Kate Morris

Vanessa Fox just published a live blog from MSN’s event yesterday announcing their changes to MSN (aka LIVE search). They recognize that their relevance sucks and they aren’t talking to webmasters. So … they’re fixing it.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens.

I’m all about it. I can’t wait to get one of my websites on this to try it out. Go ASK Go!

Microsoft is after everyone really. They had it good for so long, and have so much money as a result, what else can they do?

Search Engine Land notes that with the acquisition of aQuantitive, Microsoft is attacking Google at all sorts of legal levels. Okay, I am not a master at business law. Acquisitions are marginally interesting to me. But what really gets me is what is Microsoft main goal?

Squash Google like they did Apple and Netscape?

I don’t think they can, and it’s on a really simple level of my thoughts as to why they can’t/won’t succeed. It’s going to take something/someone fresh and new to out do the masters of search. Why? They have (even though we hate admitting it) webmasters in their back pocket. They talk to us more. They answer questions, and solicit out opinions.

Google is stronger in its base which are webmasters. No other engine has matched that. We all want to feel needed and useful. And we are the consumers. Want to do well in the search world? Start by converting the master’s of search.

MSN - in reality the algorithm is not all that great. The paid search is getting better, but no where at the level of YSM or AdWords. First fix the product, then talk to us. That’s the only way you are going to make it.

This is becoming my thing. My theory that Facebook is so popular because it has yet to be banned at companies. Apparently, and not surprisingly, I’m not the only one thinking this.

There is a live debate going on at TinyScreenfuls and John Bancroft’s posting of Should Intel Ban Facebook? Most of the responses have been to ban it. That surprises me considering where I found the link. Jeremiah Owyang is against it, saying “If they do ban Facebook, they might as well ban the rest of the web, but intel.com.”

Hate to break it to you Jeremiah, but there are lots of companies that don’t want their employees burning time adding new applications and talking to friends. Why do you think MySpace was banned? Yeah, security and all. But really it’s a productivity thing.

This is going to get more interesting as time passes.

I am sure I will talk about this issue a lot. So this is just number one. I didn’t get to attend SES San Jose, and I still regret it. But one of the things brought up there was the paid link debate. Since then a number of SEMs have gotten in on the debate, and the consensus from what I’ve seen is that seasoned SEMs don’t care for Google’s stance.

Matt Cutts has said that Google will not count link love from a paid source. You won’t be banned, but that money will have gone to nothing when it comes to your Google rank. Okay. I get this. Google is trying to keep money out of relevance as much as possible. Score one for the underdog white hats that don’t have the arsenal of money behind them.

What every posting I have seen says is that Google can’t catch everyone. But here is what every post has missed so far: Google is aware that they can’t catch everyone. It’s impossible. It’s like trying to catch every kid that steals a piece of candy.

The other point has been that you shouldn’t just think about Google in your SEM efforts. While that is true to a point (I tell my company that they need to focus on the end user religiously), Google still holds the market. You have to give them more consideration until someone else takes over that top spot.

And then I go back to what Matt says (I am not saying verbatim, but I did hear him say something like it) “Don’t build your site for us, build it for your end user. You have the right to ignore our guidelines, there are no laws online. But we have the right to take you out of our index as well.”

Will I do paid linking? Not really. I don’t see true value. My company happens to have a fantastic base of affiliates to link build with. Content rich related sites that we can get to link to us. Does everyone else have this? No. Should they do paid linking? Maybe. It’s your choice. But Google makes known what they like and don’t like. You are free to go against it, but it’s your choice.

You take the risk. With risk comes with great reward sometimes, but also great loss.

They say that marketers are the devil. All we want is your information so that we can sell you more stuff. We bog down computers with pop-ups and spyware (at least that’s what people think I do when I say “Internet Marketing”).

Then why is it that it was a pair of internet marketers (Danny Sullivan and Lisa Barone) are the ones to notice that Facebook was posting details about people after they opted out because their friends didn’t opt out?

