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vineri, 1 august 2014
New Pin picks!
Seth's Blog : A bigger logo?
A bigger logo?
The original reason for brands was to let the buyer know the source of the goods. "We made this," says the organization we trust when we buy something.
Over time, though, brands have evolved into something we want other people to see, not just us. "I bought this," says the person who wears or drinks or drives something with status.
The essence of a brand with social juice, of one that matters as a label, isn't how big the logo is. No, what matters is that the buyer thinks the brand is important, and that the logo is a signifier that they're paying for.
So no one complains that the logo on the wine bottle is not in tiny 18 point type, or that the BMW convertible has 8 or 9 or 14 logos on it, or that we can tell it's a Harley just from the sound it makes driving down the street.
If you are angling to make your logo bigger but your customers don't care (or resist), if your customers aren't eager to say, "I bought this," then you're doing the wrong angling. The work that needs to be done is to create a product and a story that makes your customers want you to make the logo more prominent.
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joi, 31 iulie 2014
Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis |
- "Nancy's VoiceBox", Lou Gehrig's Disease, Google Glass
- Driverless Cars on UK Public Streets Starting January; Transforming Personal Mobility; Taxi and Truck-Drivers Targeted
- Sanctions Starting to Bite the Hands That Promoted Them
| "Nancy's VoiceBox", Lou Gehrig's Disease, Google Glass Posted: 31 Jul 2014 08:44 PM PDT Occasionally I receive a touching email that also offers a practical solution to extreme challenges. This is one of those times. Please consider this email from reader "Zentangle". Hi Mish,Zentangle Let's hop over to Zentangle's most recent blog entry, simply labeled "ALS". The article notes how Maria Thomas came up with an idea to get around the ALS communication problem. I went through the same things. My wife Joanne could not talk but she could write. Then she lost that ability but could manage to push a button say select phrases. Then everything went. With that personal background, here is the idea that Maria Thomas came up with after several months of unsuccessfully trying to use a very expensive, speech-generating device (basically a computer with technology that tracked eye movements). From Zentangle ... She [Maria] lettered the alphabet, numbers and some key phrases on a large 3 x 4 foot piece of 1/2 inch foam board. I ordered a bunch of laser pointers. We got a pair of Nancy's sunglasses and removed the lenses. We used electrical tape to attached two small laser pointers with switches (so they would stay on without keeping them pressed in) to Nancy's eyeglass frames. We used two laser pointers so the frames were balanced, and if a battery ran out in one laser, the other could be immediately turned on."Nancy's VoiceBox"  Google Glass Nancy's Voicebox is a fantastic idea. But I think we can easily improve on it. The problem I see is that "Nancy" (anyone with ALS), might not have the ability to turn their head and point a laser at a word or phrase. The obvious solution is Google Glass. As long as someone can move their eye just a slight bit (something they probably can do) Google Glass will work. I believe Steve Hawking, renown theoretical physicist could greatly benefit from such a device. I am going to pass this on to my contacts at Google, and also to the Les Turner ALS foundation. Mish Experiences Those interested in my experiences with Lou Gherig's disease can read about them here ... April 2, 2012: My Wife Joanne Has ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease May 16, 2012: My Wife Joanne Has Passed Away; Stop and Smell the Lilacs May 14, 2013: Wine Country Conference Speaker Presentations All Posted (Hussman, Chanos, Martenson, Pettis, Mauldin, Mish) In honor of Joanne and Nancy, please consider making a Donation to the Les Turner ALS foundation. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com |
| Posted: 31 Jul 2014 01:04 PM PDT The march for fully autonomous driverless cars marches on. In May, Google announced the Next Phase in Driverless Cars: No Steering Wheel or Brake Pedals. Google's prototype for its new cars will limit them to a top speed of 25 miles per hour. The cars are intended for driving in urban and suburban settings, not on highways. The low speed will probably keep the cars out of more restrictive regulatory categories for vehicles, giving them more design flexibility.Taxis Targeted Google's cars come equipped with elaborate sensors that can see 600 feet in every direction, are fully electric, and have a range of about 100 miles, perfect for city use, especially driverless taxi cabs. Google plans for 2017 operation. Last year, Lawrence D. Burns, former vice president for research and development at General Motors and now a Google consultant, led a study at the Earth Institute at Columbia University on transforming personal mobility. Driverless Cars on UK Public Streets Starting January The BBC reports UK to Allow Driverless Cars on Public Roads in January. The UK government has announced that driverless cars will be allowed on public roads from January next year. It also invited cities to compete to host one of three trials of the tech, which would start at the same time.Taxi, Truck Drivers First To Go Taxi drivers, truck drivers, and mining operators will be the first to go. I have written about this many times, and was largely dissed. But the future advances relentlessly. My target of 2020 no longer looks optimistic; it looks pessimistic. Further Discussion
All of the above will be in widespread usage by 2020. Personal cars will likely be the last affected. Taxis and commercial trucks will be first because eliminating the driver eliminates a huge expense. Millions of drivers will lose their jobs. Inflationary? Hardly. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com |
| Sanctions Starting to Bite the Hands That Promoted Them Posted: 31 Jul 2014 11:27 AM PDT As I have said on numerous occasions, sanctions are a lose-lose game. So it is not surprising in the least to discover Russian Crisis Already Taking Toll on Western Businesses.
