The Commerce360 Blog

Yesterday I posted some comments on the complexity of organic search engine optimization. I tried to make the case that completing a basic site optimization is (theoretically) easy, but delivering the intended results - the maximum possible amount of organic search engine traffic – is extremely difficult. Marketers need to stop buying search engine optimization and SEO’s need to stop selling or promising site optimization, and both need to start (respectively) buying and selling results.

A few related thoughts:

1. I believe that ‘SEO is easy’ in the way and context I described yesterday, but Danny Sullivan makes a cogent point in saying that ‘it is rocket science if you know nothing about it.’ While the basics of search engine optimization can be, as I am occasionally fond of saying, be written on the back of a business card, the painfully obvious fact is that the vast majority of web site developers and owners are clearly oblivious to these basics.
   
   Moreover, implementation of these principals once you do know them does seem to confound otherwise intelligent people more often than not. And there are certainly way more exceptions to the basic rules than basic rules themselves. Hence the addition of the parenthetical (theoretically) into today’s summary of yesterday’s point. Maybe it's not so easy.
   
   
2. The SEO industry is effectively crippled by a horrible lack of measurements and tools. Neither the engines nor the analytics companies treat organic ranking like an important metric. In fact, for reasons both good and bad Google and the others make it very difficult to track search engine result page rankings – doing so is in effect an illegal activity.
   
   Sure there are a half-dozen 'SERP reporting' utilities out there - but until the engines sanction, or sell, legitimate rights and methods to adequately check results for large numbers of keywords building such tools are just plain bad investments for serious developers. Notice that Adwords and Google Analytics will tell you dozens of things about how your paid ads are doing, and effectively nothing about your organic rankings. Until paid advertisers start request (or better yet demanding) vastly improved organic reporting we're probably not going to get anywhere.
   
   Additionally, I’ll renew my call for the engines to pass along in their referrer data the exact position number in the results where the clicked listing appeared. I just want them to tag the following on the end of the referring URL: ?serp=14 to tell us that the organic click was generated by a listing currently ranking 14th in their results. They could do this easily and it would be a great first step toward meaningful organic reporting. Think a report showing how much more money was being made off of top 5 results than page 5 results would motivate some SEO attention, effort, and spending?

Thoughts on paid search and the PPC vs SEO comparison tomorrow.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 11:58 PM | Permalink

How hard is it to optimize a web site? Is it a one-time or an ongoing activity? Is paid search harder to manage or master than organic search? Is one ‘better’ than the other?

These are the meaty questions flying around within a somewhat silly and intentionally provoked debate going on within a number of blogs and forums in the search marketing community.

But they’re also real questions that we hear all the time from CEOs and Marketing VPs trying to select a path through the world of online marketing.

Optimizing a web site is easy. The same way that playing golf is easy. It doesn’t take long to get the hang of holding the club, whacking the ball, driving the cart, and counting your strokes.

But becoming a good golfer and producing great results (ie a low handicap) is very difficult. It takes oodles of practice, development of very fine motor-skills, the mastery of widely varying conditions, selection and control of equipment that best suits your individual characteristics and style, and sustained mental discipline. And of course there is no such thing as total mastery – the courses, the competition, and other variables make the pursuit of perfect an ongoing process.

A web site can fairly be considered ‘optimized’ if it has individual pages targeted at specific keywords, title tags and other content focused towards those selected keywords, and at least a few relevant inbound links. Anyone with a little time and at least half of a high-school education should be able to get it done for you.

And with a little luck you’ll start seeing an increase in traffic from Google and the other engines, and perhaps some ‘high ranking results’ for your company name and maybe even a few targeted keywords. But in the broader scheme of things (meaning measured against the potential), your results will not be significant. Completing a basic site optimization (even a very good one, which VERY VERY few companies accomplish) and then expecting significant results is a bit like learning to putt through the windmill and then expecting to pick up a Green Jacket at Augusta National.

