Some of you may have last year about Cat Stevens (now known as Yusuf Islam after his conversion to Islam) throwing out to the press the idea that he might consider suing Coldplay over a suggested infringement of his song Foreigner Suite via their chart topping song Viva La Vida. His song is a 30 year old track that likely nobody under 20 has ever heard of.

I’ve listened to both songs. Ah… yeah. Whatever. Keep dreaming the dream.

Anyways what got me was the transparently lame marketing ploy that this was. Yusuf is a washed up 70’s rock star looking for a fresh 15 minutes of fame in the U.S. while he tours his new album. He did one of those brilliant Prince like moves several years ago when he converted to Islam and changed his name to something nobody can remember or would even associate with his music. Hey I’m all for religious freedom. He seems happy with his life and I could really care less about his personal beliefs. From a marketing stand point this wasn’t the best move unless he was going to ditch his legacy work and start with a clean slate.

But that’s not what he did, so his P.R team has had a nightmare of trying to expose his non-core fans to the brand change with his name so they get as many baby boomers out to his tour dates as possible. They also need to hopefully scratch out a few new fans for his new work in the process (of course he’s been trying to get new fans for years and hasn’t gotten much traction, hence the need to dig up boomers for ticket sales). Yusuf is alot like Jimmy Buffet in this regard. Yawn.

Anyways, his P.R. team has went so far as too play the 9/11 sympathy card in going on about how his name was mistakenly on the DHS terrorist watch list preventing him from flying into the U.S. for several years. That alone got him a day or two of front page news when he flew in to start his tour.

This then got me thinking about how a lot of people sue other people simply for the press coverage. Front page brand exposure is expensive! But front page exposure where the news is talking about your frivolous lawsuit is free. Personally I think the whole practice is unethical and a waste of public resources but there are clearly people out there without ethics or an appreciation for the fact that our court system has real work to do. This activity is the basis of why so many companies quickly pay out on settlements fast before the story can make it into the news cycle.

People! Isn’t there a better way to handle all of this?

In the world of advertising and marketing you can identify communications as either push or pull. Push is where you push content out to viewers and Pull is where viewers come to you to get content.

Mediums such as TV, newsletters and banner ads are identified as push based communications in that they are designed to push information about new products and services to you. The idea is to inform you about a solution to a perceived need you never knew you had.

Internet content in general (and by extension most social media) is considered pull based communications because the viewer has to actively go out and request the information in order to receive it. There is currently no way for you to force someone to read your blog or watch your YouTube video (not that people aren’t trying to figure out a way to do it though). Granted you can design a website that forces a pop-up ad to show before you can read the page you want to visit. In this case the add is push, but the content that that provided you to the chance to see the ad is pull.

In many ways, modern TV has evolved to this state. Historically when all we had generally were three channels run by national networks to choose from in any given U.S. city an advertiser could simply run their ad on all three networks at peek viewing hours for their target demographic and be confident that just about everyone would see the ad. Now with literally thousands of TV channels between broadcast, cable, satellite, internet, etc… combined with time shifting technology (ie, DVR devices such as Tivo) advertisers are moving to running ads specifically related to a particular program. In very much the same dynamic as a web site (eg, you want to run an advertisement that I.T. workers will see? Run it on TV during a show like MythBusters, and then put your online ads on a site like Slashdot.

Really, the bottom line is consumer choice vs. advertiser choice. The less choice a consumer has the more push communications can be applied unilaterally. The unfortunate thing here is that as people have more choice, marketers must get more intrusive in order to push their messaging out. I’m left thinking of a scene in Minority Report where the Tom Cruise character is walking along and all of the wall ads are narrow focusing audio at him with personalized sales pitches.

In the decade since blogs first formally appeared as a platform, people have been trying to figure out a way to make them more Push based instead of Pull. Why? Because as a Pull based technology your readership is limited to who you can draw into your site and this is where link aggregation services such as Digg, etc… come into play. Effectively people have been trying to find a way to make a things like blogs work in the way TV communications used to work.

A site like Digg or Technorati are Pull services, but they have such high volume and high visibility that they can effectively becomes a Push agent for everyone else down stream because they have critical mass audience based on being an aggregate.

I suppose in the rare cases, there have been blogs that have attained that same space but in all of the cases I am aware of the blogs are working as an aggregate site. Examples would be Slashdot mentioned above as well as sites like BoingBoing or in the most extreme FARK.

So, I guess the lesson learned here is if you want to get the word about about your product, you either need to advertise everywhere you can (print, TV, web, etc…), go door-to-door like the old days (or site to site posting comments — don’t spam!) or get your site/product referenced on one of these aggrigator sites (you better have something unique going on to get their attention). Hmm… that’s all that comes to mind at the moment. Does anyone else have ideas on this subject?

