Check it out: http://www.slideshare.net/MarkRiggan/mobile-first-responsive-web-design

Last night I attempted to purchase some toys from ToysRUs.com.  The inventory was rapidly changing in front of my eyes, only certain items were available for in-store pickup, etc.  When I actually placed my order, the “find the store nearest you” feature was dead in the ajax waters of no return.  In short they were getting slammed!  Good for them.  Bad for me.

So an announcement quickly appeared on their home page that they were extending their deals to Tuesday.  A really solid business move on their part and good indicator that they can react well to crisis.  I logged on today and when I went to purchase an item one item (that was on sale that was supposed to be in-stock) was not available.  It was pulled off my order and my discount evaporated through the ether.

So I placed a phone call to customer service and the representative was able to make sure that when the order was in-stock I would get the discounted price.  A notice to all merchants: as Gary Vaynerchuk warned us all at the Internet Summit #ISum11 that service and engagement with your customers is what will allow you to survive.

All it took was awareness of their own performance issues, empathy and a little Christmas Spirit.

Helpful tips for ToysRUs:

1. Get rid of the phone maze, I want to talk to someone
2. Real time inventory is a must now for a chain your size
3. Give customer service reps the power to make things right and you will keep customers who had tough on-line experiences

Follow Lisa on Twitter (@LisaSorg)

Use #abtmeetup in Search.Twitter.com to see stream from meeting.

Will blog about Lisa’s fascinating talk soon.

How is a print publication thriving in our digital times?

The Independent Weekly and IndyWeek.com editor Lisa Sorg is speaking at our second Raleigh Internet Marketing Meetup Wednesday (tomorrow) 11.30 at 6:30. Lisa will share how, when large print publications are faltering, a niche arts print publication from Durham (one we all love) is thriving by embracing the web, Internet marketing and the strange relativity we all know and love.

Please join us the Atlantic BT Center for a special presentation by a beloved Triangle arts institution.

Not a member of Internet Marketing Relativity Meetup? Join Here

What to know more? Learn More

Why? Learn marketing and niche publication secrets so we are better Internet marketers.

When: 6:30 on Wednesday 11.30

Where: Atlantic BT Offices (across from Macy’s Crabtree Valley Mall, 4509 Creedmoor, Raleigh, NC 27612)

Dinner? Yes, Atlantic BT will be buying dinner for attendees

Parking? Yes in front of the building and behind (if front is full)

Host: Atlantic BT Director Marketing Martin Smith aka @ScentTrail (Martin.Smith(at)Atlanticbt.com)

Hope to see you Wednesday night at the building across from Macy’s with the big, beautiful blue marble.

Martin

http://bit.ly/kStOny

@drewdiskin Drew Diskin, M.S. Digital Engagement Strategist, Inertia

Commentary:

I think Drew had a powerful story to tell, using this story of John Hopkins and showing more specific examples of HOW they turned around their results, HOW he got C-Level buy in would have made this a much more powerful story.  All in all a good presentation.

Notes:

How do you translate real world experiences into a digital one? Drew worked at Hopkins Hospital & Health System.  There was a culture that was beyond anything you could describe in some ways about how amazing they performed.  But they had severe digital woes.  They had a 62% bounce rate, 75,000 pages, 350+ websites.  The reality was that their brand sucked on-line.

The took on a smaller subset of pages and put them out in a few months and put it out there fast so they could figure out how they were doing.  Their CMS was an old Cold Fusion product that was inhibited fast turnaround.  How do you speak to people not at them when all the patient cares about is that their cough has been persistent for two years because they worked in coal mines?

Be present where your customers are at in their lifestyle and how to change to make it more relevant to them.

Obvious UX – Analytics can be used to get a baseline, UX Testing and Prototyping, Focus Groups, Online Surveys, Informal Conversations with Internal and External Customers are a MUST now, they are necessary to do business.  The challenge is convincing the C-Level executives that this is worth spending money on.

Not Obvious – Are people returning?  Are they sharing? Are they converting? Are they completing the tasks that you have? Can you access the site via mobile? Are you trending? Do you have a Facebook presence? Where else were your users before and after they were at your site?

Measure, Recource, Prototype, and Measure again – was part of the Hopkins rescue mission for UX.  Drew helped create a Digital Engagement Strategy that creates and experience for users not just a website.

Traffic findings were a success: Find a Doctor was up 187%, Apply to the School of Medicine was up 200%.

