May 07
Supernatural Agency is a virtual company. Both of us have full time jobs at Software as a Service (SaaS) companies. Mike works at a hosted email company called BlueTie and I have recently joined Techrigy as Director of Marketing. We run Supernatural in our ’spare’ time, (not a lot of that) which fits our business plan of no customers, no employees, 8-10 hours a week of work.
Techrigy is a social media search and discovery company. Our SM2 service allows brand marketers and PR pros to track conversations and sentiment across blogs, wikis, online video, microblogs like Twitter and other social media in real time. As a domain owner, entering this vast universe of user-generated content (UGC), brings up something very interesting. This social media eco-system has millions of participants, members and users and very little of it rests on unique domains. In fact it is an entirely different iteration of the web. Nothing is static, communities form and dissolve constantly, opinions and ideas spread way too fast for conventional search to index and track, and these trends and memes can make or break a candidate, a product or a reputation overnight.
Unlike sites on domains, social media resides in a sphere of reputation that is fickle at best. Concepts like the social graph which (as I interpret it) attempt to map where you and your ideas reside in a three axis grid, are not fixed- they change as relationships change. Other concepts like semantic search attempt to understand the context of a query so they can improve the relevancy of results, the never-ending Holy Grail of search.
As you might understand the challenge of marketing this new universe of ideas is both irresistible and daunting. It took me months to be able to write the sentences above and feel that they made sense to me. Now I have to explain them to others and help them see why they should care about what people are doing and saying in that universe. Pretty cool or should I say Dyson?
May 05
Given the ballyhoo this morning over MS saying no thanks in the Yahoo takeover (and it would have been a takeover, the Borg don’t merge), there is all kinds of speculation about how they will handle the threat of Google. The problem with this analysis is that Google is not the only threat and may not be the primary threat.
In search advertising Google is so entrenched (70+% of the market) that no acquisition can really change the equation. The problem here for MS is growth. Their operating system and Office applications are where the money is, nearly all the money. Google’s Apps will threaten their cash cow Office franchise but the days of corporate acceptance of hosted applications for day to day business are still a ways off. It’s the operating system that is a problem, a big problem.
Apple is starting to make little inroads into acceptance in the corporate IT mindset, in part because Vista is a major failure and, in part, because it works great, is solid and quite resistant to malware, all critical issues for those IT people. Every time Apple takes a point of marketshare from Windows they not only add users for their software, they add a user for their hardware ecosystem (Macs, Exchange-compatible iPhone, Air), users MS will not regain. They are predicted to go from a 2% share of business users to 6% in the next few years. This is pure growth while MS is left trying to plug the leaks in a dam that could burst.
MS has always had a huge wad of cash on hand, in part because they have a poor record of profiting by acquisition- the Yahoo buy always looked like a desperate attempt to buy market share to me. But take a look at Apple- they have $19.5 billion in cash sitting around and that is growing each quarter. This would make a great warchest for a campaign to enter the corporate markets.
Finally, regarding advertising, which is what the search world is really about. There are no synergies between Microsoft’s desktop software business and their search business. Should they develop true hosted productivity applications like Google Apps they would be competing directly with Office. In both situations there is no growth model, the primary reason Ballmer should be shown the door- he has utterly failed to develop a strategy for growth which is his number one job description. Acquiring Yahoo was a last-ditch attempt to cobble together such a strategy. Net result:
- Google continues to grow in advertising and starts killing the Office business
- Apple continues to take market share with the combo of software and hardware
- Yahoo does ? (honestly I don’t know- their long term business model is equally blurry)
- Microsoft shrinks, possibly much faster than expected
May 04
Aaron Wall has done it again with a very detailed analysis of the value of a top ranking in both organic and paid Google search results. This is a long read but should be required for anyone working to drive traffic and conversions via search
May 01
When Joel Spolsky goes off on a rant like this you know there’s real trouble in Redmond because this guy knows whereof he speaks…