Bring out your dead. Bring out your... Wait. Friendster's not dead.
Kinda makes you wonder...
Facebook's traffic never comes out right b/c its been mostly inaccessable to anyone w/o a .edu address... but as for Hi5 and Friendster, they certainly seem to be gaining in traffic.
So what are we supposed to make of these sites? How valuable is 3rd place? You have to imagine someone like AOL or IAC making a run at one of these. I think, more then anything else, they need an identity. People are clear what MySpace is like and who Facebook is intended for (well, they were until a few days ago anyway...) but everytime I mention Hi5, Tagworld, or Friendster to someone, they immediately say, "Who's on there??" Well, a lot of people, actually.
I do think there's an opportunity to create a "quieter" version of MySpace. That was Friendster at one point, and perhaps they've solved the performance issues that drove so many people away in the first place.
Marks of a great coach? Great CEO?
Jeremy Shockey said the Giants were outcoached yesterday.
And frankly, I can't say Tom Coughlin has ever really impressed me.
But then again, this Giant team, save for Tiki, hasn't really impressed me. So, how do you know when it is the players and how do you know when it is the coach? Certainly Bill Parcells seemed like a great coach and he's won to prove it... but what about someone like Willie Randolph? Second best team in the bigs... so-so starting staff, and yet somehow, I really don't think Willie is such a great coach. He's made a lot of questionable moves.
There are always going to be standout CEOs--obvious people that everyone points to... Gates, Jobs, Jack Welch... but are there examples of great CEOs at mediocre companies? How long does it take to go from good to great or turn something around? Can a mediocre CEO take a great product to success? I mean, seriously... I could do Joe Torre's job, I think. With that payroll and lineup... I'd just say, "Hey guys, Jared Wright is pitching tonight, so do me a favor and score 9 runs." I mean, he doesn't even need a bench... never needs to double switch or pinch hit for the pitcher. How hard could it be?
How do you seperate what a single person has done for a team, a company... hell... even a whole country? Does Bush suck or are we all collectively sucking? Or maybe just all the politicians? As bad as you might say our president is, you gotta admit that there are probably others who deserve blame as well... people on both sides of the Pantone wheel.
Black Dahlia
Scarlett Johansson will be the best actress of this generation. There, I said it. Black Dahlia is a cool movie with great style that perhaps gets a little bizzare at times, but she does another fantastic job. I think I need to find a way to get her an avatar for some kind of promotion.
The story is based on a real life unsolved murder, and the writers come up with a highly implausible scenario for the truth that, in the movie, kinda comes out of nowhere and got a few unintended laughs. Still, the acting is really good and I was also pleasently surprised by Josh Hartnett, who I still sort of think of as the guy from The Faculty. This was also the first time I thought that Hilary Swank came anywhere close to being attractive. Its that mouth... I dunno...
Anyway... cool, but only a must see because of Miss Scarlett.
New Year Oddcast Style
The senior members of our team here at Oddcast are Israeli, so today, we got a little culture for the office related to the Jewish New Year...
links for 2006-09-22
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Check out our wifi section
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24% of Gen Yers read blogs, which is twice as often as the 12% of Gen Xers (ages 27-40) and three times the 7% of Young Boomers (ages 41-50) that read blogs. So skeptics of blogs should suspend their disbelief
Feeding the Monster
This is exactly how I felt about Salesforce:
"Feeding the Monster": Like many knowledge management initiatives, CRM requires end-users to take actions that are not part of their natural work process in order to "update" the system. After all, CRM output is only as good as the input -- "garbage in, garbage out." Most end-users in small businesses, whether a partner in a law firm or an account manager at a consulting shop, interact with customers in their email system (usually Outlook). The act of opening the browser, putting in your password, navigating to the proper account, and filling in a form, fundamentally wastes that user’s time. The only way to motivate most users to "feed the monster" is by forcing them to update the system prior to the weekly meeting. Many sales organizations make updating the CRM system a requirement for getting paid. In fact, we added a paragraph in Groove Networks' sales compensation plan requiring the updating of our customer systems (feeding the monster) as a requirement for getting paid. […CRM needs to learn a lesson from Del.icio.us and the rest of the web2.0 crowd where the application provides real value to the user and incidental value to the network/community.]
Brian hits it right on the head... so much so that I just signed up for the Beta for Hubspot.
Tags: small business, crm, salesforce
And you thought monkeys were fun...
"There's a guy on our team who dresses like a pirate?"
Check out Dead Man's Mail... a workshop we just built to help promote Pirate's of the Carribean's upcoming DVD.
If you send me a Dead Man's Mail, I'll link to it in upcoming blog posts. Extra points will be awarded for creativity. :)
I love these workshops... they're so addictive. I think we need a Mr. Met workship, no? How about Christopher Walken? (I don't even know what product he would pitch, but I'm not sure it matters.)
