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 ...

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 #3: Jeff Bell, NCT Ventures

Seattle’s Jeff Bell is investment partner at NCT Ventures, and talks with digitalCMO about his recent investment and exit from ClearSaleing, working in a remote office, his time at Microsoft and Chrysler, digital marketing, and other fun stuff.  This is part three of five in digitalCMO's Seattle interview series. digitalCMO: You are on the investment team at NCT Ventures, a VC firm. You are based in Seattle, and NCT is based in Columbus, Ohio. NCT is not well known in Seattle, can you tel...

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 ...

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...

Beware the Wounded Dog

Happy New Year. It’s harder than I expected to come back to a neglected blog.  I haven’t posted since May of last year, when I wrote on conversion attribution. The longer I wait, the harder it gets – I think I was waiting for that great flash of an idea for a luminary post that would justify the 6 month wait. Well, this ain’t it.  But here it goes. Beware the Wounded Dog This has been on my mind for a while:  how to recognize – and avoid – the Wounded Dog at work.  As unpleasant as t...

LVIMA Presentation 5/27

Thanks LVIMA and Shawn Rorick for the wonderful event. (*note: I just revised the .ppt to account for lack of animation on SlideShare.) Here is a copy of the presentation. Feel free to link to it (although the animation online doesn't work.) If you would like a copy of the original file,  please leave me a comment with your name, email, and company in the comments section of this post. Comments always appreciated. h