What happens is, is that you show up at work and you sit down and you don’t just immediately begin working, like you have to roll into work. You have to sort of get into a zone, just like you don’t just go to sleep, like you lay down and you go to sleep. You go to work too. But then you know, 45 minutes in, there’s a meeting. And so, now you don’t have a work day anymore, you have like this work moment that was only 45 minutes. And it’s not really 45 minutes, it’s more like 20 minutes, because it takes some time to get into it and then you’ve got to get out of it and you’ve got to go to a meeting.

People are different and are productive in their own way. Some people can crank out a ton of work in the morning. Others like to get in and relax, check email, then organize their tasks for the day. A Meeting might fit into one person’s schedule, while it hinders the other people involved. I once had to attend an end of day meeting with my entire team. We’d just present data and talk for a moment or two about the information. Of course, we’d each spend all morning preparing and compiling data and then one person would have to collect the data and compile it. It was a huge time suck. A better approach would have been to have each member compile a daily report showing a few key metrics and upload the information to a dashboard. Then when we’d come together we could hit key discussion points. I really didn’t need to know 90% of what the other members of the team were presenting and the information that did have an impact on my role, could have been easily accessed through a dashboard.

Meetings do need to occur, but they need to have rigid guidelines.

A few of my suggestions for a well-run meeting:

• 30 minutes or less
• A clearly defined goal
• No straying from discussion of the set goal
• As few people involved as possible
• A set start time
• No laptops or phones allowed

So my name is Paul Adams and I work in the UX team at Google. Iʼm the user research lead for social, and work on things like Buzz and YouTube. I spend a lot of my time doing research with people on how they use social media. I sit down with people, and have them map out their social network for me, and we look at how they use tools like email, Facebook, Twitter, their phone, and so on. One of the things we talk about is the differences between their social network online, and their social network offline. Today, Iʼm going to talk about some of the things weʼve learned over the past few years, what it means for the future of the web, and some tips for design. Before I get down into some detail about social networks, I want to start by telling you a story from our research.

A note from Paul’s comments:

…the story is because the story is *real*, it’s not fictional. It’s a story from my research. I changed the names to protect the identity of our research participant but left all other details exactly as they were.

Visit Paul’s website: ThinkOutsideIn

I have seen a few ads in the “premium slots” that have contained a ratings link as well. The ads with rating information stand out significantly. I have not seen one with the Google checkout icon and the rating link yet, but if those are in existence, the CTR of those ads could be huge.

One ad I found with a rating link was for a company that did not list any items within a shopping feed, so this could enable service companies, restaurants, etc. to have their rating links added to AdWords ads.

According to the Google AdWords Blog, the ratings will show up if:

• You have 30 reviews or more
• You average 4 stars or better

With more and more information being placed on a search page (maps, product listings, social features, etc.) and AdWords ads becoming larger, the organic results keep being minimized. How long before Google gets rid of them on some searches?

The recent hot topic in marketing has been retargeting. Google recently pulled their retargeting offering out of beta and available in all accounts. While retargeting is an effective advertising method, there are a few things you can do to make it even more effective.

Add cookies to different pages on your website and target those visitors in a unique manner. A person who hits an informational page should be retargeted differently than a visitor who was in your checkout process and left your website. There shouldn’t be just one banner ad for all retargeted users. The creatives should be unique for each tactic.

The NHL does an AMAZING job reatargeting visitors to their ecommerce section. I visited the site and was looking around at some items I was interested in. I left the website without buying and a few clicks later I saw this ad.

The item shown was the exact item I was looking at. The NHL attempts to grab visitors who were looking at specific products and send them back to the site by showing an item the visitor was looking at as well as offering a discount. I spoke with a few people involved in the retargeting process at the NHL and they indicated that the tactic was amazingly successful.

Retargeting is a great tactic, and if the time is taken to implement properly, can increase sales and even provide a better ROI on paid search, or other online marketing tactics. For example, if a visitor came to the site via a paid search ad, then left, the retargeting could entice that user to return a few days later. This allows that paid search click to have even more value even if the sale didn’t occur to much later.