The trouble isn’t the complexity of the optimization; it’s the complexity of the game. Even focused companies should have target keyword lists that number into the thousands and retailers or larger organizations often need to address tens or hundreds of thousands of different words and phrases. Optimization results that only address a dozen or two ‘keywords’ is like having a great fairway shot but being incapable of hitting the ball from the rough or sand. Putting it in business terms, imagine if your phone number was only in the Yellow Pages of 2% of the people who tried to find you – that’s your situation if your ‘optimization’ only yields top5 ranking for 2% of the terms real people search when you’d like to get their business.

Beyond keywords, you have Yahoo and MSN and the rest of the non-Google universe. Studies show that the top ranking sites vary greatly between these engines, and even if Google has nearly 70% share (as some have recently claimed), are you really ready to walk away from 30% of your potential customers? On top of this we have nearly constant algorithm changes, a world where getting a contextually-relevant non-paid link from a legitimately credible and highly ranked site is just slightly easier than getting six PowerBall numbers right, web designers who think text segments longer than 16 words are visual anthrax, and competitors who seemingly gain their rankings through either the world’s most insane combination of ‘black hat’ techniques (sure they’ll get banned, but when?) or because they built their site on a whim in early ’96 and haven’t changed it since and yet Google still seems to love them and their decade old back-links.

The real world process of SEO isn’t plant then harvest. It’s research, plan, execute the easy parts, lobby for extensive site changes, measure initial results, investigate why some efforts worked and others didn’t, re-double efforts and change tactics where necessary, win some internal battles to build more content or make more radical page changes, get very creative to build or attain meaningful links, wait around for results, react to algorithm changes, figure out how to measure results in a world where all the tools suck, repeat.

SEO is easy. Great organic search results are extremely difficult. They take many months and years. They require nearly endless SEO hours and a commitment to change the site dramatically to give the engines what they want – this means costs from designers, writers, webmaster, engineers, etc. It ain’t cheap, it ain’t easy. So is it worth it?

Over $6B is spent on paid search because it’s easy to understand and highly predictable. And it works. But last I heard seven or eight out of ten clicks were still in the organic listings. So if you buy the #1 spot for every keyword possibly related to your business you’re still missing nearly 80% of your potential traffic.

And despite all the cost and effort described above, organic traffic carries no variable per-click cost, and so it gets cheaper the more successful you are. Algorithms and competitors may change, but generally speaking the organic rankings you earn tend to hang-on for months or even years. So the amortization of the fixed costs spreads even thinner over time.

In the end the question isn’t how hard it is to optimize, it’s how difficult is it get results – and what are those results worth. The inside-baseball debate will continue among the search guru’s, but for marketers wrestling with these issues I hope the above ads some texture to the issues at hand. I didn’t even make it into the issues of paid search or the comparison between the two, and will tackle those in a subsequent post.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 11:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The page view doesn’t have to die. It just needs some help. One little metric can’t carry the weight of the internet anymore. (Sure hits did it for a while, then stickiness then eyeballs and even clicks, but those were the old days…)

The problem is that we need to understand at least four basic aspects of life online:

• Traffic - The flow of visitors in and out of our sites is critical in a world where dollars are spent on ads and paid search, word of mouth programs and organic search optimization. We need to know where these visitors come from, what they do after they arrive (this visit and in their ‘lifetime’), and then calculate the ROI of our investment in acquiring them.
  
  
• Sites – While we can increasingly syndicate content and distribute widgets, the majority of our time and energy still goes into building and maintaining web sites, and we need to know how those sites and (yes) the web pages that comprise them are being used. What’s new is that we can no longer assume the page is a static element – it can now contain dynamic content, elements syndicated from other locations, AJAX and other levels of interaction and progressive or reactive disclosure, and significant personalization or contextualization. So we need to know not only what pages visitors saw in what order and how many times (and for how long) but also what content was on those pages when they saw them and how they interacted with that content in that environment.
  
