Teh definition of Train wreck

Great commentary on Sarah’s awesome interview with the Zuck @ SXSW:

http://tweetscan.com/index.php?s=train+wreck&u=

Remember The Tweet

I am addicted to tweets. I can’t get enough of them. These one to two liner posts to twitter might as well be a new chocolate similar to Treats (remember those?). Friends are able to keep up with my life by following my tweets which I can easily send via SMS at any time and place–even while I’m on my throne. I was in London last week without my US mobile and all I could think about was how I wish I can twitter. My constant twittering annoys my girlfriend; Verizon loves me because SMS tweets contributed to a $160 bill last month.

What I really love about twitter is that it extends to other applications by creating a twitter feed for that application. Twitter has an API and I recently saw 2 cool applications of it:

1. The blog rock star known as Jeremy Wright uses twitter to update his blog. Each daily post is a digest of that day’s tweets that he sent via his mobile. He demonstrated this application when he twittered about my girlfriend and now we are on his blog.*
2. Remember The Milk is allowing users to send updates to their to-do list and interact with the service via commands sent over twitter. These are direct messages to RTM so they do not appear in your own tweeter feed.

* Note: I am not canadian nor am I engaged. We all had a lot to drink that night...

There will be Blood

Interesting Quote from AOL re: MicroHoo deal via Rafat Ali —

AOL (NYSE: TWX) CEO Randy Falco spoke today at IAB’s annual conference, and echoed what the official and unofficial thinking within Time Warner is at this point: “I’m hoping the two of them will beat each other’s brains out over search and leave the display market to us,” he said

Tools to “just make it look good”

Some useful tips from Chinwag on design tools for selecting colors and fonts on your prototypes. I like these kind of tools because I can play around with designs and then had off to a techie for proper implementation. I love seeing the look on their faces when a “business” dude is able to pull together a quick demo without their help.

As part of a recent trip to MSN Research Lab I picked up a copy of the Expression Studio design package. I have been playing around with it and it is a great tool for creating prototypes for products. You can actually use it to create rich websites but I have been using it to design my new mountain bike.

Get Satisfaction

I was just twittering and I had some problems adding friends. I looked at their help and saw a link to a discussion topic about the same problem I was having. The link took me to Get Satisfaction, a site where companies can create their own discussion forums for their products – i.e. a help system built by advocates of the product. This is the kind of UGC I can really appreciate – it is a slick and clean interface which is easy to contribute to.

I added my current employer to the site. I wonder what content might come out of this?

West Elm

I bought some sheets from West Elm recently, and ever since I keep getting emails from WE with offers, etc. Now I am not likely to buy from West Elm on a daily basis (more like “once-in-a-blue-moonly” basis) so I felt like I was getting spammed. Instead of banishing them to the junk mail dungeon I decided to try and unsubscribe. It was such a refreshing experience to see it done right I had to blog it.

I opened the email, looked at the footer and found an unsubscribe link. “Looks good so far”, I thought to myself. I was then redirected to a page where I could unsubscribe from the promotional emails.

Instead of just one option, I was presented with 4 options:

• Send no more than one west elm email each week
• Send no more than two west elm emails each month
• Send no more than one west elm email each month
• Unsubscribe completely

Given that I was pleased with my purchase and I may want to to buy something else in the future, I chose the “no more than once a month” option. Now I get the occasional email and it piques my interest. Before that I had a torrent of emails in my inbox that felt like an invasion.

West Elm gave me options to make my experience better, they didn’t say “take it or leave it”.

Looking for Social Networking Pros

For those of you that are actively looking for jobs, or employers that wish to post jobs, a new resource popped up today.

Inside Facebook, an excellent blog tracking the latest Facebook application and platform news, has created Inside Facebook’s Top Jobs; a jobs board for social software and media companies to connect with technology and business savvy social networking experts looking to make the next step.

Yahoosoft or Microhoo

Personally I think Yahoosoft rolls of the tongue better however I don’t think they will get top billing if Steve Ballmer’s marriage proposal gets the formal yes.

I am both a Yahoo! and Microsoft Alumni which give me a rather cool perspective on this. The cultures are similar in that they are both founded by engineers however Yahoo! is clearly inferior in terms of being able to cope with growth and maturity into a major corporation. While I am sure there will be some riffing, MS is clever enough to recognise talent so I don’t think any of my old friends need to worry too much about aquisition pain. For those people that thought Yahoo! was just one big gravy-train: you know who you are and I would be worried.

