Why? Because the iPad, barely 6 months old, has already sold around 7-8 Million units, and is on track to break through 10M units for the year. That makes it the fastest electronic gadget sales ramp-up in history!

Still think that Apple’s deep Archetype Branding to create aspirational products is meaningless? Keep in mind that this record is being set as the wider economy is still largely suffering the after-effects of The Great Recession, and is at best in a tepid recovery.

And as Business Insider reports,

Apple is gearing up to sell 45 million (!) of them next year, says Ticonderoga Securities analyst Brian White who just chatted with supply-chain vendors in China and Taiwan (via Elizabeth Woyke at Forbes).

Sales are rising so quickly that according to BestBuy and other retail outlets, the iPad is beginning to truly “cannibalize” netbook and even laptop sales (by as much as 50%!). I had predicted the former in my Deeper iPad Intel post, but the sheer speed of the impact is surprising even to me.

How did this happen so quickly? First off, it turns out that the majority of people really didn’t need/want major creation powers with their computing devices, making the issue of “no physical keyboard”, etc. a moot point.

Sure, Bloggers and other writers are still going to need more powerful text input, image/video artists/designers/editors more finely grained image manipulation via a mouse, asf. But this “creative class” is only a fraction of everybody, and even they might enjoy some simple social media, video, reading, etc. consumption every so often.

And keep in mind that people are now able to edit photos/videos on their i- or Android Phones. Not super sophisticated, but I’ve seen some pretty impressive photo alteration results in recent months.

And people love the direct touch interaction, very long battery life (when compared to most laptops), and quiet/cool running with “rapid-ON” startup of the device.

Also as I predicted in that same post, Amazon appears to have successfully positioned the Kindle as the cheaper, and more task specific eReader. There even is a TV commercial out with a lady tanning/reading poolside, that makes fun of iPad’s outdoor glare problem. Smart positioning move by Bezos & Co.

And of course there are signs that the iPad will be sold at Amazon, Target & Walmart just in time for the Holiday shopping season. Somewhat related, Amazon is also coming out with its own App Store for Android smart phone apps. What it means is this: All mobile/tablets, all the time, everywhere…

Which brings me to another prediction of mine and a very important point about category leadership. As I said in the Deeper iPad Intel post, the longer that potential iPad competitors wait to get their products (hopefully actually competitive ones) out the door, the more Apple gains a head start that makes it the de facto owner of the entire category.

By default! Because the competition was asleep at the switch…as Nokia, RIM (Blackberry maker), et al. already were with the iPhone.

We are reaching an important threshold in the next few weeks. Whatever tablet competitors come out in time for the holidays (like Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, which is launching at all four major wireless carriers according to their own launch schedules, but which may end up being priced too high, possibly $399 WITH contract), will have a chance at competing with iPad.

Especially on price, as is being proven by Kindle. But the window is clearly closing, so it must be disconcerting to Microsoft that there are still no particularly good/credible Windows 7 based tablets on the market. Part of the problem is that Windows 7 isn’t really optimized for touch-based computing, even though it sort of works right now.

But the much bigger issue will be the build quality and power/CPU needs of the devices that try to run with Windows 7. A current entrant into the field shows the main problem: The CPU needs a fan and creates heat/noise, same as in a laptop, while having less battery life for more weight.

So it may be well into 2011 until Microsoft is geared up to compete on par, by which time Apple could control HALF the tablet market for the long haul (as predicted by Category Leadership).

Writes PC Magazine(!) in “Windows Tablets Can’t Match the iPad’s Magic“:

“The iPad has No Competition…Sure the Samsung Galaxy Tab looks cool. Dell has Streak in the wings. God knows, at some point HP will release the Slate that it has been teasing for the last six months. And Microsoft will almost certainly…well, I am sure they will do something… Nonetheless, right now, there isn’t a single tablet that can go head-to-head with the iPad. The product has been on the market for six months and no rival… By the time The BlackBerry PlayBook comes out next year, Apple will be releasing the iPad 2.”

BTW, that 2nd generation of iPads could easily include the 7″ screen form factor I’ve been clamoring for.

Will Apple be running away with it? And if so, how much will it ultimately cannibalize Windows, and how fast? Certainly Wall Street has been in the mood to punish Microsoft’s stock of late.

Opines Goldman Sachs, heretofore forever bullish on the company who’s IPO it once underwrote:

…investor sentiment on Microsoft’s core Windows and Office franchises is unlikely to improve until the company gains a firmer foothold in the growing migration to mobile devices – both smartphones and tablets. We don’t see this happening this year as Apple’s iPad and iPhone plus Google’s Android operating system are well established; a Windows-based mobile device could certainly begin to garner momentum in 2011, but the stock remains in show-me mode until at least then…

The bet seems to be that iPad and possibly Android-based iPad clones will be “fine young cannibals”…

Stop Whining About How Elitist And Expensive TED Is [Just Because] You Didn’t Get Invited
Feb. 15, 2010, 9:17 AM

>> Too bad you missed it! Larry Page gave everyone a free Nexus One.

.

via Silicon Alley Insider.

(Minor edit for colorful language.)

What is amazing about this (the subhead sentence after the headline), is not what it says about TED, but what it says about the future of content creation, and the question of charging for it.

Yes, Larry Page is a multi-billionaire who gave away free Nexus Ones created by his Fortune 500 (currently ranked #150) company, Google, to other well-to-do folks who were able to afford to pay $6,000 for the exclusive TED Talks experience. In doing so, he is following word of mouth (WOM) marketing model 101, of getting your product into the hands of key influencers, and hopefully winning them over, and getting them to evangelize your product.

But aside from all of that, he is showing what the future really holds: With ever cheaper reading & communication devices such as the Nexus One, it will become increasingly common to give those away to users, JUST to have SOME influence over what content (and thereby advertisements) they consume.

In essence, such a give-away represents A PAYMENT of the consumer for consuming content on the “gifters” platform. That is how important it is to get some, any slice of the attention pie. The getting of some of which implies that you will have opportunities down the road to do business with the “giftee” in the form of offers (ads or otherwise) that can be embedded with the content.

