Joseph Morin

Social Rewards Launches Loyalty Program Using the Power of Viral Marketing

2010-09-12T12:02:00.000-07:00

WEBWIRE – Thursday, August 19, 2010

Turning Tweets, Likes and Check-ins Into Rewards

San Francisco – (August 19, 2010) Social Rewards announced today that it will debut its social media loyalty rewards platform with electronics leader, Sanyo on August 19 during Connected Marketing Week in San Francisco. Gaming giant Tropicana Las Vegas was the first to go live on the Social Rewards platform and was the initial launch beta partner earlier this month. Social Rewards will then celebrate the launch of its newest partner in the Las Vegas market, five-diamond, four star resorts, The Venetian® and The Palazzo, with a tweet-up at Lagasse’s Stadium at The Palazzo on August 20. Additionally, Las Vegas based social media and internet marketing conference PubCon will also launch its Social Rewards program showcasing the platform’s conference and event marketing capabilities.

Featuring a complex backed infrastructure with the ability to track brand mentions and sales activity, Social Rewards offers a complete analytics package highlighting top brand advocates and conversions resulting from the most influential users. Designed to work with a brand’s existing loyalty program or provide a platform upon which a brand can create, customize and create a new one, Social Rewards monitors and tracks tweets, location based check-ins such as Foursquare, Facebook likes and fan activity.

“The premise of Social Rewards is to take existing brand loyalty program members that have social media tendencies and reward them for their loyalty and word of mouth activities with program points that can be redeemed for tangible goods and services,” said Joseph Morin, CEO of Social Rewards. “Our system is also designed to easily create customized programs for companies that do not already have an existing loyalty program.”

Morin continued, “Peer-to-peer recommendations have long been considered to be the strongest form of advertising and Social Rewards is going to change the way retailers think and engage in social media as we turn tweets into sales.”

Tropicana Las Vegas, an early adopter of social media, has already seen initial success with Social Rewards. “We continue to have a strong social media presence, but until recently did not have a social loyalty program to reward our brand ambassadors,” said Brandie Feuer, head of Marketing, PR and Innovation for Tropicana Las Vegas. “Social Rewards provides us with a way to do this.”

About Social Rewards
Social Rewards is a new Social Media startup company based in Torrance, CA founded by Joseph Morin and Mike Uesugi, veterans of the digital industry with a combined experience level of over 25 years. Social Rewards is a cohesive blend of Social Media, Affiliate Marketing and Rewards Programs rewarding consumer brand advocates with loyalty program points for social media activity. In development since late 2009 and incorporated in June of 2010, Social Rewards is self-funded with 6 employees. For additional information, please visit the Social Rewards website at www.socialrewards.com, follow on Twitter http://twitter.com/socialrewards and Facebook at www.facebook.com/socialrewards.

Related Links: Sanyo Social Rewards; The Venetian / The Palazzo Social Rewards; Tropicana Social Rewards

Launching New Start Up - Social Rewards Where Loyalty Marketing meets Social Media

2010-06-09T11:19:00.000-07:00

This month I will be launching a new start up. I guess as a serial entrepreneur its hard to not always be thinking about companies or a new way to do things. This new company was born out of a long term relationship I've had with my high school best friend, Tatsuo (Mike) Uesugi. Over 20 years ago, Mike and I attended Western Christian High School in Covina, CA and even though he spoke little English at the time, we became fast friends as I sat behind him in English class during our Sophomore year. We eventually became roommates after high school and Mike went on to fame working at both Apple and IBM, helping Apple design the first Japanese language KanjiTalk OS for the Mac.

I went in another direction, becoming a private investigator and starting my own detective agency but enjoying the tech sector, the start up process and then running my own tech companies. Eventually the start up bug hit Mike and he founded Global Micro Solutions, doing integration work for just about every Japanese company doing business here in the US and growing to over 50 employees in 5 countries. Last year, Mike approached me with an idea regarding merging affiliate marketing with social media and I was hooked joining him as an advisor on building out a back end for a yet unnamed company. I was exiting my last business - Storybids, had stopped SEO consulting and had just taken on a stint as VP of Search and Social Marketing for Fly.com - a new Travel meta search engine which was funded entirely by Travelzoo (NASDAQ: TZOO) but the entrepreneurial bug wouldn't stop biting me.

