Category: Microsoft (MSFT)

Microsoft (MSFT)

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Wall Street Journal Says Google “Stumbles” in Video

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an awesome article about Video ads and discusses MSN’s early dominance. The article states:

“MSN’s early success positions the portal to benefit from the explosion in online video advertising now under way. It also raises questions about Google Inc.’s ability to maintain its stranglehold on Internet advertising.”

“Advertisers say there aren’t enough ad spots to go around. A June study by McKinsey & Co. estimates that 80% of video inventory was soaked up in 2005 and that demand is likely to rise five-fold next year, outstripping current supplies. “Whenever we create more inventory, the sales force can sell it instantly,” says Rob Bennett, general manager of MSN Video. “There’s a tremendous demand.””

“Jason Zajac, general manager of social media at Yahoo, says Yahoo currently runs banner ads only on the home page of video.yahoo.com, Yahoo’s page for homemade videos, which are vetted by Yahoo editors. Mr. Zajac says that Yahoo hopes to be able to offer 15- to 30-second ads inside user-created videos soon.”

“At the same time, portals are keeping an eye on Google. The search giant stumbled in an effort to move into video early last year.”

It’s interesting to see people questioning Google’s potential in this area so early in the game. Just like mobile marketing, the premise that Google will dominate is being questioned very early here.  

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Steve Ballmer Speaks – Should Steve Spin Off MSN?

There is an interview in the Wall Street Journal today with Steve Ballmer.

First I’d like to say that I wish they would have hired me to do the interview as it was mostly a rehash of many things Steve has already said save the Bill Gates is leaving and how does this affect you.

For example the article says: “Google Inc., meanwhile, has outpaced Microsoft online, poached key Microsoft employees and will likely become an even greater Microsoft rival in years to come. The Internet search company’s rising share price has raised debate over what more Microsoft can do to retain and attract employees.”

An intelligent question about whether MSN needs to spin off a portion of MSN to create a high growth currency would have been nice on this issue.

Asking about Yahoo! when Microsoft just hired the CEO of Ask is just plain silly – especially since this issue has been talked to death. A question about what exactly Steve Berkowitz’s mandate is and whether Ask might be acquired makes a million times more sense than to rehash the Yahoo speculation.

If anyone at Waggoner Edstrom is listening, I would to have one of the first public MSN interviews of Steve Berkowitz, a groundbreaking and unique conversation, you may find my contact information in my about section.

Posted on by — 2 Comments

Shally Steckerl: Leadership Recruiting Innovator

Through my participation in linkedin.com during my amazing transition and discovery period, I’ve gotten to know some extremely interesting people. One of those people is Shally Steckerl (www.jobmachine.net/shally), a leading innovator in use of data mining and reverse viral marketing techniques for recruiting purposes.

Alright David, just why the heck are you interviewing a recruiting guy on your Marketing Innovation and Customer Listening blog? Well, many of the techniques he and his peers are using are strikingly similar to search engine and viral marketing so they are important to learn about. It’s one degree away but there is innovation happening on both sides and we should all be constantly learning from different perspectives. As you know, I love and embrace learning, innovation and process refinement, it’s what makes businesses with healthy cultures interesting!

David Dalka: What are you up to these days, Shally?

Shally Steckerl: I manage the central research team for Microsoft under a newly formed group called S.T.A.R.T. (Strategic Talent Acquisition and Research Team) led by long time Microsoft Staffing visionary Bridgett Paradise. We focus on candidate lead generation and Recruiting CI. I’m fortunate to lead a team comprising some of the most advanced and creative minds in the industry. I’m still maintaining jobmachine.net, blogging, and participating in many online communities and forums revolving around the Recruiting and Internet Research industry.

David Dalka: You are also frequently a public keynote speaker at conferences in this regard…

Shally Steckerl: I’ve been fortunate to be invited to address my peers at conferences like SHRM EMA, ERE, Kennedy and Onrec on topics I’m passionate about like Internet Research and building a recruitment network.

