MKT595 Week 7 - Data Growth Explosion: Video is the Next Wave

Data Growth During the Recession
Despite the fact that we are in a recession, data is growing at 70%, according to news from the EMC World Conference currently being held in Boston. The title of this year's conference, "The Journey to the Private Cloud Starts Now."

Digital Universe
EMC calls the total amount of information the digital universe. Amazingly enough, only 5% of data comes from data centers, 35% comes from enterprise and

"About 70 percent of the digital universe is created by individuals, although companies are responsible for the security, privacy, reliability and compliance of 85 percent of that data, the study said."

Video As the Next Wave of Communication & Expression
My inside source tells me that the explosion of video sharing will be the next wave of social interaction. Not too surprising. It seems that I myself am going this way. In building my website I have come to realize that a video will draw in more website traffic. But optimizing video for SEO is not actually that easy. A holistic approach toward quality and best practices are still important for getting a top You Tube hit.

Just Flip It
I am considering buying a flip video camera. I guess all of the advertising on the CTA blue line coming to and from classes at DePaul has finally worn off on me. Once I get enough videos I'll be needing to buy some data storage from Carbonite.

Carbonite
How much cooler can you get than a company called Carbonite? The name carbonite comes from the material that Han Solo was frozen in Star Wars (see image above). I am sure that this dates me, but Han Solo was hotter than Luke Skywalker. Carbonite is a startup company - the "Symantec of Online Backup." This company is doing so well that they just want to go public next year. It is one to watch.

Week 3 GOMC Team Formation & What Search Is

Marketing Sharpshooters Team Formation
This week we formed our teams for the Google Online Marketing Challenge. Our team name is Marketing Sharpshooters. We completed the following tasks:

• Selected the business.
• Got agreement from the business that it was ok to use their website.
• Sent an email confirming the team.
• Created a Google AdWords account.
  

The part that confused me was the statement that any campaigns created should be paused. Since we had not started any campaigns I assume they did not need to be paused. The help menu on Google AdWord explained how to pause a campaign.

We registered our team and entered our customer ID into the GOMC page. Now we wait for the $200 in AdWords.

Search
We discussed how searches are made in class this week. After you create a business website it is important to list in a directory. This helps the search to find what industry you are in. DMOZ is an open directory and the first place to index your page.

How Search Reads Your Site: Lynx, Browser for the Blind
One item that was of interest was the Lynx browser for the blind. Lynx only reads text and simulates which a search engine will see when it looks at your site. Since search engines look for words this is very helpful. I found it more user friendly to use a Lynx viewer. at the bottom of the HTML code I inserted a delorie.gif image so that the viewer could read my site. It was really neat to see the results. I have known one blind person in my life and wanted to volunteer at RFB&D.

Number of Links
The most interesting thing about search is that after 200-500 links to external pages the search engine optimization (SEO) will not pay attention to. Choosing which sites you anchor to is important.

Strategy of Choosing Words

When bidding on words the price of the word is not the only consideration, but also the quality

Ad rank = CPC bid x quality score

an expensive word does not mean your ad will be placed for sure, it also relies on how clickable your ad is. Adwords is like a word auction. You can place your bet but you want to make sure you have got a high quality website to sell.

Some Google Ads have images, which I imagine could boost the quality score.