  
• Content – Chunks of content live free and independent lives these days. A chunk of text can appear on many different pages of a single site, and/or be syndicated across any number of sites. Widgets and videos enable important interaction at the content level (which we need to know all about) but can simultaneously live in lots of places both on our site and across the web. We need to be able to look at both the interactions with any widgets we’ve imported (the widget owner cannot withhold that data) and the aggregate interactions with any widgets or content we’ve distributed. Ads are just chunks, so this applies to them too.
  
  
• People – The elements and constructs above only exist to serve people, whose money it is all of these web pages are really chasing. Yet the current crop of analytics software and conventional metrics only let us see glimpses of these people in the shadows of clicks and page views. We need to be able to segment users not only by where they come from and what pages they see, but by inferred or explicit personas, psychographics, scenarios, intents, and the type of content they interact with and the way in which they interact. We then need to clearly tie these folks to content, sites, traffic sources, and success events.
  
  

If I were developing a new analytics platform I’d consider the needs of each of these four aspects separately, and design both the data collection and reporting for each based on their unique needs. Current systems start with the click and then the page and try to spread this very thin data across all of them. It doesn’t work and as both the industry and people working in it become more mature and sophisticated this is becoming clearer and therefore less tolerable.

The increasingly loud complaints about the page view are the sound of a market opportunity for the next wave of web analytics products. For all of our sakes I hope someone jumps on this quick.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:13 PM | Permalink

If you had a $500M launch budget for a product that nearly everyone was going to have to buy eventually anyway, how much emphasis would you place on word-of-mouth marketing? Microsoft is in that position, and yet thinks the role of influencers is important enough that they're sending Vista-equipped laptops to selected bloggers.

Over the past two weeks I've seen countless TV pundits lambast TIME Magazine's choice of 'You' (as in user-generated) as the 'Person of the Year'. It wasn't hard to understand how a bunch of journalists (mostly in their 50's and 60's) would take the idea too literally, look at YouTube and get confused, and think the editors at TIME had fallen off their rocker.

I wonder if these same folks would have an easier time if they tried to get their heads around the fact that this year, unlike years gone by, Microsoft thinks that a key to the launch of their billion dollar + product is a dozen or so guys with blogs but not many (mostly 1000 or way less) readers.

The internet connected people, blogs gave them a voice, and syndication and other 'web2.0' technologies help rank and then magnify certain of those voices. It's a massive simplification but it's also true. That would be important enough, but now that the traditional media puts their huge magnifying glass in front of those who first gain influence online, the power of one person and a blog is nearly unimaginable.

Microsoft probably spent less than $100K on this exercise. If they'd have chosen to spend $1M it probably would have been a wise decision.

More interesting is the question of how businesses without $500M take advantage of these changes. We're spending more and more time thinking about this as we continue to see large and increasingly urgent opportunity for our clients in the world of blogs, communities, and word of mouth.

Sidebar: The blog-nannies are calling the laptops payolla and predicting a major backlash. This will help balance things out, proving you can write a blog and be both wrong and non-influential too.

Update: Scoble thinks it's good. Microsoft sends out a very silly request to 'give the laptop away or send it back', and other opinions emerge. The circus is in town.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 7:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This list of entrepreneur songs came up in my RSS reader today, and I had to add what has long been the only song that I ever associated with this designation: Joe Jackson's Wild West. (from the out-of-print Big World CD)

"You keep pushing on when your friends keep turning back.
You keep building towns and laying railroad track
And things get crazy and you have to use that gun
And you wonder if this is the way the west is won"

Not only are the lyrics unintentionally dead-on, but the music captures both the solitude and frenzy that are part-and-parcel of making a business happen. Twenty five years ago I remember playing this song a few dozen times in a row very late on a number of nights sitting alone in my first real office, in a desktop publishing shop I opened in in 1984 in Boulder CO. It sounds just as great now.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 5:24 PM | Permalink

If you're an Omniture SiteCatalyst user, you should be familiar with ClickMap, a browser plug-in for IE or FireFox that creates visual overlays to show you which links on your website are being clicked. ClickMap makes it easy to see and understand how visitors are interacting with navigation options you provide on your web pages - and I've never seen a case where that information didn't create an urgent desire to make some obviously needed changes.

