Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

Book of the Hump Club

I'm constantly blown away by the ways the Web keeps making the world smaller. Here's a new favorite:

Though The Camel Bookmobile (HarperCollins, April 2007) is a novel, the camel-borne library actually exists. It operates in Kenya’s isolated Northeastern Province near the unstable border with Somalia. It brings books to a semi-nomadic people who live with drought, famine and chonic poverty. The books are spread out on grass mats beneath an acacia tree, and the library patrons, often barefoot, sometimes joined by goats or donkeys, gather with great excitement to choose their books until the next visit.

Thanks to to Sylvia Gimenez, my first boss at eMarketer, for the link. You can send books directly or buy them via an Amazon wishlist.

The Hidden Value of a Link

Is PayPerPost evil?

Sure. I can get on board with that. Though it's a flawed hypothesis, a lot of my column this week tries to explore why. It actually does have parallels in other media, and there are even some blog advertising campaigns enlisting bloggers themselves that tapped into the real power of community, but PayPerPost keeps making me squirm. I'll take pop-ups over PPP any day. It does have some defenders, such as those who commented on the column on MediaPost (granted, those who emailed me were much more supportive - hardly a surprise, given sample biases).

The column also once again, like last week, stars the link. The full column's in the extended entry. Is PPP really just product placement or advertorial? Or is it corrupting the fabric of social media, and the entire social media ecosystem? I welcome your take, as this debate isn't going away.

Behind the Interview: Quoting Smart Friends

I don't normally post links to when I'm quoted in the press (seems a little pretentious, even for me), yet it can be fun going behind the scenes of an interview sometimes. A quote on Google's personalized search results in Direct Magazine is a great opportunity:

For another thing, optimizing for the possible variations in personalized search is close to mathematically impossible. “I had a friend at UC Berkeley calculate the possible permutations for a search that could have 25 links—a totally arbitrary number-- show up in the ten slots on a Google results page,” Berkowitz says. “The total worked out to about 11.9 trillion possibilities.”

This could have turned out completely differently. The reporter, if he wasn't so kind, could have said, "If Berkowitz brushed up on his fifth grade math skills or knew how to use a scientific calculator, he'd have figured out on his own that this would be 11.9 trillion possibilities." But instead, he let me off the hook and made it sound like I have friends in high places. Indeed, Andrew Marcus, PhD candidate in Berkeley's chemistry department (I'm sure I'm butchering the attribution somehow, so forgive me), was kind enough to check my math, as was colleague Andrew Chang.

For both Andrews, my question on permutations was the easiest math question they answered all year, but the Berkeley reference looked great in print. You can't keep enough Andrews on your speed dial.

My Media Consumption Diet

Jeremiah Owyang started a meme. I'm now doing my part to spread it. How Dawkinsian. Based on Jeremiah's original post, here's my own media consumption diet, ranked from those I consume most to the occasional midnight snack:

Web: I get most of my news this way, though not that much entertainment. I read a bunch of blogs, though not as many as I'd like to. Instead, I generally stick with a couple dozen blogs I read regularly, most of which I receive via email subscriptions (with FeedBlitz, I can get any blog delivered that way, even if the blog doesn't offer email feeds). I read the NY Times email roundup daily and get some of their other mailings, and I always find myself reading at least a bit of WSJ. Ad Age increasingly has some of the best work-related news; it's a rare day when I don't read at least one of its articles in full. As for other trades, while I'm biased since I write for them, I get most of what I need for daily news from MediaPost, supplemented by MarketingVox. For in-depth, long-form content, iMedia's great, but I usually need a chunk of time to read any of it. I'm sure I'm missing some sources.

TV: I watch MUCH more TV since getting a DVR (via Time Warner Cable). Every morning it's NY1, for anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. It's great, low budget, laughably raw local news that does get me up to speed on my environs, to the point where anchor Pat Kiernan reads the local papers to me on TV every morning, when I time it right. Even the commercials are strangely addictive, since the same few air non-stop for months, or longer (the car service ad where women swoon "He comes when I call!" is the best). At night, it's all entertainment, no news. Depending of course on when new episodes are airing, I'm hooked on The Daily Show, Colbert Report, Entourage, The Office, Top Chef, and the Amazing Race. I've been catching up on Curb Your Enthusiasm, and I watch as many decent programs and movies as I can find on HBO on Demand. Then there are the shows I watch with Cara, adding more to the mix. Oh, and so I have at least one show that Cara can't stand, I just set my DVR for Spike TV's Pros vs. Joes. Once the Mets' season starts up, then Cara and I will probably need to take advantage of having multiple TVs at home.

Books: I read about a book a week, sometimes more, sometimes less. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, lent to me by a colleague, will take a bit longer.

Magazines: I love magazines. Weekly: The Week, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, Newsweek, Fortune. Monthly: Wired, Business 2.0. There are others - I'm blanking as I write this. I enjoy some writing offline, and the portability helps. If some digital reader hit the market, I wouldn't buy it, unless we were in some environmental do-or-die crisis and we ran out of trees.

Newspapers: I read the free amNY most mornings on the way to work and will pore over the NY Times; we get a daily subscription at home. I read Sunday's Times the most and try to catch up on Thomas Friedman columns.

Movie Theaters: I enjoy the distraction, though over the past year I've seen fewer than I have in a long time.

Broadway: Cara and I have seen a ton of shows together, though we're mostly caught up for awhile. Spring Awakening is the best thing we saw in awhile.

Museums: Visual and performing arts should count as media, right? Cara and I have been slacking off lately, but once it gets warmer, we'll take full advantage of being a few blocks from Museum Mile.

