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Google Video Migrates to the Google Home Page

In this post on July 20th, I predicted that Google Video would appear on the homepage soon. However, I guessed wrong on it replacing Images. At first, I’m surprised that Froggle was what was removed. After thinking about it more I shouldn’t be, Google Checkout migrates to the back end of process what Froggle did upfront. If there is enough penetration of Checkout, it now makes sense to me that Froggle would be unnecessary.

Maybe they are starting to run the company off of my blog suggestions now… 😉

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SES Day 1 – Social Search – Up Close With Yahoo!

Tim Mayer opens the session – reviews items from previous session.

Yumio – Yahoo Answers!
Quantifying human knowledge. Yahoo! Answers is a collective site. Better knowledge through people. Y! answers compliments web search, giving results that a user may not think about. Provide content and material that. Culture of sharing. People like to share. Remote connectivity. Impressive growth 12x UU & 25x page views. Audience is segmented by topics/categories. Brand-Specific Channel and Expert Sponsor panel.  Showed examples of how Answers functions as a traffic driver from other search engines as pages are indexed.

Del.icio.us – Joshua Schachter – Director
Remember, Share, Discover
Brief overview – nothing new

Flickr – Yumio – her speech was great – but I had to leave the room for a minute.
Talks mainly about social phenomenon of Flikr.
New partnership with Nokia

Trip Planner – Ashish Baldua
Monetization – sponsorship – commoditization – etc

Time – 2.6 words average length, this is lengthening over time

How do you prevent a product from being spammed in Yahoo! Answers?
There are community guidelines. Inappropriate posts are deleted. 24/7 moderation.

Myweb – 3 results from the community. Overlay, this result was saved by Joe Smith – number of saves. Integrating Answers recently into the organic results. People are finding the tests to be additive to their search experience. Chris Sherman followed onto my question by asking about the one box experience versus the additive content. Time indicated this will come with time, but it is something where they need to proceed slowly with caution.

Tim Mayer and his team clearly outdid his peer on this day in terms of communicating a clear vision for social search.

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SES Day 1 – Social Search Overview

Chris Sherman made introduction speech I cant stress enough that he did a really *amazing* job of planning the session and laying out the issues. Major props.

Social Search goes back to the first days of the Internet.

W3.org – first directory.

Directories were the first forms of social media. Spammers destroyed the first directories with spam.

Future – people will be getting these things right

Talent pool is volunteer and free. The scaling is happening due to people participating.

Types – Shared bookmarks (del.icio.us), tag engines (blogs and RSS) and collaborative directories (Wikipedia).

Types of social search – Personalized verticals and collaborative harvesters.

Popurls.com – combines all news sites like dig, reddit, etc in one place.

Scale and scope will be major, tagging, ambiguity of language, human laziness, lack of controlled vocabulary, and of course…idiots!!!

Spammers – new systems create new opportunities.

Chris Sherman is optimistic about social search but is concerned about some issues. Trust networks, increased personalization, etc are great opportunities

Grant Ryan , Eurester speaks:
Flew in from New Zealand and is tired!

Anyone can create their own search engine with Eurester.

Power to the people – socialization of the search technology. Spidering, Directories, Link Analysis, Swickis

Search engines have done everything to avoid

We are a printing press not a publisher. We can decide how it looks and how to make money. We have created 20,000 search engines.

Monetize the printing press the way you want to – chose what is best for your community.

Swikinomics – How can you create vertical search engines. You can own your own Swicki. Property rights are key to motivate people in any economic system.

Anyone can create a valuable asset based on their knowledge

Existing communities and brands can extend into web search to create valuable services

Anyone can organize information on the Internet and get paid for it.

Tim Mayer, Yahoo!

Launching a search builder today – builder.yahoosearch.com

Search breakthroughs come from untapped authorities and rich new sources of metadata.

Yahoo’s mission – “Enrich peoples’ lives by enabling them to find, use, share and expand all human knowledge.”

Obtain a critical mass or high-quality user generated experience.

Nils Pohlmann, Lead Program Manager, Windows Live Search

Live spaces – new release

Ideas.live.com beta release Windows Live Q&A

Windows Live Local – Maps with tags

Windows Live QnA – sign up as qna.live.com

Questions:
Are the demographics different than in a bookmarking versus answers?

Tim – Del.icio.us is tech influencers. Tails of the tags are more mainstream. Myweb are early adopters. The demographic is younger overall.