But ClickMap has some 'hidden' capabilities. With a simple phone call you can enable a visual display of Revenue, Cart activity, Conversion stats, and more. Now beyond just seeing what links users are clicking, you can see which links are making you money. And if you thought clicks were motivating, what until you see dollar signs (or the lack of them).

The reason for the phone call is that, apparently, tracking and calculating this incremental information takes up processing power and storage space and so the good folks at Omniture don't bother tracking this stuff unless you ask them.

I'm sure a huge number of accounts and users don't even use ClickMap and so I can understand why the want to avoid burning cycles on data that isn't ever going to get looked at. On the other hand, recent experience suggests that many accounts don't even know these capabilities are available and therefore miss out on something that is a very great and obvious benefit of SiteCatalyst. A little 'prefs' button with the ability to enable additional tracking options in a simple 'ClickMap Admin' dialog box sure would be nice.

One of my favorite uses for ClickMap or RevenueMap is to instigate the death of the big dumb graphic. You know, those 16:9-style images that take up half to two-thirds of the pixels on a page while 'defining an image' or 'romancing the brand' or 'setting the tone' or whatever other inane justification is put forth, proving nothing more than the person in charge used to work in either paper-catalogs or at an advertising agency.

RevenueMap tests the will of these people by putting their superstitions up against good old fashioned greed. Looking at these fabulous images showcased for what they really are - huge areas of your web page where you are making absolutely no money - barriers which force visitors into the horizontal or vertical navigation bars which they're proven to detest as their only means of escape (except of course the every-present BACK button).

Of course it's also extremely useful in less philosophical situations. A typical catalog directory with a 4 × 6 grid of product images looks very different when you suddenly see that one or two items are pulling in huge percentages of the revenue and three or four are completely bombing. Is the problem the product, the offer, the promotion, the photography, etc - who knows. But this data visualization starts those questions being asked. Is there another product that could become 'promoted' into one of these more visible slots which would take better advantage of the space? Suddenly it's becomes a priority to figure that out.

ClickMap/RevenueMap is a great tool, and even better when used in tandem with Next Page Flow (which is conveniently accessible right from the ClickMap tray) which gives you an equally visual but altogether different view based on where visitors go. Follow these paths, or use PathFinder or Fallout to learn what becomes of people who take the various paths on a page, and you can usually find some prominent links that just never lead to very good outcomes. So why leave them there?

With Revenue enabled in ClickMap, and the 'Display Conversions' option selected, we get this informative box telling us how much we made, how this use of pixels did relative to all the others on the page, and what each raw click turned out to be worth. Note that all the numbers in this example have been changed to respect confidentiality (in case you recognize that jacket).

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 8:44 PM | Permalink

Yesterday, Philip Kotler and Peter Drucker told us that marketing is finding opportunity, influencing demand, attracting response, creating value, and profitably dominating markets in the process of creating customers.

While that may be the world’s first mash-up definition, I like it. It reflects what I continue to learn – marketing is not a step or an activity, it’s a process.

It’s not a perfect definition, however, because while it captures the broad concepts well it basically ignores a whole set of fundamental marketing tasks – segmentation, targeting, positioning, the famous four P’s (product, price, place, and promotion) and the almighty branding. Plus it lacks any suggestion of what Kotler calls control (feedback, evaluation, revision and improvement).

Jeez, this isn’t a process it’s an entire little universe.

