I’ve been reading about OgilvyOne’s NeoSearch in a blog post .

"Current clients already include Allstate and IBM."

"There has been a recent influx of traditional agencies running with search offerings in their product lists, such as Avenue A Razorfish, with their AR Search business, offering advanced search engine marketing services. The range of products from the agencies are aligned with what traditional SEM companies are offering. Targeting Pay-Per-Click, Organic Search Optimization, and Paid Inclusion."

It’s true; Ad Agencies are bring SEM in house and I’ve started to deal with Ogilvy in a new metrics role, for me, at IBM.

I heard from a reliable source that Sun Develops Bathroom-Targeting Technology for Mobile Phones.

Sun Microsystems has come up with a way to detect when a cell phone is in use in the bathroom in order to provide bathroom-specific mobile advertising.

“When you’re in the bathroom, you notice the slight echo. Sound echoes of the tile… that’s also what makes the bathroom a great place for singing. We’ve put together a piece of software that will detect the echo-frequency range present in most bathrooms through a mobile phone’s microphone,” says Sun researcher Torri Niemczyck. “That way advertisers can detect when mobile users are in the bathroom, and serve them ads for things like hand soap, dental care, and even beauty products.”

"….Sun Microsystems says they are already talking to Opera about inserting the bathroom-targeting technology into the upcoming version of Opera’s mobile web browser. Opera is currently offering their Opera Mini mobile browser as a free download. Sun’s technology could open up a new source of revenue for them, alongside of Google search referrals".

So, pretty soon, there will be nowhere to go where you can’t be served an ad.

I just bought one of these……and boy am I having hard time with it!

The T-Mobile MDA was sopposed to be the state of the art phone…but it’s sure Anti-Intuitive.  I haven’t decided yet if I’ll keep it or go back to the SideKick II.   Personally, the SideKick was much easier to operate.

This phone just seems harder …everything is more complicated, and every time I take it out of my cell phone holder, I turn on the Camara.  I haven’t yet figured out how to get my voicemail and while I have configured some of my mail accounts, I’m not too sure of the rest of what I’ll do with the phone.

I’ll probably give it a week of trying ot master the MDA becore deciding if I’ll return it.

I met with a Podcasting group in New York City for dinner and talk last night and it was really fun!  Right now the New York Podcasting Association has 161 members; between 10 and 15 members showed up last night.

Found out what is being used to create Podcasts, including mobile devices that can do most of everything you need.

And here’s who attended:

I don’t think this is much of a story but it’s amusing to see it made into one.

We all know that Organic Search has costs associated with it, such as hiring someone to opimize and submit your site to search engines and directories.   But we don’t have to pay the search engine, much or any money because that part of the marketing is free.

Hmm…..RhymeRank.   What else will Barry Diller think of?  At least it’ll get Ask.com some traffic as we all have come to the site and try it.

Ask.com announced today the introduction of RhymeRank, an innovative search technology capable of producing related search results that rhyme with a searcher’s original query. The new product is located on the right-hand side of the Ask search results page, under the heading, “Rhyme Your Search.”

They were going to announce tomorrow, but they just couldn’t wait!

Well, RhymeRank is not in place yet, I guess I can’t play with it till it’s live.

I was just looking at WhatsNextBlog whose author is BL Ochman; I interviewed her early this month at SESNY06, at a Bloggers’ Lunch event and noted a recent podcast here.

But actually, there is nothing but the title..no post, the whole thing is in the title and it needs nothing more.  Yes, "Marketing, like chocolate, is best when it’s dark and complex in flavor"  .

I’m at a Starbucks right now eating chocolate, drinking coffee and writing about marketing…..I think I’m digging her sentence construction.

When did the Beatles pass the Tipping Point?  According to Seth Godin, never.  It happened gradually; there was no Tipping Point (Funny, but Malcolm Gladwell is going to be at Webmasterworld in a couple of weeks ….hmm… now if I could get to interview him……wish on Marshall).

One of the most misunderstood and misused phrases in marketing (okay, in business) is Malcolm Gladwell’s, "the tipping point." The Beatles didn’t tip. Nothing magical happened. Instead, gradually, they shifted from being the chasers into being the chased.

These were the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and the Beatles on tour and the Beatles making wigs and the Beatles making movies and pioneering music videos. It was the Beatles in a frenzy, not sure what was going to come next, but pretty sure that it could all disappear in a heartbeat.

Many organizations reach this stage and stop. They harvest. They take profits and remind themselves that they are geniuses, all powerful and immune to the laws of boredom.

Only by pushing through this stage and by using their newfound power to create the last stage of their career did the Beatles actually become the Beatles.