Subscribers for a tag, Answers, is about contribute valuable knowledge.

There was a question about paying for bookmarking actions and the panel was in agreement that they are leery of going this route.

Regarding Yahoo! – Tim – Builder.search.yahoo.com – create customized web search. Create customized search experience. Reputation and trust are important!

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SES Day 1 – Social Search : Up Close With Google

I never did catch the marketing speakers name….sorry!

Google Co-op – Subscribe links. This is new types of content and new types of information.

Building socialized search. Example of subscribed links flight stats: Instyle Magazine, Search Engine Watch and Digg are good examples.
You have control over how they work.
Fresh content is important.
Target precisely so the experience is better.
Make sure it is actionable.
Make the content pleasing to read.

Query formulation is hard for some users. Google Topic Value Proposition – Refinements allow users to start with simple queries and refine using labels.

Lack of content, users don’t know what they are looking for. Labels suggest ways to look for information.

Users don’t understand how to bring that relationship.

It was surprising to see Google only send one person with a 10 minute speech for this. They were leaving the room in droves even before he finished. When I saw it was going to be an hour and fifteen minutes of random questions, I bailed to the branding session.

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Biscoff – Offline Marketing Driving Online Sales

That second U.S. Air flight had Biscoff cookies distributed. This tasty treat was joined with an incentive to visit them on the web. When you search for cookies in Google – there are no Biscoff ads. There is one for branding when you search on Biscoff.

The more I learn about online marketing the more I see the strong correlation between many of the best executions involving offline elements. This first came to my attention at the ACCM conference which focuses on catalogs. Then a few weeks later at the Geo Domain Conference, I saw to geo domain owners comparing hotel booking stats. The one with the city that was one quarter the size had three times the hotel bookings. Why? The owner had a direct marketing background and had several offline campaigns to drive traffic to the site. These campaigns were swaps that were win-win. Which brings us to the most successful site always partner!

Consider matching your offline efforts with the online one next time you are planning a campaign. Thanks again for the tasty treat and the reminder of good marketing practices.

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US Air / America West

I had a great experience with them today overall. Flights were on time, people were friendly, etc. The flight from Phoenix to San Jose is especially beautiful in terms of scenery.

The only thing I didn’t like was the boarding procedure. It’s very unnatural with the window, middle, then aisle. Many people ignored it and the gate agent didn’t object to people doing so. So if something doesn’t work – why don’t they change it?

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Introducing nextgoogleceo.com 3.0

Lately, Google has been showing that is it participating in customer listening. This is good! I hope it continues.

Since I’ve started studying search engine marketing these past full months full time, I’ve been applying to Google – even with employee referrals of former co-workers and people I’ve met at Search Engine Strategies, etc. with out the applications executed in a way I consider appropriate – that is the politest way I can say it. I’d like to see that change, I’m presently seeking post-MBA level leadership roles within your Search Services/ Syndication, Advertising Sales, Marketing or other leading areas driving customer satisfaction and impacting revenue as you grow new product lines. Ideally I’d love to work within local, dMarc or mobile. I resubmitted (again) today for numerous post-MBA leadership positions.

So I launched nextgoogleceo.com which is a cute take of HR microsites (and discusses how next Microsoft is obsolete now that google is a common verb in our language), except that I’ve changed the wording a bit to demonstrate my increasingly dynamic understanding of both search and viral marketing and the future thereof. As soon as I hit send, I’m leaving for Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2006 and look forward to meeting your wonderful business unit leaders speak once again.

I would of course invite aspiring competitors or “next google’s” to come up and talk to me about their ideas as well. I look forward to learning and adding to my large and growing list of amazing people that are making the Internet a special place.

I look forward to seeing all of my fabulous friends at SES San Jose. It’s going to be both great fun and great learning. It’s the 3rd or 4th time I’ll be seeing some of you and I feel like I’m going on a trip to visit family…that is because that is exactly what it is! I look forward to meeting many new folks to and learning many new and great things. Thank you and please travel safely. See you in San Jose!

I leave you with this parting thought: In the book, Creating Customer Evangelists, the chapters on Mark Cuban stand out in regards to the hiring of Matt Fitzgerald as Chief Marketing Maverick: “Instead of selecting a marketing person from the NBA or the sports industry, Mark consciously made a decision to hire someone from outside the industry,” Fitzgerald says. “He believed the NBA marketing community was too in-bred so [Cuban] was looking for a marketing person with a fresh perspective and ideas.”