The Marketing Management Process, Adopted from Kotler on Marketing (click to enlarge)

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 11:03 AM | Permalink

One year later and I’m still pondering the meaning of Marketing. Even more surprisingly, I’ve been re-reading “Kolter on Marketing” and this time I think it’s sinking in.

I’m trying to understand Marketing because it increasingly seems a prerequisite to effectively executing online marketing. That may seem obvious, but I don't think I'm the first or only 'online marketer' to skip the pre-req's.

That and the fact that every time I hear someone use the word in a sentence, I increasingly feel like Inigo Montoya – a strange accent comes over me as I resist the temptation to say those immortal words: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Peter Drucker has provided my favorite overall definition of Marketing (he called it the process of creating customers) but the Kolter book is full of useful definitions that cover the subject from all angles which cumulatively provide a more complete picture. Here are the ones I’ve take note of:

• Marketing is demand management
  Influence the level, timing, and composition of demand in pursuit of the company’s objectives.

• Marketing is about value
  Understand, create, communicate, and deliver perceived value.

• Marketing is about opportunity
  The art of finding, developing, and profiting from opportunities.

• Marketing starts with a desire to attract a response
  Gain someone’s attention, interest, desire, purchase, referral.

• Marketing has the main responsibility for achieving profitable revenue growth for the company.
  Identify, evaluate, and select market opportunities and create strategies for achieving eminence if not dominance in target markets.

I should immediately make clear that I’ve edited and paraphrased most of these for my own reasons, so if you want the real list go buy the book.

So if the meaning of Marketing is up in that list somewhere, what does online marketing mean?

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:41 PM | Permalink

2006 has been the year of the death of the page view. The page view was a simple number that has been used to represent the amount of activity or accomplishment a person executed on a web page. But with new technology like AJAX and widgets, the number of times a person clicks, or the number of times the page reloads or refreshes has become completely irrelevant to how substantial or how successful a user session has been.

To further complicate the matter, a slightly deeper consideration of how people and ‘pages’ interact tells us that some page designs and content structures are simply more efficient at getting things done – so it might take one site four pages to ‘give’ the user what another site can give them in one page. Has a site with a three-page shopping cart accomplished more than a site with a one page shopping cart if they both get the sale?

Bryan Eisenberg first delivered the death notice with the even bolder statement that the ‘Web Page is Dead’. Steve Rubel then focused on the use of page views as the counter for advertising sales & revenue. But this week the concept hits the mainstream, because comScore Media Metrix announced that MySpace overtook Yahoo as the ‘king of the internet’ and Yahoo responded by saying that PageViews are now an irrelevant way to count. Ironically, MySpace had previously been critiqued for having a woefully inefficient design that unnecessarily inflated page-views.

Web analytics users and vendors need to take this death march very seriously. Both are far too page-view-centric and switching over to the new reality is going to take some time.

For vendors, the changing nature of a page impacts not only the centrality of page views but also the role and content of fallout reports, page overlay activity reports, and more. And more important than what’s broken from of the old is what’s missing from the new. How do we measure ‘content chunks’ which only appear when requested and get used in multiple places around the site as well is in syndicated locations? How do we see the path within a page much like we used to see the path between pages? How do components on a page influence each other and desired outcomes?

For users, beyond demanding that the vendors start both working on these solutions and talking to us about them, the most important need is for a new concept to replace the page view as the ‘center’ of activity reporting. Eric Peterson has been talking about the concept of ‘engagement’ and it sounds like the right concept. There are some nasty details to work both in the definitions and implementation, but the discussions and work should begin.

I’d personally like to see something like an engagement point system. One point for showing up, one for staying more than 3 pages, one for watching the entirety of an online video, two for revisiting a product twice in one session, two for putting anything in your cart or signing up for something (email subscription etc.), and on and on. A user defined system that then allows me to look at users and traffic sources and campaigns and page chunks by the segments user points.

It’s just one on-the-fly idea. The farther I get into web analytics the more I think it needs a ground-up re-think. Let’s use the death of the web page to revitalize both the software and the way we use it.