Note that it is taking for granted that a lot of content itself cannot be charged for. Why? …

…Because just like the devices it is shown on, much of that content is becoming commoditized.

There is an over-abundance of it, and certainly no scarcity at all. If the supply is going to infinity, and the demand is finite due to people’s limited amounts of attention, then the price is by necessity going toward Zero.

Now contrast this with the way that Old Media publishers have been trying to put the genie back in the bottle, and start charging for their content again, with so-called Pay Walls and other ill-conceived schemes.

Contrast it with Microsoft, which, when announcing the finally updated version of its mobile OS, made it clear that it intends to charge a licensing fee to handset makers, even though its market share in mobile has been languishing around 10%, and Google is giving away its Android mobile OS for free. All while Apple has built up a huge lead with its iPhone in the smart phone segment.

Silicon Alley Insider correctly points out that Microsoft’s stubbornness on this point is illogical, because even under the most optimistic scenarios, Windows Phone 7 won’t hardly be noticeable on their bottom line. It is however setting it up for failure in the race for market share and resulting mind share.

Microsoft’s question should be: How can we maximize our share of the attention pie for our mobile OS ecosystem? How can we catch, or better yet outflank, the iPhone?

Similarly, Old Media companies should be asking: How can we maximize our share of the attention pie for our news, opinion, and other content ecosystem?

Anything else is folly at this point. Once you have the attention, there WILL be opportunities to monetize, simply by virtue of people being in your ecosystem. Compare how street vendors benefit from people simply being at an event.

But you cannot choke off the oxygen and lifeblood of your ecosystem with Pay Walls, and other walls and barriers of any kind at the ENTRY point. If next to no one lives in your ecosystem, you won’t be selling very much to anyone.

And remember: The first sale is always the hardest. Why not make it much easier, and make the first sale…well…FREE. Someone taking your free offer still constitutes a sale, because they paid you with their valuable attention (time and energy).

Even better, PAY THEM to “buy” from you in the first transaction, as Larry Page has demonstrated with the Nexus One give-aways. Those cost real money, and yet it is still in Googles interest to be giving many more away.

Notice what Google has been doing all along, they have been giving away free copies of a lot more than just digital content (actually Google doesn’t create content at all): Google applications of all stripes and colors, including Gmail, Google “office” apps, Google Maps, Google RSS Reader, etc. etc.

Why? Because it keeps you on Google’s platform for a little longer, so that they might have SOME influence over what you are shown in terms of advertisements, and other offers that go along with the ecosystem.

Notice the deep misunderstanding by the parade of other companies, especially news and other Old Media companies, that have recently been trying to crucify Google over spreading their content through their search engine without reimbursement, not understanding that that content is typically lowest on the totem pole of usefulness:

The New York Times for example is still dreaming about charging for their news content, when it has about a 6 hour half-life (that’s why it’s called “old news”). Compare that to Google giving away productivity apps that can be useful to you for months and years.

What’s  your take away: Massively Move The Freeline, so that you may even have an ecosystem in which to sell anything.

Given the overwhelming, ever-exponentially-growing flood of information in the age of the Internet, being able to perform sophisticated searches is becoming so important that it isn’t too far-fetched to call it a literacy issue. Without these skills, you are in a sense in danger of becoming functionally illiterate in this brave new world.

Those individuals (and by extension businesses) with advanced search skills will be running circles around those without, because it saves so much time to search intelligently, and because a lot of answers can be found that are simply impossible to find otherwise. In a way, this separation into the search haves and have-nots has already been occurring over the last 5+ years.

And by the way, all of this isn’t simply about Google. Not at all. In a moment, I am going to walk you through a number of examples of advanced searches, and some of the tricks and techniques underlying them. But before I do, let me stress one other thing:

Even if you do only the most simple of "everyday" keyword searches, you are already going in the right direction. In fact, if you aren’t doing it already, make it a point for the next two weeks to stop yourself at every turn and ask: "Could I be doing a search right now to speed this up?"

I think you’ll find that the answer is almost always YES, and that it will be well worth your while to develop this as a new habit (a habit takes about 30 days of repetition to form).

Simply search for everything, and avoid using "manual" searching, i.e. avoid scrolling through documents, web pages, and lists both with your mouse and visually, asf. to find passages/names/etc. you’re looking for. Search options exist in Word, in your browser, on blogs, on Twitter, on Facebook, everywhere. Yet often we don’t use them, and the authors of software/Web tools don’t put sufficient front-and-center emphasis on search capabilities/ease-of-use.

For example, in your browser, never again manually search through long Blog comment threads or other large pages/articles manually, use your browser’s "Find" function and type the first few letters of your name or keyword, etc.

Granted, Gen-Yers on average are likely far ahead of all older generations when it comes to matter-of-cause use of Google, etc., however I doubt that even they know in large numbers about the kind of in depth, advanced search I am about to show you.

General Search Operator Considerations

Let’s first consider the most important search techniques by way of the so-called search operators. These may sometimes be accessible indirectly through a Web form under the heading of "Advanced Search", but originally they represent a kind of mini-programming language for telling the Search Engines what you want them to bring back. (Search Engines from here on shall include the "Search Function" in Web services other than stand-alone search engines.)

These are the "logical"/Boolean operators you may remember from math class or Logic 101 (fun, I know, but you really want to know a leetle bit about this, at least in these practical applications). Why know about these when you could also get most of the same results from using the Advanced Search forms?

Remember, this is about LITERACY. You want to become fluent in a secret language of sorts, and true command and mastery only come from truly delving into the heart of the matter. Plus, you will find that it is almost always faster to type queries into one search box than typing bits and pieces into Advanced Search forms which tend to look a little different for each service.

So let’s get started. I have made all of the examples clickable links, so that you can study the results. All results should be very similar on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Bing (formerly Live):

1) Nearly any search engine will assume by default that any separate words you type into the search box are meant as a logical AND, as in "show me all results matching BOTH this word-1 AND this word-2", though it may be in any order, and the words may be quite a distance from each other in the actual text.

