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rafer:

The WentNative conference team was emailed this earlier in the day, correctly and humorously. We’ve been aggressively inviting non-white and/or non-dudes to speak and have struck out across the board. Please show us up, suggest people, anything you can — however, we have been trying.
[i’ll give the photomontage artist credit if they want, but I didn’t want to unilaterally out the person or wait to post.]

As a co-organizer of WentNative with @Rafer - I’ll double down on what he said - We’ve tried and struck out so far. Nominations welcome!
Also I think it’s important to note that Rey Peralta of Deutsch - speaking on our Content Marketing for Agencies panel - is a person of color himself. So we’re trying. More to be done.

The WentNative conference team was emailed this earlier in the day, correctly and humorously. We’ve been aggressively inviting non-white and/or non-dudes to speak and have struck out across the board. Please show us up, suggest people, anything you can — however, we have been trying.

[i’ll give the photomontage artist credit if they want, but I didn’t want to unilaterally out the person or wait to post.]

As a co-organizer of WentNative with @Rafer - I’ll double down on what he said - We’ve tried and struck out so far. Nominations welcome!

Also I think it’s important to note that Rey Peralta of Deutsch - speaking on our Content Marketing for Agencies panel - is a person of color himself. So we’re trying. More to be done.

What AltaVista has done in the past few months is to infuse its Web site with bells and whistles like shopping, free Internet access, an image library and breaking news reports. Like all Internet portals, it is trying to give users more reasons to visit than just offering a way to find information elsewhere on the Web.

“

—

SFGate. Monday, March 27th 2000.”AltaVista Switches Web Portal Into High Gear / Revamped site adds new services.”

I looked this up because, on June 29, 1999, myself and my mentor/boss Mark Bockley, did a qualitative brand and category audit for AltaVista that clearly indicated that search was the opportunity. We were brought in by Jerry Blanton of their agency, to inform brand building work.

We did groups with heavy users of the various brands in the category, and discovered something pretty amazing. I believe our words in our presentation were something to the effect of, “Whoever owns search, wins.” It was clear, from the beginning, that the AltaVista wasn’t listening, and didn’t know how to listen, to consumers.

This entire article is an amazing flashback to the peak of the dot-com bubble. Google isn’t mentioned anywhere in this article, and wasn’t even in the Top 20 Internet Properties list at the end of this article and was barely mentioned in our research.

I say that to indicate that this wasn’t a case of users saying Google is awesome, and us reporting that Google is awesome, so you should be like Google.

This was a case of deep, creative, indirect listening into the motivations at work in an emerging category of behavior revealing unserved needs. AltaVista wasn’t listening that day - they had just been bought by CMGI for $2.3b.

I say this also to highlight that strategic insight - through brand listening - is possible (vital!) even when the entire industry is blind:

Here’s Rod Shrock, the CEO of Alta Vista, defending portalization in the same article. This is a year after our presentation:

“You tell me, was CBS three years ahead or behind of NBC?” Schrock asked. “No idea? So in the grand scheme of things, no one will care in 10 years whether we were three years before or after Yahoo.”

Blinded by Yahoo! And this, from an analyst (any qualitative at work?):

Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester Research, was not so optimistic. She lauded Alta Vista’s focus on Web enthusiasts and e-commerce, but stopped short of predicting that AltaVista would one day become the Internet’s top portal for all users.

“Being a general search engine isn’t enough to catch up to a Yahoo because they are so far ahead,” Li said.

Perhaps it was too late for them to do anything about it, but suffice it to say that deep creative listening with consumers gave them the opportunity to choose - chase the portals and the wisdom of the day, or turn towards the consumer and become helpful. And they chose to follow the pack over the cliff.

To anyone reading this, I ask, have you explored how your consumer experiences your category lately?

(via peterspear)Some

Meanwhile, if we made it easier to open bars and restaurants, then restauranteurs would need to hire more waiters and dishwashers and cooks and bartenders and presumably would end up needing to offer higher pay to do so. If the limiting factor of restaurant expansion in your city is licenses or permits rather than available local labor, in effect what you have is a licensing and permitting scheme that’s holding down wages across the board for people who lack formal educational credentials.

“

—	Food service sector should be taken seriously. Good example of regulatory capture. Local licensing schemes are rarely in the public’s interests.

