Sigh. This post claims that branding is irrelevant/dead thanks to search engines and how search is transforming the way in which people research and buy products.

Huh?

I couldn’t disagree more. You can’t honestly tell me that Lamborghini, BMW, Lincoln, and Hyundai (just to name a few random automotive brands) are all on equal playing fields when a consumer searches for “car” on Google. 

The post goes on to talk about the power of SEO and why SEO is not dead. SEO is most certainly not dead and should make for a critical component in your online strategy. His point in trying to prove why SEO is not dead is muddied by the claims of “branding being dead.” Brands don’t matter in certain categories (probably because there’s no clear category leader), but certainly not across the board.

Proper SEO can elevate your brand to the top of the listing for non-branded searches.

They key is creating brand awareness (through advertising, promotion, PR, etc. outside of search engines) and dominating on branded AND non-branded searches for your category. This is done by juggling your SEO work with your SEM campaigns to find the “sweet spot” so SEM can pick up the slack where you lag behind in SEO. Branding then goes onto heavily influence clicks on search engine results.

This type of tunnel-vision thinking is why “online” is still broadly viewed as an IT function.

Flat-out comments like this show the still “techy” and misguided view of some Internet strategists and how marketing and “tech” still quite aren’t aligned — even on established sites such as searchenginewatch.com. Any marketer worth their salt should understand that brands can drive search results. When industry publications and commentary throw out claims like this, it’s difficult to create alignment with a marketing department — especially when marketing should “own” (or at least have visibility to) SEO and SEM strategy.

It’s fairly easy to cost-effectively monitor your brand names and trademarked terms (and anything else you’d like to keep tabs on) using Google’s Blog search RSS feeds (and several other aggregator service RSS feeds). When you don’t have the funds (or a low volume of online/blog conversations pertaining to your brand) for a service like BuzzLogic or BuzzMetrics, it’s about as “grass roots” as you can get.

But what if you want to automatically monitor changes to your competitors’ websites that don’t have feeds built into them?

Page2RSS is the answer.

Page2RSS is a free service which creates an RSS feed out of any URL you enter into the site. Their free service creates a cached version of the page every 4 hours. Simply subscribe to the RSS feed and off you go — be the first to know when your competitors update their homepage, product pages within their sites, and so on.

I had an opportunity to catch up with a friend of mine this evening over drinks/dinner before he and his fiance move off to Colorado to continue building their online startup: foodzie.com. Foodzie is one of 10 very fortunate and well-deserving startups that will receive seed money and mentoring from some of the industry’s finest all thanks to TechStars.

The premise behind foodzie is to provide artisan food producers with the means for selling their products online with minimal investment. On top of that, foodzie will build a community of “foodies” who will have an opportunity for “one stop shopping” online. Their site will be launching soon (presumably in beta after they settle into their new digs in Colorado) and I’m very excited to see how it will take off.

Not being a die-hard “foodie” myself, my wife and I are certainly more of a “mass consumer” at heart as we purchase based on ease and convenience due to our busy schedules. That being said, foodzie presents an opportunity for even non-foodies like us to indulge in the latest in greatest without having to be die-hard foodies. Whenever business models like these come to fruition and take a complex process, make it simple, and bring it to the masses, it is a recipe for success.

It was a great change of pace to talk entrepreneurial strategy — which is a completely different type of discussion than the day-to-day enterprise strategy discussion.

Good luck to Rob and Emily on their venture!

I’m a frequent reader of CIO.com articles — such an invaluable source for eBusiness managers and directors. I’m a big proponent of open source and am finding it to be such a taboo subject within the enterprise. In the article The Challenge of Open Source Presents to CIOs, open source is almost presented as a “problem.” So much of a problem in fact that certain enterprises ban it entirely.

Quick question: Since when it is a bad thing to save money?

Now, I understand it can present challenges from governing the use of open source as it pertains to compliancy issues. However, this is no different than governing the proper licensing of Microsoft products, too. The fact that it’s open source doesn’t make open source a “problem.” If you have problem governing open source utilization, then you have a larger software/infrastructure governance problem.