How to mitigate the performance risk of 3rd party web components

@compuware Dennis Gullotti, Senior Product Marketing Manager

Commentary:

The chief takeaway for me was as we add more and more service calls to our sites, make sure you monitor and load test all your 3rd party calls.  If you increase your load time by 2 seconds you will increase your abandonment rate by 8%. When testing capture your hard data so you can show you business people the impact of adding social media hook-ins to your sites.

Notes:

3rd part components can help you drive traffic like Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, RSS all of this should be to drive traffic to your site and increase your conversions.  CDN’s can also be used to increase performance like EC2 storage, but outside of North America and Europe the performance isn’t great so add a CDN on top and it will scream.

Your performance because of 3rd party presents other challenges in getting speed because of size and customer satisfaction.  Anything above 8 seconds is not good.  Excellent load times need to be 2 seconds.  All of that testing should be done from user desktops because that is real.

Set your business and performance goals: Is my audience using it? Does the vendor guarantee performance? How much revenue is it generating?  Do some due diligence on the component provider?  How does it impact mobile?

Forrester research claims that in 2009 that a page should load in 2 seconds so think about how you are going to impact that load time when adding a 3rd party component.

Facebook publishes performance statistics for their APIs.

71% of mobile phone uses expect a site to load just as fast on their phone.  The takeaway here is to make sure you are limiting 3rd party content calls, limit the number of requests, keep sizes smalls and use a Content Delivery Network.

Make sure that you LOAD Test, especially if you have 3rd party calls.  When doing this type of testing try to do it from the end users point of view: mobile, outside the firewall, etc.

Half-Hearted User Adoption

@navigationarts Don Bruns – Director of Application Design, Navigation Arts

Commentary:

Don moved really fast through a lot of his notes.  He had some great content, the chief takeaway was to make sure you are creating experiences that accomplish their 10 most common tasks.  Overall this was a high level speed overview of how adoption is the only metric that matters.

Notes:

User adoption is not binary, it is the core success metric of your application.  Halfhearted adoption can kill your ROI.

Causes of this: No benefit to the end users, lack of business case, system doesn’t reflect how users behave, poor system performance, failure to manage change.

Change management is overcoming the points of resistance for your users, not “because I said so.”

What are the symptoms of half-hearted user adoption?  Do you find yourself bribing your employees to use the system or share information on-line? Are you penalizing non-use or even inventing reasons for use? Are you creating a scavenger hunt?  What you should be doing is creating a killer app that transforms the way that you work.

Get developers to take the User-Centered Design approach with everything you create to make sure you are creating applications that users really want to use.

Designing for Touch: Are We Ready?

@scottgunterux Scott Gunter Vice President of User Experience, Usability Sciences

Summary/Commentary:

Not everyone is ready for touch screen devices, but if you are going to roll one out make sure you do meaningful testing.

Notes:

The iPhone and the iPad have changed the whole dynamic of how we create applications.  Are we ready for it because it has changed our behaviors?  Are consumers ready for more touch screen devices?

Good example of touch screen devices in our lives:  There are over 400,000 ATMs in the US – source Wired Magazine 2009.  This device was not accepted early, but over time has become a standard.  There are now 28,000 kiosk locations nationwide for Redbox – this simple design is a recipe for success.

More choices create more decisions and that typically is bad for a User Experience.  (author note, thinking of Windows Vista here)

Distracted driving accounts for 16% of all care fatalities in 2009, most of these experiences were because of in-car entertainment systems?

Many grocery stores are getting rid of self service checkout. Big Y Foods due to their research decided to bag self service checkout.

“The most valuable asset of a successful design team is the information they about their users.” – Jared Spool

One of the best ways you can do this is buy doing a field study of observing your users.  What do you want to learn?  What do you plan to do with the results?  List out your assumptions and validate them.  This will allow you rollup your data in a meaningful way.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in research is rushing to conclusions before you complete your research.  Try to observe users in their natural environment.

Before you do your testing, conduct a pilot session, arrive early, then stay out of the way of your uses, don’t be afraid to adjust your plans on the fly, and capture all the data you can.

When you analyze your data make sure you test out your assumptions, go back to your objectives and leverage visuals, but above all let your data drive your analysis.

@lindzie Lindsay Wassell Partner and Consultant, KeyPhraseSEOlogy

Commentary:

Notes:

Create great news content and you can compete with main stream news media if you have expertise in that space.  It is easier to rank a video as opposed to entering a simple web page.

Images get great rankings, make sure you have a file name, alt tag and text around the image.  Use images in News articles, places pages, and use Panoramio.  Look for any opportunity to add rich media types as they will increase your rankings.

