I was reading Garret French's post about Chris Anderson's talk at MPlanet tonight - most of it is a rehash of the Long Tail book.  However, I found one statement fascinating and I wanted to more about ….

Your brand is what Google says your brand is.

As soon as I searched on this phrase I came up with Jim Kukral's post in Marketing Profs that said "Your Brand Is NOT What Google Says It Is".  Boy..that was quick!

Jim Kukral thinks we give Google too much credit, one way or the other, on determining brand:

"…Yes, Google can help determine perception by dissemination of negative reviews and commentary about your brand. But you know what? If your product was as good as it could be, the risk for extreme exposure to negative reviews is limited, and you can hardly blame the messenger (Google) eh?"

And as soon as I read Jim Kurkal, I found another blog post from Steve Field that corrected both Chris Anderson and Jim Kurkal.

"…..For those who haven’t been involved in this discussion, let me start with a few things that your brand is not (but can be found via Google).

1. Your organization’s logo
2. Your organization’s slogan
3. Your organization’s theme
4. What you tell others your brand is

The common thread? All of these things are delivered from the company to the customer.

The problem here is that just because you say you are something doesn’t mean that you actually are. McDonald's can try and define themselves as a healthy option by pushing their salads and white-meat chicken, but the public will still perceive them primarily as a greasy fast food joint."

Finally, I came across a white paper called "Search is Brand" by Weboptimiser that lists several top brands that had detractors in the first page of Google Search Results - some of these pages were generated by bloggers.

"…Recently the research firm Delahaye produced some work looking at the proportion of negative commentary on the net. They found that in message boards 11% of comments are negative,in news coverage 13%, but in blogs 23% of all comments are negative."

And because blogs get a lot of links and get updated often, they do very well in Google - meaning a Blogger can, in theory, take down a brand.  The rules of marketing, engagement and branding have forever changed.

That's it for November 2006 posts.

In another sign of the internet's rise as the medium people prefer to consume entertainment, it's now rumored that Saturday Night Live" Rehearsals May Be Web-cast on Friday night LIVE.

"Sometimes it's a lot more interesting than the show,'' Kliavkoff joked, referring to the closed-circuit footage of ''SNL's'' Friday dry runs viewed at NBC headquarters. “It's something we watch on the cameras at 30 Rock.''

Opening the window to “SNL'' rehearsals might represent a case of art imitating art imitating art yet again at NBC, which already has mined behind-the-scenes happenings at the sketch comedy franchise as comic catnip for the Tina Fey half-hour series “30 Rock'' and dramatic grist for Aaron Sorkin's drama ''Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.''

The truth is rapidly becoming clear - the Internet is the new testing ground for talent.

"…Much of the panel's discussion centered on whether the emergence of user-generated content will become an art form unto itself or just a way for establishment media to skim the cream of the crop. “We see the Internet as our new A&R,'' Kliavkoff said, referring to the music industry term for talent scouting. “We're out there scouting. The good stuff bubbles up to the top.''

For me, I'd look at this possibility of broadcasting SNL rehearsals on Friday night as multi channel marketing AND community building - both of which are becoming much more important as we move further into the Digital Age (or whatever you want to call the time we live in now).

And certainly - you can learn a lot more about the audience who will watch SNL on Saturday night if you can get the demographics of the Online Streaming Video Downloads on Friday night (I imagine Comscore or HitWise can provide these statistics, each in their own way).

Webmetricsguru.com will receive it's 100,000th Visitor this year, in the next 24 - 30 hours; certainly by Saturday Morning, if not before.

Right this minute:

And this year - my traffic is continuing to build each month- without any special promotions - it's happening naturally.

Also told by Know More Media there are 300+ RSS Subscribers to this blog.  

I know Know More Media is looking for a Sponsor for WebMetricsGuru.com - I would think an Analytics company would actually be the prefect sponsor for this blog - if anyone is interested contact Easton Ellsworth at Know More Media (easton@knowmoremedia.com or easton.ellsworth@gmail.com).  It's actually a great advertising opportunity.

If I can figure out who the 100,000th visitor to Webmetricsguru.com is - I'll send them a Watercolor.  I tried to find out who the 50,000th visitor was - to no avail - was someone in Pakistan.

Avinash Kaushik has a couple new Podcasts at the Web Analytics Association on measuring Rich Media Applications (Flash, AJAX, etc).  Among the points Avinash makes:

1. Preplanning: Unlike other things for this area you need to do a lot of pre-planning and make sure your code is included in the rich experience before you get started. On web pages we can recover and tag later etc. In this area it is very hard to do so set a lot of time for planning.
2. Integration of data, hyper important because A) you can’t measure in a silo (so you need to know what the differences are in outcomes based on where different segments of people come from or based on offers or what they might have seen before or after the experience) B) you want to know what people “think”, so in our case it is important to integrate into mechanisms such as website surveys.
3. Testing, testing, testing, testing. You are ready for rich experiences, but are your customers ready? I have a great example of this in the podcast above. Failing faster is a awesome recipe for long term success. 

