The Popularity Contest in real time

As a follow up to my recent post on what can be extracted from people’s comments today, I wanted to throw this out for anyone who hasn’t checked it out. Google Trends has a very cool site for comparing search words for relative search volume. I found it very interesting to put words like Dell and HP together or Patriots, Giants and see the comparisons. What was also interesting was the distribution of the hits by regions, countries and languages. By the looks of it, HP is searched on many times over than HP in India. That can’t be good.

If you are trying to get an idea of the relative popularity of one company or another this seems to be a good start. One other item of interest was the preponderance of searches coming from the home town of the companies I typed in. Dell had the most hits coming from Austin. Now, you would expect a lot of hits from their employees but could they really skew that much compared to huge metropolitan areas like Boston or NY.

Try searching Obama, McCain…I wonder if Google Trends can spot the American Idol winner as well

People in Glass Houses should not Stow Thrones

The single most interesting thing about social media is how the individual has been empowered to communicate their ideas and opinions on a global scale. My own blog is a venue for getting out new ideas on the future of business that extends well beyond my friends and co-workers.  Today, you can know quite a bit about someone without ever having met them or had a conversation about them just by reading their blog.

In fact, I stumbled across one of my competitors’ engineer’s bio on LinkedIn that tipped me off that he was working on a new feature for his company’s software. That made me wonder if I could look up my sales peers from other companies and get more insight or find them on FriendFeed and monitor what they are doing. Unfortunately, sales people are not really big into Web 2.0 whereas their sales engineer companions are pretty heavy into all that is new on the tech front.

So, this got me thinking about whether anyone has looked at scraping traffic on mico-blogging sites to determine profiles on users based on their conversations. Obviously, if they keep talking about digital cameras then they probably have an affinity for them. You really can learn more about someone from listening to them rather than looking over their shoulder while they surf the web.

Which leads me back to the title of my post - If you have a lot of important stuff to say, be careful who is listening.

— Added post note 7/14/08: Looks like someone is scraping micro-blogging feeds…summize.com and it is exactly what I thought it would be.  It even refreshes results in real time. Now, that is interesting.

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Marketing’s last mile and the Prosumer’s revenge

On July 8th, the Wall Street Journal ran a story on Targeted Ads and focused on NebuAd and Phorm. There is a good summary write up with links to the history of telcos relationship with these vendors located here:

Senate hearing on NebuAd, privacy set for tomorrow

Cable companies and telcos say they need software like NebuAd-and it’s British comrade-in-arms, Phorm-to help them develop targeted advertising for subgroups of Internet and television service users. The ad dollars, they say, are critical to their growth. Check out this Wall Street Journal story for a different look at the controversy. — Jim O’Neill

These technologies are being called into question by Congress due to the fact that it can be interpreted as wiretapping.  Cookies, Adware, Spyware, etc. have always bothered me and its amazing how much latitude these technologies and those that develop it have had over the years. This all seems symptomatic of a larger problem these days. Going back to my theme of “too much of anything isn’t good”, there is an enormous amount of product out there looking to be marketed to large audiences in the hopes that it becomes mainstream or at the very least just captures a bit of the long tail.

Experience-Marketing in the Plasma age

EMC recently acquired Document Sciences and this will open up a lot of new conversations with our customers. HP had acquired the other big player in the Document Output Management Space, Exstream, back in January 2008. The ability to merge print communications with web, SMS (text) and email is the eventual destination for large companies trying to integrate their marketing message across all these channels.

I got a mailer at home the other day that was the only piece of direct mail (EVER!) to make it past the trash bin and onto my refrigerator. It was a customized postcard with my last name spelled out in the sky with the sun setting on the ocean below. Here’s an example from the website of the company that produces the postcards for the Realtor that sent me mine…

Hey! you! Get off of my cloud

I have been meaning to get back to my thread on Too much of anything is not good.  A fellow blogger, Jeff Ventura, agreed that there may come a day when sites want to control traffic as aggressively as some countries are controlling their borders due to the billions of hits they receive each day.

“Eventually though, you’re right: there will be a way to determine grades of traffic flowing into your blog/whatever and treat them accordingly. It’ll be like QOS on the wire, only in terms of traffic flow management.”  - Jeff Ventura

As our mindset slowly starts to migrate to one of conservation I can see this naturally occurring in the way we make resource decisions on web sites.  Right now, there is a lot of talk about tiers of storage in my industry and the need to apply Information Life Cycle Management because you simply can’t keep up with the storage costs associated with your data growth. Keep the right data on the right storage at the right time and you have optimized your spend.

So, what if your web application sits up on a cloud platform like Heroku and you build it in such a way that you can provision different levels of service to different parts of the site or to different web services? People are doing this already with VMWare in a sense and a recent acquisition of VMWare, Thinstall, gave them the ability to migrate Applications from VM to VM as opposed to entire virtual servers from one set of hardware to another.

The case for Social Media Theaters and the need to explain ourselves

I am a big fan of crystal clear communication in part because I really feel like I should be much better at it myself. As I delve into Social Media and really try to separate the hype from the really useful I happen to come across this post from a fellow EMCer Len Devanna - Social Media 101 by Common Craft. That Common Craft video is right up there with the UPS whiteboard guy

Last month, I caught up with an old co-worker that had hung up the sales bag and decided to start a business in the Sales Productivity arena. His company is http://www.whiteboardselling.com/ and I can see the potential.  Ever since I first learned of X-Plane from Business 2.0 magazine, I have been a big advocate for visual communication. YouTube, Flickr and the sort have provided an open platform for this type of communication.  To take it a step further I will relate something I was turned on to recently by Paul Taylor during one of his presentations in FL.

Too much of anything is a problem

Yesterday, I was watching an old World Poker Championship with the last two competitors being Jerry Yang and Tua Lam. Both were immigrants from Asia. Yang came to the US and Lam settled in Canada. When they went all in, Lam reached for the Canadian flag and Yang’s supporters started yelling USA, USA, USA. It struck me that these two guys were not your stereo typical American or Canadian and yet each was very much proud of their new homeland.

Contrast this with some recent news stories on Congress’ actions to heavily penalize people who want to renounce citizenship. The fact that Hong Kong Political leaders are being exposed as having dual citizenship which the public finds unacceptable. And recent news on Silvio Berlusconi’s anti-immigration laws that include deportation measures to throw out unwelcome EU citizens such as Romaniam Gypsies. All of this adds up to increased nationalism and protectionism in the same era of European Union strengthening and Global Trade.

Take this notion and just assume that it has something to do with the fact that there is a worldwide shortage of resources at the moment and extra people just don’t help the situation.

The Opening Act - 7/1/08

Those who saw 2001: A Space Odessey will recall the opening scene of the ape that stumbles across the usefulness of a bone for crushing skulls. A group of apes with the same understanding of a bone, clenched in fist, proceed to move in on another pack’s turf to show them the power they have acquired. After beating an unarmed defender to a pulp, the Ape throws the bone up in the air and it transitions to a similar looking object in space that is a space ship.

That sums it up right there - humanity has always been leveraging tools to advance its motives. In the Dot.com era, of which I was a part, there was a run on the bank of ideas and a real run at de-stabilizing the establishment of modern business. I witnessed many multi-national corporations spend millions of dollars to protect themselves by emulating start-ups and trying to corner markets as some built momentum. Too bad the foundational technology just wasn’t ready for prime-time and many of these projects were written off. There was another problem - the old chiefs were not ready to cede power to the up and comers. That created a perfect storm for us B2B providers playing the young smart guys with VC money against the establishment with even more money.