David Dalka: You recently had a seminar about using linkedin.com for recruiting…

Shally Steckerl: I was invited to address 1,500 participants interested in learning more about what LinkedIn has to offer recruiters and how they can best utilize it as a candidate generation resource. I had a great time giving everyone a tour of how I use the website day to day and showcasing some of my “recommended practices.”

David Dalka: What are some of your other favorite resources to target candidates?

Shally Steckerl: I depend heavily on the Internet as a database so I frequently use many of the top search engines like MSN Search, Yahoo, Google, Ask, Exalead, IceRocket and Gigablast to name a few. I also scan many blogs and read search engine results from several RSS feeders. Finally, I make the most out of dozens of online databases. All told there are about 280 places I go looking for leads at any particular point in time though this number grows constantly.

David Dalka: For the previous items, are there differences in techniques when looking for non-technical candidates and if so what?

Shally Steckerl: Some sources are better for identifying candidates for a particular industry. Each of the 280 methods I mentioned has a range of industries. Some types of candidates have a more pronounced Internet footprint than others. I wouldn’t, for example, go looking for Auditors in discussion groups, or Research Engineers in annual reports. Non-technical candidates appear in diverse sources. Just like technical candidate some can be found with simple keyword searches on search engines while others are more easily found in deeper information sources like databases or archives.

David Dalka: Is decreasing the cycle time for hiring clearly competitive advantage?

Shally Steckerl: The clearest competitive advantage is being first in reaching top talent that has not yet considered other opportunities. First we must identify where that talent is, but then we also must quick reach them before our competitors find then. Having the first chance to offer a top candidate new opportunities is much more advantageous than being very fast at reacting to the same candidates that have applied at every competitor.

David Dalka: While I often see you speak on the topic of finding candidates from the recruiters’ perspective, let’s reverse engineer that. What are the best ways for a great candidate to become more visible to the recruiting community both on and off of the web?

Shally Steckerl: I think that candidates need to do the same thing recruiters should do, and that is go directly to the source. A good recruiter knows where the top talent is and goes straight there to get them. A good candidate should know where the best employers are and go straight at them. Make connections and find ways to reach your target audience. Identify your top ten employers of choice and define what roles you see yourself doing there, then do everything you can to meet everyone who could ever have anything to do with those roles. Get as close to the decision maker as you can then make a surgical and decisive move to influence them to create the role you want for yourself. The best jobs are “made to order” not “filled to order.”

David Dalka: What are the most common mistakes candidates make during the interview process?

Shally Steckerl: Quite a bit has been written about this by many recruiters with far more experience than I but I will take a stab at it. In my opinion, the worst mistake is interviewing for the wrong job. If the job doesn’t suit you right from the beginning you are probably not going to get it and even if you do you won’t be happy doing it. I think the second mistake is not visualizing your self in that role. I mean really seeing yourself doing that job day in and day out and being extremely confident that this job will have you leaping out of bed in the morning. To be able to do that you need to prepare well and get to know the role and the company before the interview. However, knowing is only part of it. Feeling it is the other part. The third and final fatal mistake I’ll offer is not asking for the job. That’s right. Many people walk away from an interview never having explicitly conveyed their interest in the position. This leaves hiring managers wondering if the candidate really wants the job. There should be no doubt at all that you are interested and willing to do what it takes to get the job but also get the job done once you get it.

David Dalka: What are some things candidates do best to make themselves stand out during the interview process?

Shally Steckerl: Ask for the job. Ask prepared questions about the role and the long term plan for the role. Look people squarely in the eye and ask for the job while you are shaking their hand. Give concrete examples of something you have done in the past that has given you the tools to competently complete the tasks required for this job. Provide evidence of how you have overcome unpredictable obstacles by learning and applying yourself, going the extra mile to exceed expectations. Oh and ask for the job – did I already mention that?

David Dalka: How do you see recruiting evolving going forward?

Shally Steckerl: Recruiting will become an intertwined ecosystem that brings together the ability to manage project vendors and partners while leveraging technology and applying the ability to understand business needs.

David Dalka: Thank you, Shally, I really enjoyed talking with you. Talk to you soon.

