I’m sure all of us went through a stage where no one understood us and we felt alone in the world (all of us at once oddly enough). The litmus test for me was the day the automatic urinal flushed while I was still standing at it. Even an object that gets peed on all day doesn’t know I’m alive…

Luckily machines have allowed us to beat most of that loneliness and connect with people in new and weird ways.

But, there are times when it seems that machines only widen the gap between us and others. Emoticons, after all, can only communicate so much. And, now that machines “talk” to us through targeted advertising, we can sometimes wonder how much they really “know” about us. And, we can worry that they’re right.

For instance, does Google really know about my secret desires to be a controlled-asthmatic, spiritually-awoken SWAT Team Officer who sells Tonka trucks on the side while secretly nursing an addiction to teen vampire novels?

I mean do they have a direct line into my cerebral cortex? It’s all there in Green and Black and Blue and White. How could they know so much from just the Facebook friend request of my high school classmate’s creepy ex-boyfriend?

After all, they’re doing targeted advertising now? I mean there were months at a time when Google gnawed at my sub-conscience with a single question: “Are you a slacker mom?” “What if it’s true?” I worried, despite having no children at the time and being male. “What if I am a slacker mom?”

For the record:

• I wanted to be a police officer until about sixth grade, but not part of the SWAT team. (And no, I didn’t see the LL Cool J/Samuel L Jackson/Colin Farrell movie.)
• Although I played with trucks as a kid and have two boys, I can only think of one Tonka truck that we own, and that was bought by my in-laws and never referenced in an email.
• I don’t have asthma.
• While I do have an interest in childrens and young adult literature, I have no real interest in vampire novels.
• Finally, while I am religious, the wording of this ad seems far flung from anything I personally practice.

Wow, a five for five fail not only in interest to me, but also in relevance to the email in question (unless “Facebook” is a secret Google code word for “SWAT Team interest” or, for an even crazier theory, perhaps University of Phoenix is buying unrelated keywords).

The point of this post is two-fold (you didn’t think I had even a one-fold point, did ya?)
1. Buying unrelated or overly broad keywords defeats the purpose of targeted advertising. The whole point is to be able to more appropriately match your advertising to people who might buy your product/service. Because it’s unrelated, you’ll almost assuredly spend more for lower quality traffic annihilating all of the advantages.
2. PPC isn’t something you can set and forget. Because it’s targeted advertising, it ebbs and flows with the tide of the web. What is a relevant key word today may not seem so relevant a year, six months, or even one month from now. A year ago the word “twitter” meant: “to utter a succession of small, tremulous sounds, as a bird.” Now, it’s the hottest social scene on the web. Effective PPC takes time, a bit of know-how and a lot of elbow grease.

Don’t leave your PPC out in the cold. We all know what it’s like to feel lonely.

Over the coming months, Google will be rolling out a new way to target your ads on the content network called Interest-Based Advertising.  It’s basically behavioral targeting with a slight twist that I’ll talk about later in the post.

Up until now, advertisers could use the Google AdWords content network to target their audience in a few different ways.

Keyword Targeted

Advertisers can pick groups of keywords that are relevant to those Internet users who are likely going to be interested in the advertisers’ offer.  If there is content on Google’s content network that matches the keyword group, then the ad will potentially be displayed on that page.

Placement Targeted

If an advertiser knows their target audience frequents certain sites, then they can target those sites or specific sections of the site.  Advertisers’ ads will then potentially be displayed across those sites or on the particular sections of the sites that the advertiser has deemed to be the most relevant.

Placment and Keyword Targeted

Advertisers can also target specific placements with a group of keywords.  In this case, the ad will potentially be shown if there is content on the targeted placements that match the keyword group.

Google has now taken it a step further with the announcement of Interest-Based Advertising.  As an advertiser, you can now use behavioral data to target ads.  What this means is that Google will collect data on the types of sites users visit that are utilizing AdSense.  And, based on those sites, Google can determine categories of interest for each user.

Interest-Based Advertising will also allow advertisers to tailor ads based on how the user has previously interacted with their company.  For example, if a user has been to your site you could then display an ad to them on other sites they are browsing that offers them a discount on their next purchase.

For users, Interest-Based Advertising also gives them a certain amount of control.  Using Google’s Ad Preferences Manager, users can opt out completely which means Google will disable the cookie that is used to display the behavioral-targeted ads to the user. 

The twist that I mentioned at the beginning of the post is that Google is giving users the ability to change the interest categories that have been associated with their browsing history.  They can eliminate categories that have been assigned to them based on their browsing history. They can add categories that they are interested in but that have not been associated with them based on the sites they’ve visited.

If you’re interested in being part of the beta test for Interest-Based Advertising then fill out the request form.  In my opinion, it’s definitely something that’s worth testing to see if behavioral targeting will be a cost effective way to utilize the Google content network. 

Social media isn’t a fad, and it’s no longer for the early adopters.

