digitalCMO.com

If All Marketers Were Geniuses, Digital Marketing Would Be Easier…

Josh Shatkin-Margolis, CEO of Magnetic, recently interviewed me for an iMedia series called All Marketers Are Geniuses.  (Perhaps he was looking to disprove that hypothesis.... ) Thanks Josh for the fun interview. I've posted it below, and it's also here. The area that has been most on my mind is reflected below in response to the question "how is online marketing falling short?"  It's pretty clear that we, as an industry, have gotten so stuck on getting more, faster, and better data that we ...

An RSVP to Google’s +1 party

Thanks to Covario's stellar PR and marketing team, Search Engine Land quoted part of the below here today. Below is my full-yet-brief take on Google's recent "+1" launch and impact to marketers. Net/net: marketers need not stress...the party has not started yet. But it could be rockin' when it does. Paid Search advertisers most likely  will see little or no impact from the “+1” in the short term, although the long term potential for “+1” as  an important lever could be very signific...

Will Affiliate Marketing Disappear?

Disclaimer:  I have not thought a ton about affiliate marketing in years, since we launched the practice at eonMedia in 2003 and wound it down to focus on paid search only by 2004. Recently, I was engaged in a conversation about the future of affiliate marketing. I then did a bit of digging. I could be missing something, but I can't see affiliate marketing, in its present state at least, becoming a growth industry. In fact, I can see how it might cease to exist completely, at least in its...

Google’s Hedge?

As reported in BrandRepublic on 2/3, Google  will put more muscle around a fee-based enterprise level cloud-based web analytics solution. As many of you know, Google currently attracts a lot of smaller advertisers with it's free Google Analytics and has also continued to support the legacy Urchin advertiser-hosted software distributed through resellers. It's clear that with this decision, Google will address the top end of the market, currently dominated by Omniture/Adobe and CoreMetrics/IBM at...

Seattle Interview #2: Rand Fishkin, CEO SEOmoz

This is the second in a series of interviews with Seattle-area digital leaders. Last one was Chris Devore. Rand founded SEOmoz in 2004 in Seattle, where he still leads the company. Only on digitalCMO can you discover: How Rand thinks about  transparency, leadership, and hiring Annual revenues and margins of SEOmoz.org (a privately-held co.) Mean things and hard stuff How crappy is www.digitalCMO.com from an organic search perspective and what can I do about it? The interview belo...

Seattle Interview #1: Chris DeVore/ Founders Co-op

Chris DeVore co-founded Judy's Book and currently operates Founders Co-op, a early-stage venture fund and community of entrepreneurs in the Seattle area, focused on web-based and software services. Chris graciously agreed to share his thoughts on start-ups, capital, and innovation: digitalCMO: What inspired you to start Founders Co-op? Chris: In late 2007 my business partner (Andy Sack) and I sold our previous company, a venture-backed local search business called Judy's Book.  We knew ...

Two Wacky Lists for Managers and Analysts

First List (for Managers):  25 Oddball Interview Questions, from GlassDoor.  1. “If you were shrunk to the size of a pencil and put in a blender, how would you get out?” Asked at Goldman Sachs. 2. “How many ridges [are there] around a quarter?” Asked at Deloitte. 3. “What is the philosophy of Martial Arts?” Asked at Aflac. 4. “Explain [to] me what has happened in this country during the last 10 years.” Asked at Boston Consulting. 5. “Rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 how we...

Here, You can Have your Website and Marketing Back

Yesterday, PaidContent broke the news of GSI's acquisition of ClearSaleing. The former is a ~ten year old company that started out building storefronts and providing fulfillment for sports retailers, then evolved into somewhat of a performance-based media agency. The latter is a new venture-backed dashboard for engagement mapping. Writ large, it's a good example of the movement away from media buying/management (a low growth opportunity) to the provision of holistic actionable insights, where...

Rollerbabes, or The Diminishing Marginal Utility of Social Connections

Mashable reported on SecondMarket's users' picks for the top ten private companies (list below). SecondMarket allows investors to buy and sell shares of privately held companies. Interesting analysis:  take 2 of the 10 out of the list - SecondMarket itself (no surprise); and Bloom (an energy company) - and you get 8 businesses built on connecting with others - via collaborative filtering or through direct connections - over: music (Pandora), games (Zynga), classifieds (Craigslist), local rati...

Four Digital Marketing Predictions for 2011

Not quite relevant to digital marketing, but we are expecting our third boy in February. What is related to digital marketing is that I crammed in a bunch of late November/ December meetings with agencies, advertisers, and media specialty companies before going under house arrest.  Having visited six cities in five weeks, I spoke with folks across the digital marketing world who, already having made decisions around the holiday season, were focused on 2011 execution. I did not hear any surprises...