Think of your retargeting as a key element of your online marketing and not as an add-on.

Apple is expected to ship 2,000,000 iPhone 4s at launch on the 24th. With projections of that many orders, you’d think that Apple and AT&T would have had a solid pre-ordering plan for the iPhone 4. I’m not sure who is to blame, but once issues were occurring Apple and AT&T should have made a statement and gave customers an update on when ordering would be available. If the iPhone 4 pre-ordering process was this bad I can’t imagine how bad things will go on the 24th.

A few other items of note:

- The AT&T site was charging $35 for shipping and not waiving the upgrade fee.
- The ordering process failed at various points.
- While I was in the Apple store I heard an employee tell a woman, “if you want to just surf the web you don’t want an iPad as it wont show flash websites and over 75% of websites use flash.”
- I’m using a launch iPhone, so I’m due to upgrade.
- Why was the white iPhone 4 not available to pre-order?

I hope that Apple or AT%T updates customers on what is happening with the pre-order process soon. With so many other phones catching up, will the iPhone lose customers to other carriers due to ordering issues?

In fact, THE NEXT WEB is reporting that the AT&T store was so broken this morning that some accounts were breached and personal information was exposed. I’ll be adjusting my password today and I hope none of my data was exposed. As the day has gone on, the Apple iPhone 4 pre-order keeps getting worse.

Best Buy is supposedly offering pre-ordering tomorrow (and possibly Radio Shack). It will be interesting to see if the iPhone 4 pre-order failure extends to 3rd party retailers.

Rework is a great book to read if you want to get more out of your workday. Nothing in the book is revolutionary, but the ideas will get you get you back to basics or set you on the right path. I worked for a company where I found myself pulling data for nearly half a day in order to get ready for a weekly meeting. The data really wasn’t useful in my optimization and, honestly, wasn’t really what my manager needed to be looking at to determine my effectiveness. We also had another group meeting in which our entire team would present data for 2 hours. Each of us spent another entire morning preparing and then 2 hours in the meeting. That left just a couple of hours for actual work. The information presented by other members was interesting, but didn’t really impact my job.

Rework provides ways to cut down on meetings such as these and some great tips on how to organize your work and be more productive. The Rework website has some great videos and even a PDF excerpt for download.

Most business books give you the same old advice: Write a business plan, study the competition, seek investors, yadda yadda. If you’re looking for a book like that, put this one back on the shelf. “Rework “shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Read it and you’ll know why plans are actually harmful, why you don’t need outside investors, and why you’re better off ignoring the competition.

The truth is, you need less than you think.
You don’t need to be a workaholic.
You don’t need to staff up.
You don’t need to waste time on paperwork or meetings.
You don’t even need an office.

Those are all just excuses.

Head over to Lulu.com and purchase Rework for just $14.45 if you enter the code “rework” at check-out (expires June 30). They are offering FREE Shipping on all orders over $19.95 this summer!

Here is an example:

Search Results:

BookSurge

CreateSpace

Notice that each site is offering the same free book as well as having an almost identical layout. The one site even states that the sites have aligned to offer services to authors.

The issue is not unique to these Amazon owned companies. Check out these double serving complaints on the Google AdWords support forum. Do large spenders get a pass on double serving? I’ve been in the publishing industry and have a pretty decent idea what the self-publishing arm of Amazon is spending per month. Is Google looking the other in order to not impact Amazon’s overall paid search budget?

Here is the Google policy on double serving. Notice the large bold text that says: Don’t Do It

Thoughts?

Earlier this year an undrafted Canadian Football League prospect received an NFL contract via a YouTube clip. Offensive tackle Joel Reinders was signed by the Cleveland Browns after team management had seen his highlight clips via YouTube uploaded via his agent. According to this article, Reinders was contacted by three NFL teams after his videos were uploaded. The agent put together the YouTube videos instead of supplying teams with actual VHS footage. Riley is taking a different approach. He is trying to capture interest of scouts and team management before they ask for game and workout footage.