You can usually place an AND operator without making a difference, e.g. for clarity in reading your search query, but mostly it will just look like this:

personal branding tips

2) To get a true phrase, a FIXED sequence of several words to match, you have to use ” ” (quotes) around the multi-word search term. Note that some search engines including Google will often bring a direct hit for a phrase to the top of the results heap, even if you didn’t use the quotes. But it’s not guaranteed, so using quoted phrases is much more precise, assuming that is what you are looking for. E.g.

"personal branding expert"

vs. personal branding expert

You can verify for yourself that this is more precise, by clicking both the quoted version and then the non-quoted one in Google, and comparing the number of results returned, in this case about 12,500 vs. 10 Million results (the count is in near the upper right corner in Google):

3) To get a logical OR (also called "inclusive OR"), as in "show me ALL the results matching this word-1 OR this word-2 OR this word-3", you simply type in "OR" between the keywords, or between keyword phrases in quotes:

"personal branding" OR "social branding" OR brand

Some search engines like FriendFeed’s Search also use a "," (comma) to represent an OR. (Either way, be sure to distinguish this OR from the so-called "Exclusive OR", which in essence says: Find only those results that have either Word-1 or Word-2, but not both". As far as I know, none of the search engines support this. Basically it would be like running to separate searches.)

4) Many search engines have an exclusion function using the "-" (dash/hyphen) operator followed by the keyword, phrase, or sometimes additional operator that you want excluded from the results. This in essence says: "Find all of the results for this word-1 except for those also containing word-2". E.g.

Yahoo: branding -"personal branding" -skin

Google: branding -"personal branding" -skin

would find all results containing branding, but not those also containing "personal branding", or those likely referring to skin branding instead of the marketing related kind. This would be a good search to narrow down results to those talking about corporate branding only (though you might find more exclusion terms to refine it even further).

By the way, there is typically no limit to the number of exclusions, though there may be a limit to the overall length of the query string you can submit to the search engine.

OK, with these preliminaries out of the way, let’s dig into the finer details of various key search engines or search functions on key services. Let’s start with Twitter, since it currently has the most buzz around its "Real-time Web Search" possibilities:

Twitter Search

Twitter Search is for now referring to search.twitter.com, as the Twitter Web interface integrated version is currently still somewhat limited/buggy in the result sets it returns. You are basically searching over every single public status update ("tweet") by any user, starting from the current moment and going backward over Twitter’s timeline. (If you are unfamiliar with Twitter or Twitter Search, read up on it here.)

Twitter Search allows all of the search operators already discussed, and additionally for the following:

1) "keyword(s) filter:links" – will seek out tweets containing the keyword or phrases and 1 or more links only. Nearly the same can be accomplished by searching for “http://”, though that will miss the few live links that Twitter recognizes from “www.domain.com/extension” type links.

It can largely be assumed that a tweet containing a link is more useful than one without, more likely to be chatter, unless the tweet is so sharp/witty/deep/inspirational that it would qualify as a quote (of course sometimes you may want to specifically look at the conversational chatter only – example of that further down):

"personal branding" filter:links

2) "from:username" and "to:username" – both of these can be very useful to query over your own tweetstream by topic/keyword, e.g. to find old tweets that you know you wrote, you know you wrote to somebody (containing certain link resources, etc.). Of course you can put any username you choose, and can therefore in principle back-trace all conversations between two users (each can only be used once in a given query).

You can also see if two users have been talking via Twitter’s so-called "@ replies" at all. If there’s no result returned, there was likely no direct communication, or at least recently:

from:unmarketing to:missive

As long as Twitter keeps back-data fully available in Search (currently, Twitter is unfortunately only letting you search back anywhere from 7 to 30 days depending on server loads), you could also use Twitter as a natural form of personal bookmarking this way. Nearly all of the “tags” are applied without extra work, simply as part of your tweets. A workaround to this problem of the backwards time limit is to also use FriendFeed and import your tweets there. FriendFeed currently places no such limitation. More below.

3) Searching for so-called hashtags – a keyword prefixed by "#" (pound sign) – is a way of detecting additional intentionality about tweets. Either it serves as a point of emphasis/visibility by the author (since a common keyword like "#branding" or "#quote" would still show up in a search results even without the specific # prefix), or more commonly, if the hashtag is a unique abbreviation, it serves as a sort of code to be specifically searched for by those that know about it.

This is most commonly done for conferences (recent examples are #140tc and #twtrcon), for ongoing weekly Twitter-based discussions around a given topic, e.g.

#journchat

is for journalism discussions on Monday evenings U.S. Time, or as a meme that becomes self-replicating enough that people participate, and the hashtag gets into the Top 10 "trending" keywords/phrases on Twitter for a while.

Either way, the authors of tweets using hashtags went to the trouble of using the # symbol and/or created a hashtag to highlight something. Use that knowledge to your advantage when searching.

4) "since:timestamp" and "until:timestamp" will allow you to segment out tweets from a specific day or number of days, as needed. This can be useful if you wanted to e.g. view only those tweets for a conference that were actually sent during the duration of the conference, and leave out the chatter before or after, which is e.g. less likely to contain "twitter-casting" of the actual conference panels.

#140conf since:2009-06-16 until:2009-06-17

5) "near:city-name" – this operator will find tweets that originated from a user account that Twitter thinks is the city name you are referring to. Since this is going off of users’ self-reported location field in their profile (and NOT off of some precise geo-tagging a la iPhone location, though Twitter is reportedly working on that), which is free text, and for some contains things like multiple cities, "everywhere", "The Interwebs", asf. this is not particularly precise, but it can still work in aggregate. E.g.

#140conf since:2009-06-16 until:2009-06-17 near:sf

will find all tweets about the TwtrCon Conference that were placed by users based out of San Francisco, though Twitter has no idea (yet) whether they were at the conference in New York or just talking about it.

5) To bring it all together, and for a special tip, we should also consider the so-called Retweet convention on Twitter, a format which allows one to quickly copy & paste a given (useful, funny, etc.) tweet from another user, and forward it on to our own Twitter network of followers, while giving credit to the original author. E.g. I tweeted

"RT @mvolpe: New Blog Post: Are Your Compelling Offers Actually..Compelling? http://tinyurl.com/mlbzw4"

giving credit to user @mvolpe, and used the "RT" prefix to signify the retweet. This is actually a convention that spontaneously arose from the user base (another format uses "via @username", used most often if the tweet text is sufficiently altered, but credit for the find is still meant to be conveyed).