Posted on by — 2 Comments

Being Able to Trust…Even Without Disclosure

I recently read Robert Scoble’s and Shel Israel’s book “Naked Conversations”. It’s a great book. In fact I’m currently writing a positive review for it for a publication due to it being well researched and fascinating in terms of its’ leadership and change management implications. It earned my respect due to the extensive research that went into the book. For the record, Robert didn’t send me a copy of the book and I got it at a public library.

But Robert made this post yesterday about disclosure in relation to payperpost that Richard Brownell, Chris Brennan and David Krug make some extremely interesting points that people should consider in the comments of Robert’s post. I think Robert is not recognizing that creating buzz is in itself advertising whether you keep the product or not – so either you should take what is given to you and be discreet about it or return the items as they arrive if you care about potential ethics issues.

In Robert’s July 2nd, 2006 post you say that you’ve “never really given Sonos a review before”. Yet in his April 8th, 2006 post , Robert stated the following:

“This is much much more cooler than I thought,” says Buzz Bruggeman.

What’s he talking about? The Sonos music system.

First, a disclaimer. They sent me this so I could try it out. It’s one of the things that arrived before I said “no more free stuff.”

I have to admit this is pretty cool. It lets you put a controller in each room in your home.

And you control it over Wifi.

This rocks. We’re playing my iTunes stuff right now.”

Then later in the post Robert says:

“Tomorrow Chris Pirillo and Ponzi is coming over for brunch. It’ll be interesting to see what they think. (Chris always has the coolest stuff before I do, so if it impresses him it’ll impress everyone).”

Let’s compare some statements in this post with the July 2nd post:
1) Robert talks about Sonos (with an outbound link to the product no less) in the April 8th post. You then use the terms “I have to admit this is pretty cool” and “This Rocks” to describe it. Then on July 2nd Robert says, “Well, I never really gave them a review until today.” If alongside an outbound link to the product it’s stated that something is “pretty cool” and that “this rocks” isn’t a review, I don’t know what is.
2) In that post it says that “First, a disclaimer. They sent me this so I could try it out. It’s one of the things that arrived before I said “no more free stuff.”” In the July 2nd post it talks about a new Nokia phone that just arrived. If the “no more free stuff” was truly operational you’d send it back to the shipper immediately or refuse delivery. Which is the true policy?
3) Does one not get value out of something for using it for a few months? In the car industry it’s a called a lease and there are payments involved. Did you pay Sonos or Nokia for value received during usage of these products for a period of time? If not, would you not admit that you got some value out of them?
4) In your April 8th post you said the Sonos might impress Chris Pirillo and go on to say that if it impresses him it will impress everyone. Does one gain any personal value out of impressing people with new gadgets that were sent to you?

Regardless of whether you gave the items away after a few months or not, Robert did talk about them on his blog and if they had not been sent to you likely would not have talked about them. You then gave Sonos even more buzz again by giving it away at Gnomedex as “hundreds of people witnessed it”. Why did Robert choose this high profile place to give away this item instead of quietly giving it to charity anonymously?  So regardless of whether you reviewed the product on April 8th, you gave it buzz on your blog twice and in front of an entire conference. That my friend has value to certain people with your increasing public profile in terms of buzz for Sonos. Disclosure or not Robert created significant positive PR here for Sonos by discussing it in his blog – when it arrived and again after giving it away as “hundreds of people witnessed it” at Gnomedex.

While the data from yesterday’s mention is not in yet, I would suggest that this Alexa (yes I know Alexa has flaws) graph showing the spike in traffic in April around the 8th suggests the buzz impact of this mention or review quite well:

sonos_alexa_graph

 

 

 

 

 

As I discussed previously in e-mail with Robert a few weeks back, “Naked Conversations” is about trust (and how certain actions enable trust to occur). If someone were to purposely write something misleading about a Nokia phone and someone bought it and it sucked, that individual would call that person out on it. In other words, the trust is self-policing even without disclosure. I therefore don’t need to be told like a child each time that you got these items for free, as I believe that you would not do something so foolish as to blog positively about a product that you thought sucked. Just lile the “Claire” blog at Vichy, people figured out what was and wasn’t real on their own – without any disclosure.