Google Local – if you have brick and mortar locations you absolutely must in local listings and encourage and manage reviews.  Local Places page you can add photos, videos, description, categories and address.

David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors is a great resource for using Google Local.

Microdata = Rich Snippets – all the search engines got together and set standards for classifying information.  Microdata (the date about data) is really important for rankings.  Check out Schema.org for examples of this.  Music microdata can be used to have links in search results directly to songs.

Products can be tagged using microdata to make them show up in a different way so it shows the reviews.

Info on Rich Snippet resources can be viewed on http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=21997.

Key Takeaways:

1. Expand your view of Search Marketing
2. Explore new content types and find ways to expand
3. Identify your content with microdata to help it shine in the SERPs.
4. Think beyond the web page

Next Generation SEO: Beyond Best Practices

@michaelmarshall Michael Marshall SEO Guru

Commentary:  The brunt of this one and its discussion of the Power Law did go over my head, but it was interesting from how this is used to generate traffic.  Personally I think he had too much content in his slides and moved too quickly so it was difficult to digest and get any true takeaways from the session.

Notes:

This is important because traffic leads to sales.

On-page Optimization has to do with Title Tags, Meta tags, ALT tags, Header tags, URL structure, anchor text, Keyword proximity is more important than Keyword density.

The Key to navigating through all of the methodology is MATH.

The Key benefit is to get the data so that you connect it to a mathematical model to create understanding.

More often than not your competitors have changed something that improved their rankings.  Don’t change too much at once on your site when it comes to SEO so you can track what you have changed.

StatistiXL is a great product for evaluating your SEO performance to do the work using Math as opposed to trial and error you will save money over time.

Make Your CMS Work for Your SEO, Not Against You

@markusrenstrom Markus Renstrom, Head of SEO Yahoo!

Commentary: The big take away here for me that the SEO team of your company needs to own how new pages are created to make sure they conform to a template that can be re-used to save money.

Notes:

It makes sense to have quality over quantity and you need to focus on your platform that you are going to use to get good SEO rankings.

Concept #1 – Expectations – If you work in search you need to educate your company on what they can expect from the results.  Markus spent time talking about what SEO is not.  SEO takes time, strategy and investment and not more links.

SEO is a long term Content Strategy.  50% of people are using 3 or more keywords to search now.  You also need to make that content accessible to everyone.  Search engines disable all of the javascript so that it can search through the content.

Think about who is the top user to your site?  Is the search engine your top user because they will actually look at everyone one of your pages.  SEO is about User Focused content.

Concept #2 Ownership – ownership created agility, enables standardization and automation, and it saves time and resources. If you create standards to tags and Urls it gets faster to create content.

Duplication is your enemy.  Your one article should not exist in more than one category. Dynamic URLs are scary from a search perspective.

The importance of tagging cannot be underestimated especially around the coverage of titles and well formed anchor tags.

Yahoo’s traffic is up even though they have reduced the number of pages by 40%.

Yahoo has its own content management system.

Next Level SEO: Social Media Integration

@bill_slawski Bill Slawski, President CEO, SEO by the Sea

Commentary: You should be teaching your clients about relevance of social in search results because they are the subject matter experts.

Notes:

Google has reacted to the advent of social media to show fresher more relevant content.

Bill brought up several sites that failed fast and hard like Dodgeball.com, Google Answers, Google opensocial, Googlevark, Google hotpot was integrated into Google places, Google SearchWiki, Google Wave, Google Buzz.  All of these have been shed and some parts are now being incorporated into Google Plus.

Real Time Search is what is changing.  The recent earthquake is great example of this.  Address recency-sensitive queries are starting to drive results from social media.  The results cannot be ranked the same way that normal web pages are ranked.  When you interact with Google Plus you are building a type of ranking system that will help results with your +1 activity.

Google Plus of course is now showing up in search results.  Authorship markup standards are now published by Google that will show your Google+ posts and your author picture to have richer content.  Authorship markup is difficult but uses the aforementioned mircodata from schema.org.  All Blogspot and YouTube contributions automatically incorporate authorship markup.  Google is using a contribution score to control how the markup is displayed in results.

Why Google+?  Well we should be using it because of the access to all the collateral data that they have access to.  Teach our clients on how to social network instead of networking for them.

Driving Innovation in Audio : How ESPN Takes Content Local, Mobile and Social

@espn Traug Keller Senior VP, Production, Business Division

This is a mix of my thoughts and pseudo quotes of all presenters.