I have been measuring Rich Media and Podcasts and it's a lot of work….. and there's no clean way to do it.  One thing I do notice….stuff is published without much or any testing and then detailed metrics are expected ….not so easy to deliver when there's been little testing.

Micro Persuasion points out, rightly, Yahoo! has been sending very mixed messages about RSS feeds.  I moved over to Google Reader last month because MyYahoo! would not export my RSS Feeds.  Everyone else does support that - except Yahoo.  Why?  They're just in it for the money - eyeballs.

And now we're coming to the issue of what RSS does …… it allows me, and any other subscriber to view content in the way (and place) I want it …… which might well be in a feed reader that's not on one of Yahoo's sites. 

No "eyeballs" …. no washy…     I guess Yahoo really is just about making money …. they want you to go to their properties and stay - for a long time …

So….with that goal in mind….. to quote Steve Rubel …."..In the past few weeks Yahoo has rolled out three major new web sites - Yahoo! Food, Yahoo! Advertising and Yahoo! TV. They're great sites, but none of them has feeds. There's a reason why - eyeballs."

"….My gut feeling is that Yahoo is trying to create content that you can only get on their sites and nowhere else. It's all very Lloyd Braun. They want consumers spending as much time as possible on their properties. If they put RSS feeds on these sites, it will mean fewer page views because people will only click in on content that they really care about. In other words, it means less time spent. Browsing and clicking creates page views. By skipping RSS, they will serve up more ads.

Could this be the beginning of a larger trend?"

Yes, but not for most sites …… just some publishers.   And you have to wonder if Yahoo is going against the trend…….everything is going away from going to the the site ….since you can get most of it in the RSS Reader - or whatever your using.

However, reading content in an RSS reader also presents Web Metrics issues - as it's hard, with Caching done by the Internet Providers and perhaps, by the Search Engines, to know exactly how much your content is being consumed.  

At least, when people came to your site directly - you got eyeballs AND stats …you knew how many people were on the site, more or less, and what they're doing.   Now…..it's much harder since a lot of the activity is happening in the RSS Reader.  In other words, the revenue models in place don't really deal with content that's consumed off your site - that you can't measure.

And yes, there's workarounds, like putting ads in the RSS feeds, but it's not universally adopted and many people don't want to see or deal with Ads in their RSS Feed Reader - I see them in Google Reader a lot …but I'd never click on them.

Visual Search Engines sound like they should be fun, should work better than textual based search (Google/Yahoo/MSN) but most people don't search using Kartoo or any of the number of variants out there - because the pictures don't add much value.

John Battelle mentioned a new search engine, PageBull, that actually is fun to use. It's one thing to go to each page, one by one, and look at them - it's quite another thing to the top pages about a subject next to each other with the keywords highlighted.

Lets' see what we can learn about People.

Avinash Kaushik - people talk about Avinash more than he does himself …..as the pictures show.

Amy Crehore -  Can see a lot about Amy's paintings and who she's illustrated for as well as pictures of her.

Fred Stonehouse - Look at the different "Fred Stonehouse's" out there - there's some noise but it's an interesting comparison.  Doing a search on Fred Stonehouse Painting shows two versions of my interview with in in ArtNewYorkCity.com

Brice Marden's work and life are much easier to see with PageBull than Google.

And Joe Coleman's paintings and life are a lot easier to take in visual - in this format - than textually.

What about Subjects such as Blu Ray Disks?   Just found out there is now a 100GB Blue Ray Disk when last I heard, the capacity was 20-20 GB (replacing today's DVD's).

Otto Dix - I saw a lot of his work at the Met recently in the Verist painting ( Verism - German Portraits from the 1920s @ Metropolitan Museum of Art ) show that's currently up and wrote about it on ArtNewYorkCity.com   I did a search on Verist Art which actually produced some good results (but some noise too).

And what about Political Figures like George W. Bush?  You can kinda see that with all the positive stuff - result number 4 is a "Bush Watch" site.

Will be using PageBull a lot more.

Jason Van Orden brings up the error of using "hits" to measure the approximate number of times a  Podcast was Downloaded. 

"…Looking at the # of hits to a podcast file (MP3 or other) does not indicate how many times the entire file was downloaded. Some of those hits are the result of simple requests for information (such as the file size) or partial downloads. Further, if someone starts a streaming player, but stops listening ten seconds into the program, it still results in a hit to the file in the logs.

In Podcasting Metrics Series Part 2, I pointed out the problem with looking at the # of hits to a file for estimating the # of downloads. A single download can result in many hits. The hits stat will always be bigger than the actual number of downloads."

