Slides from our latest Web Strategy Bootcamp webinar

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A slide from our upcoming webinar “running your business online in 2010”

The webinar is this Thursday 12/10 at 2:00 PM CST, 3:OO PM eastern, and 12:00 Noon Pacific…

Sign Up Here

Got questions or comments on running your business online? Ask us @WebStrategyShop!

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That’s why I keep going back

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So I bought a Dell Inspiron Zino HD yesterday to run the man cave theater and I noticed an interesting strategy from Dell…

When going through and applying some upgrades (ram, etc) I stopped on keyboard. You see this will be hooked up to a projector and TV so I will need a wireless keyboard and mouse – and the one I have requires a PS/2 port – which the Dell Zino doesn’t have.

Here’s what I saw…

The Dell Wireless Keyboard & Mouse listed costs $75 – which I thought was a tad much since you can get a decent KB/Mouse combo for under $50… Not to mention the picture has a wired mouse… Anyway I decided to jump over to Dell’s accessories store to see what was up. There, I saw this…

Yep – that’s $15 cheaper. What’s the strategy here? Well when you are in the process of buying a several hundred dollar PC Dell must think you are more apt to pay $75 for a wireless keyboard and mouse. They also must realize that no one will pay that much on their own – so their accessory store has it for $15 less.

What do you think about that?

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And Microsoft confuses us again….

via The hidden cost of product segmentation — UX Hero.

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Today, Rupert Murdoch said he was going to remove his websites from Google’s index. This includes major publications like the Wall Street Journal – among others. This aligns with his latest strategy of charging for content maintaining a clear model on how news organizations will monetize – by charging people to consume their content.

Your first thought is “Why would he do that? That’s suicide for a website”. When you sit down and think about it – there are huge implications and a real strategy behind it. The strategy behind this move is obvious as content distribution has begun to flow through the social graph rather than via search. This change in content flow has remarkedly increased the relevancy of the burgeoning link economy – whereas content is ranked by inbound links that are defined through the social graph.

This means that if a news story is posted by 1,000 people on Facebook pointing to “Source A” and the same story is posted by 500 people on Facebook pointing to “Source B” – “Source A” wins out. This is the new link economy and another reason why local newspapers are failing.

In a world where links are currency and the social graph is our marketplace search inevitably becomes less important.

While I think the link economy is a huge step forward in how content is consumed, I still have my doubts. This is where my disconnect occurs with Murdoch’s strategy -> While the link economy model works in real time, you are still leaving out the long tail of news content – search.

Mark Cuban says this is a brilliant move for News Corp as Facebook and Twitter become the primary drivers for content distribution. This is correct in the real-time scenario we discussed above but still lacks a long tail strategy. If I want to find information and news articles about the Iowa Flood of 2008 I’ll generally rely on search rather than perusing through the disorganized mess that is Facebook and Twitter archives. Beyond that, you can’t even get to Twitter timelines more than 3 months back – so how does that help?

Strategy aside – what other implications does this have? When I heard the news I immediately had the same thought as Jason Calacanis (that’s good, right?). A couple weeks ago Doug and I had a conversation about net neutrality – how it would affect the net and small businesses who operate on it. I brought up a sickening thought of content silos and walled gardens where telco companies had control over how that content was to be consumed.

We talked about how this model threatened the state of the web as we know it. TimeWarner could easily shut off its content and only distribute it on its own networks to its own subscribers – say only people using Comcast. On the other hand they could block their competitors content. In my scenario Comcast would, for instance, block YouTube and only allow Hulu. They could also block Google because Microsoft had paid them to only let Bing search their content…

This is exactly where Calacanis is going with his post… Suppose Murdoch has his News Corp sites block all search spiders except for the highest bidder. In this hypothetical scenario Microsoft would pay $20 million a year for Bing to have exclusive rights to spider its content while blocking the Google search engine. This would fundamentally shift the web as we know it.

As Jason says in his email…

So, for a moment, imagine a world where Bing could say in their TV commercials:

“Want to search the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and
3,894 other newspapers and magazine?”

This is huge news. This could change the web – especially with the richest man in the world inducing the change.

What do you think? Do you like Murdoch’s strategy? What do you think about a world where search engines have exclusive rights because they are the highest bidder?

Let us know in the comments

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As if it wasn’t already? Good title from the RWW crew but really – this was inevitable and has been going on since the inception of Twitter. What do you think half of the “Make $1,000 a day on Twitter” e-Books are about?

I am not concerned quite yet – are you? I must say I’d rather have relevant stuff thrown at my face than Twitter e-Books and MLM schemes. At least people will be hawking things like CrushIt and Trust Agents.

Maybe we need another URL shortener to track affiliate links? (sarcasm there)

What do you think?

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More Information: SlideShare Business » LeadShare

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The inevitable has happened… finally.

Microsoft and Yahoo have partnered on search – taking Google head on.

via Microsoft’s Press Release…

Yahoo! and Microsoft announced an agreement that will improve the Web search experience for users and advertisers, and deliver sustained innovation to the industry. In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.

Here are the details:

• Yahoo! will be using the Bing search engine on it’s sites
• Microsoft will integrate Yahoo search technology into its own platforms
• Yahoo will sell ads on both sites
• Both companies will share revenue from traffic on Yahoo! sites

Bing’s reach has just gone up exponentially… Is your website optimized for Bing?

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the deal…

Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz on the deal…

Live Discussion

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This is my interview with Gary Vaynerchuk during the live broadcast of our internet business podcast during the Big Omaha conference.

The video quality is crappy – recorded on the iSight over crappy wifi after which it was compressed by UStream and then converted from flash to mov and then processed by iMovie where it was uploaded to Viddler and further compressed and encoded.

But as Gary would say – it’s the content that matters!

Pre-Order Gary’s new book CrushIt right now.

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