Music: I used to listen to so much more, and I always have my iPod on me, but on the subway I read, at work it distracts me, and at home I watch TV, so music in any form gets the squeeze. I don't touch the radio at all. Maybe my music hiatus will end once I pick up the new album from the Kaiser Chiefs. Damn, they're good.

Mobile: I use my phone as a communications device, not for accessing content. That could change, but even with the better speeds on my new Motorola Krazr compared to my sluggish LG I had before, that won't change too soon.

Up Up and a Wii

Finally, I had a chance to play the Wii at a friend's place this week. Wow. And I only played the sports games that came with the system.

I started off playing boxing, which was alright, but then it got really involved. Batting practice blew me away; I had to bend my knees and step into the swing. When I practiced hitting to a certain location, it was a drill I never once did in years of sleepaway camp or gym class.

Sony and Microsoft were focusing on building the next best game systems, and they probably have (I've played Xbox 360 but not PS3). Yet with the Wii, Nintendo did something else entirely. They created an interactive experience, something you'd wait on line to try at a World's Fair.

I know I'm slow in saying it, yet with game systems, I'm hardly an early adopter; at home I have the original Nintendo Entertainment System from the 80s, still working (Dr. Mario's the current favorite). Despite many thoughts of upgrading over the past two decades, this is the first time I've ever really thought it's worth it.

All I'm left wondering now is how the heck Nintendo did it.

Fun Health Search Game: Disease Jeopardy

I'm overdue to write about health search again, but I've been compiling notes on the subject and have been briefed by some of the most companies in the space the past few months. This week, I've met with Healthline, which has the new Symptom Search.

There's a fun game you can play: type in a series of symptoms and see if you can narrow it down to one disease or ailment. For instance, I tried "runny nose," "vomiting," and "fatigue," which got it down to two, but then stumbled on the next. I typed "bleeding," which eliminated the diseases; I should have tried headache or hair loss.

It's endless fun for wannabe med students or "Grey's Anatomy" junkies.

Best Bio Ever

When reading up on the upcoming NBC show The Black Donnellys, I found this blog that mentions someone's celebrity connections to a star of both Donnellys and The Office. That led me to a Wikipedia link for Office star Mindy Kaling, who plays Ryan the Temp's fling Kelly. This line from the bio is one I think anyone would kill to have:

Originally, producer Greg Daniels wasn't sure where to use her on screen in the series until the point came in the script for the episode "Diversity Day" when Steve Carrell's insensitive character Michael Scott needed to be slapped by a minority. "Since then, I've been on the show," Kaling stated in an interview.

Optimizing For One Or 12 Trillion

This column ran last week, but I just realized I forgot to post it - hence the double-header this week. You can also find this at MediaPost; it continues in the extended entry here.

Personalized search as now gone mainstream, thanks to Google. What’s a marketer to do about it? I can sum up the best strategy in one word: nothing.

Google has experimented with personalized search results in beta, and during that trial, you could turn the personalized search results on or off. Now, if you’re searching while logged into your Google account, you get the personalized search results automatically, as mentioned on the Google Blog. You’ll see the message “Personalized search results 1-10 of about [the number of results]” in the light blue bar above the natural and paid results when it’s on.

It’s easy to overreact to the change. What should you make of articles such as those on SearchEngineLand by Nick Wilson, who spent over 1,000 words in his “3 Ranking Survival Tips for Google’s New Personalized Results”?  He advises optimizing for Google services, social search, and social networks and blogs.

Imagining a Web Where Links Don't Matter

Originally published in MediaPost; it continues in the extended entry.

  Content is SO 2006, as far as search engine optimization goes.

Everywhere I turn, the SEO discussions center on linking and link development. The appreciation of the value for inbound links to a marketer or publisher’s site is one of the reasons why there’s such corporate excitement over blogs and blogger relations, user-generated content, and tagging.

Instead of just extolling the value of links, I started to wonder what would happen if links weren’t so highly valued. Imagine if, in this “Twilight Zone” exercise, you woke up one day to find that the major search engines no longer used inbound links as a way to rank Web sites or other types of online content. The effect would be calamitous, on par with the Department of Treasury one day saying that greenbacks would no longer be valued as currency.

To see just how much the value of the link has appreciated, below are some of the ramifications of what would happen if links no longer mattered for search optimization:

The Giving Tree Goes to Niger

Courtesy of TechCrunch, I just did one of those things online that I never had any intention of doing before but seemed like a good idea in this 'World is Flat' environment: I bought a tree in Niger.

No, I can't plot Niger on a map (I could at least get it on the right continent), and I haven't knowingly met anyone from the country, but my tree's now visible to the world at Tree Nation, a site that aims to try to fight poverty and desertification. The site writes:

"Desertification is potentially the most threatening ecosystem change impacting   livelihoods of the poor" (UNCCD).  It is about land degradation caused by   CLIMATE CHANGE and human-induced factors.

By planting a tree you will make a difference by helping to create a giant heart in Niger, the poorest   country in the world, and one of the most affected by desertification.

   

There are different types of trees at different price points, all priced in Euros (convert currency here, if you need to). The whole experience feels somewhat like Habbo Hotel, the online game/virtual world/social network (the lines keep blurring). Unfortunately, it's a little clunky, and it took me a few minutes to mouse around and click the right link to go and plant a tree; a simpler option without the fancy Flash interface could help drive some more sales by those who want to get in and out of the site really quickly.

All in all though, it's a great, engaging experience for a cause that I, for one, didn't even know was that much of an issue, and I surely didn't know any easy way to help it in that region. I'm adding this to my ever-growing list of reasons I love the Web.