Posted on: December 4, 2008 by Syzlak
This morning I was greeted with a treat from my good friend Hilker. The gist of the morning surprise was that WOWOW is giving you the power to direct a video of Radiohead’s song 15 Step through a dedicated page. You can choose from 12 different angles to edit your video of 15 Step, played live during last band’s Japanese tour.
Holy shit right?
Wrong. After you’re done editing your video, you can register with the site and then they give you a badge to embed whereever you please.
Wait…Holy shit right?
Wrong. The badge simply takes you to here, where you can see Teen Beat style photos of the band and look at Japanese characters while wondering where things went wrong.
This is a massive blunder from two entities that rarely make massive blunders when concerning technology. Radiohead has been at the forefront of music distribution and Internet/Web savvy for a long time. Japan has given us the USB necktie. Clearly, these two should have pulled off something better than this.
While it irritates me that I cannot share my directorial debut, and it pains me that yet again someone drops the ball on using the Web to spread both culture, technology, ideas and joy; I must say, go make your own video, because it’s still really fun. 
Just be sure to call everyone over to your desk when you’re done.
Posted on: October 22, 2008 by Syzlak
Yesterday, Rand posted a rather short-sighted view on the discrepencies in SEO and PPC budgets. While, I understand his fundamental argument for increased SEO budgets, the post drew ire from myself and fellow PPC advocates. Through quick smattering of evidence, Rand showed that PPC is on the decline, everyone looks at organic listings all the time, and no one clicks on ads (paraphrasing here folks). So, aside from a simple disagreement on the purpose of PPC and the effectiveness of SEO, what am I so mad about?
To some of you this may be familiar:
This eye research has been shown countless times to illustrate the Golden Triangle of search – the red area in the top left of a SERP where users are most active, violently clicking away to their hearts’ desire on the first thing they see. Since you’re probably familiar with this research, you probably know that I used it in a post from December of 2007 about Google’s encroachment on this Golden Triangle. Shit, I’m not even the first to use it! In fact, if anybody clicked through on the link Rand gave for the pic, you would see that Inspired Impressions used it back in April of 2006 (over 2 years ago). 2 years in “search time” is an eternity. For reference, if you were to have a kid in 2000 and he were to grow up in “search time,” he’d be Robin Williams from Jack.
Here’s how SERPs look more often than not today…well at least as of December 2007 (I’ll admit when I took the screenshot)
See how our buddies at Google are putting ads into that Golden Triangle? Do you suppose that users might be clicking on those a bit more often than they did 2+ years ago? More importantly, did you see what the top listing was in the pic that Rand gave us?
Look’s like that’s a Sponsored Link, and it’s getting quite a few clicks too…
Wouldn’t it be great if current data was used to make claims of suspect? While I think that some of what Rand is arguing is prudent (SEO could use a bit more money and focus for many companies), I do not agree with either his methods or his implied conclusion (we didn’t get a conclusion out of Rand, so I don’t want to put words in his mouth).
The fact of the matter is, PPC can drive instant gratification (traffic), qualified visitors (through ad copy and keyword targets), motivated visitors (drop ‘em on a landing page…they’ve seen everything – they’ve seen it all), and it can do all of this for as many or as few pages as desired on as much or as little a budget available.
Market size is also a determining factor of PPC/SEO budget. When I worked in local search for a few years when it was first blossoming, I would never have suggested to the 100 plumbers in Atlanta that they could spend their budget on trying to beat each other, as well as the national giants, on organic listings. For some industries, it’s pretty easy to compete in the less competitive field of PPC with focused keywords than to try to tackle 8,000 competitors in organic. So, why not allocate $100 towards a PPC budget that will pay off, and do so quickly, as opposed to spending thousands on SEO – especially when thousands aren’t available?
I hate to call out my pal David Mihm, but I also had a problem with his comment:
Well, honestly, it all stems from Kate’s comment, but I was more irked by this one. Not to be a downer, but sometimes in a “down economy” (I call it a depression, but ok ), some companies may have to go with the cheap & quick solution just to stay alive. A lot of times, that’s the small businesses. Small businesses need to be present, build their brands and get visitors “in the door” just to make it to the next step-especially in a “down economy.”
