During her crazy adventure to Finland for the Persuasive Technology conference (more on that here), CLM’s Amy Greer met a fascinating gentleman from the UK named Richard Sedley. Richard works at a UK-based agency called cScape managing the Customer Engagement group. Amy introduced me to Richard when she returned and, in an attempt to brush up on my transoceanic diplomacy skills, we’ve been conversing ever since. Recently, Richard graciously asked CLM to participate in the Customer Engagement Survey he runs in conjunction with E-Consultancy. Having seen the people who participated in the past surveys (like Andy Beal and Avinash K), we jumped at the chance. You can see the summary report from the previous surveys here.
So I’m putting out the call to all companies (including agencies) to take the survey. It only takes a few minutes. I found it to be an eye-opening experience.

Take the survey 

SMX East is happening Oct 6-8 in NYC, where I’ll be speaking on SEO & Usability. This promises to be one of the biggest and best Search conferences.The friendly folks who run the SMX events are letting speakers offer a $150 discount off all-access passes. Just comment on this post or email info (at) closed-loop-marketing.com if interested and we’ll send you the discount code. Please look me up if you’ll be there.SMX East site

The Iceberg’s Tip

Since their inception, search engines have relied on the visible to locate relevant content. Visible text, to be precise. And not just any visible text, either - the text had to be accessible and readable to a web crawler. That is, it couldn’t be inside an animation, image, script, video, or a wide assortment of other file formats. It couldn’t be stored in a ‘deep web’ database such as the CDC or USGS, one that was reached only via an active user query.And it certainly couldn’t be spoken.This meant that, for all the blow-your-mind number of visible web pages out there on the web, all this time only a tiny fraction of the available content has been indexable and searchable by search engines. In 2001 the company BrightPlanet estimated in their white paper “The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value” that public search engines made only 0.03% of the total web content available to searchers. That’s tiny. And this estimate wasn’t even considering content hidden in images, audio files, and video. Like a giant iceberg of data and content, the majority of the web remained - and still remains - invisible to search.But this is all changing.

Making sense out of sound

Google’s beta release of Gaudi, its audio indexing tool heralds to the wider public a profound shift in the search environment.Why? Hasn’t audio search been around for years now?Actually, no. Not this way. (Read the full article…)

Let me share with you how one PPC advertiser achieved…

• An ROI increase from 77% to 323%
• A conversion rate increase from 6.15% to 8.39%
• A CTR increase from 6% to 8%

…solely through match type testing and refinement.But first some background… (Read the full article…)

More than a year and a half ago, my CLM colleague Sandra Niehaus and I attended the Second Annual Persuasive Technology conference at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, hosted by BJ Fogg and his team at Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab.

At that time, I had only a rudimentary idea about what Persuasive Technology was and what its applicability to our company and my work might be.

Fortunately, I have a boss (and good friend) who encourages us CLM-ers to explore avenues that may not initially seem to be related to online marketing because of the opportunities such varied experiences and perspectives can offer.

(Read the full article…)