One of the great piece of information, albeit a bit dated but not at all outdated, i came across recently is about marketing and privacy.

It covers in depth the following topics and related techniques of online marketing:
User Tracking
Web Analytics
Behavioral Targeting
Audience Segmentation
Data Gathering and Mining
Finally, it concludes on those words:

“The techniques and infrastructure we have described here are emblematic of only part of the data collection system being deployed throughout our digital media environment. The marketing industry is currently exploring expanded approaches to securing data collection as part of its new focus on the development of “engagement” as a measurable branding and ad delivery “metric.”

It is a inquiry deposed in front of the Federal Trade Commission on Nov. 1, 2006 by the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) and U.S. PIRG. The document is 50 pages long and available in PDF format here.

Lay back, relax and enjoy the ride around the online marketing space.

A quote from Arthur Charles Nielsen
(September 5, 1897–June 1, 1980)

He founded his company in 1923 in Chicago, Illinois, in order to give marketers reliable and objective information on the impact of marketing and sales programs. ACNielsen began expanding internationally in 1939, and now operates in more than 100 countries.

keywords : market analyst, marketing research, statistical sampling, random sample

Akamai monitors global Internet conditions around the clock.

With this real-time data, Akamai identify the global regions with the greatest attack traffic, cities with the slowest Web connections (latency), and geographic areas with the most Web traffic (traffic density).

Cool and Geeky!

A new digital hybrid is alive now  : half geek, half marketer.

Marketers by trade, they also sport an hard-core interest in technology and social anthropology. Curious in nature, those individuals are constantly on the look out for digital advances changing our online space. Full of media and culture insights, they contextualize marketing by apply the most recent way to engage and connect.
Geek Marketers create competitive value by constantly learning and testing. They are the digital version of the Renaissance Man, a digerati of all marketing advances.

Read more from Steve Rubel

Tumbr let you build a one-stop shop for all the things (citation, videos, etc.) that you come across during your online journeys. Nothing as big as lengthly posts are needed instead share the little things that are of interest to you. Simply start small as mine: fredericgilbert.tumblr.com

The rest is up to you!

Today, one phrase catched my always-on ADD:

“The price of making a powerful statement is cheap compared to the cost of ads that don’t work”

How to buy Word of Mouth
by Roy H. Williams

The web, since inception, has always been a very collective body. Myriad of connections between private and public interests had built it into its present form.

After a period of latency (circa early to mid 90’s), companies have since flocked the web up to the point where its commercialization is a growing concern for many (60s-style idealists?).

Yet today, the rapid dissemination of word-of-mouth in wikis, forums, blogs, etc. is empowering individuals to the detriment of organisations.

One excellent graph of such is Ross Mayfield’s graph

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/ross/171420476/)

Opinion leaders are emerging as the new firestarters that threaten the formal entities with what is now coined as “no-control PR”.

More, all of this is happening in a communal ecosystem based on hard to assess (therefore hard to fake) qualitative metrics as reputation and karisma. This time, cash alone cannot buy a way out as the old-economy leaders were accustomed to. Consequenses for businesses have huge long-term implications. The balance of power is shifting.

Last stats to date: 80 million MySpace pages, 40 million bloggers and nearly a million amateur encyclopedians. Call it the Age of Peer Production as Wired did in its 14.07 issue.

The collective mind becomes a collaborative one. Are you in-sync?

Our day-to-day lives; reality, as we know it, is fast becoming an integral part of the online world that surrounds us.

MMOG (massively multiplayer online games) as The Sims years ago and today Second Life are alive with always-on broadband connected internauts from around the world. Meeting people is no more restricted to places you know and time zones you live in.

Your favorite MP3 and family images can be directly streamed into Second Life; already infusing a touch of humanity to this gigantic digital mesh.

Business, too, is soaring as are events of all kind for the better and the worst; much as in the real life.

Assist to the Community Event:
What Is the Future for Real-Life Companies Marketing to Second Life Avatars? Or read the Harvard Business Review Avatar-based Marketing

Search, Discover and Meet me around the corner.
SL avatar: Gilbert Frederick

The interactive relationship of ordinary people is accelerating on the web. Yet, no mesure of it is truely reflecting its growing influence over the online landscape.

At worst, wild evaluations predict dramatic shifts in the way business will be conducted from now on. At best, enthusiasts and homegrown publishers of all walks of life are flocking to the gates of CGC or whatever it will be called in the future. I rather use “Community Generated Content” than “Consumer…”.

Precise assessments of such behavior are urgently needed by marketers in order to get a firm grasp on the opportunities and pitfalls that lie ahead. There is no way back, no escape. Delaying the inevitable will only make things worse for the last ones to join the fray.

Look no farther then “Influence 2.0” with its first chapter being appropriately named: “The Dawn of the Age of Influence” by Cymfony’s Jim Nail and add to the wiki knowledge.

Consumers now control the dialogue. Are you listening?

