New blog URL: www.michaelsevilla.com

Ah vanity.

I’ve owned my url for a few years with intentions of building a website.

Time (or rather the lack of), kids, and the need to work have lead to the realization it ain’t gonna happen.

What’s a remotely tech savvy guy to do? Set up another blog!

Yes I know blogs are so 2005. Once in a while I just might have something interesting to say. At least in my mind that is. And I do need to get things done during the day, hence you won’t see me hanging out on Facebook or responding to Twitter.

All new musings are on: www.michaelsevilla.com

Ground Breaker Alert: Google offers TiSP

 If only it were true…

;~0

http://lifehacker.com/software/google/google-brings-broadband-to-bathrooms-248734.php

When Wining a World Series Is Not a Priority

I have always been a HUGE fan of the Red Sox. Living in Colorado, I don't get to see many games at Fenway anymore like I did growing up. Needless to say, when they broke the 86 year "curse", I was beside myself with joy. In fact, during the last game of the series, when things looked good (always a relative term for a die hard Red Sox fan) I woke up my kids to witness the event.

My daughter fell back asleep. Didn't care unless the Wiggles were in attendance.

My son, who was too young to walk, was barely awake as I held him in front of the tv to watch the last 3 outs of the game. Given the Red Sox history, this may be the only time he would see them win the World Series in his lifetime! And for the record, I did shed a few tears that night as I danced around the house.  

This morning I ran through my daily ritual of checking my favorite Red Sox blogs: soxaholix, boston dirt dogs, over the monster, etc… I saw a couple of references to this story by Dan Shaughnessy. The synopsis: the Red Sox haven't "gotten around" to re-signing boy wonder Theo Epstein as GM.

For those who have interests outside of baseball, Epstein was responsible for bringing a new approach to locating and retaining talent to the Red Sox. He based decisions primarily on player statistics. Without going into detail, he analyzed many different stats, and variations of stats to determine which combination metrics would best indicate the performance and value of a player. Not an easy accomplishment for a team steeped in traditional baseball management.

So I was shocked to read that after his much publicized departure and renaissance to the team, the Red Sox owner and CEO haven't gotten around to formally signing him up. Hmm, you don't want to sign the guy who brought together the right players and won baseball's top prize for the first time in over three generations.

Just watch, Theo will get fed up and go to the Yankees.

Engagement: The New Black

Yesterday I wrote an email to Jim Meskaukas, the President of the online division of Omnicom. The email was in response to an article he wrote in Media magazine, which is one of the trade publications put out by Media Post. (On a side note, you think a site that caters to media would be better organized and easier to navigate. But nooooooo!).

Jim's article focused on Engagement as a potential replacement for frequency. He was on the right track but his article missed a critical point: Engagement must take into account the actual actions of the target audience as well as how often, and in what context, the target audience engages with your brand/product.

Here's what I actually wrote to Jim:

Greetings Jim,

Just read your article on Engagement. Great points made.

One quick question to push the concept of engagement even further:

Does engagement tacitly demand that some action must result from the engagement?

I would argue yes it does, and it can be measured, within certain mediums.

Since you head up the online media group at Omnicom, I don’t need to pontificate about the web and measurability.

My theory on engagement can be broken down into 5 macro perspectives:

1. Did you reach your target audience (t.a.)?
2. Did your message resonate with that t.a.?
3. Is your t.a. repeating, and in a sense “forwarding”, the message?
4. How many times is the message being repeated and by whom?
5. What actions come about because of number 4?

I design products for understanding and tracking the blogosphere. We’ve developed a measurement of engagement by looking at two components:

1. Are new or existing bloggers talking about you (brand/product/message)
2. If so, how many times, and with what sentiment?

Of course the next logical step (predictability) would be, what action did those engaged (in this case) bloggers take? That’s a product we’re developing and will have ready in the near future.

Again, great article.

Regards,

Michael

 

I haven't heard back from Jim, but will follow up when I do.

Insight, If You Wade Through the Prose

Stowe Boyd has written a pretty insightful posting on “Social Architecture and the Future of Online Markets”. In his typical somewhat circuitious (I say that with admiration, not criticism) manner he lays out an approach to the interest sharing spheres-of-influence of individuals, social networks, and markets.
For anyone that has read (or is comtemplating reading) Blue Ocean Strategy, the themes and aproach will sound familiar.

For those that don’t want to read his posting (or the book) here are his bullet points summary:

• “The social architecture I have handwaved (individuals, social networks, and markets) at here will come to underlie all the successful applications of our day, and the earlier apps will rapidly adapt to this model or be eclipsed by other apps that do.
• In the near future, all ecommerce will be socialized: where a user’s transaction will feel as if it is taking place in the context of some social interaction — like reading a review at a blog about a camera, or a vacation — rather than the online catalog or classified experience supported by Amazon and eBay.
• All truly significant applications will span all three tiers of the social architecture model, and will demonstrate their worth directly by the creation of a market that brings buyers and sellers of some critical resource together in a new way.”

A Big Megaphone and a Test

Senior Scoble reporting on a blogosphere test. Interesting idea, although I can’t help but wonder if the real value is not in testing blog search engines (a snoozer in my book), but rather in testing the concept of idea velocity throughout the blogosphere. In blog time, I’m writing this late compared to Robert’s acutal posting on this test so I’ll post again on any updates.

In my mind the real value (if calculated) will be the spead and breadth of how this test is adopted and spread via blogs. Geeks with Blogs started the test, Robert reported on it. By the way, here’s my contribution to the test: brrreeeport
I’ll venture to guess that many readers of Scoble’s blog are tech-centric to some degree, so the caveat in any attempts to estimate the idea velocity to the general blogoshere should be put into a centricity context (technololgy related blogs) vs the blogoshere as a whole.

Rather timely, I read about a similar SEO test today in the Wall Stree Journal.

The Fly on the Wall in a Consumer’s Brain

Om brings up interesting points regarding privacy and a “cached life”: our paths and thoughts are on servers all over the place. Clearly users of web applications can be tracked, aggregated, analyzed and put into buckets of commonality. There are companies (e.g. Tacoda) that purposely deliver you ads/content based upon what they know about you (or a pre-defined profile they may have about people like you).

Don Dodge (formerly of Napster now at Microsoft) brings up a distinction between the cached life (online world) and the observed life (although he didn’t say it, I’m guessing he means the offline world, see the Comment section in Om’s blog). This brings up a somewhat contrarian thought for me. There is information we believe, or at least I believe, should be inherently private (search history, my iTunes downloads) and information we purposely make public (blogs).

Many marketers realize that blogs are a rich and open source of observational data. There are two main methods of extracting that data: Read each blog entry, or subscribe to a service that aggregates the information into meaningful chunks of insight.

For those marketers who don’t yet follow how people write about your products, services, and company in the blogospehre, Randy Moss recently presented on the concept and importance of apophenia. Marketers are crazy not to take advantage of this open source of consumer attitudes, insight, and behavior offered by bloggers.  Compare your market research and behaviorial data with information pulled from the blogosphere.  You might just “seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data”.