 Companies have realized the benefits of integrating social media into their communications strategy, and the downsides of not doing so.  But, there are bound to be companies that make mistakes, running out and implementing ideas that seem great rather than sitting down and thinking them through. Companies that think using social media means that they have to ‘shoot from the hip,’ and companies that just don’t get how to play nice with others.   Given the news of the last few weeks, I though it was a good time to throw together some examples:

Boring Boring Facebook

How many times have you been talking to a friend / spouse / relative / co-worker and said or heard:

• “I hate my job”
• “My job’s boring”
• “My boss is a @#&@*(@$(@*”

Sixteen year old Kimberly Swann of Clacton, England wrote on her Facebook page that her job was boring.  She didn’t identify her company, and only her friends could see it, so it shouldn’t have been much of a problem.  However, she then began adding co-workers as friends on Facebook, and one of them reported her to management, which resulted in her instant dismissal.  So now, instead of only her friends seeing her say that Ivell Marketing & Logistics was a boring place to work at, everyone who performs a Google search for their name can see 8 out of 10 listings (plus a Google News listing) that talk about the firm firing a 16 year old for being in the natural state for her demographic -  bored.

Ryanair hates bloggers

A blogger by the name of Jason Roe though that he’d found a flaw in low cost airline Ryanair’s booking system, whereby flights could be booked for $0.  It turned out that he couldn’t actually complete the transaction, and it was really just a gui error.  His post did get the attention of Ryanair, with one of their representatives thanking him for informing them of the error by saying

jason!  you’re an idiot and a liar!!

erm… well, then another staffer chimed in to continue praising him with

Website is not perfect, Life is not perfect…
If you would work in your pathetic life on a such big project in a such busy environment with so little resources, you would know that the most important is to have usual user behavior scenarios working rather than spending time on improbable and harmless things. We very well know about these anomalies and unless it is not critical we are not going to sacrifice time to this.
If you would be a serious programmer you would know these things and would not post any of this on the web if you would think it can cause us troubles, but you would report to us directly.
Even you did not discover anything major you are still trying to benefit from this.
If I would be you I would think of consequences this can have.
If you would be a serious developer you would work out your About page as well. Or is this really about you? What is that bunch of links there? I could give my review of those websites and it would not be positive probably, but really I don’t know if you actually worked on them or what exactly you did and how big influence you had to make changes there. So keep working on yourself and don’t post bollocks.

Wonderful customer service.  But surely when management found out what their staff had said they’d correct the situation and smooth things out with the blogosphere?

It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy in corresponding with idiot bloggers, and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again. Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves, as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.

Ok… that cleared it up… Maybe they didn’t care because they knew that they were going to release some news a few days later that would knock this off the radar?  Yes, when they announced that they were thinking of instituting pay toilets on planes.

Twittering Skittles

Skittles.com has recently changed to be completely social media generated (bar the contact form).  Their site has links to their Flickr page, YouTube page, Facebook fan page and a twitter search stream on “skittles”.  Even their product pages aren’t company created, they instead point to the wikipedia pages for each product.  Their home page currently shows their ‘chatter’ page, which is the aforementioned twitter stream.

Is this innovative, risky or both?  More importantly is it working for them?  If their intention was to increase the chatter around skittles on Twitter, then I’d have to say that they’ve accomplished that as I’m seeing a lot of mentions in the feeds I’m subscribed to.  Now, as to whether that chatter is worthwhile chatter is another matter…

As for risks; right now people are having fun with the feed, writing anything they want and including skittles in the tweet.  That will naturally calm down as people get bored with it and move onto something else.  However, that doesn’t mean that someone with an agenda couldn’t disrupt this for them.  Say for example that an animal rights group decided that they wanted to publicize the fact that Skittles contains gelatin.  All they’d have to do is set up Twitter accounts and push that out every so often for it to get visibility on the Skittles home page.

Then there’s the issue of how a regular searcher would see when they hit the site.  I would think that they’ll think that there’s something wrong, or maybe even that the site’s been hacked, especially if the text on page is of an off-color nature.

For those that get social media, where’s the participation by Skittles?  All the feed shows is other people mentioning Skittles, there’s not even a mention of an official Skittles twitter account for people to follow.  This would have been an ideal opportunity to build such an account up, and have it engage with Twitterers (Tweeters?), as they do on Facebook, etc.

They’ve taken an interesting tack with their site, but I don’t think it’s the right move to make it stand-alone (sure, there’s participation on the Facebook page, but that’s not the focus of the site).  Ideally there should be at least a content wrapper around the site, explaining why the site is structured this way, and how people can interact with it, and with the people at Skittles.

ADDITIONAL: After writing this post, Skittles moved the Twitter feed off their home page, and instead made the Facebook page display as the default page.

So, you want to build a game, but all of that coding and leg work sounds too much like… well… work. Isn’t there another option?

The answer is a qualified “Yes.”

You’ve heard of this thing called “open source” which many penny-pinchers translate as free. While this is not the place for a deep discussion on what open source is or is not, one thing that must be remembered is that when you work with open source, you should honor the ideals of the original programmers.

Please either release your revisions with a similar license (whether or not you can release it with a different license is a question for a lawyer) and/or make significant contributions to the community whose work you are building upon.  A corporation/business taking open source code and repackaging it as their own is the antithesis of the open source movement (and possibly illegal). These are people, honor their contribution.