What this means for our searches is that we can either search specifically for "RT OR via" to find tweets that were deemed worthy of retweeting (there are actually entire third-party services set up keeping track of these counts, and thereby surfacing tweets according to their presumed repetition popularity), or, we can exclude those tweets to avoid a lot of duplicates!

So here is a great way to cut down on overly large result sets, taking out most "link-less" chatter and Retweet duplications, as well as "psychology jobs" related postings:

psychology filter:links -RT -via -job -jobs

[As an aside, though still search literacy/awareness relevant:

I use this very example query above, and then pipe the RSS feed from the result into a somewhat more permanent receptacle such as FriendFeed or a Tumblr mini-blog. Remember, Twitter might (and currently does) cut off the backwards reach of your result sets, currently during heavy daytime loads it’s at most about 7 days back. This presents a real problem for your own research/archiving purposes.

Part of the reason may be that Twitter is thinking about making long-range backward data mining a “for pay” feature that large corporate marketing agencies, etc. may pay them a lot of money for (obviously not if they could access everything for free through Search.twitter.com). Only time will tell, though I think it is definitely important for the community to be aware of this possible issue.]

Or, here is another complex example to search for the term "mashable" while excluding tweets from the username "mashable", any @ mentions (or replies to) username "mashable", and tweets with links. Remember how I said earlier that you could do exclusions on some operators? This is an example of that:

mashable -from:mashable -"@mashable" -filter:links

This could be used so that you see what people are saying about Mashable, the blog, that is NOT one of the countless retweets of @mashable, not a tweet from "@mashable" himself, and doesn’t include links to further content. In other words, what people are saying about that brand the most raw and unvarnished form.

FriendFeed Search

OK, upon writing this section on FriendFeed power search, I realized that this post was getting to be really long. So rather than overload everyone, I figured I’d push this and the section on Google search tricks into a follow-up post in a few days.

I hope you found this enlightening, and that you take the time to practice advanced search. To become "fluent" and fully "search literate", you will need to practice. I know that saying this in our ADD world is somewhat of a bummer, but the payoff, especially for your business, can be tremendous. Remember, running circles around your competition and all of that…

I wrote a while ago that the attempt at humor had fallen flat precisely because Microsoft’s “The Powerbroker” archetype had been so deeply entrenched, almost literally burned into the mind of the consumer for decades. Did things get any easier from there?

The next salvo a few months ago featured the “I’m a PC” ads which cast Microsoft (by way of its supposed users) as a strange mixture of proud/aggressive and defiant/sulking. It was pointed out then that “Microsoft as Victim” just doesn’t really work. And again, the archetype branding explains why: You cannot be “The Powerbroker” and still garner much sympathy for supposedly having been wronged.

This same theme was picked up once more recently with the “not cool enough for a Mac” ad featuring a girl named Lauren, which really was meant to focus on price as an angle to attack the notoriously premium-priced “Mac” products. In theory the idea of highlighting one of your competitor’s weaknesses (price) is workable, especially during a severe recession. But you cannot do it while violating your core archetypes.

If Microsoft had said something like, “we are the largest software company on the planet, and because of that we can create economies of scale in the production of PCs and their loading with software that much smaller competitors like Apple just cannot match, thus saving you money”, it would have made some sense.

But not with this passive-aggressive jabbing built in. It confuses people. Instinctively, no one takes it seriously when the 800 pound gorilla complains about having “unfairly” been called “not cool enough”.

And then Microsoft recently launched another ad in the series that went all wrong yet again. Silicon Alley Insider explains why:

Jackson [the kid] mentions offhand he wants “a good gaming computer.” This is a fantastic line of attack for Microsoft: The Mac has a tiny library of professionally produced games compared to what’s on PCs [...] But Microsoft fumbles the ball, and doesn’t follow through with what’s arguably their best anti-Mac selling point after “PCs are cheaper.”

Instead, Jackson’s mom makes an incredibly off-target anti-Apple smear: Checking out the Macs, she says “they’re kind of popular with this age.” Umm, no. Kids can’t afford Mac prices or appreciate Mac build quality. Far better for Microsoft to stick with [...] Macs are kind of popular with hip adults, but expensive.

So the theme of hurt feelings clouding Microsoft’s positioning and marketing continues. In truth, as the incumbent and still near monopolist (85-90% share despite Apple’s recent inroads) in the personal computer market, Microsoft would do better not to mention “Mac” at all.

“The Powerbroker” archetype by definition can choose to ignore the much smaller competitor. Reacting to any perceived slight only makes people wonder what is going on.

But the branding confusion gets even more pronounced with the recent launch of a new series of Microsoft ads featuring a strange mixture of low key scrap-booking and CEO interview voice-overs, punctuated by a slogan of “Microsoft – The People Ready Business”:

First, scrap-booking is not exactly associated with CEOs. And the overall informal tone of the ads only heightens the confusion. While we can understand in principle where they were trying to go with this, softening up the image, making CEOs cool somehow as they are buying into the “people ready business” message, it just doesn’t work.

Why? Again because it violates “The Powerbroker” archetype attributions of which our mental image of a CEO is a prime example. It will never really fit with “The Loyalist” archetype (buddy/friendship/etc.) that is being angled for here. Your CEO will never quite be your buddy, unless you are on the board of directors or something like that (or maybe work at Zappos).

What’s the end result? Ads that don’t work, that don’t “stick” in your or anyone else’s mind, because they are just too confusing. Microsoft has tried a number of times in the past to bring “The Loyalist” archetype into its marketing (MS Office as your buddy brand at work, etc.), and it never really worked too well then either.

So what’s the solution? 1) Figure out who you are first, what archetypes make sense for you, what you truly want to stand for. 2) Communicate that consistently, without fail. If you did your homework in step 1), it should in fact be HARD to get step 2) wrong.

In Microsoft’s case, it should simply embrace that which it already is, “The Powerbroker”. It has served it exceedingly well in the B2B (Business-To-Business) realm, because “The Powerbroker” is something virtually every business person understands and intuitively respects.

