So my 5-year-old nephew (the little guy on the left in the pic above) is doing pretty well so far in the NCAA tournament on ESPN.com’s contest and is currently on the front page of the LEADERBOARD.

He was tied for 1st place until Montana lost so now he’s tied for 57th with a bunch of other people.  To give you some perspective, my bracket is ranked 2,947,313 on ESPN.com’s contest. Turrrible.

As for his bracket name…. His name is Jordan, middle name Alec.  My dog’s name is Briscoe. My friend Kacie would call Briscoe, Baby B. I liked it and would call Briscoe that now and then. Last week Jordan decided he liked it and wanted his name to be Jordan Alec Baby B.  I asked him yesterday if his last name was Langford and he said, “No. It’s Baby B.” And that’s that.

Here’s his bracket: http://games.espn.go.com/tcmen/en/entry?entryID=5238513

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Random: Jordan Alec Baby B’s Bracket

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Not actually part of the game

I just downloaded the Uncharted 2 Demo on my PS3 to take a look at what is touted as the best graphics the system has seen to date. When I got inside to check out the options I was greeted with something I certainly didn’t expect; Twitter. This is the first instance that I’ve seen of a console game integrating the social media service into it’s product. I haven’t messed around with it yet but it appears that you input your twitter credentials and then it will tweet your milestones and achievements while you play. I’ll mess around with it and let you know what I think. If you see some weird tweets about Nathan Drake in my account that’s where it’s coming from. I think this is a great way to use the service and I will guarantee that we will see more developers using this feature in the future: I’m looking at you Modern Warfare 2, take notes.

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Social Media and Video Games

Technorati Tags: Social Media, uncharted 2

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Google wave invites going for as much as 72 bucks? This has to be breaking Google’s Terms of Service

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Google Wave Invites Being Sold on Ebay

Technorati Tags: ebay, google wave

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Earlier today Techcrunch reported that AT&T sent a letter to the FCC complaining that Google was violating net neutrality principles by blocking calls that Google Voice customers make to telephone numbers associated with certain local exchange carriers.  Google offered a quick background on the situation:  “Local telephone carriers charge long-distance companies for originating and terminating calls to and from their networks. Certain local carriers in rural areas charge AT&T and other long-distance companies especially high rates to connect calls to their networks. Sometimes these local carriers partner and share revenue with adult chat services, conference calling centers, party lines, and others that are able to attract lots of incoming phone calls to their networks. Under the common carrier laws, AT&T and other traditional phone companies are required to connect these calls.”

Furthermore Google went on to state the differences between Google Voice and traditional carriers like AT&T:

• Unlike traditional carriers, Google Voice is a free, Web-based software application, and so not subject to common carrier laws.
  
• Google Voice is not intended to be a replacement for traditional phone service — in fact, you need an existing land or wireless line in order to use it. Importantly, users are still able to make outbound calls on any other phone device.
• Google Voice is currently invitation-only, serving a limited number of users.

AT&T has tried in the past to restrict the same calls that Google Voice is able to restrict.  AT&T’s letter to the FCC makes them come off as the jealous step-child.  I don’t think the FCC will think much of this complaint.

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AT&T Files FCC Complaint Over Google Voice

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I signed up for GrandCentral last summer before they stopped accepting new accounts. I didn’t have any need for it at the time but I felt it was a pretty awesome application and it sparked my interest.

Jesse and I now use it for LangfordSevier. When a client calls it rings both of our phones displaying the GrandCentral number. If we miss the call our GrandCentral voicemail picks up, the caller leaves a message and then we receive an email with a link to listen to the voicemail on the GrandCentral site. Pretty awesome and very organized.

By integrating with Google Voice it now allows conference calling which for the time being allows up to 4 people on a call, voicemail transcription, and the ability to record calls and store them online.

This allows us to have a business number without having to buy new phones and deal with monthly payments.  I highly recommend it for small businesses!

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Google Voice and GrandCentral Great for Small Businesses

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I’ve recently been dealing with a client that has been dealt the bad hand of seeing success through ppc advertising. Before I was involved with the company they picked up a consultant that suggested they start spending some money on PPC to drive traffic to their then new company, they explored the medium and saw an increase in sales (revenue, and I stress the difference between revenue and profit here). That consultant has long since parted ways but what he left behind was an everlasting twinkle for PPC in the eyes of the decision maker at the company.

Now let me preface what I’m going to say here with a caveat, I absolutely believe in PPC advertising, I think that there is a time an a place for it, I’m simply telling one story where it may or may not have been the best option.

The issue was that as the company grew they began to scale based upon total traffic and revenue, much of which was supplied by PPC advertising. In booming times the company was able to grow using both the organic traffic (which they had solidified through very good SEO practices) and also the aforementioned PPC traffic which cost the company a sizable amount. The company hired staff to deal with the new volume of sales and everything was good.

