I can hear it now.

Have you seen that video on YouTube?! Makes us look like a bunch of idiots I tell you.

Technorati Tags: AT&T, youtube, social+media, video, iPhone, environmental+awareness

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Apparently Schmidt’s oversimplification of Web 2.0 has folks amused. I noticed several Twitters ( or is it Tweets?)  within the hour of posting this poking fun at Schmidt’s take.

And while it’s obvious AJAX  improves the way we interact with content on the web, it’s just technology. Web (whatever the number) dot oh won’t be remembered under the brand of any technology. It’ll be remembered in terms of our collective experiences. I can see the nostalgic headlines already, “Web 2.0, The Era We Made Contact” or “Web 2.0, The True User Experience.”

Schmidt went on to guess at what the next rev of the Web might bring, essentially describing a world of lightweight mashups accessible on any device and pulling the their data from “the cloud.” He finished by predicting the applications would be distributed virally, through social networks, email, and other forms of electronic communications.

Seen first @ Read/Write Web..YouTube posting by KoreaCrunch

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One of the best things about the FASTforward conference was seeing how customers have used FAST technology - how they’ve applied it to the real world. I sat down last Thursday with CEO Tauseef Bashir of TauMed, a virtual health community, and got a glimpse of how healthcare information is evolving. This time the evolution is being  driven by social media and powerful search technologies.

(Photo | Tauseef Bashir and Jerry Bowles)

According to some recent stats from TauMed’s PR firm about 10 million Americans go online each day searching for answers to health questions. And to no one’s surprise Health searches are now just as popular as paying bills online, reading blogs, or using the web to find phone numbers and addresses.

With that kind of activity, you can see why there’s an information land grab going on. So Is there room for another WebMD? And how do you compete with the 800 lb. gorilla? Bashir says they’ll do it by improving the quality of information, how that information is delivered and expanding the site’s social networking capabilities. No small task by any stretch.

The beta site, launched in December, is impressive. It’s actually more impressive when you see it go head-to-head with WebMD. During his demo, he showed me some of why there’s so much buzz around search becoming the new interface. When we searched for “MS” (multiple sclerosis) in WebMD’s v1.0 site and asked to see the Web results, we  saw things like Microsoft Corporation and other irrelevant items. Doing the same search in TauMed rendered much more precise results. The other things I liked were the “ask a question” and “HealthShare“ features. Tauseef’s product team uses rich Ajax interfaces to dynamically serve up content, giving the site a clean, interactive feel when searching for data or contributing content for HealthShares. 

Tauseef,a former FAST employee, is passionate about the company’s prospects and knows they’ve got a fight in front of them. He says consumers have short attention spans for fruitless searches and irrelevant information and intends to capitalize on it.  The data mining and contextual analysis is the key, he says, to serving up razor-sharp results and creating a memorable user experience. But search aside, I dug a little deeper on the social networking aspects of TauMed’s community. Apparently, they’ve built their own content management system (CMS) and blog-like capabilities. I couldn’t help but notice how their user profile pages mimic blog features, providing very simple and intuitive interfaces and easy onramps to adding user-generated content. 

The other thing that popped up during the demo was advertisements, mostly from Google. I’m OK with that, but what surprised me was the irrelevancy of certain ads. In the midst of deep-diving for additional multiple sclerosis (MS) information, a political ad obtrusively took over half the side rail in TauMed’s 3 column-ish layout. Suffice to say, Tuaseef quickly pointed out their product team is in the midst of improving their ad-serving backend. He also added TauMed was an early AdMomentum customer, putting much of the platform under rigorous testing and customization.

But let’s face it, as Web 2.0 as TauMed 1.0 is,  they still have a numbers problem. Not the financial kind, but traffic. Outside of mass media advertising, you’ve got  a classic case of a company needing some good ol’ fashioned grassroots and word-of-mouth marketing. Perhaps they should also reach out to other social software providers supplying the resources to companies building intranets, niche communities, and other social-oriented portals. You could even include some of the office 2.0 candidates like ZoHo, CentralDesktop, and others. They too will become more and more dependent on customized content as user bases grow. I guess you could think of it as enabling TauMed to become the de facto health widget.

However it plays out, they’re an interesting company that has a new evangelist.  

Cross-posted @ The FASTforward Blog

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Before you call me a sell out, hear me out on some coffee-shop observations

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1. Competitive Intelligence

This is an easy one. Once you get rid of your paranoia and turn off Google’s competitive ad filter, your competition will be at your blog’s doorstep shortly.

2. Marketing and Advertising insight

Take a quick look at the kind of ads your site serves. Once your content  settles and gets indexed, an aggregate theme begins to develop as you look at the ads. Many times this helps me understand if my content is providing the right context for you, my user.

3. Product discovery and selection

My colleagues and I joke about this one. Anytime we have some downtime and get in an exploratory mode for new webby tools and services, we just take a quick spin through 5 or 10 pages and voila!

4. Business Development

This one’s also terribly apparent. You’re a digital agency and you provide email marketing services. I probably shouldn’t admit this and open source my email marketing strategy, but one of the solutions we’re using for a few of our clients is IntelliContact. How’d we find them? Yep, the ad running on my blog.