The Long and Winding Road, a Yahoo + OMD recent study, reveals a lot about today’s user behavior during its daily online and offline consumerism.

By way of multi-channel surfing, in-market consumers are gathering information all the way well before any intend to really buy what they are looking for.

Search plays a large role into that data amalgam as it is used to help gather the many bites and pieces needed for a prospective consumer to make up his mind about one’s product or service.

No more is the road to purchase a strait path or a gentle curve (funnel). Today, the shopping experience now ressembles a series of detours (tumbler) that truely symbolizes the way the brain thinks; doubtful and assertive. Simply said: human.

In today’s hectic pace of things and ideas specially in technology; what seems to be fresh yesterday is becoming “traditionnal” in a blink of an eye. All things fade to grey at some point of time.
Search marketing is no exception. It is now totally mainstream. Yet, this getting of age is not a sign of weakness; on the contrary, it is a measure of its pervasiveness on the internet.

This enjoyable situation is relatively new as 2-3 years ago, much hard sell was in order for one agency client or even the corporate world to grasp the potential at hand that represents Search today.

Search is now everywhere and everything all rolled up into one giant Grand Central Station where everyboby comes and goes. As internet usage is soaring, niche content is exploding thus rendering the imperative need of Search unavoidable.

The strength of its success lies in the fact that any online content is retrievable one way or the other. You got to search in order to find.

The future is happening now. It is what you make of it today. Online.

One good read: The Future of Advertising Is Now /strategy + business

Looking for the keywords used to search lead to a better knowledge of the prospective visitor. That helps understand its personality and build a persona out of it… Do you follow me?

Enter persuasion architecture (PA) which look for a visitor to act according to a pre-planned scenario, a path of sucessives call-to-action and interactions to engage him into a dialogue.

Take 5 minutes to evaluate yourself: Take the Keirsey Temperament Sorter II

Who is the inner self?

Tonight, I have been playing with RSS aggregator scripts.

Namely two: rss2html and feedwordpress. In less then a few minutes, my blog was full of news snippets…

Very interesting in essence but it is not because the technology to aggregate in order to propagate exists that it must be used.

Aldo so much power is always very impressive.
Finally, I deleted all the feeds and desactivated the scripts.

At site redesign, the question does arise for the content provider of an already exisiting site?

A simple answer would be : “Fresh content is good, especially when it is good content”. But Old Content is part of your history in SE index; it acts as some sort of foundation. Build on it. Add some new on top of the old. Augment!
In conclusion, keeping the old content in place and adding new one on a regular basis would leverage legacy and freshness with both your visitors and the search engines.

According to a recent Shop.org study, the average conversion rate is declining in major retail sites since 2002.

IF with

• recent site redesigns,
• better ecommerce technology,
• almost real-time web analytics and
• broadband access now common for most users,

the capacity to convert is not gaining traction.

THEN it is NOT a question of technology.

Engage early each of your site visitors with a relational initiative to gain mind share and possibly a conversion or risk loosing him to the category killer whom cannot be beaten on price.

SEO fever is gaining online versions of newpapers and magazines eager to get their daily trafic. Without a constant stream of visitors both new and returning, subscriptions and advertisers may go elsewhere.

Read the New York Times article.

Analysis of a user session at a search engine suggest that is short in time and very superficial in its depth.

Usually, most web searches are initiated with up to three keywords. No more than three queries are performed by one user during the same search session. During those queries, only one term is modified either by remplacement, substraction or addtion

Only the two first results pages (at 10 sites per page) are viewed by web users with the most clicked hyperlinks being located in the top five results of the first results page.

Today search behavior analysis shows 3 growing trends:

• shorter session time (fewer minutes spent searching),
• minimal query modification (by one term within same search session)
• surface skimming in regard to consultation of search results (fewer results pages viewed).

This decrease in interactivity signifies that web visibility is narrowing. Increased efforts will be needed as the limited number of top positions are under greater stress from competition with fewer web users willing to venture past the first page of results.

In editorial copy.
The fundamental building blocks of information are words. Alone, they encode meaning and weaved together, they transmit ideas. But all words are not made equal.

Stop Words (of, as, by, …) are extremely common words that are automatically excluded by the search engine during a query unless otherwise included by using boolean operators.

Keywords, on the contrary, count more toward comprehension in communication. As they are relatively in smaller number than others words, keywords concentrate concepts and henceforth, carry traffic.
Search engines are looking for them in editorial content, anchor links and titles to aggregate websites into tighly focused categories.

In search results
After being visited by the search engines and based on context retrieved from its editorial content, a website is assigned a relevancy value given in comparaison to already known websites on the same topic.
This perceived pertinence translates into a rank in the search engines database.

Note: Modifiers as verbs, adjectives, numbers, etc. tend to deteriorate the quality of search results by adding too much variables in the query. Instead, aggregating more than 2 keywords together and using Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT, +, -, …) results in better targeted searches.