I am going to start this post by telling a bit about the Scandinavian Search Marketing 2006, which I attended yesterday, held at the IT University, happening to be very close to where I live at this very point. One of the speakers who impressed me the most was Philip Schindler, Google’s Director for the whole European region, a very young guy, who seemed to have done this whole presentation charade before (duuuh) . His performance included fast talking, explicit terminology which I bet more than half of the listeners didn’t get, and a little insight of Google’s theory of life. Very nice. The other one who impressed me was Mike Moran, IBM’s chief engineer and responsible for the companies success. What I liked mostly about him is though he was an old generation fellow, he was FUNNY, and well informed and up to day with the trends. Very very interesting person. He even has a book which seems to be canonical among marketeers nowadays (“Search Engine Marketing”). One of the other things that he mentioned and I kind of liked it, was “do things fast, make mistakes, fix them”. That’s one way of looking at it, but in terms of natural optimization that might not be so wise. Search engines are known to visit a page every week or so (depending on the actualization speed of the website), so if you screw up today, and Google visits you tomorrow, and taking into consideration that you are a mid-sized company with at least a few hundred hits daily, you might have a problem until next week’s visit of a spider.Not very funny is it ?
In terms of Paid results you can do that without problems. Things can change fast, and they will in case you screw up. Here you will find Mike’s notes about the conference which he attended with us in Copenhagen.
Other things on the line for today: I have scheduled a hard-disk format on my laptop this evening, so I’m going to be installing a fresh copy of Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2, which should be able to provide updates from Microsoft bypassing WGA. We shall see tonight.
I’m quite depressed with my digital camera who has died for unknown reasons, leaving me without any imaging devices. Hopefully I will resolve this issue quick enough.
In an ending paragraph, I would like to say something about the recent release of the PlayStation 3 into the US market. According to news sites, people have been standing eating and sleeping in a cue for several days in order to get their hands on one of the 400.000 consoles that have been prepared for the launch. The gadget costs around 500$ (american that is), but enthusiasts seem not to care about price when it comes to the gaming needs they have.
Somehow I reaaaally don’t understand those guys. I mean, OK, it’s a very nice console, top technological achievements in it, I bet it provides blasting experiences when it comes to simulating reality, but then again… it’s just a console. How much lack of sex or other activities must you have in order to stay in line for nights in row, spending a quite big amount of cash to get one of these “wonders” of the technological world ? There aren’t even enough games out there already released to enjoy your investment! Why can’t people like wait, for a couple more weeks and get them like any other product, in store, without any hassle. It’s this “herd” thinking, hey … if I have it today, I can totally laugh of my geek-friends who don’t have it yet and they are still playing on that old Pentium 4 at 3,0 ghz.
It is perhaps a frustration, of unachieved things that are surfacing the sub-conscious in order to set so seldom satisfactions. End of that…
Tomorrow is Saturday, and I think I already have some stuff scheduled for that …. (is it legal to schedule during weekends??)
Today on the other hand it’s my mom’s birthday, and though she will never read this, I still want to wish her Happy Birthday.
Leita’ ..
Thanks for the kind words. I’m glad that you enjoyed my talk.
You’re right that a mistake in organic search can hurt for a short period of time, but I would argue that avoiding the risk of a mistake is even worse. My point is that if you constantly experiment and measure your success, you’ll eventually end up in a lot better place than if you try to think through every decision to make sure you make no mistakes.
You learn a lot faster by making a different mistake every day and then correcting it, rather than being careful. In the old days, mistakes were very expensive and costly to fix. Now, sitting still costs more than mistakes do. I expand on this a bit in a newsletter I wrote a while back, called Do It Wrong Quickly.
Thanks again for your kind review and thanks for spending some of your precious time with me.