Category: The Conversation Economy

Google’s Perfect Ad: Missing the Marketing

I missed this blog post last week from one of Google's most senior VPs of Product, Susan Wojcicki. Titled "Ad Perfect" it starts: Google's advertising business was founded on the core principle that advertising should deliver the right information to the right person at the right time. This is…

I missed this blog post last week from one of Google’s most senior VPs of Product, Susan Wojcicki. Titled “Ad Perfect” it starts:

Google’s advertising business was founded on the core principle that advertising should deliver the right information to the right person at the right time. This is very similar to our mission in search, and, like our colleagues in search, those of us on the ads team are constantly striving to achieve better results. We have hundreds of thousands of advertisers who collectively have millions of products and services, and out of that vast amount of information our goal is always to show people the best ads, the ones that are the most relevant, timely, and useful (and, from the advertiser perspective, measurable). Achieving this ideal has been difficult since the early days of ads, but now, with the Internet, it is within reach.

Then comes the nut graph:

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Click to Get Your Searchblog Discount: CM Summit Returns to San Francisco

Last Fall we took a big step at FM and launched our own conference series focused on the media business, in particular, the marketing piece of the media business. Called The Conversational Marketing Summit (CM Summit for short), our inaugural event was a hit – though it didn't sell…

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Last Fall we took a big step at FM and launched our own conference series focused on the media business, in particular, the marketing piece of the media business. Called The Conversational Marketing Summit (CM Summit for short), our inaugural event was a hit – though it didn’t sell out till the very last minute, leaving me a bit terrified no one would show up.

But given the speakers – Kevin Rose, Sarah Fay, Steve Hayden, The Ninjas, Suzie Reider and tons more – I should have known it’d be fine. We then repeated the event in New York this past June, and that was really a blast – we were joined by the CMO of GE, CEO of Ning, CEO of Hulu, and tons of case studies. And that one sold out early.

Now I’m proud to announce our line up for our second Fall conference, and offer SearchBlog readers a hefty discount to book. Here’s a selected list of our speakers:

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The Web IS an OS. Get Over It.

There is always a backlash against anyone calling anything the Web OS, mainly because, as folks point out quite accurately, the term "operating system" technically applies to the stack on top of PC hardware that interfaces between that hardware and a user's intentions. Here's an example of what I…

There is always a backlash against anyone calling anything the Web OS, mainly because, as folks point out quite accurately, the term “operating system” technically applies to the stack on top of PC hardware that interfaces between that hardware and a user’s intentions.

Here’s an example of what I mean – A Web OS? Are You Dense? In this story, the author, who I don’t know but I certainly do respect, gives Arrington a ton of shit for “not knowing anything about computers.” Well, color me dense because, yes, in fact, there is a Web OS, and it will be built on top of the Windows/Mac/PC OS, and that’s just fine with me, because I could care less about technical purist theories of what an OS is. I don’t care if it’s built on top of Windows, which is a “classic OS”. In fact, Windows, as I recall, was built on top of DOS for most of its career, so what does that make Windows? Not an OS? And DOS was built on top of some arcane machine language, I am sure. And we can keep dancing on the head of definitional pins, but to me….

To me, operating systems are computer-mediated realities that help us get stuff done. And to my mind, that makes Chrome an OS. A system that lets me operate sh*t. End of story.

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New Post at Amex Blog: Marketing as Product Development

This latest post is some sketching for a longer riff I'm eager to dig into. I love the fact that I can do sketch out loud thanks to American Express. Here's the first few grafs: Over the past several posts I’ve been talking about the role of search, conversation,…

This latest post is some sketching for a longer riff I’m eager to dig into. I love the fact that I can do sketch out loud thanks to American Express. Here’s the first few grafs:

Over the past several posts I’ve been talking about the role of search, conversation, and media in your business. While not explicit, each of these posts was about one thing: Marketing.

Marketing is one of the most misunderstood practices in business today. For most of us, marketing is about convincing potential customers that our product or service is worth their money. And while that’s certainly party true, it never struck me as the whole narrative.

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I Know, I Know. But This Post *Is* About Search and Google, So All Is Well At SearchBlog

I hear you all. What is Battelle on about, all this music stuff, all this non search stuff? I am sorry, but you have to trust me, it's going somewhere. I'm following a hunch, of a sorts. Today some bankers from Piper Jaffrey came by, and they asked me…

I hear you all. What is Battelle on about, all this music stuff, all this non search stuff? I am sorry, but you have to trust me, it’s going somewhere. I’m following a hunch, of a sorts.

Today some bankers from Piper Jaffrey came by, and they asked me the same question I was asked by two or three reporters who were writing pieces on Google’s 10th anniversary. (When is it, anyway? I am sure it’s this year, depending on how you count…).

Anyway, the question is this: So what’s next? What might unseat Google?

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Updated: Exclusive: A Look at Google Ad Planner Data Vs. Comscore

When Google Ad Planner came out back in June, I immediately thought of Comscore – and I was not alone. Many in the marketing industry thought that Google's product would be a "Comscore killer," and when I noted as much in my coverage, Gian Fulgoni, Comscore's chair, shot back…

When Google Ad Planner came out back in June, I immediately thought of Comscore – and I was not alone. Many in the marketing industry thought that Google’s product would be a “Comscore killer,” and when I noted as much in my coverage, Gian Fulgoni, Comscore’s chair, shot back in a comment to my post:

Hi John: Before celebrating the availability of these products from Google, I think it would be prudent for web site operators to compare their site traffic numbers as obtained from their server logs (or Google Analytics for that matter) with the unique visitor numbers that Google is now publishing through Google Trends and Ad Planner. I think they will be astonished at how much lower Google now says their traffic is.

I asked Gian to elaborate, and published the resulting interview here.

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Outside Lands Sked Is Up!

Check it out here. And don't forget to feed the Crowdfire here. You can see shots from my Blackberry of the Wailers last night here!…

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Check it out here. And don’t forget to feed the Crowdfire here. You can see shots from my Blackberry of the Wailers last night here!

1 Comment on Outside Lands Sked Is Up!

Al Gore Joins the Lineup At Web 2 Summit

Those of you following my posts around the theme of this year's Web 2 Summit already know that we're expanding the scope of the conference this year, and asking a core question: How can we apply the lessons of the Web to the world at large? From my post…

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Those of you following my posts around the theme of this year’s Web 2 Summit already know that we’re expanding the scope of the conference this year, and asking a core question: How can we apply the lessons of the Web to the world at large? From my post outlining the theme:

As we convene the fifth annual Web 2.0 Summit, our world is fraught with problems that engineers might charitably classify as NP hard—from roiling financial markets to global warming, failing healthcare systems to intractable religious wars. In short, it seems as if many of our most complex systems are reaching their limits.

It strikes us that the Web might teach us new ways to address these limits. From harnessing collective intelligence to a bias toward open systems, the Web’s greatest inventions are, at their core, social movements. To that end, we’re expanding our program this year to include leaders in the fields of healthcare, genetics, finance, global business, and yes, even politics.

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What Are Community Standards?

Is it what people say they value publicly, or what they search for in the privacy of their home? Man, that's a tricky one. In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to…

Is it what people say they value publicly, or what they search for in the privacy of their home? Man, that’s a tricky one.

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.

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