April 1st 2011
Google +1 is a critical priority to Google. Here’s why this still thin beta may still be the biggest shift of the year in search marketing. Spoiler alert: I see this as the gating event for repackaging Google’s many services as to a social network. And that’s a pretty great idea.
March 6th 2011
A story arc is growing in China that Google is not just a search engine tool — it is a tool to extend American hegemony…and that the influence of social media in recent Arab revolutions just proves that point. The story, now on 300 party sites, paints online media from the West is a tool for Western domination no less than opium trade.
October 28th 2010
Audience Platforms Emerge as the New Networks We are now among 2 billion people on the Internet. Have you noticed that we’re increasingly spending the bulk of our time on an ever-smaller handful of hub websites? According to data from Compete in 2001, 30 percent of all Internet traffic went to the top 10 visited [...]
September 3rd 2010
Last fall I started to worry about this site’s performance. The process of posting and viewing pages was becoming alarmingly slow. Everyone who works on the site noticed it, and I started to wonder if sometime soon I’d sign on to find a major server crash, and potentially tons of lost data to restore. So [...]
August 31st 2010
Your site visitor’s experience starts with waiting for that first page to load. Does the speed of a website really influence visitors buying decisions on it? You bet it does. New research from e-commerce websites backs this perception up with lots of hard data. Improving pageload speed helps: Increases conversion rates, page views, and time [...]
July 30th 2010
Recently, numerous political groups have been quite upfront about their intent to exert authority over different parts of the online world. It seems everybody want to rule the Web. Dept of Justice moves to regulate Web through accessibility standards. FCC proposes to regulate Web access via broadband, claims it’s part of regulating telcos. Commerce Dept [...]
April 1st 2010
Last month, the mayor of Topeka, Kansas, stunned the world by announcing that his city was changing its name to Google. Now Google has honored that gesture by changing its name name to Topeka for April Fools’ Day. This makes Bill Bunten the Mayor of Google and Eric Schmidt the CEO of Topeka, Inc. Of course, [...]
March 25th 2010
New Haven law firm Stratton Faxon sued Google for selling competitor ads triggered by searches on their name. Specifically, they alleged that these ads interfered with the firm’s business relations with clients, were an unfair business practice under Connecticut state law, and resulted in unjust enrichment. Read the details on Lawyers and Settlements. Note the [...]
February 15th 2010
Presidents Day and Valentine’s Day came together in Fortune Magazine’s feature story. This cover featured an inspired visual melding of brands, and the title promises something juicy along with tech policy. The article chronicles Google’s shift, like much of Silicon Valley, from being blind to government policy to building a lobbying arm to participate in politics [...]
February 11th 2010
The most frequent response to my question about what online law issues our readers are most concerned about centered on the still undetermined law around the use of trademarks as to trigger advertising in search engines. The issue is both prominent and vexingly permanent in the minds of both IP layers and and search marketers. [...]
The future of digital marketing will be built by strategists who grasp the full array of emerging business, social, and technical models. Specialities in user experience, branding, application design, and data are laying the foundation for richer user experiences and business models breakthrough products and revenue based marketing.
UsefulArts is a soapbox to discuss the frontline of digital marketing, and the agencies and platforms that enable it. Marketing today needs a cadre of leaders who can connect c-level enterprise strategy with these new capabilities.