I left Fly.com last month and joined Mike full time as CEO and Co-Founder at the now named Social Rewards, Inc. which we have built into social media based loyalty marketing programs that reward consumers with a brand's own loyalty program points for engaging in social media activity such as brand mentions via Twitter, Foursquare check-ins and Facebook likes and fan activity.

This grew out of our own simple desires to be rewarded with loyalty points for tweeting about brands that we already loved, we are both extreme travelers, he a Diamond Level at Japan Airlines and myself as an Executive Platinum with American Airlines, a Silver Premier with US Airways, a Starwood Platinum and Fairmont Silver President's Club member. I've also become enamored with both jetBlue and Virgin America since US Airways pulled out of John Wayne airport for flights to Las Vegas and AA stopped going to the San Francisco Bay area.

I had become familiar with the social media benefits of rewarding influential online consumers with products via the 'Blogger's Night Out' promotion that I did during the PubCon Internet Marketing Conference in 2007 where we gave away 500 tickets to major Las Vegas shows such as Spamalot, Blue Man Group and Cirque du Soleil. It was a huge success and evolved into Tweet4Tix that I continued to run during BlogWorld and Pubcon conferences over the last three years. The hard part was coming up with a business model on how to reward consumers for blogging and then ultimately tweeting activity and for three years I met with brands and partners and pondered the logistics of first theatre tickets and then movie tickets online for rewarding online brand mentions.

Early last year I stumbled upon a little start up called Klout that was barely 4 months old and just getting ramped up. I emailed their CEO, Joe Fernandez and after a few meetings, he and his Co-Founder Binh Tranh figured that I could do what I said I could do and started the process of opening a lot of doors for them both from clients to investors as an official member of the Klout Advisory Board. Eventually I began to see how both Mike's software for affiliate marketing via social media and how Klout's online influencer analytical tools could be merged into the business model that I had been pondering for three years with the Tweet4Tix concept. Now we could identify influential online consumers using Klout and reward them for brand mentions using Mike's nearly completed back end CMS with the most obvious choice of online currency - loyalty program points. Social Rewards was born.

Now with our software finalized and ready to go, we launch this month, please wish us luck. ;)

Storybids, Inc., Acquired by IDT Media Group

2009-12-09T07:24:00.001-08:00

I'm pleased to announce that Storybids, Inc. has been acquired by IDT Media Group of Irvine, CA. I will be joining the Board of Directors and my Business Partner and Co-Founder Juan Prado will be joining IDT as it's incoming President.

IDT Media Group enters into a definitive agreement to acquire Storybids.com

December 8, 2009
This strategic acquisition is meant to strengthen IDT’s Consumer Strategy, Video Broadcasting and Brand Connection to boost IDT’s Music Sponsorship Network (www.musicsponsor.net).

Irvine, California – IDT Media Group, a leading provider of end-to-end artist's solutions and monetization platform to the independent artists community, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Storybids Inc., which includes technology and related intellectual property, customer and partnership agreements. In addition Storybids’ founders and board members to fill key positions in IDT’s management as well as IDT’s board of directors. With the completion of this acquisition, IDT will provide its independent musicians and film makers customer base additional technology and expertise which ties-in with IDT’s Music Sponsorship Network that was launched earlier this year. In conjunction with this acquisition, Juan Prado will fill the position of President of IDT and Joseph Morin will be appointed to IDT’s Board of Directors. Juan and Joe are both veterans of internet marketing and consumer business model.

Consumer strategy and matching artists and brand-sponsors are critical component of IDT’s total artist solutions, going forward. “IDT is well positioned to expand its base of 70,000 active independent musicians and film makers, by providing a meaningful array of essential tools and services designed to maximize their exposures and income opportunity.” Says Ben Abadi CEO of IDT Media Group.

When fully integrated, underserved independent artist community will benefit from a unique platform that covers all four corners of entertainment, physical, web, mobile and live performances that is tied into IDT’s sophisticated direct and sponsored monetization platform.