Russian Response Bloomberg reports Russia Eyes Banning U.S. Chicken And Some European Fruit. Facing tougher sanctions over Ukraine, Russia said yesterday it may ban imports of chicken from the U.S. and fruit from Europe and is investigating McDonald's Corp. (MCD) cheese for safety.Geopolitical Madness Sanctions are a form of Chicken Coupled With M.A.D. So far, the damage is minimal, but if Putin angrily cuts off natural gas flows to Europe, or raises prices in response, all hell will break lose. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com |
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The Month Google Shook the SERPs
The Month Google Shook the SERPs |
| The Month Google Shook the SERPs Posted: 30 Jul 2014 05:18 PM PDT Posted by Dr-Pete As a group, we SEOs still tend to focus most of our attention on just one place – traditional, organic results. In the past two years, I've spent a lot of time studying these results and how they change over time. The more I experience the reality of SERPs in the wild, though, the more I've become interested in situations like this one (a search for "diabetes symptoms")... See the single blue link and half-snippet on the bottom-left? That's the only thing about this above-the-fold page that most SEOs in 2014 would call "organic". Of course, it's easy to find fringe cases, but the deeper I dig into the feature landscape that surrounds and fundamentally alters SERPs, the more I find that the exceptions are inching gradually closer to the rule. Monday, July 28th was my 44th birthday, and I think Google must have decided to celebrate by giving me extra work (hooray for job security?). In the month between June 28th and July 28th, there were four major shake-ups to the SERPs, all of them happening beyond traditional, organic results. This post is a recap of our data on each of those shake-ups. Authorship photos disappear (June 28)On June 25th, Google's John Mueller made a surprise announcement via Google+: We had seen authorship shake-ups in the past, but the largest recent drop had measured around 15%. It was clear that Google was rethinking the prevalence of author photos and their impact on perceived quality, but most of us assumed this would be a process of small tweaks. Given Google's push toward Google+ and its inherent tie-in with authorship, not a single SEO I know had predicted a complete loss of authorship photos. Yet, over the next few days, culminating on the morning of June 28th, a total loss of authorship photos is exactly what happened: While some authorship photos still appeared in personalized results, the profile photos completely disappeared from general results, after previously being present on about 21% of the SERPs that MozCast tracks. It's important to note that the concept of authorship remains, and author bylines are still being shown (we track that at about 24%, as of this writing), but the overall visual impact was dramatic for many SERPs. In-depth gets deeper (July 2nd)Most SEOs still don't pay much attention to Google's "In-depth Articles," but they've been slowly gain SERP share. When we first started tracking them, they popped up on about 3.5% of the searches MozCast covers. This data seems to only get updated periodically, and the number had grown to roughly 6.0% by the end of June 2014. On the morning of July 2nd, I (and, seemingly, everyone else), missed a major change: Overnight, the presence of in-depth articles jumped from 6.0% to 12.7%, more than doubling (a +112% increase, to be precise). Some examples of queries that gained in-depth articles include:
Here's an example set of in-depth for a term SEOs know all too well, "payday loans": The motivation for this change is unclear, and it comes even as Google continues to test designs with pared down in-depth results (almost all of their tests seem to take up less space than the current design). Doubling this feature hardly indicates a lack of confidence, though, and many competitive terms are now showing in-depth results. Video looks more like radio (July 16th)Just a couple of weeks after the authorship drop, we saw a smaller but still significant shake-up in video results, with about 28% of results MozCast tracks losing video thumbnails: As you can see, the presence of thumbnails does vary day-to-day, but the two plateaus, before and after June 16th, are clear here. At this point, the new number seems to be holding. Since our data doesn't connect the video thumbnails to specific results, it's tough to say if this change indicates a removal of thumbnails or a drop in rankings for video results