No matter if I am right or wrong about that - this product would be laughed at in the US. Even four years ago. What we taught our customers then and there was that “learn how to write for the web”, we gave the technicians the tools to create a strong solid technical architecture, and we gave the press and marketing departments the tools to create a natural, honest, ethical linking network with stakeholders of all kinds.

Sounds simple, huh? I have yet to be offered anything remotely close to this in Sweden, and I have sat through probably 50 different sales pitches…

David

For me, the biggest aha-experience was the continued rise in sightings of Chinese cars in Stockholm. I mean, how many people have heard of SSangYong? Well, I had not. Anyways - I was seeing taxis, mostly. But never more than one at a time. All over the place, but always the same company. My friend and partner in crime Emil came to an obvious, but eventually erroneous conclusion: there is but one SSangYong taxi in Stockholm.

He was joking, but I could not prove him wrong. Until today.

Therefore, I now give you two SSangYong taxis:

David

Thank you, Nobel. Thank you for making climate change a winner. Thank you for reigniting the debate.

David

Another school shooting. Another tragedy. More destroyed lives. And, as always, media is getting it all wrong.

In the latest event, noone except the gunman seems to have lost their life, but this CNN article distrubs me all the same. All because of this passage: “He was an atheist and a devoted follower of Goth rocker Marilyn Manson.”

Now, for the record: I am not a fan of the music Marilyn Manson creates. It is far from the vocal house I spend my days listening to. Marilyn Manson the person, however, is an amazing orator and thinker. I have posted this before, but have a look again:

I am very upset that CNN chooses to refer to this murderer’s taste in music when it absolutely positively has nothing to do with his attempted murders and successful suicide. It is, to me, as pointless as saying that the murderer “refinanced his home with Geico, not Nationwide”. What are we saying? That people who listen to Marilyn Manson are more likely to go on bizarre murderous streaks?

I long for the article about a Nobel prize winner which ends “She is an atheist and a devoted follower of Goth rocker Marilyn Manson.” Likely to be read in media? Nope. Likely to be true? Well, who knows.

David

When I saw the keynote where the iPhone was presented, I knew I had to have it. Then, when I started comparing the phone, on paper, with others I started feeling disappointed. There were clear discrepancies between the feeling I had in my soul and the specs on paper.

Now, after 10 days or so with an iPhone as a part of my life I know. I know that the soul is mightier than the spec.

The iPhone is, in a word, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Functions are intuitive, function is flawless. Have I had problems? Sure. Are they overshadowed and made insignificant by the massive amounts of breathtaking functionality and interface afterthought? Without any doubt.

Mike Ness (genius lead singer of legendary band Social Distortion) once sang “I’m in love with my car”.

Me, I’m in love with my iPhone.

David

When I recently reinstalled my computer I decided to give Microsoft a shot. I have not installed Firefox. I have not installed a Google toolbar. I am using the built in screen-shot tool rather than Snag It.

But now I can not take it anymore. The MSN Live search is absolute crap - simple searches give completely irrelevant results, such as “swedish english translation” - in Google I get a long list of free tools, in Live I get along list of companies offering the service. Maybe some like the Live-way better. I am absolutely not one of them.

Google Toolbar, here I come.

David

When the four now ruling parties won the last election in Sweden, they did so in part by referring to themselves as “the Alliance”. They were viewed as homogeneous, and this unity was often attacked by the opposing group of political parties. It seemed that the opposing group of parties knew that the unity of smaller parties was powerful.

On TV, as I write, the two smaller parties of the opposing group are in a debate. Calling each other old fashioned and ridiculous.

Smart? Probably not.

Will we forget? Probably so.

David

I am involved in a financial institution’s lead generation optimizing (sounds familiar…) and again working together with one of Sweden’s most successful marketing and business development managers.

As a part of any project of this sort, we have a rather large PPC  campaign going. Both to learn search behavior and to test landing pages and application forms. So far, we are measuring the success using Google Analytics. It is a great tool, but drilling down deep into the data is not possible.

We have envisioned a funnel displayed at login which represents the whole flow - all referrers, all landing pages, all application variants, but that the funnel could easily be expanded and drilled down ad infinitum. I want to see how a particular referrer works with a particular color and text and application variant. And so on. We have a meeting with one of the big big big suppliers of web analytics Thursday - I expect to chock him deeply with our thoughts and demands. If it works, if the system is implemented with all the other in development parts, it will become the heart of the institution.

I have always had difficult times with poorly installed and maintained complex web analytics suites. Now that I know that the correct preparations, and the correct demands set on the installing consultant can result in fantastic reports I am not as hostile. Without web analytics, you are blind.

And if you are blind, well, you cant see.

David

I met with an extraordinarily exiting company today. It is a highly successful online retailer built on the scraps of a not as successful online retailer originating in the dot com hysteria of late nineties, early two thousands.

Talk about turning stuff around. They have increased turnaround tenfold in four years, without really increasing their staff. They developed their own systems and architecture and routines.

And without venture capitalists involved, they are in no hurry.

This is significant. They have the time to make sound decisions - no one breathing down their neck. I was incredibly impressed. More about them later.

David