Life in the Blue

A great idea from Enviseo today. The idea is to take a look around work areas and compare them with fellow SEM’s. Let’s give it a try.

I was once told by a fellow young executive that her boss told her to spend 2 hours per week cleaning her ‘work area.’ If my boss thought I was spending two hours a week cleaning my desk he would fire me on the spot. If he told me to I would probably litter the entire floor with animal crackers and spend the rest of the day playing Sega. I mean I use a calendar with the pictures drawn by 2nd graders for crying out loud.

I wager that most fellow SEM’s must have desks that look similar to mine. Let’s go on a guided tour. With us today will be famed Sand Maps tour guide, Geraldo Rivera.

Good morning and welcome everyone. We start with an aerial photograph looking down where the computer is stored. Clearly an important young executive here. Why, he has a half a ream of paper and a box that at one time contained a $9.99 answering machine from Staples. It looks like he has a Fisher Price my first printer off in the distance there as well. And, very important, a roll of paper towels to wipe up spilled vitamin water or gin and tonics, whatever the drink of the day is.

Looking behind the desk we see he stores all of his important papers in Dunder Mifflin paper boxes stacked on top of each other. There appear to be some unused manila folders there as well. I’m sure if he should even need to make some important graphs in excel, he would file them there. Martha Stewart once told me on the Geraldo Rivera show that all important young executives store their important papers on the floor. There also looks to be a football and wiffle ball stored along side last years stock portfolio. He probably uses those to throw at his local donkey.

As you can see his desk is also very in order. An empty bottle of vitamin water always makes for a great paper weight. He appears to handle all of his writing with a bic pen and yellow crayon. He is also very high tech, keeping his cell phone in reach at all times, and let’s not forget the aviator sunglasses, those are always in style.

He seems to have a great filing system atop his desk going on as well. The most important papers are pushed more toward the middle to ensure they won’t fall off, while less important ones move to the edges and eventually fall off. In an exclusive interview, I learned that once the papers fall off, he files them in the perviously mentioned Dunder Mifflin paper boxes. He feels this improves productivity by 37%.

And anyone in need of a new task management system, or TMS as they call it in the biz, check out his high tech color coded task system. He appears to write his to do list in crayon. For a small fee of $5,000, he will teach you his excusive TMS that uses only the back side of a piece of scrap paper, one pen, and two or three crayons.

Thanks for joining me on tour this evening everyone. Don’t forget to tune into me and my broom pusher man stash on the Gerald Rivera show on the Fox Noise Channel.

That was fun. Props to Enviseo for the idea again. If you time, put some photos on your blog and leave a comment. Next time we will compare underwear.

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I decided to bite on the ABC’s of SEO sponsored by Enviseo for another post.

By now I am sure that someone like ALGS Nate has explained to you why milk is located in the far back corner of a grocery store. The reason for this is simple. The supermarket is trying to get as much money from each shopper as possible. They don’t want you to simply buy the milk you originally walked in there to get, they also want you to buy a few other ‘impulse’ items while you are there.

To get milk you have to walk thru all the other drinks, bread, and of course all kinds of tofu organic food that has the flavor of a piece of paper. There’s just nothing like an organic ham flown in with rice pellets on an organic airplane from China to brighten anyone’s case of the Monday’s.

The point is the store has already spent all kinds of advertising and fixed costs to get the person into the store. Now, what if they buy two items instead of just one? That’s pure profit and that’s how ALGS Nate and his excel files makes money honey. Since SEO Nate has $10,000 to throw away on TV with Rob Lowe, he will happily drop $20 for some freeze dried carrots wrapped in organic bread to go with the milk he bought for his local donkey.

While it is true that driving visitors on an easily navigated path thru your site is the best way to convert them, this doesn’t mean you have to throw out all sorts of other money making opportunities. Maybe you could recommend a similar item or gift certificate. If all else fails throw adsense in your site, as long as you can do so without making your site look spammy or hurt its rankings.

Monetizing visitors is difficult and there are always barriers like sending people to other crappy websites that are not optimized, tracking issues or having to actually converse with someone outside of your cubicle, but the extra profit you can gain makes it worth a try. M is for monetize, and that’s good enough for me.

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I would like to share one final story that not many people know about Super Bowl XLI in Miami. It has nothing to do with who won or lost the game, the rarity of running back the opening kickoff for a touchdown, or how many points were scored. Before the game even started, at the mid field pre game coin flip, the Indianapolis Cots of the AFC called tails. After the coin was flipped, and heads was the winner, Jim Nantz of CBS Sports proclaimed that although the odds were more than 1000 to 1 against it, the NFC had now won 10 coin flips in a row.

Was Jim Nantz correct to announce this? Did he get his statistics right? In the PPC industry, people can use numbers to claim just about anything. It is up to you to decide which of the numbers actually mean something, and which do not. Everyday there are variations in your data, but you don’t get all worked up each day over the slightest change. It is up to you do decide when numbers are telling you something, and when they are just part of normal variation.

One way to gain an intuition into randomness is to take two people and play a coin flipping game. Tell one of them to flip a coin 100 times (or use this coin flipping simulator) and record the results. Tell the other to make a fake sequence of 100 coin flips that is supposed to look as though they had actually flipped the coin. Anyone trained in probability or statistics would be able to easily tell the difference between the two sets of 100 flips. The fake one will be almost too random, and will alternate too much between heads and tails. However, the real flips will contain a run or two of 5,6,7 or more in a row of all heads or all tails. Check the simulator if you don’t believe me.