Notice that most of its software has been sold to other BUSINESSES first, even if it ends up on the consumer’s home PC, or their computer at work. Why mess with that out of a sense of hurt corporate ego?

If you’re not on Twitter yet, you should be, if only to see what’s going on, and to grab any usernames (for your own name, your company, and your products/brands) that may still be available before someone else does.

(If you are completely new to Twitter, first watch this brief video, and click though this presentation slide deck.)

Even if you decide that you don’t have the time to invest in maintaining an active profile on Twitter, you should at an absolute minimum understand that the new "real-time Web" that is emerging due to Twitter’s popularity is changing the game in many ways:

Not only is it causing redesign changes and opening-up at Twitter’s rival social media services such as FriendFeed and Facebook. Search of Twitter’s massive real-time stream of "Tweets" (the micro-messages that users send to their follower lists), is now being called "the pulse of this society" by wine merchant turned Social Media guru Gary Vaynerchuck. And I would agree:

Should you know what 10 14 Million people (yes, it grew by nearly 50% in the last month), many of them sought-after influencers and early-adopters are saying about you, your company, your brands, your products, your market, and your business’ target keywords on Twitter?

Of course you should. Twitter’s recent geometric growth proves that it is finding itself right at the inflection point from early to mainstream adoption in these last few months. And therefore searching at Seach.twitter.com has become an absolute goldmine of marketing relevant information, one that must almost be considered indispensable at this point:

So much so that there has been much rumor and speculation lately regarding a possible acquisition of Twitter by either Google or Microsoft. In Google’s case, it would be mainly a way to preempt Microsoft or other competitors from disrupting its search dominance. In fact, I have recently argued that acquiring Twitter may well be Microsoft’s last best hope at getting back into the search game in earnest.

This is because Twitter’s so-called Timeline makes its search results extremely, well, timely and time-bound, unlike Google’s and other search engine’s authority models that can feel stale in comparison to Twitter in many circumstances (and don’t allow for a clear sorting by recency of e.g. the 1,000 top results).

A good recent example were searches for SXSW Interactive Convention  panel attendee notes: The results via Search.twitter.com taken from Twitter’s Timeline are much fresher & more pertinent, especially during and right after the conference (one caveat is that Twitter will currently at times cut off backwards results beyond 7 days, apparently due to server load issues).

Google on the other hand will serve up mostly results from SXSWi 2008, 2007, asf. due to its authority model (the pages obviously had much longer to gather links from everywhere on the net, through blog post mentions, social bookmarking, etc.).

So again, one could easily see how Google simply cannot afford to let anyone else walk away with this whole new category/aspect of "real-time Web" search, which in itself has a strong component of recommendation filtering: Twitter users mostly only pass on those items and links that they feel would add value to their followers.

That’s because in a sense their reputation is on the line with every tweet they post. They know that almost instantaneously dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people might hold them accountable if they send them garbage. Compare that to Google, where the ever-evolving practices of search engine optimization (SEO) have already greatly distorted the results that Google will spit out for most commercially relevant keywords.

In a way, Twitter is succeeding, to some extent by seeming accident, at crowd-sourced search models where the likes of Jason Kalakanis’ Mahalo and recently Wikia Search (started by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales) have failed, largely because they could never get enough users and user buy-in to scour enough content. On Twitter, content recommendation happens naturally, as a side-effect of the ongoing conversations or (more or less helpful) "stream of consciousness broadcasting" (sometimes referred to as "life casting").

And incidentally, each tweet containing a link to further content tends to also have a good amount of semantic/meta-data accompanying that link, without much of the nuisance of formal methods such as tagging, because the descriptors are added naturally as I already mentioned.

Are you beginning to see why Twitter is so special? Why you should start running searches at Search.twitter.com today if you haven’t done so up to this point? Go do it, right now. Go there and input queries for your most important keywords.

As gary Vaynerchuck says, (rough quote) "if your business is selling soup, you should go there and monitor the pulse of soup in society"…

(A follow-up post "10 Deep Points About Twitter" is on its way, stay tuned…)

I consider this a must-read to get yourself back up-to-date on everything that has transpired over the past 3+ months behind the scenes, while we were all busy watching something else, the global financial melt-down, say.

It is almost precisely 1 year and 1 month to the day that Microsoft first launched its unsolicited buy-out bid, and you know the endless back-and-forth that ensued. What stands out is that as of today, while Yahoo’s stock has fallen from its pre-offer price of about $19 on 2/1/2008 to about $12 (and Jerry Yang was so maligned for not taking Ballmer’s offer that he ultimately resigned a few months ago), Microsoft’s stock has gone from $32 to now around $17 during that time!

If you do the math, that’s worse than Yahoo’s stock has done. So who still wants to argue that Ballmer would have really been much better at steering Yahoo (or really worse: the combined Micro-hoo “Franken-carrier”)? Which brings me back to the headline, and this quote from Blodget’s post that sums it all up very neatly:

Another six months of Microsoft Internet futility.  Last summer, Microsoft had been struggling to succeed online for 13 years, and it had only managed to run a distant third.  Now it has been struggling for 13 and a half years.  The company’s Internet branding, strategy, and organization is in its usual chaotic disarray.  Perhaps the new search head, stolen from Yahoo, can cut through the bureaucracy and fix everything.  After 13.5 years of a lot of talent and money being thrown at this problem, however, we wouldn’t hold our breath.

So the saga continues. The patient (Micro-hoo) indeed isn’t completely dead yet… but Yahoo’s new CEO Carol Bartz now appears to have the upper hand in any negotiations from here on…

Note: In case you don’t recall how badly Microsoft’s branding in particular has been going, refresh your memory here. Branding is where it all begins, after all, how can you know what you should be doing if you don’t know who you are?! And hoping that an engineer like Lu, however talented, is going to fix branding and related woes is simply delusional.

You might also enjoy this post on complexity, and why even the 800 Pound Gorilla such as Microsoft cannot avoid it’s pernicious effects.

