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The Future Of Search And Social Media Is Right Now

by Lori Taylor · 23 comments

Recently on One Click Society I had a down-to-earth conversation with Nova Spivack who has been to the edge of space. He talked a lot about the Semantic Web and the future of search and social media. Very cool stuff!

“I worked at Thinking Machines which made, at the time, the most powerful parallel supercomputer in the world. One of the things they were doing there was a lot of different simulations, artificial intelligence type simulations of the brain, as well as all kinds of simulations of physics and emergent computation. A lot of the stuff that I did there and just the exposure I got to all these different projects that were working on artificial life and emergence really helped me think about the early days of the Web. And I ended up building there, before the Web started, I built basically their own web. It was a multimedia hypertext database of all the different projects on all their Thinking Machines installations around the world that you could browse. It was very much like the Web.

And then when the Web came out, in the early days it was actually Gopher before the Web. In those early days, I realized hey, this is a platform where you can do this kind of thing. So I think that kind of thinking launched me into that. I had also done a lot of work on neural maps and other kinds of systems at other companies. I worked on information filtering at a company called Individual. So I was pretty familiar with a lot of these concepts, which then came into play as the Web began.”


Listen to my entire interview with Nova Spivack on the Positive World Radio Network here.

Download the complete transcript of my One Click Society conversation with Nova Spivack just by clicking here.

Dear Google, Are You Trying To Spam Your Way Into Our Hearts?

by Lori Taylor · 0 comments

Google’s mission statement “Do No Evil”, without fail, reminds me of Hamlet’s famous quote…

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
–From Hamlet (III, ii, 239)

I’m just wondering why they chose that?  Typically when someone focuses too much on what they are NOT going to do, it’s because…

a.  The know they can do it if they want to.

b. They’ve done it before.

Which is why I ask to join me as I give pause to “Do No Evil” as a mission statement, remembering all the legitimate business who lost a ranking over night, and therefore their business because Google didn’t like the way they did something.  This doesn’t even include the net kill (as opposed to road kill) created by the new instant search Google caffeine…

Look, I’ve never been Google slapped, so I’m not bitter about anything, I’m just concerned.  I’ve never even gotten a warning for anything from them, so I’m not in the internet marketing crowd of 50,000+ marketers who were banned for life from Google to pretty up the net or to maybe free up some spam space.

If you are still on the fence about Google’s being seemingly altruistic or not, you might want to ask yourself one question – why do almost none of the top bloggers like Copyblogger or Leo from ZenHabits want Adsense or any ads on their site ?

Because it looks SPAMMY, right? Pretty ironic…

You can differentiate by having product information. But Google scrapes it. You can differentiate through consumer & editorial reviews. But Google scrapes it. You can differentiate by brand, but Google sells branded keywords to competitors. No matter what you do, Google competes against you. You can opt out of being scraped, but then you get no search traffic (& the ecosystem is set up to pay someone else to scrape your content + wrap it in ads).

Read more here…

Why Surveys Don’t Suck

by Lori Taylor · 0 comments

So you own this pizzeria. It’s been in your family for generations and you just know that people keep coming back because they can’t get enough of Mama Rosa’s secret recipe-handed-down-for-eighteen-generations pizza sauce. Everyone in your family loves the stuff and the recipe is locked away safely in a safe deposit box to ensure the future success of your business.

In all your marketing, you mention Mama Rosa’s sauce because you know it sets you apart.

One day you sit down with a cup of coffee and a stack of customer comment cards and you have a revelation as something becomes blatantly obvious. Card after card after card, the customers all say they’d come back to the restaurant but the comments consistently mention the great service, the cool ambiance and the garlic bread sticks. Almost everyone said they felt like they were hanging out at a friend’s place for pizza night – in a good way.

But here’s the kicker – nobody even mentioned Mama Rosa’s sauce.

How could this be? You love that sauce.

But guess what? You are not your customer.

You’re too close to your business to see it the way your customers do and whether you’re a restaurateur, a mechanic or a chiropractor, unless you ask your customers what makes them come back you are very likely using the wrong messaging and in turn wasting your money by marketing to the wrong audience!

If you were this pizzeria owner and you came to me for help, I would urge you to further survey your market to find out if everyone agrees that the best part of your pizza joint is the ambiance, service and “where-everybody-knows-your-name” vibe.

If you discover that you’re the only one who cares about Mama Rosa’s sauce then get it out of your marketing materials and advertisements!

You can’t afford to throw away your marketing budget. Make it effective. Make it stick! Get people in the door by focusing on the experience the customer will get when they visit your place because you know after polling your customers that that’s what they want.

By doing this, you’ll be marketing to your ideal customer. See how beautifully that works?

I’d like to know why more small business owners aren’t using surveys…are they afraid to know the truth? Are you?

In a few days I’m going to post another piece about how surveys can help before going to market with a new product or service and I’ll share an easy process for you to use to survey your customers and potential customers. In the meantime, I’m going to let this sit with you and I hope you really think about ways a survey can help your own unique business. If you have any revelations, please share by posting a comment. I’d love to get a discussion going around this!

4 GUIDELINES FOR “LEGAL” FACEBOOK CONTESTS

February 14, 2010

Summary of Facebook Promotions Guidelines (http://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php last revision:  December 22, 2009) Disclaimer: This post provides a topline summary of the key points you need to know if you are planning on using Facebook to promote/advertise a contest.  The new guidelines limit the use of Facebook’s built in status update and commenting features in promoting and/or [...]

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