Most Analytics don't do much about RSS Feeds, Podcasts or Vidcasts and really ought to - and I've been suggesting this to every Web Analytics Vendor I talk to.

Right now, I gather the bytes downloaded of a file by the size of a file to get an approximate number of downloads for a file. Another possibility I found gets you close the first set of numbers is taking the number of Hits to a file and multiplying by .80 which seems to be consistent.  

Every podcast is usually downloaded a little more than 1x per visitor - same is true of transcripts of a podcast - that .80 multiplier seems to work but I can't tell  you why it's .80 except that I  observed this ratio works several times.

Some neat new tools at WEBuildPages that might be useful.  Here's a few that I find useful

Strongest Subpages Tool - Finds 30 of your most backlinked subpages and shows how many pages on other sites that  are linking to those pages.

This could be very useful if you can co-relate pages that are linked to more strongly ALSO rank better in search engines.   Certainly this tool gives you the first part which pages more liked to from other pages in your site or sites outside your own.

Top Competitor Tool - Find who ranks in the top 10 across Yahoo, Google, and MSN.

This tool can be useful to just find out who the main players are; you can do the same thing yourself or use this tool which is faster and neater.

I posted on Competitive Analysis tools yesterday.

Yesterday I wrote about Widget Analytics and Marketing with Widgets - today I found another functional Widget Analytics platform called MuseStorm.

MuseStorm appears to have analytics that show actual Widget Usage and they might be farther along that ClearSpring in having a platform ready for use and the analytics to go with it. 

Some of the Widgets on MuseStorm today are pretty interesting.  There's a Widget to show YouTube videos on any subject you chose beforehand.  Recently I was looking at a Travel Site for Ireland and I wanted to embed YouTube videos of different cities in Ireland on the Tour package page …go the Social Media route … and this Widget actually does that for you…the whole thing.

Here's some Competitive Analysis Free Tools I find useful.
 
http://snapshot.compete.com/webmetricsguru.com/  Compete.com Snapshot of a site (still not that accurate but helpful to have anyway - attempts to gauge unique visitors).
 
http://www.quantcast.com/webmetricsguru.com  Quantcast is an interesting company that I met with and wrote about - data is not accurate unless you put their tag on your site - but it's very interesting and free.
 
http://www.alexaholic.com/webmetricsguru.com+conversionrater.com+kaushik.net  Alexaholic is a great tool if you don't expect much from it …you can compare pageviews (but don't expect accuracy).
 
http://adlab.msn.com/demo.aspx   Microsoft AdLabs Demos
The tools that I find most useful here are:
http://adlab.msn.com/DPUI/DPUI.aspx Demographics Prediction
http://adlab.msn.com/OCI/OCI.aspx     Detect Commerical Intention of a site or a keyword.
http://adlab.msn.com/keywordforecast/KeywordTrendsWeb.aspx  Gives trending information about a set of keywords as well as some basic demographics - I may have been the person to give them the idea to create this tool.
http://adlab.msn.com/searchfunnel/  Search Funnel tool is pretty intersting - would be more useful if it included more terms.  Try this example for "house plans" to see what I mean http://adlab.msn.com/searchfunnel/index.aspx?kwd=house%20plans
 
http://www.claritas.com/MyBestSegments/Default.jsp?ID=20  Claritas PRIZM Cluster Demographic Zipcode lookup.  For example, my zipcode, 11218 has these main cluster demographic groups living near me as well as a map of the the area a zipcode covers.
Brooklyn, NY 11218's most common PRIZM NE Segments are:
Number Name
16 Bohemian Mix
40 Close-In Couples
07 Money & Brains
31 Urban Achievers
59 Urban Elders

http://advertising.msn.com/msnsites/msnsites  Microsoft's MSN Site tool - put in a demographic and the tool will tell you which Microsoft sites have that demographic so you can advertise there.  For example, people who access Microsoft sites from work and using Broadband woul most likely visit MSNBC first - http://advertising.msn.com/AdProducts/MSNProfiler.aspx?Demo_CategoryID=8&Demo_ItemID=99  While people making between 75K and 100K would most likely visit FOX Sports and MSN Money first http://advertising.msn.com/AdProducts/MSNProfiler.aspx?Demo_CategoryID=3&Demo_ItemID=90
 
 
http://www.claritas.com/MyBestCustomers/Content/GeocodeAppend/BatchGeocodeAppendUploadFile.jsp
Claritas Analyze Email List for Cluster Demographics tool (may be a small fee for this tool - but worth it if you have a decent sized list and what to get overall stats on who are the main cluster segments making up your mailing list).
 
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eat-the-press/  The Huffington Post's People Ranker - a cool widget type tool that tells you how popular someone is over the last week.
 
http://www.webbrain.com/html/default_win.html   WebBrain shows a map of how terms are related that your searching for - that can be very useful for a Competitve Analysis - you can click on links to drill down.