Google Conversion Optimizer

Google recently released a new product for Adwords that could change the way advertisers manage their spend on Search Marketing. The new product is called Conversion Optimizer and it allows advertisers to specify a CPA price for each click-through rather than to set a price per click (CPC). For example if an advertiser wants to spend no more than $1.00 per new customer they can tell Google that is all they want to pay, rather than to set a price per click when a click doesn’t guarantee a customer.

Google presented the Conversion Optimizer this week and here are my findings:

1 – Settings and installation

Conversion Tracker cookies are set in Google domain

Advertiser must opt-in to use Conversion Optimizer after tagging is complete and the data criteria are met.

• This will help gain advertiser trust – the product cannot be activated until the system is ready to optimize. This will set the correct expectations and minimize advertiser dissatisfaction.

Conversion Tag is javascript/pixel hybrid.

2 – Optimization method

CPA is a max CPA, not an actual.

• The CPA you set is just the maximum CPA Google will optimize to. It does not represent an actual goal.

Using conversion optimizer, bids are set at ad group level, not keyword.

• Setting bids at the keyword level gives the most granular control of your spend. Setting at ad group level may mean that spend is not managed efficiently.

No learning feature for Keywords that do not meet volume criteria.

• A feature of sophisticated SEM technology such as the Efficient Frontier platform is that keywords that do not have sufficient data can still be optimized. Conversion Optimizer is simply not able to optimize the long tail using this criteria.

Conversion Optimizer requires 200+ conversions in the last 30 days for each campaign you wish to optimize by CPA.

• This makes a lot of sense – the optimizer needs to understand past performance in order to affect future performance. While this is sensible it does mean any campaign that is highly targeted or gets little traffic will not be optimized.

Conversion Optimizer uses Adwords Conversion Tracking (this is independent from Google Analytics). Advertiser may use analytics AND tracking at same time.

• This means that advertisers must install two tracking tags on their webpages. Each additional tag adds to the weight of that page and can be difficult to maintain.

3 – Management and configuration

Not compatible with Ad Scheduler feature in Adwords.

• If you want to optimize by time-of-day and already use this feature, Conversion Optimizer will ignore those settings.

CPA is only set at campaign and ad group level, not at account level.

• If you have a single CPA goal that is measured at a global level you will need to change this in every campaign in your account.

CPAs cannot be set in Adwords Editor or through the API.

• Given that this is a free product, presumably aimed at the small business market, this should not be an issue. However if you use a 3rd party SEM software product you should check to see if it can set the CPA for you with their software.

4 – Other

Users that use geo-targeted campaigns will probably not be able to meet profiling criteria.

• This could be an issue for advertisers that set budgets for each geo-market. Budget controls in Adwords are set at the campaign level. Advertisers wanting to optimize geo-targeted campaigns that have low traffic will need to reorganize their accounts to commingle geo-targeted ads into the same campaign. This could be a lot of work but it will have a positive impact on optimization, albeit without the granular budget control.

Not suitable for advertisers that do not measure direct response online (offline conv or traffic are not goals).

• Conversion Optimizer only uses its own data. Google assumes that advertisers are not interested in optimizing by offline conversions. If you use your website to create leads and the actual sale occurs offline Google cannot optimize using that data.

No extra charge for conversion optimizer.

• This is a huge benefit, and I believe will be the primary driver for adoption. Compare this to Yahoo! Search Marketing: their campaign optimizer is only made available to top-tier clients that spend significant money with Yahoo!.

No weighting for different types of conversion. If a lead and a sale can happen in the same user session, it is counted as one transaction.

• This means that advertisers may find discrepancies between the number of conversion events recorded in Google Analytics vs. Adwords Conversion Tracking. Savvy advertisers track all conversion events and assign weights to each type of conversion based on their relative value. A lead is generally less important than an actual sale so you should ensure you give a different weighting to each type of conversion in order to optimize efficiently.

Google still has a separate “Pay per Action” product where advertisers can buy traffic at CPA prices. Conversion Optimizer just optimizes CPC spend to a CPA target, so you still get charged for each click.

• Obviously this is confusing, making it difficult to differentiate and decide which product you should use.

Case studies and testimonials available on website: google.com/adwords/conversionoptimizer

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