(via Donald R. Hopkins - How to Eradicate Guinea Worm Disease - NYTimes.com)

Caption: Donald R. Hopkins, vice president for health programs at the Carter Center, helped to eradicate smallpox and is trying to do the same to Guinea worm disease.

Sawickipedia comment: This guy is awesome. Instead of nominating President Drone Warrior for the Nobel Peace Prize - real humanitarians like Dr. Hopkins deserve awards like that. What a modern saint.

lickypickystickyme:

goktgo:

life does not get better than this.

A cat dressed like a shark on a roomba chasing a duck.

yes.

The internet NEEDED this today.

As a cat owner… GOTD (Gif of the Day)

Why not just build a phone?

I’ve always been very clear that I don’t think that’s the right strategy. We’re a community of a billion-plus people, and the best-selling phones—apart from the iPhone—can sell 10, 20 million. If we did build a phone, we’d only reach 1 or 2 percent of our users. That doesn’t do anything awesome for us. We wanted to turn as many phones as possible into “Facebook phones.” That’s what Facebook Home is.

“

—	Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook Home, Money, and the Future of Communication \| Wired Magazine \| Wired.com Good insight

So it’s complicated. As a wise man once said: “Everyone is different. No two people are not on fire.” The best take-away to glean from this is probably that, all else being equal, being married makes you happier than you’d otherwise be, but it does so presumably because it involves spending a lot of your time with someone whom you love and who’s a good match for you. “If you can find a marriage option that’s going to work and you’re in your early twenties, take it,” Cherlin says. “The trouble is people are not finding those.”

Holding partner quality equal, Wilcox argues, it still depends. “If your goal is to maximize your professional and financial accomplishment, then there’s no question that getting married later is the answer for you,” he says. “But if you have a more traditional orientation in terms of having kids or being religious, then getting married and having kids in your 20s is a good bet.”

“

—	People who marry young are happier, but those who marry later earn more

“The lesson from TV is, sell a metric that’s positive and stop screwing around with metrics that essentially say how we’re not dong a good job,” said Todd Sawicki, president of Zemanta. “Partly the move to content marketing and native advertising, in my view, is in part a reaction to this reality. Content marketing will be about reach and brand lift — metrics that work well for brands.”

To Sawicki’s point, many online ad sellers are now selling their ad products based on more “traditional” metrics. BuzzFeed and Twitter, for example, both now report on things like awareness and brand-lift. Part of that is about tapping into TV and print budgets by talking in a language that traditional buyers understand, but it’s also about pitching their products in a positive light, versus a commoditized, by the numbers approach.

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—	Digital Media’s Achilles Heel: Measurement \| Digiday Measurement - once thought to be the golden ticket for digital advertising - is perhaps it’s biggest achilles heel.

But Mr. Liu, the chief technical officer at Shanghai’s airport authority, jokes about how much more profit-oriented state-owned operators are in China. “The difference between here and the U.S. is that in the U.S., the government manages the nonprofit parts of an airport and gives the profitable parts to the private sector,” he said, laughing. “The U.S. way is more socialist and the Chinese more capitalist.

“

—	Airports in China Hew to an Unswerving Flight Path - NYTimes.com

A VC: Content Marketing Simplified »

To quote @FredWilson (from the post linked):

In many ways I see this as the future of online marketing. Instead of paying tens of millions of dollars a year (or more) creating banner ads and paying to run them on pages filled with someone else’s content, marketers can create their own web and mobile presences and use the most efficient form of advertising, pay per click advertising, to drive traffic to these pages and then engage in a conversation with their customers and potential customers.
I like to think of this as moving the message from a banner to your brand and changing the engagement from a view to a conversation. It also helps that this approach works better on mobile where we are spending more and more of our time every day.

At USV we have quite a few companies engaged in this world of content (or conversational) marketing including Twitter, Tumblr, SoundCloud, Disqus, Zemanta, and GetGlue. Based on what I am seeing from these companies, marketers are responding quickly to the opportunities presented by content marketing and the market is growing rapidly. That makes a lot of sense to me.

To those wondering why I joined Zemanta - this is why. Zemanta is my bet on content marketing as a business and it’s future as the future for online advertising.