Notes:

ESPN’s mission is to bring sports to fans anywhere at anytime and now you can be bored in any meeting and watch ESPN.  This might be the greatest innovation in history.

They were one of the first radio companies to stream their presence. How are their audio users interacting with ESPN?

1. 21.1 minutes with the Internet
2. 12.3 minutes per day with Mobile
3. 55.9 minutes with Terrestrial Radio
4. 27.5 minutes with Streaming Radio

In 2010 the decided to put the World Cup on the Radio.  Many thought this was a dicey proposition.  During the Cup on an average day 6.6 million people tuned in to the coverage. Among all the listeners 30% were digital.  This is HUGE.

I have to get a hold of Traug’s slides because ESPN does great data management.  The thing they spent the most time on is the ESPN Radio App – Number One Paid App on iTunes. $2.99 one time fee.  They really focused on the less is more strategy.   The App has more than 500,000 downloads.   He dropped @sportsguy33 Bill Simmons, when he does a pod cast over 1 million people download it after it is posted and they have found a way to monetize it.

Mobile Audio is no more complicated than making the experience convenient, on the go, and INTERACTIVE.  They monitor the number of Tweets on Mike and Mike to see when to move on to a new topic.

The story for ESPN Audio is GROWTH.  The prediction of the session was that we may see the end of AM Radio in our life times because of mobile devices.  ESPN just make it easier to listen and they were able to increase revenue for ad sales.

Some stats:

1. Most listened to sports stream on the planet
2. ESPN brand lives in over 350 markets nationwide
3. Over 24 million listeners per week consuming ESPN content
4. Over 24 million total streaming listening hours
5. Nearly 32.5 million session starts
6. 9 million to 10 million podcast downloads per week

Someone asked a question about whether or not they were worried that users were transitioning to moving away from traditional cable providers.  Traug’s response was that people a lot smarter than him are going to try and figure that out.

Commentary:

Mobile Consumer Issues – Privacy and Trust

@franmaier Fran Maier President & Executive Chair, TRUSTe

Notes:

Privacy Tips for developers: Get Serious about Privacy, Give Consumers Transparency and Choice, Always Ask Before Collecting Location Data, Prepare to Offer Opt-Outs For Mobile Ad Targeting, Push for Mobile App Directories to Filter by Privacy and Security.

Shorthand for TRUSTe is Transparency, Choice and Accountability.  TRUSTe works with companies to figure out how information is shared.  Consumers want choice over how their information is shared and they want CONTROL over how my information is shared.

A lot of apps are asking for notice about collecting location data, but they don’t explain what they are doing with their location information.

Without transparency 70% of all consumers think they are being tracked on your mobile phone, but we need to do a better job of educating consumers. 45% of consumers said that they would not share information even if they were offered free services.  Many consumers feel like the App Stores don’t give a good overview of privacy security.

300 of the largest free apps and only 25% of them have a link to their privacy policy, the message there is to really as consumers to push for privacy policies so you can hold companies accountable.

You can download a mobile privacy policy generator at TRUSTe if you don’t have one.

Commentary: The content of this presentation was really relevant to what is happening today in the mobile space, but the stats and survey’s were really powerful, but the slides and charts were not really very easy to read and they really were the story about educating the consumers so they can make better choices.

Uses for Location-Based Mobile Marketing for Non-Brick and Mortar Business

@gregkihlstorm Greg Kihlstrom, Chief Creative Officer and Founder, Carousel30

Notes:

Why location based services?  It is all about engaging people about where they are physically located. How do you take advantage of this technology if you have on-line presence only. Location based marketing does not only mean FourSquare.

Consumer = location.  As the consumer you can become a location now.  Greg referenced the Heineken’s app that allows users to connect during soccer games.

Red Cross created a Blood Donor badge on FourSquare.

Deliver exclusive content that can only be delivered at a conference.  Animal Planet had a campaign at ComicCon where you had to find BigFoot and Tweet a picture if you found him.

History Channel has offered tips at Historical Places when you check in to them to better send a message about their brand.

One of his major points was to use the right medium to cater to the audience that you are trying to reach.  The California Department of Public Health created a text service to send locations where you could get a flew shot during the H1N1 crisis.

Not everyone is motivated by obtaining a FourSquare badge, but a lot of people think that it is valuable.  These are successful because they are exclusive!

Commentary: There is tons of room to grow in this arena, but find something that motivates and captivates your audience.  The main point is that mobile location marketing creates an opportunity to create ads that are beyond the normal flat advertising.

