……………………………..and Other Stories

Video: Live Search 1 – Plucky powered skates

“You can’t just buy page rank. You can’t expect to buy a site, add new content and expect it to rank the same right off” - Vanessa Fox

“Especially with SEO there’s no such thing as a quick fix or a quick buck. It’s a long term strategy! You have to put into your dues and it’s a rich, rewarding process.” - Avinash Kaushik

“I saved $300 last night by not going out drinking!” – Mike Grehan

Great reviews here and here!

Who needs an iPhone?!

“I spend a lot of time thinking!” - Avinash Kaushik

“Questions are the fundamental things you need to ask to gain actionable insight” - Matt Bailey

“Did you see the fabulous eBay presentation?” - Anon

“How did I manage to spend $300 last night on champagne?” - Mike Grehan

www.live.com

This woman makes her living from this kind of stuff! I don’t think she looks anything like her.

I’m now signing up to the agency and am touting myself as Greg Proops!

“Many people I talk to can’t answer the question - what is the purpose of your website?” - Rufus Evison

“It’s not just what people do on your site but how they feel.” - Jim Sterne

“6% of data from the last ad is being used to calculate ROI. 94% is being thrown away!” - Esco Strong on Engagement Mapping

“When people start buying nappies they also start buying beer. Plus people who have condoms in their basket often pick up a cucumber too!” - Rufus Evison on the more bizzare joys of Tesco ClubCard data

“As we go through life we try and figure out what people are communicating. We test we look at their body language, we look at their facial expressions, but then there is the problem of distance, we have to figure out other ways to communicate over long distances. And as the communication that we want to transfer becomes more sophisticated, we come up with more sophisticated and more elegant ways of transmitting that information.

We are getting good at sending signals. And when the technology comes around to help us send signals, it gets more sophisticated and more complicated. And we discover that we’re pretty good at receiving signals so we reach out to whatever kinds of signals are out there, whatever kind of signals we can find going by, to determine is there meaning there?

We take whatever data we can get and try and turn it into something that’s understandable, something that is logical, we take raw data and turn it into something that might be meaningful and hopefully is useful……………hopefully!

The number of signals that we are receiving are growing, the way that we are receiving them and interpreting them is improving. The potential for what we can do when we receive signals from people on our websites is enormous because we have a very sophisticated tool for receiving signals. We’ve got lots of different kinds of ways to receive those signals. We can array that data to be even more meaningful. We have the capacity to really, really listen to what’s happening in the market place.

We have the opportunity to move from simply reporting on what’s happening, to comparing us to others, to analysing what people are doing to dynamically returning signal with signal and try to match up with 1-1 marketing and peering into the hearts and mind of the market place.”

Pure nectar……

Gotta love Google’s Universal Search!

The picture of a very happy and excited Steve Ballmer is from an article on Friday on DailyTech.com.

How appropriate Google should see the relevance of the photo to the news story this morning on Bloomberg that Yahoo’s stock has tumbled after Microsoft walked away…

I’ve arrived in California for the eMetrics Summit and am really quite excited!

Being in charge of the adCenter Analytics Blog has meant I’ve had to get up to speed on the whole analytics industry……….and quickly!

It’s one thing going to web analytics sessions at a search conference and listening to Matt Bailey or Avinash do their very good & well established thing, but it’s a totally different bucket of page views to be thrust into THREE DAYS of numbers, goal, actions, funnels and treemaps!

How will I cope? Well at SES London I was a little nervous about attending a dinner Ian Thomas had organised for the Orion Panel - Jim Sterne, Bryan Eisenberg, Brian Clifton etc…. Ian had even said it might be a little dry & nerdy but it wasn’t at all.

I’m happiest when my brain is hurting! The wit, charm, intelligence and mental agility was immense and  the generous repartee made for a fine evening…

Life’s about looking forward, moving forward and learning how to get there.

If you own a website, you could do worse than find yourself in amongst these guys…….you’ll definitely come away with some things to think about!