Just used RedBox DVD Rentals for the first time this evening and what an impressive service:

• DVD rentals for $1.00/day
• Easy-to-use interface
• Online integration (rent online, pick up at your local RedBox location)
• Return the DVD to any RedBox kiosk (not just the one you rented from)
• Slick little DVD dispenser that casually spits out the DVDs in their hard-plastic cases

These are new to our area in Greensboro, NC but I know are popular in the Atlanta area (based on feedback from a few friends who pick up DVDs from the RedBox at their local McDonald’s). And what a business model this must be: Drop a kiosk in the store, feed it new DVDs each week for new releases, and watch the money roll in. I’d love to learn more about their infrastructure and how they keep tabs on the health of the machines.

The user experience on the computer kiosk is well-done, although I wish the system was a little more responsive (i.e. faster). It could use a slightly larger screen to view the DVD titles. These are very minor complaints considering how easy it was to walk up and rent a DVD for the first time. Our main problem the whole time was feeling “rushed” by the other people waiting in line to rent and return their movies!

This post about business processes as a competitive advantage hit home for me (it references a poor experience with an airline — which I’m sure we’re all familiar with). I am often jokingly ridiculed for how often I ask “why?” when evaluating internal business processes and the way data is organized in the enterprise. Quite often the answer is surprisingly, “I don’t know, that’s how it was done before I got here.”

In the link above, the same is true for the airline industry. It’s as if the entire industry was designed for an ideal world where there are no mechanical malfunctions, bad weather, or delays. Contingency planning and business process optimization go such a long way to improving operational efficiency and most importantly, customer satisfaction. Revisiting pre-existing processes is also a great way to find the low-hanging fruit of improvements.

When building any new business process or system, I find that the following question is helpful to ask over and over during the planning phase: Does this process add value for the end-user?

Such a simple question can go a long way to avoiding a situation like in the above post/link.

In a tough economy, advertising dollars are typically the first to go. On the flip side, in a flourishing economy, advertising dollars seem to be readily available without needing much justification or proof that the advertising will pay off. Why is this?

Many advertisers have no methodology for measuring the effectiveness of their ad campaigns. In a flourishing economy, taking risks with a low probability for success is often encouraged in hopes of the big pay-off. In a tough economy, investing in anything (advertising, R&D, etc.) will require a great deal of scrutiny.

At SES NY in ‘06 I attended an invite-only dinner with WebTrends with a group of about a dozen online marketers — some existing clients of WebTrends and some were potential clients they were wining and dining. One of the dinner guests I sat next to was Rex Briggs, co-author of What Sticks.

For anyone who thinks “advertising cannot be measured,” I would recommend reading this book. It covers concepts that online marketers should hold close to their hearts: Test, Learn, Deploy, Repeat. Many traditional marketers are used to deploying large budgets on print and TV advertising with no plan or budget to measure the effectiveness of the ad spend. They excel at developing the creative, but fail miserably when it comes to answering the simple question of “Did it work?” 

In the online world, measuring ad spend becomes somewhat easier with the various tracking technologies (particularly if you sell online). If you can definitively prove how advertising positively impacts sales (directly or indirectly), then you’ll most likely see your ad budgets remain flat in a tough economy, but not entirely eliminated like some marketers are experiencing this year.

I recently came across an article that really hit home for me. It’s titled “How to determine if you delegate enough.” To quote the article:

How do I know when I am delegating enough? I think that the answer is very simple: You are not delegating enough if the questions that you are getting are easy for you to answer.

If your subordinate comes to you with an easy question … the possibility is that the answer was indeed simple but you didn’t share the necessary information, requiring the subordinate to ask the question. This may mean you retain some information in order to feel that you have not lost control, but it causes your people to be frustrated and to feel that you don’t trust them. It’s important for you to disclose to your subordinates all of the information that they need to do their jobs.

Shifting from “doer” to manager & avoiding “doing nothing” as a manager

In my recent role change, I’m now managing a larger range of projects and a larger group of people. I’ve always admired managers and executives who could get their hands dirty. I think this garners respect and establishes credibility with any manager. In this new role, my biggest challenge is identifying the tasks to take on myself and to delegate to my staff. While there are many simple projects and tasks I am perfectly capable of handling without the help of my staff, I need to be able to identify which tasks make the most sense for me to be focusing my time on.