Right Here, Right Now: The New Pace of Mobile Consumer Insight

@lumimobile Dana Kirchman SVP, Head of Client Operations

Notes:

The opportunities to survey your costumers are out there because you can collect information instantly and Report Immediately as to what is happening with your clients.

Mobile unites four insight types: Self Reported, Behavioral Insight ( your phone can tell you how far your drove to get a bargain ), Social Insight, Emotional Insight ( video recording of emotions in reactions to advertising ).

With the mobile world has the focus group died? Can you have access to larger groups and get access to data in the same day?

The challenges that are out there today are the multiple platforms (iPhone, Droid, iPad), device customization, data plans and costs of those plans are some of the challenges.  Are we trying to reach users that don’t have a TV, a high bandwidth plan, but they have a phone.

What is the potential of mobile?  Can an app capture health and wellness?  Can it capture leadership behaviors?  Could we use games as a diary? Is Crowd Memory very far away to share all of our experiences?

Commentary: This is more of a high level overview of what a few different valuable people in the industry are trying to push, but overall I thought it was at too high, too broad, but again some valuable insights.

Think Like An Internet Marketer

Watch our Prezi / Video

Want to think like an Internet marketer? Let’s start with a story. Recently over lunches, phone calls, webinars and emails an important idea surfaced. Were Facebook LIKES becoming the new “link love”? Friends who run startups, large ecommerce sites and other Internet marketers I trust were seeing something in their web analytics, something new. Are Facebook LIKES the new link love?

The Facebook “LIKE” button was mentioned by Byron White, CEO of IdeaLuanch, Phil Buckley Interactive Media Director at Capstrat and entrepreneur and CEO of PointShops Eric Garrison. One friend mentioning “Likes are the new link love” has me reaching for a thinking cap, two friends saying  something similar creates a search for articles and links. Three smart friends = a new Internet marketing truth.

But we didn’t have confirming data, or nothing my friends would share .

Hope you are as blessed with smart, smart friends since life is so much easier. My friends pay for their lives knowing statements such as “Likes are the new link love” mean our Internet marketing world is changing again. We lucky few Internet marketers must change or lose traction. Traction is life online. Traction is NEVER neutral. You always gain or lose traction.

Search Engine Optimization is the giant scorecard in the sky. The most immediate interim step, the thing before you earn money, is creating an ever expanding Google presence and why platforms beat web sites. Platforms, sites capable of putting up hundreds of thousands of pages (Amazon is on their way to a billion), win Google’s content marketing network race.

Google is always only an addictive environment. Take things away and pain ensues. Take away too much from Google all at one time and MONSTER pain ensues (been there, done that, burned the t-shirt and NEVER want to do it again). Since almost every Atlantic BT customer HAS a web site these days, our jobs are changing again. Back in the day we preached  search engine optimization (SEO), content network marketing and social media marketing.

We carried, new and so suspect Internet marketing messages to a mistrusting, skeptical mob. We rode a noisy old roller coaster clattering its way up a towering railed mountain hoping wheels held and no one moved suddenly. Reaching the top we threw our hands up in sheer joy as Newton’s roller coaster laws came into full force. In search of consistent absolutes we never find (or never find fast enough),”Facebook LIKES are the new link love,” sounds good.

We wait and wait for data. Reviewing NorthFace, Patagonia and Oakley for a prospective customer we found the data, the sword in the stone. Each major adventure sportswear brand finds a way to win with Internet marketing. How they win reinforces their branding. Web marketing is an accurate reflection of who you, your product, brand and company are. Here is how three different and competitive brands found blue oceans in the adventure sportswear online RED OCEAN:

• NorthFace rules Facebook with 1.4 million likes producing a magical PageRank of 7
• Patagonia has the most pages in Google, a great blog and link love also PR7
• Oakley’s page count is way down, but they are Twitter scrappy with a PR6

Each company creates a unique strategy. They find ways to win traffic and Google “Authority”. Each understands internal strengths and weaknesses. They know how to play poker with competitors avoiding strengths in favor of exploiting weaknesses. There MUST be weaknesses creating blue oceans somewhere.

Every Internet marketer trades off gross # of site pages for winning on Twitter (Oakley), Facebook likes for blog posts (NorthFace) and Blog posts for Facebook Likes (Patagonia). Each brand’s character is visible in their Internet marketing choices. NorthFace is adventure, Patagonia community and Oakley adrenaline buzz.