Such as the fact that Yahoo’s stock has been declining dramatically over the last few weeks, falling through a relatively steady support level around the $19 mark that it had stood at on January 31 of this year before the beginning of the "Micro-hoo" attempted hostile take-over saga.

Having already slid a few more dollars from a range around $21 after the regulatory headwinds to the Yahoo-Google search ad serve outsourcing deal started picking up, it then fell through various support levels all the way down to as low as $15.50 (settling at $16 for the week). I don’t mean to bore you with stock market speak, this is only to get across the increasingly precarious situation that Yahoo finds itself in:

1) I have argued repeatedly that the entire Micro-hoo saga would take a severe toll on the productivity at both Yahoo AND Microsoft, and judging from the dearth of useful roll-outs and even mere announcements (and I doesn’t take much to keep Wall Street happy with announcements) from either company, I was right.

Steve Ballmer has claimed that the Yahoo purchase attempt had been just a tactic, and that Microsoft could go it alone, but since then he really hasn’t said much of substance that could be construed to be a credible Internet strategy for Microsoft.

UPDATE: Incidentally, I just looked up the beginning of year prices pre-bid (1/31/08) again:

As of 10/8, YHOO has lost 26% from $19 to $14, but MSFT has lost almost as much: 25% from $32 to $24! Sign of superior management skills and credibility at MSFT?

Check out what David Einhorn said today in his letter to his hedge fund clients (via AlleyInsider):

… Since then, management has acted in an overaggressive and almost panicky fashion regarding its online offering. First, it sought to acquire Yahoo! and then after that failed, it announced extremely high internal investment requirements to pursue this “huge” opportunity (read: “Google-envy”). We doubt the opportunity is what they say it is and wish MSFT focused on its core strength: software.

The CEO is a very smart and very wealthy man. Perhaps, he is so wealthy that he has bigger ideas and aspirations than making MSFT’s shareholders wealthier. We’ve given up on MSFT for now…

2) I said it would take a massive effort by Yahoo’s Jerry Yang and Co. to get the ship righted at Yahoo after all of the distractions, and the deteriorating economic conditions haven’t helped. I guess I had really been hoping for Jerry to jump into full-scale survival mode and ride on a wave of adrenalin from the Micro-hoo negotiations.

But it now looks as if Yahoo is drifting helplessly, with consulting firm Bain apparently hired to set up major lay-offs in the coming weeks.

3) The stock price mentioned above is almost exactly half the offer of $31 per share that Microsoft had launched (though that number was partially in non-price-guaranteed Microsoft stock, which was already moving down after the announcement).

So that puts the speculation of Microsoft buying all or part of Yahoo back on the table. (Not to speak of the continued rage that most Yahoo shareholders have been venting toward the board over the failed/prevented deal for months.)

I have written several posts worth of arguments on the lack of soundness of a simple buy-out plan, and could write several more, but thankfully I don’t have to:

Henry Blodget of the Silicon Alley Insider has written a very concise, yet thorough post this week on why the original plan was never a good idea, and why an alternative proposal, a spin-out of Microsoft’s own foundering Internet division into Yahoo plus cash, would be a much better idea.

I have participated in the discussions on his blog for months, and so feel that at least in some small measure I have contributed to various points made in the post. Here a quote that rings of my repeated arguments about the Internet going against Microsoft’s corporate DNA:

At Microsoft, the Internet will always play second fiddle to the Windows and Office cash cows. At Google, every idea that will disrupt Microsoft is rushed into production. At Microsoft, every such idea will be buried in politics and bureaucracy. This will make it very hard for Microsoft to attract and retain the best talent… 

If you have any interest in the future of either of those two companies, the competition against Google for domination of the Internet, or simply the business strategy examples inherent therein, the post is absolutely worth a read. Here the link again:

"Microsoft Smart Not To Buy Yahoo… But Now’s The Time To Do The Better Deal"

Best wishes during "interesting times"

- Alex Schleber

And one thing appears to be clear: Regardless of the merits of the technology and features behind the platform, Wallop never had much of a chance of succeeding during the same time frame in which first MySpace and then Facebook rose to massive prominence.

Why? Because the “Wallop” brand name that the new owners (presumably voluntarily) took over from Microsoft Research Labs is simply a horrible idea branding-wise.

One can almost see how a group of middle aged techies thought it sounded sort of cool. But as reality has proven, there are a number of things wrong with the name:

1) It is a generic noun/verb and as such creates little differentiation in the mental real estate of consumers.

2) It is confusing in terms of giving no indication what “Wallop” is supposed to do for its users. Brand names like Friendster, MySpace and Facebook on the other hand give a reasonable hint. When you are free to choose, when in doubt opt for something that makes a modicum of sense, and actually helps make your case as a company.

(Granted that a number of very successful companies have used “non-sequitur” names – Google, Amazon, and Yahoo come to mind. But that was during the Web 1.0 era when it was a lot easier to break through the noise, and get your share of attention to imprint your brand on the mental real estate of consumers. Also, back then everything Web was still so new and wondrous…)

3) Worst of all, the only association it does have is with something negative and somewhat archaic sounding, per the American Heritage Dictionary, “Wallop – v. tr. 1. To beat soundly; thrash. 2. To strike with a hard blow.”

Given that Wallop apparently started out as a photo sharing site at Microsoft Research, the name makes even less sense. But one should NEVER use a name in branding that conjures up potentially negative associations. Unless you know exactly what you are doing (as in some youth slang were “bad”, “ill”, etc. actually means “good” – or at least has in the past), and know your target market audience to a T.

Not so good if your 15-30 year-old target market for a social networking site associates your brand name (even if more or less unconsciously) with spankings they may have received by their parents, or on the playground.

4) It is missing any kind of pleasantness in sound, rhythm, or rhyme that would make it more likely to be repeated by people (to themselves or to others), which may seem trite, but in reality can make a huge difference in the adoption of your brand name “meme”.

Wallop rolls of the tongue like a sack of potatoes. Its particular combination of consonants and vowels leaves it oddly unpleasant to say (maybe that’s because the word originally denotes an unpleasant event). Just try it out-loud to yourself a few times: “Hey dude, go check out that party invite I put up on Wallop.”