When we rewrite history (and we do it every day) it’s easy to imagine that Starbucks and JetBlue and all the other poster children for new successes just got blessed. It’s almost never the case, though. It’s just that it’s easier to think of them as winners.

So, is Seth saying…."we re-write history" or is he saying "there is no Tipping Point" or is he saying both things?  Seth?

Thanks to ConversionRater for an interesting post - that also keys in Omniture (below)

"By contrast, Visits has largely been the neglected stepchild of web metrics. Most folks know it’s there, but many prefer to ignore it in favor of the more popular Unique Visitor metric. Generally speaking, a visit starts when someone reaches your website, and is considered complete after 30 minutes of inactivity. It is also commonly referred to as a "session".

Now for sake of argument, let’s say you can only report one of these metrics to your executives - which is it going to be? Unique Visitors? or Visits? When working with clients, I’m often asked this question, particularly in the Media and Retail verticals. And my answer?

Visits…always. Sure, call me crazy - but my logic is actually quite simple.

Here are my top reasons for using visits:

1) Visits are more accurate than Unique Visitors.
2) Every Visit represents an opportunity to persuade or convert a visitor to a customer.
3) Measuring visits is based on fairly established industry standards

Now, here are the top reasons I would not use Unique Visitors:

1) Unique Visitors are less accurate than Visits - Most analytics programs, in the absence of cookie setting, fall back on IP address and user agent. This introduces significant variability in your Unique Visitor counts and can skew your true site performance and reach.

2) Unique Visitors mask your true conversion opportunities - Unique Visitors are a superset of Visits and may represent multiple opportunities to convert a customer. As such, using Unique Visitors as the denominator in most performance calculations is actually overstating the effectiveness of your site. For example, if I visit a retail site 4 times in one week, and purchase twice - what is my conversion rate? If you use weekly unique visitors, my conversion rate is 200%. If you use visits, my conversion rate is 50%. Which is a better representation of site effectiveness? Clearly the 50% is much more valuable in understand where your site may or may not be performing optimally. With the 50% conversion metric, I have the opportunity to analyze which visits did not convert…what happened? Is it a navigational issue? A cross-sell problem? Or perhaps a remarketing opportunity? If you used Unique Visitors, you’d never get this visibility.

3) Unique Visitors are subjective - At the end of the day, what is a unique visitor? Is it someone who comes daily, weekly, or monthly? How do you decide on a time frame for uniqueness, and why is this time frame better than any other? Tying into my earlier point about masking your true conversion opportunities, the longer your unique visitor timeframe, the more you effectively overstate success.

4) Unique Visitors aren’t really visitors - Let’s be honest for a moment. Unique Visitors can represent several things. Optimally, a Unique Visitors represents an individual that comes to your website. If you have a strong registration process, like say an Apple iTunes, you could actually achieve this high level of accuracy. However, few sites - even in the media space - have such a luxury. Rather, most sites rely on cookies to measure unique visitors. Well, we’ve all heard about the issues with cookies replacements and deletions, and some cookies are certainly more resilient than others (did you know there are at least 5 different cookie types you can use to track visitors?)

Let’s assume 5% of your visitors delete cookies…that would imply a 5% level of inaccuracy around uniques right? Wrong. The fallback method for unique visitor determination is most commonly IP and user agent string - a *much* less reliable approach than cookies. This was actually a key reason log file solutions fell out of favor - because most relied on IP and user agent and hence were highly inaccurate. Because of the inaccuracy of user and IP agent, your 5% of cookie rejecting visitors can actually skew your traffic numbers by many times over. So you may find that your 5% is actually 15% of your unique visitors. And because it’s nearly impossible to reconcile this number (outside of triangulating with registered user counts), you have little hope in relying on unique visitors as a true measure of "visitors".

Furthermore, assuming you can set a persistent cookie, you’re only measuring a computer - not a person. Multiple people use single computers. Single people use multiple computers. So what is your true unique visitor count?

To summarize…embrace Visits, steer clear of Unique Visitors
Amidst all this uncertainty around unique visitors, the fact is that I rarely use this metric in my web analysis and optimization efforts. In fact, beware the vendor that says they can provide a "more accurate" unique visitor count than your current vendor - until they can solve for the above issues, it’s useless. Now, there are situations where I do use unique visitor counts - and I’ll talk about those in a future blog entry. In the meantime, my recommendation is always to use Visits - no matter how neglected it may be in your organization! And as always, if you’d like assistance understanding how to leverage web analytics to drive ROI, please do not hesitate to contact the Omniture Best Practices Group.

I think this somthing to think about - but most of the industry still uses uniques - so we have to have those metrics - even if you don’t agree they are that accurate.