“This acquisition is one of many acquisitions IDT has in the works for 2009 and 2010, where my experience can lend IDT the expertise it needs to execute deals in short time frame.” says Juan Prado, IDT’s incoming President and Storybids co-founder. He also added “Timing could not be any better for IDT to consolidate additional revenue, qualified traffic as well as complimentary technologies. 2010 is going to be a great year for IDT.”
“I am excited to be part of a company that has established itself as great brand through technology innovations, reinventing itself. That says a lot about the team. My focus for 2010 would be bringing tons of eyeballs to IDT’s “to-be-launched” entertainment portal and its artist solution platform. 2010 would be IDT’s breakout year, just watch.” Says Joseph Morin, IDT’s incoming Board of Director and internet marketing guru, a well respected evangelist and organizer of www.PubCon.com an Internet Marketing Conference.

“I have known Joseph for a long time and I look forward to working with him and Juan to make IDT a global player in the independent artists community for Music and Film.” Says Leonard S. Johnson, Executive Vice President of Strategic Alliances & Corporate Development of IDT Media Group.

About IDT
IDT has been an end-to-end artist solutions provider to its 70,000 independent bands and film makers since 2002. Till 2008 company’s operated as a backend technology provider for a number of major brands such as: Guitar Center, Musicians Friend, Harmony Central, American Musical Supplies, American Film Institute, USC School of Films and many more, under its DiskFaktory brand. Since then company has invested heavily into completing its end-to-end artist solutions platform to include:

www.DFJams.com
www.DFjamsstore.com
www.DFGEMS.com
www.MusicSponsor.net
www.DFcreative.com
www.DFmastering.com
www.MFARecords.com

To learn more about IDT’s services go to www.idtmediagroup.com.

About Storybids

Storybids give content creators a link to the product placement marketplace. Storybids provides an outlet for auctioning online content to advertisers to include their products in online video content. It provides an option for content creators, i.e. filmmakers and musicians to off-set production costs and even make a profit on their creation. It also lays the foundation for independent content creators a bridge to monetization resources traditionally only available to big budget productions.

OFFICIAL Blog World Expo Party, Tweetup & Events Schedule

2009-10-04T11:59:00.000-07:00

The time is now upon us as we gather for the 3rd annual Blog World Expo and the 2009 conference has grown by leaps and bounds and this year's Las Vegas nightlife is no different. This year we bring you not only a solid conference and exhibition hall bigger and better than ever before but a party schedule that even the most hard charging party reveler will blink at. Keep checking back here as well, because I will be updating this post with new information and late breaking news as we add other events and get more information on these events. We present to you - your evening festivities:

Be sure to RSVP!!!

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

TheLasVegasTweetup.com & @LasVegasHilton Tweetup

Time: 6:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m.

Location: Tempo Lounge (inside The Las Vegas Hilton)

Thursday, October 15, 2009

America's Got Talent Tweetup @ Planet Hollywood

Falls Mall Bar Tweetup

Techset and BlogWorld After Hours Party

Time: 8:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m.

Location: The Bank (Inside Bellagio Hotel)

Friday, October 16, 2009

BlogWorld Opening Night Party

Time: 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.

Location: Jet Nightclub (inside Mirage Hotel)

TweetBash! @ Lavo @ Palazzo

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Las Vegas Hilton Poolside BBQ Tweetup

Grand Tweetup! at Studio 54

See everyone there!

TechKaraoke Shenanigans Tweetup

- Joseph Morin (Your BlogWorld Party Guide)

Hosting BlogWorld / PubCon Las Vegas Tweetup

2009-08-23T11:46:00.000-07:00

I'll be hosting a Tweetup in Las Vegas on August 26th at Koi @ Planet Hollywood Las Vegas Hotel and Casino (Mezzanine level by Strip House Steak House). Guests of honor will be Rick Calvert, CEO of Blog World Expo and Brett Tabke, CEO of PubCon. As an added treat Felipe Coimbra, the Founder of TwtApps and TwtVite will be in from Montreal and it's also my buddy Nick Raba's birthday.

We have availability for 50 and Koi will give out a free shot to those that mention they are following @phvegas on Twitter. There will also be 1/2 price drink and appetizer specials during the happy hour.