5) There could be spelling issues in terms of people hearing it word-of-mouth (if it weren’t for the fact that people are already less likely to repeat it very often), as to the number of L’s and P’s, also never an advantage in getting something to spread “virally”.

Do your homework…

In regards to both 4) and 5), do your homework people: It’s easy enough to bounce names off of friends and family, and see what they think, and more importantly, if they can’t stop saying the new name – or not. See if people spell it right in writing each time without you spelling it out for them (the recent “Cuil” launch has become infamous in this regard).

Why am I kicking Wallop in such detail when they are already down? Only for this reason: To demonstrate that despite what I actually believe may have been some reasonably innovative technology, these good folks were never even close to helping their business venture from a branding perspective.

In this regard, it is very telling that they apparently neglected to hire a branding firm or other similar assistance when they spun-off Wallop from Microsoft Research, and kept the name (needlessly, as there likely was next to zero brand equity accrued to the name at that point).

There is always the danger/trap that as a business founder you become attached to a name created during an incubation phase that has simply grown on you. Or appears clever TO YOU in one way or another (and is often too-cute-by-half). None of which guarantees that anyone else will think so, which is why you need to ideally test such names with your target market (of course some simply get lucky, such as Facebook).

And when you are trying to launch a social network, something that almost by definition needs to make use of “viral” network effects, the above factors, and hence the rate and speed with which your brand spreads, do indeed matter.

Just ask the guys who got it right almost accidentally, like Facebook. Ignore these principles in your own small business branding at your peril.

Can two or more reasonably goofy and self-deprecating ads, which someone on a Silicon Alley Insider comment thread had smartly termed a "branding palate cleanser", overturn years of Windows support frustrations, forced upgrade paths, and general Microsoft bullying of all and sundry?

I’d say it’s doubtful:

1) Microsoft is seen as stodgy and corporate because, well, they are…

Analysts such as Henry Blodget had argued recently that Microsoft should simply acknowledge that they are much better at selling to the corporate world (after all even their Windows OS has been mostly sold to the PC Manufacturers rather than directly to the consumer), and concentrate on B2B while letting go off most of the comsumer space aspirations that have so far proved massively unprofitable to them (Zune, Live Search, etc.).

2) Microsoft has tried before to bring in "The Loyalist" archetype in its marketing (MS Office as your buddy brand at work, etc.), and it never really worked too well, because their association with "The Powerbroker" archetype is so entrenched. This latter fact BTW explains why they do so well in the B2B (Business-To-Business) realm, because "The Powerbroker" is something virtually every business person understands.

3) Trying to bring in "The Buddy" again in the form of "The Adventures of Seinfeld And Gates", alongside of "The Little Trickster" (with humor, irreverence, sleight of hand, etc.) via Seinfeld is ultimately no more likely to stick than before.

Typically companies have been using this archetype to add some delight (your Inner Child likes humor) to their otherwise "boring" products (e.g. insurers, see the GEICO Gecko, etc.). But these companies typically didn’t have strong existing identifications like Microsoft does.

Once again, it’s doubtful that Microsoft can shed the associations that have been forming in the consumers’ minds for about two decades. Just ask IBM: They’ve had a lot of little humorous ads out over the last few years (most recently with Disney characters drawn into corporate server room live action!).

So ask yourself: Do you think of IBM as hip and funny?

Once an imprint is burned in deeply, you’ll have a heck of a time getting it changed. Microsoft is proof that all the money in the world (which it undoubtably has) can’t move the mountain in people’s minds.

But beyond that, it’s anybody’s guess as to what will happen next:

Is it a case of "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer" that will allow Yahoo to move Jerry Yang and Yahoo forward less distracted by Microsoft’s various advances and the joint Icahn-MSFT proxy threat?

Or is it just the overture to a renewed round of negotiations that could still lead to Microsoft buying Yahoo outright?

Given that last week’s developments had seemed to indicate Microsoft growing weary of Icahn as an intermediary, and that some observers had previously bet on a renewed MSFT offer before August 1 to bolster the chances of unseating Yahoo’s entire board in a proxy fight led by Icahn, the latter possibility appears increasingly dim.

But given the now nearly 6 months history of the Micro-hoo saga, who really knows at this point. What we do know however is that if negotiations continue at whatever level, it would continue to serve as a distraction for both Yahoo and Microsoft from what they should be concentrating on:

Innovation.

So bad have things gotten that this fact was acknowledged in no less than MSFT’s internal email on how to get its listing Internet division to profitability:

… 4. Fix our online branding – Our brands are fragmented and confusing today, and we recognize a need to clarify and align our online branding . We are now driving forward to address this opportunity.

Ironically, in that same May 18 email MSFT’s Kevin Johnson was pre-announcing their latest attempt at search "disruption", "Live Search cashback" (yes, the lowercase ‘c’ is intentional, someone at MSFT must have thought that it was "cool").

Let’s examine why "Live" is such an unfortunate choice for branding Microsoft’s search offering along with a slew of other properties:

1. Since "Live" was from all appearances originally conceived to refer to an online version of Windows and Office products (e.g. "Office Live Small Business", etc.), it draws an implicit comparison back to those products as being NOT "Live", or, in other words, "Dead". And that can only be considered to be unfortunate.
2. By matching the term "live" with a slew of other terms across many different properties, there is brand dilution built right into the naming "methodology".
3. "Live" is also a well-used, one could even say well-worn term in a context of "real, live, as in not recorded events" in entertainment and media, while browsing the internet is not really considered "live", unless we are talking about live streaming of audio or video. And so things get particularly confusing when paired in ways such as Microsoft’s "Craigslist killer" attempt "Windows Live Expo", which conjures up images of a real-life trade show or other similar events in most people’s minds. So it comes as no surprise that Live Expo never got any traction and is now being decommissioned.
4. "Live" may actually also be generally too generic a term to capture any real mindshare: "Live Search", "Live Expo", "Live _Anything_" do not carve out enough of a unique mental real estate in the way that newly minted terms, and/or terms with novel usage such as Amazon, Yahoo, Google, and eBay can. Ask yourself if there is a reason that just about none of the internet companies built on "generic" domain names ever really took off. Buy.com, Shop.com, etc. etc.
5. Oddly enough, single syllable terms may also be too short to, except for a very small number of exceptions, create enough naming differentiation and rhythm: One syllable is like one single "beat", when the majority of successful brand names (not necessarily companies) are two or sometimes three syllables long, with the stress typically falling on the first syllable: INtel, BEbo, iPhone, Gmail, Windows, YouTube, Meebo, Facebook, MySpace, eBay, PayPal, Kayak, iTunes, iPod, craigslist, Wordpress, Blogger, Apple, flickr, twitter, Yahoo, Netflix, Google, Netscape, Drupal, Hotmail, Amazon(3), Firefox(3). Add your own favorite non-techy examples here.