The other evening I was inspired to see what the top three search results were in Google for the word Computer since I expected it to be generic enough to not be branded yet specific in such a way that all languages referring to it would be identifying the exact same concept in their word. To make it interesting I first stopped by the Babel Fish translation service and from the twelve non-English languages I translated the word computer into that language in the native character set.

Then where possible I went to the Google landing page for that country and executed the search by pasting in the translated word. Eg, for Japan I went to www.google.co.jp and entered “コンピュータ” which is what Babel Fish told me was the Japanese translation for the word.

What follows are my results followed by some observations.

In Dutch: “computer”

1. http://www.mycom.nl/
2. http://www.computertotaal.nl/
3. http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer

In French: “ordinateur”

1. http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinateur
2. http://www.ordinateur.com/
3. http://www.dicofr.com/cgi-bin/n.pl/dicofr/definition/20010101003926

In German: “computer”

1. http://www.computerbild.de/
2. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer
3. http://www.atelco.de/

In Greek: “υπολογιστής”

1. http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%97%CE%BB%CE%B5%CE%BA%CF%84%CF%81%CE%BF%CE%BD%CE%B9%CE%BA%CF%8C%CF%82_%CF%85%CF%80%CE%BF%CE%BB%CE%BF%CE%B3%CE%B9%CF%83%CF%84%CE%AE%CF%82
2. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%85%CF%80%CE%BF%CE%BB%CE%BF%CE%B3%CE%B9%CF%83%CF%84%CE%AE%CF%82
3. http://www.komvos.edu.gr/periodiko/default.htm

In Italian: “calcolatore”

1. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/calcolatore
2. http://www.freeonline.org/calcolatrice_dtml
3. http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer

In Japanese: “コンピュータ”

1. http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B3%E3%83%B3%E3%83%94%E3%83%A5%E3%83%BC%E3%82%BF
2. http://www.dell.co.jp/
3. http://www.apple.com/jp/

In Korean: “컴퓨터”

1. http://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%BB%B4%ED%93%A8%ED%84%B0
2. http://www.compuzone.co.kr/
3. http://www.trigem.co.kr/

In Portuguese: “computador”

1. http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computador
2. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/computador
3. http://www.dell.com.br/

In Russian: “компьютер”

1. http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BF%D1%8C%D1%8E%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%80
2. http://www.sigmacomputers.ru/
3. http://www.depo.ru/

In Spanish: “computadora”

1. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computadora
2. http://www.monografias.com/trabajos15/computadoras/computadoras.shtml
3. http://www.alegsa.com.ar/Dic/computadora.php

In Chinese-Simplified: “计算机”

1. http://baike.baidu.com/view/3314.htm
2. http://product.enet.com.cn/price/plist3.shtml
3. http://www.enet.com.cn/computer/

In Chinese-Traditional: “計算機”

1. http://home.educities.edu.tw/tky999/top/top-right/tool/FinanceTools/calculator.htm
2. http://www.acm.org
3. http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%87%8F%E5%AD%90%E8%AE%A1%E7%AE%97%E6%9C%BA

And last but not least, in English: “computer”

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer
2. http://www.dell.com/
3. http://www.apple.com/

On a lark I dug into the English results to see where IBM showed up since I would think that they would be synonymous with the word computer to some degree… After lots of clicking I found it. At the bottom of page #57 in my results: http://www.research.ibm.com/compsci/

This kind of blew me away so I quickly did a search for the word “server” in English as well and found IBM at the bottom of page #9 with a link to: http://www.ibm.com/software/webservers/appserv/was/

While I was not surprised to see Wikipedia frequently showing up as the #1 result in most countries/languages I did expect to see more academic material represented. I was surprised to see how well Dell and Apple were represented. I was also taken aback by the Chinese Traditional #1 which is a bland page with a giant basic math calculator square in the middle of the page.

Also, looking at this from a global SEO frame of reference, I think this nicely highlights that when you are doing global SEO analysis, it can pay to develop localized strategies. For instance it would seem to me that Russia, Korea and Spain might be low hanging fruit for an aggressive campaign to capture visibility on the word computer.

Tell me what you think about these results.

Cheers!

In 2007, it was estimated that 36%-40% of the world’s population carried a mobile device giving us an estimate of 2.4-2.7 billion people carrying at least one phone. At that same time several writers projected that based on current growth estimates, sometime around 2010 to 2012 (depending on who you asked) we might hit 3.3-3.6 billion mobile devices.