To summarize, while I certainly can’t speak for the whole blogoshpere, I trust that you are wise enough to not write something positive that you don’t truly believe to be true about a product regardless of whether you disclose that you got something for free or not. Aren’t you worthy of this trust Robert?

Posted on by — 1 Comment

Online E-mail Service Reliability Needs Improvement

At present, I have 4 web-based e-mail accounts, Google’s Gmail, Microsoft’s Hotmail/Live.com, Yahoo! Mail and my University of Chicago Graduate School of Business “Email4Life” account.

I can now discuss the issue without being accused of favoritism or bias because all four of the organizations above have now done this recently. This is the issue of e-mail reliability and making large changes in the live environment and ignoring the issues of a continuous and positive user experience is a disturbing trend. All of the above providers have had large outages and/or rollbacks to previous versions in the past month. This is not optimal and should not become the “norm”.

I’d like to ask program managers to please consider the following going forward:
1) Reliability of service is paramount and should not be sacrificed
2) Sacrificing long-standing features in new versions is not a good idea
3) Communicating and explaining the feature upgrades transparently is encouraged
4) Asking for user feedback on new features is encouraged
5) If the application operates more slowly using Ajax than it did before, please optimize it before implementing

I would hope that these organizations would understand the potential attrition and retention implications of actions such as these and change their future actions before it adversely affects them.

I’d like to share a glimpse at the top items on my wish list for improvements:
Gmail
– I love the conversation bundling feature, though there are times when I would like to unbundle a conversation and adding the ability to do this would be helpful
– Automatic spell checking (the new Hotmail/Live.com Beta has spell check integrated as you type – this should become the best practice)
Hotmail/Live.com
– In Live.com, restoration of the radio buttons to complete actions on multiple e-mails at once is necessary
– Stability of Live.com needs to be a priority, I switched back to Hotmail for now (you get kudos for the feedback form – though an acknowledgment that shows someone read it would be confidence inspiring)
Yahoo! Mail
– In the new version, restoration of the radio buttons to complete actions on multiple e-mails at once is necessary
– Automatic spellchecking (the new Hotmail/Live.com Beta has spell check integrated as you type – this should become the best practice)
– In the new version, I’d like it to look and feel more like the old Yahoo! Mail – e-mail me if you’d like more detail
University of Chicago
– Build an understanding that Email4life is a critical alumni networking tool and treat it as such
– Communicate clearly with all members of the community and act on their feedback in an accountable manner; In summary, providers need to fully consider the user experience when making changes in their offerings
Do other people have other suggestions or thoughts on this issue?

Posted on by — 2 Comments

The Motley Fool Suggests Google is “Killing the Internet”

So far this month there have been two noteworthy pieces written about click fraud and related issues.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban blogs that click fraud is “FAR greater” than imagined. Quite an interesting read and one coming from a wealthy Internet pioneer to boot. It’s clear that he has a strong opinion on this subject.

The second article is from The Motley Fool and is entitled “How Google is Killing the Internet”

While I encourage everyone to read the article thoroughly, here are some interesting quotes from Seth’s article:
“Markets don’t correct without competition and information, and I don’t think there’s enough of either here to make a difference. Yet.”

“I don’t know the answers — or even all of the questions. But if this problem is as bad as some fear, it could eventually put a major crimp in Google’s entire revenue model, if not the entire pay-per-click business. I would argue that the explosion of link farms and spamblogs is pretty decent evidence that the click-fraud biz is not only alive and well, but also thriving at the expense of all of us. Except Google. For now, anyway.”

It’s interesting to see such high profile articles or blog posts on these topics. It will be interesting to see where this goes from here.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

I’m #1!!! (literally)

With the most recent index in Google, my site is now in the #1 position on Google and MSN for the term “David Dalka”. I’m also #2 on Yahoo! It’s impossible to isolate the influence of blog crawlers versus new links to this site, though it would be interesting to know which played a stronger role in my rise.

For the search term “Dalka” alone on Google, I’m now #11, up from like #362 or something like that. That is a dramatic rise!