These days I get trend alerts for services and products with over 520% price deviation! (my last booked fare moved from $650 to $3420 and back to $870 in just 2 months).
Today we can track service prices and scan product barcodes at the store, choosing the perfect time and source to get what we are looking for. Awesome, isn’t it? Same product, same quality, 526% price amplitude ? Welcome to 2009!
Name it as you want it – crisis, shaking demand or branding wars…
If we do a quick comparison of the last 3 enterprise SEO analysis reports, they all share the same onpage/ offpage problems:
Mature and huge brands with rarely noted websites, scattered on 3-4 “fresh” domains on foreign servers;
FRAME-based! corporate websites with zero URL visibility or rewriting;
Thousands of products, hidden in ZERO crawl-rate framed pages and MISSING /duplicated metadata;
Missing lead capturing system or CRM – 30% of the “requests” were found in the spam folders;
Extremely low traffic, measured in raw log files, full of unfiltered dummy robot and spam visits;
Corporate focus and business sectors are presented NOwhere, industrial slang EVERYwhere;
Hundreds of “keywords”, stiffed on the homepage, leading to 0.4 -0.7% keyword density;
Poor navigation, structure, internal linking, MERE external linking;
Bad server response codes, HUNDREDS of bad crappy neighbor websites on the same shared IP?!;
Less than 60% indexed content by Google. Yahoo and Live are doing better!?
ZERO ranking for the 5 top priority phrases in ALL search engines;
Top5 ranking (by a “SEO expert”) for a few phrases, which NOone searched in the last 3 months;
Poor URL mentions in the search engines, some non-relevant poor quality links in local FFA directories;
DMOZ and Yahoo virgin, ZERO blog links or bookmarks, mere brand reputation and web2.0/social media backlinks;
Alexa…
I will skip the next 17 pages…
The fun part is that in the end of the day we won the SEO tender NOT with a statistically proved triple conversion and double sales increase strategy, but with the “sense that the consultants know why we don’t like our website look-and-feel”
The moral? If the line of business don’t gets the SEO part, shoot the Usability, Customer experience or even the CRM part.
… and keep brandmoving. See ya at the top!
It’s a nice snowy Sunday afternoon up in the mountain.
High time to recap the branding landscape in 2009.
Top performance through Digital brand management.
It’s a whole new layer in the business management workflow.
When we add Search & Social (marketing), Leads & Sales (CRM),
Mobile & Local (services), Micro & Global (sharing), Grids & Clouds (computing), the sky is the limit for creative innovation.
Hot chocolate with icecream, please.
Every year in late January, like today, heads of the leading companies worldwide go to the Swiss resort of Davos.
Around 2,500 participants from over 90 countries – politicians, artists, leaders and NGO campaigners jet off for a week of networking events and workshops “for a better world”.
Fighting the crisis or having some fun in the snow? Economic times have become harder. Paying members are about 1,000 companies, non-business participants attend meetings for free. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are not attending this year, Bono and Peter Gabriel are.
US president Obama has told several of his biggest people to stay at home.
The key players of the world economy China and Russia are side by side.
The event is just a very high-powered talking shop. Some launch global initiatives to fight poverty and epidemics, other get an opportunity to make their case and meet people who have the money to help them.
Caviar, lobster and Dom Perignon are out. Ham, cheese and wine are in. Caviar parties by top Wall Street bankers used to be the top buzz for the annual Davos forum, but the belt is tightening today. Leading banks like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan, are not holding parties anymore.
Aren’t these people who want to solve the world’s problems the same who caused them?
Bad news for our Caviar SEO campaign today.
I should stick to tiger shrimps for dinner.
While it still works to inspire a weekend Google Bomb and make the government #1 failure, we can’t change the optimistic human mindset and drive for Success.
The search volume for Success (успех in Bulgarian) is over 12 times higher than the search for Failure (провал).
Millions of creative optimists out there…
See you at the top!
The holiday’s shopping fever is over. While the visitors trend to our caviar and fashion website projects dropped down to their “normal” levels, reflecting the worldwide search volume trend for December/January, ecommerce conversion jumped 3 times. The battle is Quality vs. Quantity. Performance matters, beyond trends. In the end of the day the 80/20 ratio is rock solid.
After a deep research for my smart tools upgrade, Santa brought me a new smartphone, camera, monitor and MIDI controller.
They all share a common trend for 2009: slim and stylish design, hundreds of consolidated features, precise touch control and web-native applications.
…but you may end your holiday with HTC’s Touch Pro, like I did.
All you need – wherever you are.
Digital Camera
Canon PowerShot SX1
Recently gone through some hunting, I decided to compare Canon EOS 450D with the new Powershot SX1. The pictures from the dSLR were comparable to the ones by the SX1, which is a great hybrid – crisp macro and enormous telephoto zoom in a one-hand package was a perfect fit.
If you wanna get rid of your old and heavy SLR, Canon SX1 is empowered with features never seen before on a compact camera:
20x wide-angle optical zoom
10 Megapixel CMOS
new DIGIC 4 processor for fast performance
4 fps continuous shooting and
full HD movie capture!
2009 will be the year of the rich, detailed, crisp full HD images in a wide ISO range of shooting situations with full manual control on the move.
All-in-one LCD Monitor
Samsung T260HD
I was tired of messing with 3 screens in the studio, so an upgrade to a full HD, crystal clear LCD monitor with integrated DTV tuner was a perfect fit.
The Samsung T260HD is a 26″ Widescreen full HD+ (1920×1200) resolution with embedded DTV tuner, 10000:1 dynamic contrast, 2 invisible built-in SRS TruSurround speakers and 5ms grey-to-grey response time.
The viewing angle in both axis is over 160 degrees, so I can follow what’s is going on literally from everywhere, even from the bent glass bathtub. Finally all video cables go to the same unit – Analog RGB, DVI, HDMI, Component, and TV. The only problem I had was, that there is no VESA wall mount, so I had to mount it on a wall TV swivel/ tilt stand.
MIDI controller/ Stage piano
KAWAI mp5
8 years later I’m happy to get back to daily jam sessions with hundreds of native sampled instruments, played on an advanced hammer action professional stage piano. After testing CME VX8 and Yamaha Motif XS8, I decided to stick to KAWAI and their 80 years of piano sound experience. The new KAWAI MP5 is sure to satisfy the most demanding performer’s need for impeccable sound quality, responsive touch, 4 zones and powerful control. Not to mention using it as master 88-key MIDI controller in your home-based studio. Boasted with 256 high-quality instrument sounds, including Kawai’s famous Concert Grand piano, the sound is awesome! Hope to find a KAWAI K1 library, which was my favorite 12 years ago.
It’s good time to get our business plan up to date, to recap 2008 and get a strategy for 2009. Last year we learned and achieved a lot. The main strategy components for 2009 will be the same, but still we need and update and it will be finished soon.
Any questions or suggestions are welcomed.
All the best for you, your family and your business!