Maybe your site sells high end audio like Moon Audio, is the leading construction M&A firm in the country such as FMI or your Informer application connects disparate databases for easy web reporting such as Entrinsik. Your business segment doesn’t matter. Somewhere there is a blue ocean. There is a blue ocean in every business, a piece of ocean not yet red with carnage. Watch the Prezi below to see how Oakley found Twitter, NorthFace cornered Facebook and Patagonia knitted strength from a  campaigns (1% for the Planet), blogs, social media and site strength (Patagonia had the largest number of pages in Google).

Are Facebook LIKES the new link love? YES, unquestionably.

On Monday, if your site doesn’t have Facebook’s LIKE button LARGE and IN CHARGE, think, “What would Steve do?” And, plaster the thumbs up all over your site in clear and present danger, make your customers trip over it, campaign on it (free something when you LIKE us on Facebook) and you will be doing what Steve would have done. You will be thinking like an Internet marketer.

Not convinced?

Watch this Prezi and then plan to walk over to your IT department, beg, plead and cajole to get Facebook LIKES all over your website as soon as possible.

Think Like An Internet Marketer Prezi – Watch the VIDEO NOW.

Grab your friends, family and pumpkins, then join us for a Halloween celebration unlike any other: compete  in our Pump”King” carving contest, chunk your pumpkin the farthest to win “Lord of the Gourd”, and lots of fun for the kids to decorate their very own pumpkins.  We’ll have plenty of food and beverages, so come hungry.

Festivities begin at 4PM.

Rain or shine.

We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

A step in the right direction towards making the internet “less big brother”? As internet marketing analysts and specialists write angry blog posts, I’m relieved. The internet just became more private. It may surprise you that an Internet Marketing Analyst feels this way about Google trying to hide search referral data.

What is SSL?

The acronym stands for “Secure Sockets Layer” which is a way of privately transmitting data through the Internet. Basically, when you are logged into your Google account and execute a search, it will prevent your search query from being grabbed by the website result you eventually click on.

Internet Marketing Just Got Harder

The Internet marketing is rife with Snake Oil salesmen. Businesses who promise the world based on little more than a grouping of keywords and magical thinking.  I’ve been optimizing web sites for search engines a long time and have yet to see magical thinking attain a Google page 1 listing. Have you heard this sentence before, “I will get you #1 position for  keyword x”?  This is the wrong question asked in the wrong way about the wrong thing. why Why focus on a keyword??  Keywords don’t kill business, people do. You hire us to increase your business.  Focus on a keyword’s rank and not the bottom line is how businesses die.

Once your company’s, brand’s or product’s unique selling proposition (USP) is defined, your creation story written and macro strategy outlined keywords can be placed in context. Keyword research is not fun. Researching keywords requires patience, determination and experience. It may be difficult for you to target specific keywords to optimize because they are “red oceans” (competition is intense) The good news is EVERYONE ELSE is having the same problem.

Google makes changes all the time. Everything we know can change any minute. “This,” as Mr. Pacino so aptly stated in GodFather III, “is the business we’ve chosen.”During my Atlantic BT tenure in Raleigh we’ve pivoted many times. SSL becomes just another turn, another rule in an ever changing game.

SSL and Search Retargeting

What is search retargeting?  Retargeting is when a company sells your personal and private data gathered when you visit a site via a “cookie”.  Ever had that eerie feeling of a company following you as you traverse the world wide web?  Google’s SSL implementation reduces the footsteps by hiding data from the companies who were  following you.

How search retargeting works:

1.  I type “best basketball shoes” into Google and visit www.about.com

2.  www.about.com assigns a cookie telling a cookie repository I searched for “best basketball shoes”.

3. Simpli.Fi, Rocket Fuel, or another search retargeting company buys my cookie data from a vendor such as Blue Kai.

4.  Nike works with the search retargeting company showing you their basketball shoe ads on advertisement exchange networks encompassing almost  85% of the internet.

5.  My search  information was just sold to the highest bidder!

Putting all of eggs in ONE basket?

Google’s SSL changes opens online marketers eyes forcing more creative solutions to grow client business.  Google wants to make the search experience better.  Is Google’s SSL change good or evil.  The good or evil question is moot, like most things GOOGLE this latest change, this SSL change, simply IS. If Internet marketing was the same all the time it would be less interesting and not as fun. Internet marketing is building castles on the beach as fast as humanly possible and with the inevitable mean regression already in mind. The next time some snake oil salesman promises a #1 listing on an intensely competitive keyword ask them about their sand castle building philosophy.