I couldn’t find Philip via a Facebook search or simple searches on other social media outlets.

I feel Philip have better results using image ads in a site-targeted instead of using text ads run on the content network. If he didn’t generate any visits via the ads by NFL scouts, he’d at least get quite a bit of buzz in the sports community if the campaign was targeted correctly. There is no phone number on the website; just a contact form to fill out promising a response within 48 hours.

I’m interested in keeping track of his success with this approach and will be looking for his name on an NFL roster this Fall. Has anyone come across any other athletes running social media or online marketing campaigns in order to get a contract? If you are an NFL or CFL GM or scout visit Phil’s website to contact him.

Thumbnail Photo:Wilder Graves Penfield (1891-1976) while a football player at Princeton University.

Is anyone seeing this in their account? Do you want Google personalizing your results?

The RavenTools team was in attendance and kept a running blog of each speaker. (My PPC session). I was lucky enough to have Benjamin Rudolph, David Kyle and Kate Morris present during the same session.

This was my first time presenting this topic, and while I felt I did well, I plan on adjusting some of the information and flow. My presentation was also radically different from almost all of the other presenters. Jason Keath’s (SocialFresh – Social Media Conference) presentation on Social Media was somewhat similar as he just used graphics and minimal text as well. Wayne Sutton didn’t even have a PowerPoint presentation. He chose to read his notes of his iPad and actually converse with the crowd. I hope to be able to give an updated presentation soon in the RTP area.

The amazing drawings in my presentation were created by Rachel Nabors She offers web design/web development services via The Pink Crow. I plan on having her add more “people” to the presentation in the future.

What has been amazing is that hardly any of these issues occur at my current employer, FTP site for business and virtual data rooms provider ShareFile.

There are some NICE JUICY links right in there…

Funny what you can do with the code….

If a user then thinks, “oh, hey. I know PING.” and then clicks the PING brand in the area between the paid and search they will then see this result:

Now the results change.

In other searches I conducted the brand that shows up nowhere on the unbranded search organically is now at the top of the list after adding the branded term via the Google brands link.

A few thoughts:

• This will make bidding on Competitors names even more essential.
• Longtail keywords will be increasingly more important than “head” words (great point by Linking Geek Brian Chappell).
• Google is caving to big advertisers who are consistently getting beaten at SEO and PPC.
• How does Google decide what brands to show?

If I’m a smaller company with a product that is just as good, or better, why can’t I have the same opportunity to get exposure in that same slot? Is a Google engineer making the decision?

This all reminds me of this Great Gatsby quote:

They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.

and this exchange as well:

Fitzgerald: The rich are different than you and me.
Hemingway: Yes, they have more money.

I could be reaching there, but hey, I was an English major. My earlier point is still valid. Google knows where there money comes from: big brands with deep pockets.

A bit more on the branded results subject from Barry over at Search Engine land

One night I was refereeing a youth roller hockey game in Durham and overheard the parents talking about the Whalers moving to Raleigh. I was pretty shocked. NHL hockey in the area? The Raleigh Icecaps of the ECHL had been playing in Dorton Arena since 1991 and drew a decent sized crowd. The Whalers moved to Raleigh and played in Greensboro while the RBC Center was being built. I made the trip often to see them play. After having to drive about 2 hours to see the Penguins play when I lived in Pennsylvania, a drive to Greensboro was not an inconvenience.

The NHL had promised the team an All-Star game since it moved into the new arena, but had been passed over repeatedly. Now, in 2011, the NHL will give Raleigh the 2011 NHL All-Star game. The events in the past included not only the NHL All-Star game but a skills competition, futures game and an old-timers game. It should be a great event and hopefully the weather that weekend is mild and outdoor events around the RBC Center can go off without a hitch.

