The Commerce360 Blog

If you're not a hardcore blogger and/or technology industry insider, you may not know about Mini-Microsoft, a MSFT employee who has maintained anonymity while becoming a highly visible critic of the internal workings of largest company in tech-dom. The Seattle Times has a profile and summary of Mini, which does a nice job of summarizing his impact:

I ask him what he considers his biggest success. His answer: increased transparency, a sense that Microsoft management now has to be more open with its workers. Funny it took someone going underground to achieve that.

The idea that Mini has changed Microsoft isn't just delusions of grandeur. None other than MSFT uber-blogger Robert Scoble recently wrote: "Can one person change a huge company? Mini did. And we don't even know his name."

But this isn't a post about Microsoft. It's about your company. What would you have to change if you couldn't keep certain secrets locked behind the firewall or hiding behind the executive washroom door? Are there flaws in your products or services, issues with your employees, untruthes in your marketing materials, dangerous limits in your capacity or capabilities?

Every business is full of these things, not because anyone is evil but because there are only so many hours in the day. The urgent overwhelms the important and days turn into months and then years. Over time those most impacted by whatever shortcoming we're talking about just get used to it or accept it. The reality is, most customers or employees didn't used to have many effective tools for complaining or lobbying to change a whole range of things. But that now has changed. Now any one of your current or ex-employees or customers or competitors or just about anyone else who can become 'Mini You' in an instant.

So spend a few minutes thinking about Mini-Microsoft, and how you might prioritize things differently if you were either honest with yourself or someone chose to force your hand. This might not be the most pleasant way to come to grips with the new world order (where customers are in charge and transparency is the rule) but like Microsoft it could help you to make some smart and important changes to your business.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On the old blog, I wrote several posts on the definition of 'Marketing', and I have the same interest in finding a good definition for the world 'Brand'. An article called 'F*ck. Love. Brand.' over at UX Mag (User Experience) take a look at the sacred and the profane aspects of this question:

Catholics believe that there is no difference between God The Father, God The Son, and God The Holy Spirit, to them there’s just God. God is all three, and all three are God, they call this the Holy Trinity.

Similarly in business we have, The (company name) Brand, The (company name) Culture, and the The (company name’s) Customer Experience. Yet all of these simply make up The Company. Like the religious reference above, they’re one and the same.

The word brand is a generic term that I believe should never be used in a non-generic sense. I don’t want people discussing the Missing Link brand (culture, or customer experience) for me, they should only ever be discussing Missing Link. Internally and externally, there is and should be no differentiation.

He goes even farther in his conclusion, arguing in effect that the company and everything it does is the brand. That may be more true than some narrow definitions, but seems like a cop out to me. For now I'm sticking with the idea that a brand is a reputation, the sum (or prevailing mass) of what people think about a company (or a person). From there it's relatively easy to understand how different business actions or decisions will impact a brand, or not impact it.

I don't think that's the ultimate definition though. Any more ideas would be appreciated.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The specter of morality has again reared it’s ugly head in the world of search engine optimization. This time it’s the self-appointed ‘king of all links’ telling us how pure is his heart and backlink report.

And like most moralists, he relies on mis-placed faith, half-truths, and completely distorted examples to prove his point. For him it appears, a link is a sacred thing, and one can only incite their creation if working towards the purity of the web or the enlightenment of the user.

The crux of the argument from the SEO moralists is always the same: If you use techniques that work specifically because they work, then you are evil and heading for online damnation. On the other hand, if you work towards the service of Google and your fellow netizens, and your efforts happen to be rewarded with improved search rankings, then you can have your SERP Positions and your smugness too.

Let's consider the list of moral offenses: Trying to get 500 links to a web site. Buying links. Using social bookmark sites to create links. Commenting on blogs because it creates a link (not necessarily a useless comment, even a meaningful comment is a no-no). Using Trackbacks. Customizing anchor text to improve rankings. Issuing press releases for back-links. Wow. With all this kind of mis-behaviour going on it's clear that someone should establish a "Family Links Council' and accept 'link permission requests’ which must be obtained before taking any action that might result in the creation of a new link.