In reality, are you more likely than not that in a series of 100 coin flips to see either a long run of heads or tails? To understand just takes a little bit of information about basic probability. The actual odds of flipping a coin 10 times and getting all heads are in fact 1024 to 1. So Jim Natz was correct, that would be equal to the odds of one side winning the coin flip 10 years in a row. However, those are the odds of picking up a coin and flipping it only ten times and getting all heads. If the Super Bowl is played for 100 years, there are actually 90 different sets of 10 flips in a row. So, if the Super Bowl is played with the coin flip in the same manner for 100 years, there will be 90 opportunities for one side to win 10 times in a row. Another way of looking at this is to say that the first flip of10 flips in a row happens 90 times. That means that in 100 years of the Super Bowl, the odds of one side or the other winning 10 times in a row are actually closer to 9%. In fact, if the Super Bowl is played for 375 years, there is actually a 50% chance that one side or the other would win 10 times in a row.

I like to play blackjack on my frequent trips to Las Vegas, so consider this example. For simplicity, let’s say the odds of winning a hand of blackjack are 50%, and you wager 15% of your total capital from after your last winning hand, on each hand you play. To run out of money, you would only need to lose 7 consecutive hands. Well with a 50% chance of winning, the odds of losing 7 times in a row would be 128 to 1. That would never happen! Right?

Well say thru the course of one sitting you play 4 shoes with 25 hands per shoe. That is a total of 100 hands. Calculated similarly to the odds of one side winning a coin flip 10 times in a row, in those 100 hands it would be more likely that not to go on a losing run of 7 hands in a row one time, and you would be out of money.

I bring this example to you to get you to think about the way people present numbers. Indeed, in after only 41 years of the Super Bowl, one side winning 10 times in a row is quite unlikely, but not totally unexpected. The point here is that over the long course of a strong PPC campaign, there is destined to be some serious variation. What will separate the best SEM’s from the rest will be those who can understand and interpret the statistics on their own, and those who cannot.

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For me, the letter ‘S’ with relation to SEO can mean nothing else than Shoemoney. Talk about an industry player, Shoemoney has done a great deal for the community whether it is relating to his radio show, blog, speaking sessions, conferences, or the like. He has helped me learn a lot and more importantly, make more money.

When I first started getting into search marketing, I did some looking around on popular forums and blogs that I could find through Google and I kept coming across this name over and over. At first, I was just impressed with amount of time the guy was referenced in other people’s discussions regarding search marketing. I had to check out his blog. Honestly, I have made it a daily stop for myself ever since.

I’m not really sure what to highlight as I’ve been able to gain so much just by following along for the past year and a half. I specialize in PPC and while that is only a portion of the things he is an expert in, I gained a lot of insight from the 2-part podcast on PPC he put out last summer. Along the way I have also picked up a lot of useful tips on affiliate marketing and just SEM in general, that, like I said, have helped me be much more successful with my PPC campaigns for my company.

I’m sure my case is the same as many others – I’ve seen a lot of praises of the big Superman/dollar sign symbol out in the blogosphere. Fitting, then, that for EnviSEO’s ABC’s of SEO that he earns an entry under ‘S’.

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Since we are all in the advertising biz I thought I would share what I consider to be the deteriorating advertising in America. Corporate America must think that the US population drives pick up trucks, gets fat, buys all their clothes from Wal-Mart and shoots guns at mailboxes. Let me give you a few examples of said companies, who I vow to never purchase from again.

By far and away the leader, Hardees. You have seen these. They are usually of some fat construction worker chomping down on a ‘thickburger’ the size of a small plane. The thought that the sound of chewing a huge mass of greasy meat and talking with your mouthful makes me want to buy your burgers is insane. Then they came out with one staring a woman truck driver that had to win Ms. Missouri’s homeliest person contest. She is tearing into a salad and all you can hear is the sound of her smacking her dirty trucker fingers. Yeah, this makes me hungry. Throw on a burrito while you are at it.

Second goes to Chevy. During the recent college bowl games and NFL playoffs, they played that hosier country song ‘This is Our Country’ while people loaded up their trucks at every commercial break. People who live on the east or west coast must think that is how all people in the Midwest are. Drivin’ arend in my pickup, gunna get me a four wheeler. Secondly, I promise you that 80% of people who purchase these trucks will never once put anything in the bed. They will use their huge pick up to tool around on city streets, swinging thru the Hardees drive thru.

Three is kind of an odd one. Olive garden. They have these people who in no way reflect anyone in actually society. There are ladies sitting around giggling with their girlfriends and their waitress. Then the perfect husband walks in with the smiling perfect kid. Yeah right. First off, waitresses at Olive Garden are high school students. Second, this perfect husband with kid in tow does not exist. Has this ever happened? I don’t this so. More like the husband is late, and forgot the kid.

Next up is Applebee’s. A chain restaurant with one or more in every city in the US does not make you a small home town place. By that standard McDonalds could be a ‘hometown’ restaurant. I challenge you if you go there to ask someone who works there about the local high school sports squad. If they even know the mascot, you win. And not to mention the thousands of times they showed their singing dorks last year during the NCAA tournament. Every time it went to commercial it was, “sit right down and hear a tail, a tail of some tasty shrimp.” Good grief, is this what creative advertising has come to?

Finally, a local store. Furniture Factory Outlet. I have to try to explain this to you, but it is a lady who talks like she is from deep in the Alabama south and is going to “tell ya abert all the hot deels dern here at fernitcher factery outlet.” Are you kidding me? Every single person on television or radio can learn to speak correctly, but this lady cannot? She is always wearing a turtleneck every day of the year, even in the dead of summer. And she has a hairdo that was popular in 1982. Here’s a tip, You might want to do something, about that hair.

As advertisers, lets challenge ourselves to be better. Be more creative and get away from the same old garbage that used to sell soap in the 1950’s. I know we can do it.

PS – Did any notice that Yahoo SM sent out an email with the word advertising spelled wrong? Priceless.

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