Enter RescueTime - How I measure where I’m spending my time

I recently came across a new free service called RescueTime. It’s a web-based service with Mac and PC “listeners” that install quickly and effortlessly so I can monitor my application usage and website visits. The benefit here is that my “doer” tasks vs. my “management” tasks are clearly divided between the websites and applications I use:

• For example: firing up the Mac OS Terminal app and hopping on a server to move some files around is clearly a “doer” role. I file the “Terminal” app as a “development” task/app.
• On the other hand, reviewing Omniture web analytics data is most definitely a web marketing role, so I flag all Omniture sites as “web marketing” tasks.
• Email, Excel, Visio, Microsoft Projects are all tagged as “eBusiness” applications.

The RescueTime Dashboard

Since I have a dedicated laptop specifically for work, the only time I really use it is for work-based functions. Since the RescueTime “listeners” time out after 2 minutes of inactivity, the service provides a very accurate portrayal of the true time spent working (for me, at least). Of course, when I’m in meetings and the laptop is idle, this “work time” is not captured. Since the majority of my job involves a computer, it’s pretty safe to say that it captures most of my work-related activities on any given day:

Below we see (for the week of March 30th) I spent 55 hrs and 50 minutes working.

Below we see how my 55 hrs and 50 minutes that week broke down into the “tagged” sites and applications I used:

RescueTime then tells me how efficient I’ve been based on the above data collection and my account settings (I rate “ebusiness” as more efficient than “development”):

I’m still spending too much time “doing” and not delegating

When logged into the RescueTime dashboard, you can hover over the above red bars to see the total time spent on the tags. “development” was comprised of more than 11 hours of work. That’s 20% of time dedicated to “doing” which is much too high. RescueTime has also calculated my efficiency. Efficiency is described as:

A score based on the ratio of productive activity to distracting activity. To improve this, spend a higher percentage of time on productive tasks.

Without the RescueTime software and web service, I’d have no way of quantifying this information other than going by gut feel.  Now that I know I’m spending too much time, I am not worrying as much about being perceived as a manager who doesn’t like getting their hands dirty. RescueTime is enabling me to focus on more accurately managing and delegating the tasks and projects for my staff.

In an attempt to solicit feedback, Scion commits an end-user faux pas which drives me nuts. In a previous post, I showcased a similar end-user violation by Men’s Health.

Website accessibility is no different than in-store accessibility within a retail environment. Would you design your store aisles and product shelving so only people that were 5′10″ or shorter could fit into the aisles? Of course not. Even if the majority of your customers may be 5′10″ or shorter and only a small percentage must duck and maneuver their way through crammed aisles, this small percentage are being turned away for really no reason other than poor planning. There is no excuse for this type of website accessibility limitation because it’s not a bug — it was literally a decision made to specifically not develop a survey (of all things) to be accessible to everybody.

When working on the bleeding edge of technology with ajax and dealing with the browser-specific intricacies of javascript (among many other challenges of a web 2.0 implementation with an older end-user demographic), we spend a large percentage of our time in the QA stage testing features of Levolor.com across operating systems and web browsers. From Windows 2000 running “vintage” versions of IE6 to Mac OS X running Safari 3, Levolor.com is very accessible.

We’re human and do admit to making mistakes — and sometimes the capabilities of an older browser simply cannot support web 2.0 functionality — but at the same time go out of our way to ensure an optimal experience for all of our visitors from accessibility to usability. Popular brands like Scion need to embrace similar strategies for all online touch-points.

The kid in me still loves chocolate milk. However, chocolate syrup has been missing from our fridge for a while now so I picked up a new container of Hershey’s chocolate syrup today while running a few errands. I was pleasantly surprised to see they had redesigned the cap on the bottle. Here’s a picture of the old style (remember how it would always not get fully closed and would get all crusty?):

Here’s the new and improved design which, so far, stays much cleaner, easier to open, and easier to use:

Sometimes it’s the little things in life that make me happy. Oh, and by the way, Chip’s Ahoy has improved the labeling on their product so you don’t accidentally open it on the sides of the packaging (see my original post where I accidentally mauled the package):