It was a day that made me wish I had never gone into this business – a day that made me long for a warm beach and a mai tai. I don’t have these days very often, but yesterday, oh boy, I had it in spades!
I’ve been doing search (yesterday, I used a different, less polite noun) for a long time. And I have to be honest, some days it feels like a thousand leeches are sucking the blood out of me. Given that, it was impossible to muster up much enthusiasm for the roll out of Google Business Pages or the raging controversy of Facebook’s “LikeGate”. Really? Are those the most important things to litter our in-boxes with?
My friend Mikey (who you may remember from the “Mikey Mobile Adoption Test”) and I were recently driving through our hometown, past a long row of new “big box” retail locations that have recently sprung up.
Ironically, the hottest thing on Google is a rant from a Google Insider about how Google is hopelessly limited because Google doesn’t get the importance of platforms. Steve Yegge goes on at some length (over 4000 words) contrasting his first 6 years at Amazon and his last 6 years at Google.
Many webmasters repeat the mistakes made by their predecessors. Take a look at these Top 10 most common web design sins. Have you fallen victim to any of these?
My heroes from the world of business number exactly two: Walt Disney and Steve Jobs. Walt died when I was 5 years old, so it’s not surprising that our paths never crossed. But theoretically, I could have met Jobs. It was not beyond the realms of possibility. Unfortunately, I never got to meet either of them. And for that, I’m immeasurably saddened.
I was in Minneapolis’s Mall of America and happened to wander by the new Microsoft store. The layout, the look and the feel were a near-exact clone of the very popular Apple Stores, one of which just happened to be directly across the concourse. Here, in the largest mall in the world, I had the opportunity to compare and contrast the physical embodiments of two of the most ubiquitous brands in the world.
Facebook continues to evolve, and one of the latest features they’ve announced could become really useful for marketers to tap into. The new feature is called Timeline; from the individual Facebook user’s perspective, Timeline is a new kind of profile. For people who want to share a more complete picture of themselves on Facebook, (hmmm, managing your personal brand?), Timeline will allow them to share things they do on their favourite websites and apps. Users will be able to add or remove anything to their Timeline and build a complete profile, from their very first activity on Facebook to their latest post.
We should have taken it as a sign of things to come.
The panel I was moderating at OMMA Global, with the highly provocative title "The Evolving Role of the Search Marketer," was in a tiny room that seemed to be an afterthought of whoever planned the meeting space layout in the Marriott Marquis in New York. You actually had to walk through another, much larger room and go through a door tucked in the back corner. If one of the show organizers hadn't been personally guiding me, I might never have found it.