I know Mihm, I know his work, he’s damn good and any small business would be wise to pay for his SEO services. Hell, businesses of any size would be wise to spend money on SEO; but for a lot of them, it’s just not in the cards right now. Not everything comes down to SEO having a bad reputation, being misunderstood & misrepresented, complex or the rest of the excuses a lot of us use; sometimes, SEO is just not what a business needs when we’re trying to sell it.
Posted on: September 22, 2008 by Syzlak
These are the words of Barry Sonnenfeld (the man who brought you Wild Wild West and Space Chimps). Uttered last night during his acceptance speech at the Emmy Awards, these words stood out amidst the political discourse that other winners chose to litter their acceptance speeches. What did Sonnenfeld mean when he said these 6 words? Here were my knee jerk reactions:
Barry Sonnenfeld is against free speech
Perhaps, as a respected member of mainstream Hollywood, Sonnenfeld could be fundamentally against the tennets of the First Amendment. Anyone who would caution “fear the Internet,” must be in some way against freedom of speech; afterall, the Internet (Web technically) is simply a soundboard for anyone’s opinions, stories, trivia, or creativity.
Barry Sonnenfeld wants a controlled market
Where there is no Internet, TV would retain its former stranglehold on entertainment. Seriously, before the rise of the Web, who remembers what we used to do every night from 8-11pm? Personally, I would be watching TV for hours. Mindlessly sitting in front of a glowing box, digesting what advertisements and agenda was thrown in front of me. Today, I spend most of my day interacting with others (humans, bots, corporations) on the Web. Choosing which advertisements I want to see, versus which I’d be willing to pay not to see.
Barry Sonnenfeld hates creativity
Name all the decent TV shows that started in the last 5 years. You’ll probably come up with quite a few (if you need help According to Jim started in 2001, so you can’t count that…oh and it’s fucking horrible). Now, compare that with your bookmarks for the last 5 years. Clark and Michael, Homestar Runner, The Legend of Neil – on a quantity scale, the Web wins for me. The creatitvity inherent in a system with fewer rules and regulations, lower cost of development and production, and less reliance on advertising is astounding. While TV might have better quality from time to time, shows like Arrested Development had a hard time surviving on TV.
In the end, what I realized about Barry Sonnenfeld is this – he doesn’t get it. He’s not probably (hopefully) for or against any of these things; however, he doesn’t get how you could harness the Internet for good. Instead, he rails it from a fear standpoint. Unfortunately for him, it doesn’t look smart, it looks ignorant.
Posted on: April 16, 2008 by Syzlak
How the Hell am I Supposed to Optimize the Air?
Flogos …really?
Posted on: April 1, 2008 by Syzlak
I get pinged this morning by a former co-worker asking whether “[I'd] come across any blogs that say running homepage & branded terms in ppc is a good thing?”
It’s getting old people.
What’s getting old? Two things:
1) Asking around for answers instead of figuring it out for yourself (whether it be running tests or looking it up on some sort of universal encyclopedia…we need to get access to one of those)
2) Thinking that for any reason, bidding on brand name keywords would be a bad idea.
I know that I come at this industry from a different direction now that I work at an agency. The main focus of our agency has been building brands. So, whilst drinking the Kool-Aid (mmm, cyanide flavor!), I apply branding to everything I do online. Sure, some of our clients don’t have branded terms that generate much traffic, but that doesn’t mean they should be ignored. Building a presence in the SERPs is half the battle sometimes, especially for small clients.
That being said, did I learn this from running small accounts at the agency? No, I learned the value from running branded keywords and homepage ads on Best Buy – not really a small business.
So, in response to my friend, go run a test and figure it out for yourself. While I love how open this industry can be at times, and admit that I’ve learned a lot from some of the bloggers out there and the conferences, I hate how lazy it has made some of us. Shit, on average it takes 20 minutes and a week to find out how a new concept will work, and only 5 minutes to convince the boss man that it’s worth testing.
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