That being said, building on an open source game can keep you from reinventing the wheel. Even so, there’s still a lot of work to be done.

The greatest failing I have found in most open source programs is usability. Most of the time, programmers will program for programmers and will focus on functionality rather than usability.

This is great in that you can find a program like Gimp that has 90% (or more) of the functionality of Photoshop without the thousand dollar price tag. The down-side is that the interface isn’t very intuitive and can be really hard to use (particularly for someone who has no graphics editing experience).

Most of the open source games that I downloaded and played while researching this blog had great graphics and horrible gameplay and/or a poor user experience.

A Note About Me: The following reviews/thoughts will be tainted by three factors (at least).

1. I have a Mac so I only looked at games that would work on Mac (not all that rare considering it’s usually easier to port a Linux-based game to OSX than to Windows).
2. I have a fundamental belief that I, as a player, should not have to work to play a game. I can work while playing a game, but not in order to actually play.
3. I only have seven fingers. (This sounds like a joke but it’s true. I only bring it up because it affects my ability to hit certain key combinations. And, just because you’re wondering, the story involves a bar fight, a ninja, and an ancient prophecy).

N.B. I found all of these games using Wikipedia’s list of open source games.

Super Tux Kart: This Mario Kart style game was by far the best game I downloaded and the one that I often decided needed more “research.” I wasn’t a huge fan of the left-handed controls, but that’s probably more my lack of fingers than a fault of the game. Graphics –  were on the whole -pretty good although many of the tracks are textured with repeated and low-quality patterns.

Nexuiz: This multiplayer first-person shooter had some of the best graphics, but I’ve never felt more “pwned” than by the “easy” bots who riddled my character with bullets and various projectiles during the training level. I don’t tend to be a fps man, but I’ve held my own on Halo and its first sequel (no, not on Legendary). This felt overly hard to me, but I’m not 13 anymore with endless time to learn how to misspell “owned.” The controls were less than responsive and were difficult to use (especially for me).

Project: Starfighter This 2D shoot ‘em up had pretty good graphics, and an in-depth story.  But, the way they forced you to watch slow animations made me hate the game before I even played it. Gameplay was ok, but difficulty in precisely navigating the ship made it less fun than I wanted it to be.

Yo Frankie I’m not even sure what kind of game to call this. It has pretty good 3D graphics and a world you can walk around in, but little to no gameplay and lasts about as long as a blueberry pie in front of my Aunt Bertha. Load times are horrendous and there’s no explanation as to what you’re doing or why. This was probably built as a starting platform so that users could build levels and fill out the content (at least that’s what I’m hoping). They are in the midst of a level design contest.  But, from what I can tell there’s no overarching goal of putting out a “complete” game.

Which brings me back to the “qualified” of qualified Yes. If you want to use open source to give you a jump start on creating your game, great!   But, you must realize that there will still be a lot of work in developing a story, refining gameplay, creating graphics that are appropriate, and making the game something you’re ready to present to the world.

That said, using an established game engine might give you more time to focus on those things rather than starting from scratch and building every part of the game.

A word to the wise, taking an open source game, slapping your logo on it, and calling it done is worse than creating no game at all. In so doing, you’ll anger the programmers who made it, and – depending upon the game’s usability – you may also frustrate your customers/potential customers.  Please don’t do this.

Happy gaming and beware of skin sores!

Over the past few years, when working with clients to improve their pay-per-click campaigns, one of my first pieces of advice was to opt out of the Content Network.

From 2005 to 2007, it seemed the Content Network was just a black hole.   By default, a percentage of your spend was spent in the Content Network. 

Where did that money go?  Some of the traffic showed up in Web reports such as ‘Google Content Syndicated’ or ‘Google Ad Services.’  But, much of the traffic had no referrer information nor any keyword information.

And, if you did create a separate campaign for the Content Network, the traffic almost always proved to be lower quality than search traffic.

Google realized this.  And, back around 2007 … gave you the option to set bids differently for the Content Network than for search.

But, the problem remained. Where was this traffic coming from?  With no referrer nor keyword data, it was impossible to know.

Google realized this was a huge problem to search marketers.  So, while many search marketers were not paying attention … Google listened and made some changes, and the Content Network got good.

Some things you may not know about Google’s Content Network, 2009.

1) Reach – The Content Network reaches 76% of internet users across both mass media and niche media sites.

2) Placement Options – No more is the Content Network the black hole of search marketing.  You can choose where (type of site or specific site) you want your campaign to run.

3) Exclusions – Even better, if a site in the Content Network is not driving quality traffic, you can exclude it from the campaign.

4) Demographics – When you set up a campaign, you can include only the age and gender that you want to target.

5) Reporting – This is my favorite.  The Keyword/Placement report will tell you not only the normal stats for each click including domain but also interesting information about each site. (Parked Domain, Error Page, etc.)

If you are one of the search marketers who opted out of the Content Network a few years ago, it is definitely time to give it a second chance.