Update: Google's Matt Cutts weighs in on AJAX, Yahoo, and Page Views.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:39 AM | Permalink

To help generate buzz for the WOMMA Summit taking place in DC this week, the Federal Trade Commission issued an opinion suggesting that "companies engaging in word-of-mouth marketing, in which people are compensated to promote products to their peers, must disclose those relationships." (as reported in the Washington Post.)

My first question is whether it was the Post or the FTC that got the comma wrong. There is lots of WOM in which people are not compensated, and one would assume that won't be subject to disclosure rules.

TechDirt frames this part of the discussion by saying that "True word of mouth efforts don't come about as the result of any specific campaign". I disagree with that statement but it does highlight the fact that WOM is intended to encourage and facilitate discussion and compensation – either as direct monetary payments or in the form of rewards, discounts, or prizes - is an optional component.

Determining the levels of grey is going to be the fun in all of this. Paid WOM, which is basically another name for affiliate marketing, should be disclosed and I (like WOMMA) applaud the FTC for their position.

But what about refer-a-friend programs where the original customer gets a discount when they get others to sign up? Sirius Satellite Radio currently has a holiday promotion whereby a current subscriber who gives another person the ‘gift of Sirius’ is rewarded with a Howard Stern keychain – does this mean there will be 5-point legal disclaimer type on the bottom of Christmas cards this year?

NOTE: Ad Age spins the story differently pointing out that the FTC rejected a request for a full-scale 'probe' into word of mouth practices. They suggest this will lead to increased WOM activity.

PS: I've shared some more thoughts on the implications for affiliates over at ReveNews.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 7:57 AM | Permalink

We don't really ask that much of our web analytics software. Just tell us what's happening on our websites and what we should do about it. Count what people do, tally it up, create pretty little tables and graphs for us, and then offer a suggestion or two about how things could turn out better tomorrow. Is that too much to ask?

Apparently it is. For some reason to use website analytics software is to be frustrated, confused, and more than a bit unhappy your choice of web analytics software. In fact, website analytics packages are like airlines - the one you use the most is almost certainly the one you hate the most. Unless of course the memories of the one you tried before that haven’t completely faded…

There are plenty of reasons for this. Blame to go all around. So let’s start assigning some:

1. Welcome to my delusion. The web analytics vendors make claims and create impressions that would make a weight-loss marketer proud. Visit their sites, download their whitepapers, get chatted-up at the trade show booths, and you could somehow get the idea that installing any of these packages is going to nearly magically solve your online business problems.
   
   
2. Help is not a specific request. Analytics buyers and even users, in my experience, have a vague and simplistic notion of what they want, generally along the lines of the completely unrealistic requests I used to start this post. They are complicit in the way vendors market and even prioritize features because they ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ at all the right times in the demo and walk away believing that they really want/need lists of the most popular pages and the ability to see what percentage of their visitors came from Google.
   
   
3. There is no ‘Brain Surgery for Dummies’. Measuring and understanding the interaction between web pages, site visitors, marketing activities, and the economic attributes of a business is massively complex stuff. Vendors who pretend it’s going to be easy or users who expect it to be are setting themselves up for failure and disappointment.
   
   
4. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Realizing that web analytics isn’t going to be fast or easy allows us to begin accepting that it’s going to be slow and hard. We can consider the phases that a real-world adoption will require and stop to ponder a conceptual framework for what it is we’re really trying to accomplish, while at the same time enjoying the new and broader perspective that our analytics software is just one tool we’ll use along the way. In other words, knowing that this is a tough process which is going to require significant time and energy, we’d be wise to figure out what we really want and exactly how we’re going to get it.
   