Well, here we are in 2010 and according to a UN report published in March 2009 it was estimated that there were already 4.1 billion mobile phone subscribers  at the end of 2008 (60% of the world population), with the fastest growing country being… Pakistan.

Additionally, it was noted that there had been a clear shift from fixed to mobile cellular phone use and that in the same reporting period there were over three times more mobile cellular phone subscriptions than fixed telephone lines globally. Two thirds of those mobile phones are found in the developing world compared to less than half in 2002.

Why does this matter?

Because among Gen Y (and younger) and throughout many parts of the developing world the cell phone or other mobile devices are becoming the first device of choice (or necessity) for interacting with the Internet, for making online purchases, for banking, etc… South Korea, a country considered to be at the leading edge of digital communications is a place now where nearly everything is done through your cell phone and the simple idea of getting a plastic card to use for purchasing is archaic and offered as a courtesy option to banking customers who think they might be traveling out of the country.

This leads us to another thing to be aware of when you look at that graph above. The racing climb of mobile devices also represents a growing class of web users that may be visiting your website, buying your products, trying to get customer support.

It was estimated that in 2008, the number of mobile Internet users had reached 1.05 billion, surpassing the number of PC web users (1 billion) for the first time ever.

The natural questions become, why isn’t your website mobile friendly? And, if you’re doing any kind of e-commerce, why isn’t your store front not only mobile friendly but able to accept payments in the common methods of payment frequented by your customer base?

If you don’t have the answer, your business could be in trouble. Even the best established business relationship or brand loyalty can dissolve in the blink of an eye when there is a major change in the way society communicates.

You can see this taking place right now across all aspects of the publishing world. Non-Internet based media companies have spent the greater part of decade trying to figure out how to apply their business models to Internet communications rather than the other way around. For example let’s take the contemporary case of the newspaper classifieds. Classifieds were the mainstay of newspaper revenue for over a hundred years in the U.S. but they were never a perfect process for users. Limited words, fees, trying to figure out what days you wanted your ad to show up… these things all presented challenges to customers using the service. Then a very basic website called Craigslist showed up which was free to read, free to post (short of fees for job postings and some services) and had no real limits on word counts or listing durations. Within a few short years the classifieds industry was decimated and many newspapers soon found themselves going out of business because they could not or would not adapt.

So let’s bring this all around… in short everything I’m talking about here relates to location and convenience. These fundamental elements have been key to business success since the dawn of time. Real-estate agents get it “Location, Location, Location!”. Traditional marketing people get it “Go to where the customers are”.

People are on the web, people are using their cell phones to use the web. People are using their cell phones for the majority of their day to day communications when you take in voice, SMS, web, chat, gaming, etc… Do your children have their own cell phone? Does each child have their own cell phone? When they grow up to be a consumer, will your company be positioned to communicate to them in a way that they expect to be talked to or are you simply expecting them to learn an archaic way to talk to you based on how you talk today? When you get that Fax with their answer let me know.

Get it? Good. Next you need to actually have something relevant on your website for visitors to see when they get there on their cell phone, but that’s another conversation all together.

My thanks to the following resources for my data:

• http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2007/01/putting_27_bill.html
• http://www.itu.int/newsroom/press_releases/2009/07.html
• http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/technology/25iht-mobile.html
• http://wapreview.com/blog/?p=3019
• http://www.tomiahonen.com/ebook/almanac.html
• http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

We’ve watched a couple of Vincent Price films lately and ended up “discovering” a film that none of us had ever heard of called Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs. The movie was a total 60’s b-grade spy film parody where Vincent Price plays the role of the super villain out to take over the world. You just need to see it. It’s all kinds of awesome. Apparently it’s also a sequel to another Dr. Goldfoot movie that was released a year earlier that we need to watch now because the first one is apparently even better from the reviews I’ve found. Both films are on Hulu as of the writing of this post (here and here).

Speaking of Vincent Price, we also recently watched The Last Man on Earth (completing our I Am Legend related movie watching short of a the most recent direct to video production). I would have to say that all things considered this version seems to run closer to the book than any of the others. If you’re looking to watch these movies yourself I would say the canon (contrary to Wikipedia’s thoughts) would be:

• The Last Man on Earth
• The Omega Man
• Night of the Comet
• 28 Days Later (& 28 Weeks Later)
• I Am Legend
• I Am Omega

All of these are pretty awesome taken individually, and of course each has it’s own set of issues or variations on the book story. If you’re adverse to gory violence though, stay away from the 28 Days/Weeks movies. On that note, I can’t say anything one way about goriness with the last one on the list as I still haven’t seen it.