The event will take place from 5:00 to 7:00 so if you're in town (Las Vegas) come on down! RSVP on the TwtVite to the right (sidebar) and also be sure to follow me on Twitter.

Animated Short Film via Graffiti

2009-05-20T14:37:00.000-07:00

This is the craziest short film project I have seen. The entire animation sequence is done via murals on outdoor and indoor walls in Buenos Aires.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

If Paint Were Sold by Airlines

2009-05-01T14:22:00.000-07:00

I'm looking at booking some airline tickets and while pondering times and dates - several options for departure and arrival that existed a few minutes ago simply disappeared right in front of me - now the flight is still available mind you but the price went up - twice - in the space of about 30 minutes. This inspired today's Friday Funny so I thought I would post a classic that I was able to reference from Flyertalk:

If Paint was sold like Plane Tickets

Buying Paint from a Hardware Store:

Customer: Hi. How much is your paint?

Clerk: We have regular quality for $12 a gallon and premium for $18. How many gallons would you like?

Customer: Five gallons of regular quality, please.

Clerk: Great. That will be $60 plus tax.

Buying Paint from an Airline:

Customer: Hi, how much is your paint?

Clerk: Well, sir, that all depends.

Customer: Depends on what?

Clerk: Actually, a lot of things.

Customer: How about giving me an average price?

Clerk: Wow, that's too hard a question. The lowest price is $9 a gallon, and we have 150 different prices up to $200 a gallon.

Customer: What's the difference in the paint?

Clerk: Oh, there isn't any difference; it's all the same paint.

Customer: Well, then, I'd like some of that $9 paint.

Clerk: Well, first I need to ask you a few questions. When do you intend to use it?

Customer: I want to paint tomorrow, on my day off.

Clerk: Sir, the paint for tomorrow is the $200 paint.

Customer: What? When would I have to paint in order to get the $9 version?

Clerk: That would be in three weeks, but you will also have to agree to start painting before Friday of that week and continue painting until at least Sunday.

Customer: You've got to be kidding!

Clerk: Sir, we don't kid around here. Of course, I'll have to check to see if we have any of that paint available before I can sell it to you.

Customer: What do you mean check to see if you can sell it to me? You have shelves full of that stuff; I can see it right there.

Clerk: Just because you can see it doesn't mean that we have it. It may be the same paint, but we sell only a certain number of gallons on any given weekend. Oh, and by the way, the price just went to $12.

Customer: You mean the price went up while we were talking!

Clerk: Yes, sir. You see, we change prices and rules thousands of times a day, and since you haven't actually walked out of the store with your paint yet, we just decided to change. Unless you want the same thing to happen again, I would suggest that you get on with your purchase. How many gallons do you want?

Customer: I don't know exactly. Maybe five gallons. Maybe I should buy six gallons just to make sure I have enough.

Clerk: Oh, no, sir, you can't do that. If you buy the paint and then don't use it, you will be liable for penalties and possible confiscation of the paint you already have.

Customer: What?

Clerk: That's right. We can sell you enough paint to do your kitchen, bathroom, hall and north bedroom, but if you stop painting before you do the bedroom, you will be in violation of our tariffs.

Customer: But what does it matter to you whether I use all the paint? I already paid you for it!

Clerk: Sir, there's no point in getting upset; that's just the way it is. We make plans based upon the idea that you will use all the paint, and when you don't, it just causes us all sorts of problems.

Customer: This is crazy! I suppose something terrible will happen if I don't keep painting until after Saturday night!

Clerk: Yes, sir, it will.

Customer: Well, that does it! I'm going somewhere else to buy my paint.

Clerk: That won't do you any good, sir. We all have the same rules. Thanks for painting with our airline.

Hummingbird mom and baby in nest at night

2009-05-01T10:13:00.001-07:00

Hummingbird mom and baby in nest at night, originally uploaded by equitymind.

Hummingbirds in my front yard taken completely dark at night with Nikon Speedlight 900 flash by holding camera high over my head and guessing where to aim - complete luck with this photo!