Of course, the kicker is this: "Quit trying to fool Google.' Google is out there magnanimously building this huge public service, and scum like you are causing decay in the beauty of their creation. Ignore the fact that the entire ranking system is arbitrary, secret, and constantly changing, because Google is always right and will deliver the 'most relevant' results to the best of their ability (unless losers like you make it too hard for them). Forget about the huge change in revenues your company can experience by rising to the top of the SERPS for your desired keywords and instead bask in the satisfaction of knowing that you didn't violate any of the vauge recommendations of these people who are freely aggregating your content in order to sell adjacent advertising. Don't worry about all the clearly manipulated results that you see, the companies that have turned to the 'dark side' and are rewarded with top ranking (and the associated $$), but instead bask in the personal satisfaction that an extremely tiny number of myopic freaks think your hat is white. And most importantly, don't let it bother you in the slightest that Google is a business that happens to drive leads and revenues to other businesses without any cost and will continue to do so until the moment when that is no longer in their best interest. They used to drive cost-free leads 100% of the time, then 90%, then 80%, and now a reported 70% of outbound links from them are not paid. They're using the aggregated content of the world to create and solidify long term relationships with consumers and then one by one they will leverage these relationships to compete with the very content providers who originally enabled them. Of course you should behave while facilitating your own demise.

The icing on the cake is an example, where we're shown that if you simply take a 13 year run at one single subject, you can dominate search results without even slightly offending the Gods of Google. So start now, and by 2019 that top slot can be all yours.

Now I should admit that I too am against many link building tactics, and would never use or condone things like comment spam, or link trading. But it’s because I think they’re bad form (in the case of blog spam), or ineffective (reciprocal link farms) – not because of any sense of loyalty to the ethos of any search engine. The engines themselves have spawned 90% of the junk on the web because they measure things without the ability to know when they’re being manipulated. They’re getting better at not rewarding junk (pages or links) and I applaud them for it.

We happen to believe that it’s now easier to build a great site with interesting content, and win top SERP results through a combination of merit and an understanding of what the engines are measuring, than it is to game or cheat your way to the top. That alignment of interests – by building the best pages for users we also earn the best SERP results – is the best possible world. We do our job. The search engines do theirs.

(And the moralists can go back to trying to ruin people’s lives in the real world and get out of cyberspace. – sorry, couldn’t resist that one.)

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There's always danger in accepting things as they are, especially in the world of charts and graphs. The data can easily be made to look like something, even if it isn't exactly (or even remotely) what it appears. On a web site the number of variables that impact most situations are numerous, and yet web analytics software generally delivers relatively simple reports that attempt to boils the situation down to just two or three variables. This many of your visitors converted into sales. That many people who saw the ad clicked on it. Very often that information should only be taken as a clue - an indication of something much larger and more complex.

Omniture's Matt Belkin challenges one of the cornerstone metrics in website analytics, in a series of recent posts, where he argues rather persuasively that 'unique visitors' should be passed over in favor of the more accurate and perhaps relevant 'visit' metric. Even better, Matt documents 15 reasons why the Unique Visitor metric is untrustworthy - cool stuff coming from the head of the Best Practices Group at the largest Analytics vendor.

It isn't that there is (or would be) anything wrong with unique visitor analysis, as Matt explains, it's just that there is no good way to accurately get that number. Despite that little fact, vendors (including Omniture) deliver oodles o'reports as if they could. But even more interesting, I think, is Matt's contention that visits represent opportunities. That's value-added thinking. Every time someone returns, they are trying to learn or accomplish or buy something. It doesn't really matter if they've been here before or not, right now you've got a chance to persuade and convert them.

Taking those visit numbers apart - figuring out how many of your chances were converted into not only final sales but also 'micro-conversions' as Matt suggests, improves the texture of your information dramatically.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 1:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)