Nearly every writer wanted their book to look just like a book that can be found on the shelves at any Barnes & Noble or local bookstore. What many writers fail to see is that more money can be made by selling the same content in eBook format. Numerous writers who use Lulu will often have two versions of their books available; a print version and a downloadable eBook version. The royalties on the eBook version are much higher than with the printed copy enabling the author to make more money per sale. eBook versions are often priced a few dollars less as well, making this version more appealing to a reader who has no prior knowledge of the author and may not be willing to spend $15 on a book they might be wary of purchasing due to the “self-published” stigma attached.

One issue with eBooks is that many readers lack a decent eBook reader in which to consume the content. The format Lulu provides is easily readable on a computer (it is basically a pdf), but reading a long book on such a screen can be less than ideal. The Kindle, Nook and other readers are ideal for such content, but these devices are still gaining traction and many owners stick to best-sellers and only a few dive into non-mainstream content. Apple’s release of the iPad has put an eBook reader into the hands of 300,000 in one day. A better stat for writers is the fact that Apple announced that nearly 250,000 eBooks were downloaded on the same day. While many of these readers might stick to the best-seller list, the fact that such a huge number of people now have an eBook reader enables the chance to sell to more people.

Pricing an eBook correctly as a self-published author is vital and the key to driving sales. I have seen many self-published authors price their content way too high. As a reader who purchases about 5 books a month, I may not take a chance on an author that I don’t know unless the book is at a discount or priced lower than average books.

Check out Lulu’s iPad formatting here.

According to TechCrunch the iPad sold 300,000 units on opening weekend. The bigger number is that 250,000 eBooks were purchased for the device. At $9.99 as an average price per eBook = $2,500,000 in sales. A pretty significant number.

Looking at the iPhone as a comparable marker, look at the search trends for each device:

The iPad has a much larger search volume near launch than the iPhone had. This could be due to the iPhone being able to pave the way for more consumers to become aware of the Apple brand. While these users might have been PC only at that time, once they switched from a Blackberry to an iPhone they were more open to what Apple had to offer. While a switch to an Apple laptop might have been a huge leap, the switch to an Apple phone was much easier. The iPad’s sales numbers for were higher than the Iphone’s during launch.

Do i want an iPad?

I’m not sure. I really can’t figure out what I would do with one. My son might use it on road trips, but the iPhone works just fine for him now (as does the mini-DVD) player we own. I might use it to read magazines, but the initial cost of the device just does not make a purchase worthwhile. I don’t watch a ton of web-TV and when I do, I just plug my MacBook directly into my TV. The applications available look nice, but how many are just larger versions of their iPhone counterparts?

I think I’ll wait on getting an iPad for now. I am curious to know what the next iPhone upgrade will entail? Thinner? More memory? Better camera?

Some iPad Links:

10 Essential iPad Tips & Tricks
iPad Sales
Gregory Ng’s iPad Love (he makes a good point about using it as a notetaker)

Lego iPad photo via jmenomeno

Google Ad Innovations

A couple of items really stand out with these changes/new features:

Re-marketing – This is huge. Knowing now that I can target users who have been to my site and not signed up for a free file sharing trial is a great feature. Many banner networks offer re-targeting, but having the ability to make quick changes via Google is much easier.

Video Ads – The targeting within a certain video via keyword is also a great new feature. I’m not sure what kind of impact this will have, but being able to target videos on YouTube could enable marketers to put ads on competitor’s videos.

Google Stars for Search

We’ve long believed that personalization makes search more relevant and fun. For nearly five years, we’ve been tailoring results with personalized search. Today we’re announcing a new feature in search that makes it easier for you to mark and rediscover your favorite web content — stars.

Oh boy, “makes search more relevant and fun“. I’m not sure if there is any SEO impact or not. If a SERP gets starred by multiple users, will that listing get a bump?

Real-Time Search

I’m not a huge fan of real-time search results as I don’t want the latest result, just the “best” result. When I am looking for real-time results I either use a search column in TweetDeck or the search functionality at Twitter.com.