Tags: marketing, viral marketing, pirates, movies
And I'll add one more Typepad feature request to that...
Fred is right on with his Typepad comment request. When I hit "Reply All" to Typepad's notification e-mails, I'd like that to autopost to my blog in addition to going to the sender. Typepad's comments should Reply to both them and to the commenter. So many times, I e-mail the sender back, then cut and paste that e-mail right back into my comments. Its annoying.
Plus, I don't need a comment notification for this for when I post back through the mail.
Also, when I get a spam comment notification, I should be able to hit Reply All and just write "junk". I hate logging into Typepad to clean up my spam comments... especially when I'm on the subway and offline.
links for 2006-09-20
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Check out the embedded links in my post... they can make my avatar speak. :)
Custom and Creative versus Canned and Scaleable
AdSense is easy. It takes minutes to create a text link and then you can blow out as much advertising as your bank account can take. That's scaleable.
Banners are a little harder. Someone has to draw it. It might take an hour or two, but once its done, you can repurpose.
When you do something a little more creative, it's harder. Things you can only use once don't scale as well, but they can be a lot more entertaining. Plus, its much more appealing to the consumer.
Rich media is a great example. When TV commercials get reporposed for internet video, its mindlessly easy to setup. However, the level of ease is only matched by the level of hatred people have for TV commercials following them onto the web. Easy to setup, easy to fail, to alienate... easy to never click a video again. When I hear the talk about YouTube monetization, I'm hoping we'll see some really creative advertising appear within this unique community, but I also recognize that it might be difficult to make happen.
Or, on the other hand, aren't brands looking for unique? Don't they want different? Certainly the agencies should be pushing this, no? For them to come up with unique applications for all of these web communities, it would be more revenue and more work... but hopefully better results as well.
So how do you create a tradeoff? Are creative campaigns destined to become more niche and more specialized, making them more appealing, but also less profitable and more people-heavy. Are there even enough talented creative types around to think of these creative brand interactions? How does creative and unique scale?
Salesforce... Maybe its me?
I've been meaning to write this for a while.
When I joined, I was really excited to get a chance to use Salesforce for the first time. I had held up Salesforce as a great example of the death of enterprise software and why apps were best delivered over the web.
Now, after having access to it for two months, I have to say, its pretty underwhelming... or maybe I just don't get it.
It seems to me that a great organizational help should help you establish a routine... should provide shortcuts for you and help bring order to chaos... in a lightweight "companion" sort of way. It should slip seemlessly into my lack of routine and help maximize my productivity.
So, when I started using Salesforce and its Outlook plugin, I was surprised at how much database setup needed to be done on simple little items.
For example, I started talking to someone from a new company that Oddcast had never spoken to. I wanted to add that quickly to Salesforce, but you can't add a new contact company on the fly. You have to set it up in the system first. That was sort of a pain. Plus, there's nothing automatic about its e-mail intelligence. Its like an empty database. You have to tell it the meaning of an e-mail and who it belongs with... there aren't algorythms to detect when someone e-mailed me and I didn't e-mail them back. LinkedIn does that with its new Outlook dashboard.
I'd love to see a little floating hotlist of recent contacts, and people I'd like to elevate to a "watchlist". E-mails from watchlist people would get automatically sucked into the database and reminders would pop up if I haven't returned their e-mails. I don't need this whole backend monster... I just need a little ping to remind me to follow up with someone I talked about something with last week. Salesforce, in spite of its webification, still seems very heavy to me and very difficult to use for people who aren't good about the routine of updating contacts, etc. I want "automatic for the people."
The End of the Beginning: The Mets Clinch the NL East
Wow... was that Steve Trachsel on the mound last night? Where ya been all season? (Aside from the 14 other wins...)
And how great a pickup was Jose Valentin? To think that Kaz Matsui was going to be the secondbaseman this year. Ugh.
Once he left with a lead, you knew it was over. I got to watch the game at Blondies on 79th with my softball team over unlimited wings.
Many wings were eaten. Many pitches were cheered on. Much high fiving occurred at the end. Bring on the Playoffs!
And we'll do it again...
Thank God that none of the playoff teams have two good lefties, because its obvious the Mets just can't hit the southpaws. Oh well, hopefully they'll do it tonight against the Fish, and Trachsel will get win number 15 by giving up 5 runs in 5 innings and letting the pen take care of the rest.
No, not my cookies!!
The other day, one of the IT folks here was helping me with a browser issue and accidently deleted my cookies instead of my cache.
I was really upset about it, actually. I started thinking about all the things I'd have to sign into again... how this would affect MyBlogLog, which I'm really getting hooked on, and whether or not all my behavioral ads would become irrelevent.
How things have changed!
So, now I'm getting really weird behavior that I think is tied to my Google Browser sync. I think it keeps syncing the fact that I don't have any cookies over and over again, so I feel like I'm always signing into things twice or three times.
Wish I had those cookies back.