» 2008 » November

This morning TechCrunch posted an article of some talks of Facebook acquiring Twitter.  The rumor on the street is that that Facebook was offering $500 mil of their already overvalued stock.

TechCrunch reports: “Facebook has raised $516 million in funding to date, while Twitter is backed by $20 million in investment. Twitter boasts 6 million active users, while Facebook reports more than 120 million.”

I’m on the fence as to whether this would be good for the tech community.   I like the idea of the expanding Twitter’s existing reach and making it a lot more powerful than it is.  I also like the idea of it becoming a more stable platform with the right team behind it.  My main concern is that Zuckerberg will try to integrate it in with Facebook too much and cause it’s unforeseen death.

Either way, Twitter, of which I’m a big fan, does need to start thinking about its future and quick burn rate.

What are your thoughts on Facebook acquiring Twitter?

TechCrunch featured a company called InLinks.com yesterday and referred to it as “hard to detect”, as in the world of blackhat SEO.  I’m not so sure about that one.  Let’s face it, the folks at Google are pretty smart.  It took me a few minutes and I quickly discovered some of the publishers by performing a few simple Google searches.  Here are just a few of the publishers I discovered: The Hunters Mark, Krimson News, TheRandToday.com,  Stephan Miller and Peer1.  Michael Arrington, are you telling us Google can’t do this?

I think that building a business model based on what is considered a violation of Google’s terms wasn’t the smartest idea by New York-based advertising firm MediaWhiz.  Matt Cutts, Google’s SEO guru, specifically states on his blog, “Google has been very clear that selling such links that pass PageRank is a violation of our quality guidelines.”

There’s a lot of talk about this in the new media industry.  Olgivy commented that appearing on TechCrunch is normally a good thing – but not this time.

My advice, stay away!  Don’t touch this one with a ten foot pole whether your an advertiser or a publisher!

UPDATE:  The Hunters Mark posted a comment below today in regards to this post.  InLinks.com had an excerpt from their blog which when searched on Google was the only result which lead me to believe that either InLinks.com is using thier blog as an example or the Hunters Mark actually did act as a publisher on their behalf.  Either way, our agency tries to encourage best seo practices and found Inlinks.com business model unethical on many levels.  If the Hunters Mark was never a part of it, I apologize for the inacuracy, however, I can assure you that we did research this thoroughly.

Last night, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins, from Mashable wrote the blog entry, “Just What is Social Media, Exactly?”  As an owner of an interactive agency, this is a topic that’s of great interest to me and I am always interested to learn other points of view on social media.

Marks start’s out by referencing Brian Eisenberg’s post from FutureNow:

“The biggest problem I have with the term “social media” is that it isn’t media in the traditional sense. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all the others I don’t have the word count to mention aren’t media; they are platforms for interaction and networking. All the traditional media — print, broadcast, search, and so on — provide platforms for delivery of ads near and around relevant content. Social media are platforms for interaction and relationships, not content and ads”

I think that Brian is trying to deconstruct the meaning of the word “media” too much and should be focusing on the broader picture.  To that extent, I do agree that social media is a platform and the term “social media” applies, as does the term “new media”.  I don’t think there is much confusion between new media and the traditional sense of media either.  Why can’t social media simply be defined as the interaction and relationships formed on new medias?  We’ve just barely seen the tip of the iceberg.  Social media is about to entrench us in every type of way we know, including mobile and eventually TV. (more…)

Embracing the green space in today’s eco-friendly world has proven to be an overwhelming success for my client and friend, Shawn Burst of Jeriko House.  Every bit of this story is like a marketing fairy tale.  Hug a tree, test the waters and find yourself in a forest of greenies lining up at your door for what could be the next, most revolutionary home to hit the housing market.

It all begins in the wake of hurricane Katrina when Shawn had just lost his family’s dream home.  Determined to build a new home and not willing to wait years, he set out on a mission to find a new high-end housing alternative overseas.  After visiting engineering firms in Germany and exotic finishing manufacturers in Bali, Shawn came home with the most incredible vision which he named Jeriko House.  He called BOALT to design and develop a new alternative home brand literally from scratch.

After investing a significant budget in developing his website, he left faith and one press release to do the rest.  It was only a matter of days before the website started to received hundreds of visitors a day from blogs such as InHabitat, TreeHugger, JetsonGreen, Luxist and Architect Magazine to name a few.  Some reviews better than others but you know what they say, all press is good press.
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I have so many prospects that spend so much money on search marketing but haven’t taken the time to consider that good design and content will get them more actions.  We measure return on investment (ROI) based on conversions or how frequently a visitor reaches a goal on your website.  Generally that goal is to get the visitor to a thank you page for filling out a lead or an order form.

The first step to increasing your ROI is to define your goals.  It could be multiple goals.  For example, the BOALT website has two goals: a contact inquiry and request for proposal form.  If you don’t have goals on your website – that’s a problem. You might want to consider adding a form or two.

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There seems to be an ongoing debate within our agency on how much time should be spent on information architecture.  In retrospect, I think the main reason we previously focused so much time on information architecture was because we needed a client sign off and found it more efficient to make changes in this stage.  But what happens when we’re working on one of our own start ups?  How should we approach information architecture?

The below snippet is from a 30 page set of wireframes that we provided to Aspen Snowmass when we designed and developed their booking engine user interface.  Information architecture was a must for this project because making changes in the development phase would have been extremely inefficient.

37Signals in their Getting Real book, swears by building out the interface first.  “Too many apps start with a program-first mentality. That’s a bad idea. Programming is the heaviest component of building an app, meaning it’s the most expensive and hardest to change. Instead, start by designing first.” (more…)