   
5. Geez, this is a crappy hammer. Analytics software starts with data and tries to produce information. They pride themselves on the reports they can give you and the formatting and delivery methods and triggers. Marketers need actionable insights and/or understanding and these are rarely provided by reports no matter how well formatted. I believe this is what’s underneath all the dissatisfaction with web analytics software – they’re starting with this relatively modest pile of clickstream data and trying to stretch it and shape it as many ways as they can and we’re thinking about the complexities of software and business systems as well as human behavior and asking questions which they can’t begin to answer.

So to summarize: vendors lie about what they can do, users really don’t know what they want, this is much more complicated than most of us can imagine or are willing to admit, it’s going to be a long hard process to really get anything useful, and no matter how you look at it the current crop of analytics software really kind-of sucks.

/// Lots of thoughts to expand on here, and I hope to in the comments or over the coming days. And yes it's a little tongue-in-cheek vendors, we don't really hate you. But we sure could love you more. :-)

{This post inspired by Robin's report from SES about retailers and their thoughts on analytics software}

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:00 AM | Permalink

Five years or so into the 'Blogolution' and the vast majority of marketers still ignore this amazing opportunity. Like many aspects of online marketing blogging is a simple but completely foreign concept that is easy to do badly but with a relatively small amount of effort and insight can pay amazing dividends.

I was reminded of this point tonight by this Forbes column by BoingBoing author Cory Doctorow who describes the great ROI he's seen on giving away his books. The point he makes is that by giving away his books he engaged tens of thousands of people who would have otherwise never heard of them, resulting in a net increase in sales. Undoubtedly there are other beneficial indirect effects - such as on his personal fame which leads to opportunities, etc.

Hugh MacLeod, now appearing in 3 blog posts straight, takes this and churns out another of his fabulous insights into blogging:

"Blogs are a great way of making things happen indirectly"

Two of his previous insights, which I'm paraphrasing out of laziness, are:

"The most interesting conversation wins"

"Blogging breaks down the layer that separates the conversation inside a company and the conversation happening outside in a market"

We spend a lot of time suggesting blogs as an important component in any online marketing arsonal, but frankly have yet to create that magic powerpoint presentation that can convert a non-believer in any reasonable amount of time. We need to, and no doubt these points will anchor our message.

It strikes me that the very bottom line is this: Does your company have anything to say? Is there a market, a product, a company that has so few thoughts, so little news, such an absence of perspective that press releases, brochures, a bi-annual website revision, and the CEO's quarterly powerpoints really captures it all?

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:14 PM | Permalink

The list linked to in the last post, (and Hugh's entire manifesto series) has encouraged me to offer up something which I was coincidentally reading last night. It's take from a 1978 RollingStone interview with Bob Dylan.

In it Jonathan Cott says to Dylan:

I wanted to read you two Hasidic texts that somehow remind me of your work. The first says that in the service of God, one can learn three things from a child and seven from a thief. "From a child you can learn:

1. Always to be happy
2. Never sit idle
3. Cry for everything one wants

From a thief you should learn:

1. To work at night
2. If one cannot gain what one wants in one night to try again the next night
3. To love one's coworkers just as thieves love each other
4. To be willing to risk one's life even for a little thing
5. Not to attach too much value to things even though one has risked one's life for them - just as a thief will resell a stolen article for a fraction of it's real value
6. To withstand all kinds of beatings and tortures but to remain what you are
7. To believe that your work is worthwhile and not be willing to change it

Cott then reads the second one:

Another Hasidic rabbi once said that you can learn something from everything. Even from a train, a telephone, and a telegram. From a train, he said, you can learn that in one second one can miss everything. From a telephone you can learn that what you say over hear can be heard over there. And from a telegram that all words are counted and charged.

So until I write one myself, this plagiarism will have to stand as my contribution to the other thought-provoking pieces in Hugh's series.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:26 PM | Permalink

When Hugh Macleod and Seth Godin team up it's bound to be great. This cartoon and manifesto don't disappoint.

(note this part of a series of 'manifestos' Hugh is currently featuring.)

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 11:09 AM | Permalink