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No Famous Marketers section would be complete without mentioning Steve Case. A traditional marketer who cut his teeth at Pizza Hut and P&G, Case was born in that perfect swirl of time pointed out in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.  A late Boomer, born in 1958, Case is 3 years younger than Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.  As his career reached a point where he had authority, Case plunged forward as his contemporaries did and disrupted an entire industry.

steve-case
Steve Case testifying before a Senate Health Committee in 2008

There can be arguments forever about who invented the Internet, but few can argue about the identity of the person who brought widespread Internet access to the American consumer.  Case’s innovations at the nascent Quantum Computer Services are legendary.

Riding herd over a network of dedicated hobbyists using Commodore computers in the mid 1980s, Case’s pushed online chats, streaming music (albeit 3 voice music more rudimentary than greeting cards sold today) and the concept of consumers paying extra for premium content. Quantum, known to devotees as Q-Link, quickly blossomed into Apple and PC specific platforms.  (Disclosure:  I was an early contractor at Quantum and later received a job offer to manage a segment of the Apple platform).

Tying the brands together into a single entity, Case created America Online, a behemoth that was serving 25 million subscribers by the new century’s celebration.  The company’s ubiquitous trial CDs become late night comedian fodder and filled many trash bins. Having conquered online access, Case took on Wall Street and created a massive entertainment and information company when AOL merged with Time Warner.

The vision was simplicity:  the content from Time Warner’s vast collection of movies, music, news and television would flow across the growing Internet to AOL subscribers.  Through financial engineering, Case’s AOL managed to own more of the much larger Time Warner. Unfortunately for Case and the new company’s shareholders, AOL was one of the poster children of the Internet bubble, and the balance sheets soon took a write-off approaching $100 billion.  Case was ousted from his role, and in 2009, AOL was finally poised to break free and spin off as its own organization once again.

But Case had a third act up his sleeve — one that was revolutionary.  Using his own funds as seed money,  Casey founded an incubator that created offerings in health, finance and invested in prominent social media companies.    From an initial investment of $100 million in personal funds, Case began rolling up small companies into something larger, much like the $160 plus billion dollar deal he once made for Time Warner. The result, as he turned 50 years old in late 2009?   Seeing AOL leave the Time Warner fold with a capitalization expected to be several billion and the announcement in November of 2009 that American Express would buy Revolution Money, the company’s finance offering, for $300 million

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Get ready because a ranking factor that was kind of important until now is receiving all sorts of quiet guidance from Google that things will change again.  Page Loading Time, call it Page Speed like Google does, is literally how fast an individual page loads.

Google is serious enough about this factor that there is a page speed section on Google Code describing their new plugin. Yes, the company that built the Chrome browser created a Firefox plugin that rides along with FireBug.  And this is some seriously good development advice, if not simple SEO advice.   After testing on our home page, we got results showing some inline CSS no longer being used.    Our big hit was on caching and setting expiration dates. I don’t feel so bad because visiting Google News showed that they too had CSS issues.

Amazon, which knows a thing or two about code but probably doesn’t care if it messes with usability, got beat up by the new tool, including a warning for my new favorite, “Serve static content from a cookieless domain”. After grumbling about the amount of work I had to do, I took the tool to the World Wide Web Consortium because if anyone gets good coding concepts, they would be the folks.    They got beat up too — almost as much as my sites did so I’m in good company. Meanwhile, page speed has been hinted at for months if not longer.  Now you need to start doing some reading and focus your radar a bit more on the entire concept.  Oh, and W3 folks?  Google says you need some help.  Here’s the screen shot from Monday morning.

Google's new Page Speed plugin finds fault at W3.org
Google’s new Page Speed plugin finds fault at W3.org

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I watched another potential lead go by today and decided not to purchase the information because the prospect was in a medium sized market.  Their sole criteria was that they wanted to rank in the top 3 spots for a certain local phrase. It’s important that you as a small business don’ t make this mistake:  there are no more ways that rankings can be counted. There are lots of SEO specific phrases that tie into this concept.  Ignoring them for a minute, here’s what you need to know:

  • The Google results you see for a query will likely vary based on the physical location of the Internet connection you’re using.
  • The Google results you see for a query will likely vary based on whether you have a Google account and are logged into that account.
  • The Google results you see for a query will likely vary based on how other searchers have interacted with a page and query over time.
  • The Google results you see for a query will likely vary based on constant testing Google does for thousands of variables.
  • And our new favorite, Google Social Search.

Forget about Social Search for a moment.  Remember this because it’s critical business advice that predates the Internet by thousands of years. Who cares how many people visit your store, call your 800 number, stop by your cave to see if your wheel is more round than Ogg’s, say your cow’s milk is the best or think you’re a dandy doctor?   Referrals and word-of-mouth are great, but the bottom line remains the bottom line.

If people walk in to a retail store, quickly mutter, “Just browsing” as a spell to ward off salespeople and leave without buying anything, you’ve perhaps gained some brand awareness (but it may be poor), and you’ve used sales resources on someone who didn’t buy. That’s what happens when businesses say they want to “rank” for a term.  They don’t want to rank for a term.   They want to make the most profit possible given the enterprise’s constraints.   Having a great location helps retail walk-in traffic for some businesses.  Having a great web location helps too, but the days of static placement on search engines are over.  Stop asking about them.

We, the person reading this post and I, can sit down side by side, type the same phrase in a search engine’s query box and receive different results. Rank is worthless. Traffic is only slightly better, and the only reason you should care about traffic is as a function of profit. So back to Google’s Social Search, now being beta tested in Google Labs.   Right now, this is opt-in so you have to want to see this information, but Social Search will change the results page based upon people identified as part of your social network.

What does that cover?   Well, consider that your Facebook friends list is likely wide open.  Ditto for your LinkedIn contacts and your Twitter feed. Here’s a killer.   Once a search engine can associate your account on that search engine with a Facebook, Twitter or other account, then the true social “graph” is reality.  Here’s something else to chew on:  if a search engine associates your account with four other networks and finds that of all the people, you’ve “friended” four other people, the knowledge it can glean by micro-targeting will make today’s web advertising look primitive. So please stop asking for “rankings”.   You’re a smarter businessperson.  Ask for profits.  And demand ROI from your online marketing efforts.

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