Yes, the horrible people are actually the saviors. Facebook is working on the issue right now. We are human beings too and don’t want certain things out in the world just as much as the next person. We just have contacts — let me rephrase — Danny and Lisa have contacts to fix problems.

People are still saying Facebook is the next big, really big thing. I still hold to my theory that it will head the direction of MySpace. The program is being bogged down with external programs and add ons. Apps that constantly ask to know what you are doing all the time. Soon enough it will be just as time consuming as MySpace and companies will ban the access because of productivity loss.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Facebook, but the original was better.

I was reading a Seth Godin blog entry today about his new book, Meatball Sundae. This entry was about organizations new obsession with Web 2.0 and Social Media Marketing. One thing he said hit home:

They [company's efforts] fail because the Web and the New Marketing work only when applied to the right organization. New Media makes a promise to the consumer. If the organization is unable to keep that promise, then it fails.

I see that a lot in organizations today. They think that all they have to do is market in the right way and the sales will come. Guess what? Web 2.0 and SMM are all about the end user taking back the power. You will soon no longer be able to have all the money in the world and a bad product, and expect to do well.

As a speaker I once heard said, we have circled back to the origins of communication. We started as people just telling stories to each other, making recommendations. Then marketing came into play and people lost that power, it was the media that told us everything. Now we are back to informing each other by stories. The power is back in the hands of consumers, and they will not buy if you don’t appease them with a good product.

I need to rant about the features of Yahoo versus Google. Who has what and what they need to share.

First off, I am setting up Yahoo with all of my company’s accounts. We spend lots with Google every month and are wanting to do the same (maybe not AS much) with Yahoo. So I start with my first question, how do I get all of these keywords and data from Google to Yahoo? When I first started in search marketing, it was all by hand. And if you were a BIG Yahoo client, they let you load a spreadsheet. Man, that was a good day for the agency I was working for at the time.

Alas, things have gotten easier … sort of. Using Google AdWords Editor, you can export your campaigns from Google (Good Job Google!). But you can’t just throw that into Yahoo. They use different inputs. So I started looking into redoing the info to be Yahoo! friendly. And guess what?? They have a converter! I was excited! I would have this seemingly 40 hour project done in an hour. I downloaded all my campaigns and loaded those into the converter.

It “converted successfully” and said to load the new sheets into the import engine. I did so … and got an error. The header in the sheet they gave me was wrong.

Wait … didn’t Yahoo give me that sheet? Weren’t they supposed to convert it for me? I looked at the sheet they gave me, and the template they provide on the import engine. Sure enough, the headers are different. Annoying Yahoo Thing #1

I figured out what to do to get it to import a few hours later and have been working on it since then. But this is what irritates me, why can’t this be easier? You two use the same ad size, etc. But really, why make it this hard to do this? I won’t mention what else I saw in the “converted” sheet I got from Yahoo! but the ads weren’t right.

So then I got to thinking about something else. Yahoo has this nice converter, and Google might, but I don’t know about it right now. I recently asked my Google AdWords team (they are GREAT) about Manager Defined Spend and getting restricted logins. They set me up with BETAs. They listened and gave me what I wanted with the logins, but it was stuff I had already seen in Yahoo. There are things that Yahoo does better.

Logging into accounts into Google vs Yahoo. In Google I can assign people to accounts, and they only need one login. Right now in Google, if I want to give someone reports access on 2 accounts, they need 2 different logins. Hmmm … Annoying Google Thing #1

But something Google does better is payment. Yahoo only allows CC and PayPal. Well I love invoicing. My Accounting department loves invoicing. Less CC bills. But that’s not an option in Yahoo right now. Annoying Yahoo Thing #2

So I guess the point is that I have been doing this for a while. And it has gotten easier, but it could be so much easier if the industry leaders would set some standards. Share you two and help us all. And if you can’t share … steal. You use each other’s systems. Steal away, you already do.