The bottom line is, brand names need to be memorable first and foremost. And by being easy to say (using rhythm and even rhyme), you and I and everyone else are more likely to repeat them – out loud or to ourselves. Add uniqueness that ideally carves out a new spot in our mental real estate (a "category label" – think Q-Tips, Xerox, and yes, Google, as in "to google someone or something"), and that is NOT confusing, and you’re there.

To bring it back to Microsoft, "Windows Live Hotmail" isn’t it. Hotmail (not originally created by Microsoft) was actually a very good brand name, which accounts among other things for it’s wide, "viral" spread throughout the world.

Bizarrely enough, Microsoft in it’s tortured branding forays and strict insistence on spreading around its still powerful "Windows" brand , had considered dropping the "Hotmail" name entirely in favor of "Windows Live Mail".

Windows incidentally was always a decent brand as long as it is reserved for naming an operating system, anything past that was needless brand dilution. I have discussed previously where the strong but mistaken urge toward brand dilution stems from: Corporate hubris and misunderstanding of branding fundamentals.

The three-way "negotiations" between Carl Icahn, the Yahoo board, and Microsoft turned up another non-starter offer for MSFT to cherry-pick Yahoo’s search assets, which in turn led to much finger-pointing, and general acrimony.

The result is that Icahn may now be out of the picture, and that Yahoo will survive through its August 1 shareholder meeting. Unless Microsoft comes back with a last minute complete buy-out offer at a guaranteed, cash-equivalent price that is ($29 per share would seem like the absolute minimum in this regard).

But it all seems increasingly unlikely, leaving Microsoft without a strategy, and Yahoo desperate to get past the distraction of the entire episode, and its operation back on track.

Jerry Yang is apparently begging his troops to keep working (for the second time in two months), and as I previously pointed out, for good reason. And even though we don’t hear similar exhortations form inside the Microsoft bunker, there is little doubt that Microsoft is not similarly affected:

During the entire first half of 2008, the only news out of Redmond other than the Micro-hoo botched deal attempts, has been the announcement of the "Live Search Cashback" (LSCB) attempt to sort of buy search query share using a rebate gimmick (that had failed to work before). That MSFT and some commentators touted this as a "game changer" proves the depth of their dilusion.

I have been working on a detailed post for why LSCB was such a bad idea in many (technical) ways, but the end-result is much easier to ascertain through some simple tests: I occasionally have been checking LSCB price quotes against Google search results for identical items, and the FREE(!) product listings at the top of Google Universal Search beat the LSCB prices with the "discount" (that MSFT is kind enough to hold in escrow for you for up to 2 months) MOST OF THE TIME!

I expect ComScores due out this week to tell the tale that Live Search Cashback has caused nary a blip on the search share radar screen. Even Microsoft seems to not be talking about it anymore…

During the same time frame, Google has had major announcements regarding their OpenSocial, GoogleGears, Google App Engine, and Google Android (Google’s mobile phone) software kits, all the while honing their core search and search ad serve in the background. Even Yahoo recently announced a relatively substantial opening up of their search toolkit to developers for third-party applications.

Back to Yahoo’s Serious Issues

In recent weeks, high level departures and reorg moves by the Yahoo board’s Sue Decker, have highlighted again how deep the rot of bloated hierarchies and excessive middle management has gone inside Yahoo. I had previously reported some signs of the same thing on this blog.

The question is if this can be turned around in any meaningful way. And by the way, there is a huge question as to whether MSFT/Steve Ballmer would be doing any better, they are not exactly masters of nimbleness and have ZERO credibility when it comes to making a profit on the Internet.

Yes, Yahoo still has reach and scale, but what is really needed is a clear vision and marching-order on what Yahoo is supposed to stand for going forward. Their lack of focus has been their achilles heel the entire time.

While Google has built "Google = Search" brand in a (mostly) disciplined way, which is one of the key reasons for why they have been able to monetize better on search (people come to their site with a relatively defined mindset), Yahoo = what?

Yahoo’s portal strategy has been an albatross around their neck almost from its beginning.

Add to this the slowness in response due to the excessive hierarchies, and that is all you need to know as to why they haven’t been able to compete with Google. It’s a simple focus and positioning issue.

(The argument repeated again in a comment on Silicon Alley Insider by supposedly a Yahoo employee that Google monetizes better vs. Panama due to larger query share is simply false: It is about the average user mindset/context gap. Remember that Yahoo once had a lot larger share of search. So that’s not it.)

The only thing that Yahoo can do now is to decide how they want to position themselves, ideally in a new category instead of as an also-ran, and then stick with it and execute. But that decision must come first.

I for one see a lot of potential in making Yahoo into one gigantic open social network from the inside out, and among other things leveraging their user base to create a supplementary user-generated/rated search a la Mahalo and Digg.

Plus open up all of the spickets to leverage open source development assistance. If they still want to be in search and search ads, outflank Google by opening up the kimono to advertisers and become the "transparent search ad platform" vs. Google who like to keep things close to their vest.

At this point, they need to create an undeniable, compelling reason to get the advertisers back and hence the monetization up. Also, if they can begin to create context-targeted "social ads" a la Facebook (only better) inside of a newly created "Yahoo as Social Network" (see above), they could leap-frog Google search because Google still knows very little of real substance about the individual user at this point.

It’s all about proof of concept right now, and the more radical the better, as only that can have a chance to generate mindshare and get people to start using the new services. Everything must be on the table. I hope Jerry and Co. are seeing this on the inside.