overall. Considering how smaller drops in authorship signaled a much larger change down the road, I think this shift deserves more attention. It could be that Google is generally questioning the value and prevalence of rich snippets, especially when quality concerns come into play. I originally hypothesized that this might not be a true loss, but could be a sign that some video snippets were switching to the new "mega-video" format (or video answer box, if you prefer). This does not appear to be the case, as the larger video format is still fairly uncommon, and the numbers don't match up. For reference, here's a mega-video format (for the query "bartender"): Mega-videos are appearing on such seemingly generic queries as "partition", "headlights", and "california king bed". If you have the budget and really want to dominate the SERPs, try writing a pop song. Pigeons attack local results (July 24th)By now, many of you have heard of Google's "Pigeon" update. The Pigeon update hit local SERPs hard and seems to have dramatically changed how Google determines and uses a searcher's location. Local search is more than an algorithmic layer, though – it's also a feature set. When Pigeon hit, we saw a sharp decline in local "pack" results (the groups of 2-7 pinned local results): We initially reported that pack results dropped more than 60% after the Pigeon update. We now are convinced that this was a mistake (indicated by the "?" zone) – essentially, Pigeon changed localization so much that it broke the method we were using. We've found a new method that seems to match manually setting your location, and the numbers for July 29-30 are, to the best of my knowledge, accurate. According to these new numbers, local pack results have fallen 23.4% (in our data set) after the Pigeon update. This is the exact same number Darren Shaw of WhiteSpark found, using a completely different data set and methodology. The perfect match between those two numbers is probably a bit of luck, but they suggest that we're at least on the right track. While I over-reported the initial drop, and I apologize for any confusion that may have caused, the corrected reality still shows a substantial change in pack results. It's important to note that this 23.4% drop is a net change – among queries, there were both losers and winners. Here are 10 searches that lost pack results (and have been manually verified):
A couple of important notes – first, some searches that lost packs only lost packs in certain regions. Second, Pigeon is a very recent update and may still be rolling out or being tweaked. This is only the state of the data as we know it today. Here are 10 searches that gained pack results (in our data set):
The search for "mystic" is an interesting example – no matter what your location (if you're in the US), Google is showing a pack result for Mystic, CT. This pattern seems to be popping up across the Pigeon update. For example, a search for "California Pizza Kitchen" automatically targets California, regardless of your location (h/t Tony Verre), and a search for "Buffalo Wild Wings" sends you to Buffalo, NY (h/t Andrew Mitschke). Of course, local search is complex, and it seems like Google is trying to do a lot in one update. The simple fact that a search for "apartments" lost pack results in our data, while "apartments for rent" gained them, shows that the Pigeon update isn't based on a few simplistic rules. Some local SEOs have commented that Pigeon seemed to increase the number of smaller packs (2-3 results). Looking at the data for pack size before and after Pigeon, this is what we're seeing: Both before and after Pigeon, there are no 1-packs, and 4-, 5-, and 6-packs are relatively rare. After Pigeon, the distribution of 2-packs is similar, but there is a notable jump in 3-packs and a corresponding decrease in 7-packs. The total number of 3-packs actually increased after the Pigeon update. While our data set (once we restrict it to just searches with pack results) is fairly small, this data does seem to match the observations of local SEOs. Sleep with one eye openOk, maybe that's a bit melodramatic. All of the changes do go to show, though, that, if you're laser-focused on ranking alone, you may be missing a lot. We as SEOs not only need to look beyond our own tunnel vision, we need to start paying more attention to post-ranking data, like CTR and search traffic. SERPs are getting richer and more dynamic, and Google can change the rules overnight. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!       |
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