Then we entered this most recent economic downturn and things slowed down. Now this had two effects; one, sales were down based on the reluctance of users to purchase in the marketplace which reduced income, and two, advertising dollars were drying up as what revenue was being brought in was used for payroll and other mandatory expenses. So ad dollars were down, which lead to even less sales and even less revenues which led to less ad dollars… you get the picture.

The company has been forced to lay off several people and make major cuts in a lot of areas, including online marketing consulting, needless to say I have more time to deal with other clients. The decrease in sales based on a poor economy could likely not be avoided, but could a different approach to PPC make a difference in the situation this company is in?

Over the past couple years the amount of organic traffic to the site had dramatically increased and the previous online marketing consultant hustled to increase PPC spending to keep the ratio equal. Had they decided to decrease PPC spending while organic traffic increased they would not have been so susceptible to the decrease in consumer spending, as well as keeping the cash that they spent on PPC through those years.

The main point of this post is to convey that PPC makes sense in many situation, mainly for new sites that are trying to get established in a marketplace before their organic rankings take off, but does it make sense for an established company that ranks well organically to structure their business model and staffing numbers based on that traffic. When times are good and money is flowing PPC advertising can be a nice boost to increase overall cashflow (if the ROI works with the current site and conversion rates), but I stress the importance of not overstaffing based on those good times so when things slow down, you can pull the ads, conserving some cash, and still have a solid traffic base from all that hard SEO work you did early on. You did do that hard SEO work early on didn’t you?

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PPC as a Luxury, not a Business Model

Technorati Tags: Consulting, PPC

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Whew…that title was tough to spit out. DailyRadar claims to be “the leading portfolio of living trends.” Basically they’re Digg or Reddit for niche markets. I believe they started off with ShowHype.com and BallHype.com and now have around 23 niche sites.

Here’s a list of what they have so far:
BallHype
BeltwayBlips
MovieBlips
TVBlips
ComicsBlips
ActionSportsBlips
MMABlips
RevolverBlips

MacBlips
TechBlips
PCHardwareBlips
GadgetBlips
WallStreetBlips
MommyBlips
RacingBlips
FootballBlips
HipHopBlips
IndieBlips
GamerBlips
MassiveBlips
42Blips
EarthBlips
WebMarketingBlips

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Daily Radar adds more niche social news aggregator sites

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The percentage of mobile phone users who said they accessed social networks from their handset jumped 182% from September 2007 to October 2008, according to a study conducted by The Kelsey Group and ConStat.

What would we do if we couldn’t spy on our Facebook friends at all times?

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Mobile Social Networking Growing

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Announced yesterday, you can now keep track of what you need to do within Gmail. Sounds great, but Rob over at Regular Geek makes a few valid points on this new app and wonders why they didn’t just team up with a task management system like Remember the Milk.  Some of the most notable being:

• Gmail and Gtalk have had issues lately and this app is bound to have problems on its first release.
• Remember the Milk makes revenue from selling ‘pro’ subscriptions.

On top of that, Google has been laying off people lately.  I think the case can be made that they are spreading themselves too thin.

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Gmail launches tasks. Necessary?

Technorati Tags: gmail, google

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With the recent instability of our economy, many online and traditional marketing companies are having a hard time convincing their clients that they should continue to pay us.  Everyone knows that more often then not that marketing dollars are often the first to go, most of us also know that the companies that make smart use of their marketing dollars in economic downturns often can gain considerable market share.

Two strategies that can have great impact on the bottom line during hard times without spending a lot of extra money are website optimization and conversion optimization. Both of these processes are closely related but differ in a few areas; website optimization focuses on making your website comfortable and easy to navigate for the user while conversion optimization focuses on the final steps to get your customer to complete your conversion goal.

The immediate benefits of website optimization is a lower bounce rate, higher pageviews and more time on site due to greater user comfortability. Conversion optimization will help funnel existing users to complete your goal, whether that is to purchase a product of download a whitepaper.

Both of these strategies can work very well in situations where the decision maker is hesitant to spend money for two main reasons: One is that with a solid analytics program you can offer hard numbers on the difference you have made for the client. Managers and clients will be less resistant to spend money if you can show them with hard facts that what you did helped, no more guesswork. Reason two is that the time it takes to see if the changes you have made is less than the time it takes to determine if traditional methods have been successful. This short time to results is much easier to pitch to a client.

Probably the biggest advantage to these strategies is that you can use your current customer base as your target. The entry sources are already in place wheter they be organic search results, direct entries or ppc campaigns. If you are currently converting at .5% and you can optimize your checkout process to increase your conversion rate to 1%, you have effectively doubled your revenue, signups or whatever your metric may be. That sounds pretty cost effective to me.

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Website and Conversion Optimization in Hard Times

Technorati Tags: Website Optimization

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