5. Brand and Community Building

As you begin to develop consistency in your content, you’ll notice the ads begin to tell your story. WOW Feed has a lot of Web 2.0, social media, and agency-oriented content. If you look around you’ll usually notice some very targeted Ads on at least a few of those topics. Users, in turn, get a quick sense of what the site’s all about..a sense of what conversations are taking place.

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The Norway-based company released news yesterday morning of AdMomentum, billed as an alternative to internet advertising’s big three - Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. IDC’s Sue Feldman commented on contextual advertising and described FAST’s Ad platform:

Online ad revenue drives the digital economy, and no one has a lock on that revenue stream today,” said Feldman, IDC’s Vice President for Search and Digital Marketplace Technologies. “Online advertising – particularly contextual advertising – continues to soar. IDC believes that large publishers and ad networks can seize a significant share of this revenue. FAST AdMomentum provides the infrastructure for publishers to manage and monetize their online content. It’s a digital marketplace in a box.

You’re probably thinking, big deal right? Nobody’s catching Google. Even if you’re right, think about how wide open the internet ad market is right now. The scramble for number two or even number five or six in market share is worth billions. I’m sure FAST has done the math.

But I’m thinking there’s more to this battle than just fighting for the big brand websites. What about FAST’s position with enterprise customers?

Some of the world’s largest companies use their technology (much of it behind the firewall) to enhance their information management strategies — the company clearly has a strong brand in that respect. The question is, who can expand the footprint of the enterprise customer first? Will it be Google with its search and bevy of web 2.0 apps or a company like FAST whose genealogy already has a decidedly enterprisey slant.

It seems like there’s plenty of customers who could help FAST chip away at Google’s AdSense. If ACME already has FAST infrastructure, why wouldn’t they pilot FAST? Wouldn’t it be an easy ROI to use an existing backend from FAST while ramping up your Ad resources?

I also think it’s a bit naive to think large organizations will be tied to one Ad platform. Someone mentioned how Google customers might threaten to employ FAST to get a better deal. Not sure it really matters. The smart companies will tailor their advertising strategies so precisely, they’ll quickly figure out Google and FAST can each serve their own purpose. One size fits all is dead.

And what about all the channel and OEM communities that companies like FAST have? To me, those are armies entering the enterprise through all sorts of other Trojan horses — back doors like this.

Speaking of back door entrances into the enterprise, it made me think of a comment I ran across (on Rubicon exec Michael Mace’s blog) from Robert Scoble a while back describing Google vs. Microsoft. Although the parallels may not be the same in scale, I think Scoble paints a scenario that can be played out for all sorts of David and Goliath matchups.

Google hasn’t made an impact on the enterprise yet. And I don’t see them challenging Microsoft or taking money off the Office team’s plate in the enterprise for the next two years. Further out, however, they are positioned to come in and take some business from Microsoft. The first thing Google will do is stop the growth of Microsoft Office. Small startups aren’t going to buy Office anymore, they’re going to use the free apps on the Internet. Is Google going to get Chevron to switch from Exchange? No. Not soon. What they are going to do is add new value that Microsoft can’t, like the Google calendar team showing me how to put my calendar on my blog. It’s really nice. Those kinds of things are what you’ll see enterprise companies start to use in little projects here and there. Google will sneak in the back door, just as Microsoft did 25 years ago with DOS and PCs.

So with the above in mind, what’s it gonna take for FAST to take real market share? Running your own Ad network will take some muscle.

Maybe I’ll have the chance to ask the FAST product managers this week in San Diego about  the platform’s complexity, but it’s not even that. It has more to do with an enterprise’s propensity to outsource all the functions related to web advertising. That’s a big reason so many companies look to AdSense, Panama, and Microsoft’s AdCenter. Outside of producing content, all the stuff related to development, payment, stats, etc., is handled effortlessly, maybe too effortlessly. We’ve gotten lazy and the big advertisers are profiting.

So, are we to the point where corporations are finally ready to act like real media companies? You have to think it’s just a matter of time before internal marketing and PR teams get tired of everyone reaching into the coffer.

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My premise for pitching the SMNR to them was simple. Let your audience slice and dice your content on their terms. Some folks will download the video, some will pull down a photo. Others might decide to just Digg it and move on. Whatever the interaction with your SMNR, the key is just that, interaction.

It’s fascinating to think how early we are in all of this. Fast forward a few years and think how silly it’ll seem gloating over an embedded video (below) inside of a press release.

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From the AP wire story:

Google is betting its technology can do for radio what it has already done for the Internet by automating the process for selling and distributing ads to an audience where the messages are most likely to pique consumer interest. As it does on the Web, Google plans to charge a commission for helping radio stations sell ads.

                                       <<Screenshot via CNET>>  

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tags: starbucks, viral+marketing, guerrilla+marketing, grass+roots+marketing, online+advertising, google, google+adsense, blogs, business+blogs

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tags: google, google+checkout, paypal, ecommerce, antiques, adwords, online+marketing, online+advertising

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Technorati Tags : google+checkout, google, antiques, ecommerce, shopping, gbuy, blog, paypal

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