Bing’s Search Updates

Bing announced a number of changes at SES NYC including:

Quick Tabs – These tabs are meant to help the user refine their search. Bing stated 42% of all search queries required additional searches.

News – Real time searches not only give the latest results from the leading news sites, but also provide the most popular shared links from that publication.

Maps – Bing added Foursquare integration into the mapping functionality.

The Google “Caffeine” updated that was supposed to be launched during the post-holiday season has still not been pushed live according to Matt Cutts. I’ve seen some significant adjustments in the SERPs that are close to what was on the Caffeine sandbox, but I’m not sure if that is due to the update actually being pushed live or just a coincidence. I’d love your thoughts in the comments.

I’ve written a few posts about eBook readers, but still don’t feel like I’d enjoy reading a book on a Kindle or Nook. I don’t know if the iPad will be any different. Using the device to read magazines could be interesting, but the subscription price would have to be lower than the physical version. I like grabbing a book and just digging in and being able to throw it down on the coffee table or shelf when I’m done. With an eBook Reader that experience would change. I do use my iPhone to read numerous RSS feeds and enjoy that, but the content is usually shorter.

What I’m Reading:

Scratch Beginnings – Adam Shepard: A book about his experience trying to get from only having $25 and nowhere to live to $5000 in his bank account and an apartment. A good read and interesting story. I read this book in one day (not something that is uncommon for me). I do wish the book was longer, as he mentioned a few events in the epilogue that seemed like they would have been very interesting. Adam lives in Raleigh and does public speaking about his experience.

Rework – Jason Fried and David Hansson: The latest offering from the founders of 37Signals. They published their first book using Lulu and it sold extremely well. This is one book that I’ll have a notebook open while I read in order to take notes.

Skinema – Chris Nieratako: I have always been accused of reading weird books. This would definitely fall into the “weird” category. Chris is a decent writer and his short passages are quick to read yet engaging.

Flip The Funnel – Joseph Jaffe: I received this book for free from the author. He ran a Facebook contest and gave the 1st 30 people to become a fan of the book, free copies. It is a great read so far and I hope to implement some of his ideas for customer engagement.

(UPDATED)

I also read The Lie by Chad Kultgen. He is also the author of The Average American Male. Both are excellent books and are highly recommended. I finished The Lie in just over 24 hours. His first book was promoted using YouTube and was noted for going “viral” and getting a big lift from social media, but I really don’t recall hearing about it at all last year before or after I had read it. Find out more on Chad’s official site.

This is just a short list of what I have waiting to be read on my bookshelf. I’d love to get other recommendations in the comments.

Things have changed. With the invention of high definition TV I no longer have a better experience at a live sporting event.  The picture is clear and there are multiple cameras in use, so I get a great view of each goal and big play. I go to about five or six Carolina Hurricanes games a year and while I have a good time usually there are a few things that really irritate me. The biggest offender is the music. It is just so freaking loud. My son and I went to a game and arrived early so we could watch warm-ups. We didn’t go down to the glass, but stayed up in our seats so we could eat some dinner before it got crowded. There were about 2,000 people in the arena as warm-up began and once the arena staff started playing music, I couldn’t hear my son at all without yelling. Is there really a need to blast music that loud prior to the game starting? I really don’t think that some bland “arena rock song” is really going to fire up the players.

Some Good Things about Live Events:

• Draft beer
• The energy of the crowd
• Picking up things that you don’t catch on TV

Some Bad Things about Live Events:

• Parking cost
• The “monster-truck” mentality of the arena AV staff
• Ticketmaster fees
• Crowds of morons
• Long bathroom lines

Has television evolved to the point where attending an event is secondary? With so many channels available I can usually find a second NHL game to watch at the same time. I even end up playing hockey in the living room with my son during games. In fact, at the last game we went to he wanted to leave early and go home so we could watch the game and play. I even find myself playing sports video game while watching a live event or reading.

A broadcast from the 1970s

A broadcast from 2010

Has television made attending live sporting events matter less?