Taken with Nikon D90, 18MM - 200MM VR Nikkor Lens, F/ 5.6, Exposure 1/60 sec., ISO 800

Start Up Tips #1: Picking the Right Domain Name

2009-04-10T13:19:00.000-07:00

I'm always referencing this list when I do strategy consulting for Start Ups so I thought I'd repeat it here as both a tip and as a Friday Funny:

This list comes from Independent Sources:

1. A site called ‘Who Represents‘ where you can find the name of the agent that represents a celebrity. Their domain name… wait for it… is
www.whorepresents.com

2. Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views at
www.expertsexchange.com

3. Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at
www.penisland.net

4. Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at
www.therapistfinder.com

5. Then of course, there’s the Italian Power Generator company…
www.powergenitalia.com

6. And now, we have the Mole Station Native Nursery, based in New South Wales:
www.molestationnursery.com

7. If you’re looking for computer software, there’s always
www.ipanywhere.com

8. Welcome to the First Cumming Methodist Church. Their website is
www.cummingfirst.com

9. Then, of course, there’s these brainless art designers, and their whacky website:
www.speedofart.com

10. Want to holiday in Lake Tahoe? Try their brochure website at
www.gotahoe.com

;)

Optimism And Opportunity At SXSW

2009-03-19T11:56:00.001-07:00

I strongly agree - the majority of people I know in digital media make things happen on their own and don't rely upon an employer to secure their future. Why worry about a job when you can work for shorts stints of time or work for three or four companies at once - all from home? It seems project based is the way to go from what I was observing at SXSW. I definitely didn't see signs of a recessions during the past week.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Storybids Hosts Dinner for Filmmakers in NYC

2008-10-17T18:19:00.000-07:00

My company Storybids recently hosted a dinner along with IndieGOGO during Indie Film Week in New York City. Among the Guests were Actress Faye Dunaway, Ted Hope - Executive Producer of 21 Grams, Lance Hammer winner of The Directing Award and Best Cinematography for his film 'Ballast' at the Sundance Film Festival and Arin Crumley and Susan Buice whose film Four Eyed Monsters has won numerous awards. The purpose of the dinner was to collaborate in an informal setting and discuss new ways for distribution for DIY filmmakers and challenges within the indie film making community. The theme was 'When Internet and Films Collide'. The dinner was filmed as part of a three part reality series that will be released on the web in the coming weeks so more to come.

Here are some of the attendees of the dinner:

Watch the trailer for Arin and Susan's film 'Four Eyed Monsters' here:

Storybids Product Placement Marketplace Launches!

2008-05-06T20:19:00.000-07:00

I've been real quiet lately. I haven't blogged. I've missed the last three major Internet marketing conferences that I'm normally known to be a fixture at. I resigned as the SES party director. My travel schedule, while still fairly consistent, now includes more meetings than conferences. I've dropped 95% of my SEO clients and now just refer new inquiries over to my Partner at Boost Search Marketing - Aaron Shear.

I've been busy.

Other than working with Brett Tabke on the upcoming PubCon this coming November (yes, no conflicts this year), the majority of my time has been spent working on my newest venture - Storybids. What Storybids does is provide a marketplace for product placement advertising within user generated as well as professionally scripted online video. Not so much the kids at a skate park videos as much as the serial mini dramas, the episodic webisodes that are garnering a following. Television programming is moving online and the traditional ways of monetizing video content is changing. Online viewers don't like sitting through 15 or 30 second pre-roll ads. They really don't. Yet there has to be a way to offset production and bandwidth costs. As consumers we have learned to accept banner advertising and even contextual ads near the video content, but don't make us wait while we are also dealing with buffering and jittery playback.

Product placement works. If done correctly where its not blatant and done in a way where the brand is integrated into the storyline. A recent Mindshare study shows that viewers react negatively to interruptive TV style ads and attempt to skip them whenever possible suggesting that consumers are far more receptive to product placement in online video programming than pre- and post-roll advertising. PQ Media released a study in February, 2007 that showed spending on branded entertainment marketing grew 14.7% to an all time high of $22.3 billion in 2007 and is projected to increase by another 13.9% in 2008 to $25.41 billion driven by product placement, event sponsorship/marketing, and advergaming/webisodes.

This is why the idea came to me to incorporate a proven business model in the offline world to the online advertising world except the pricing gets better and it can literally get to the point where anyone will be able to advertise in this fashion. Remember GoTo? Before Yahoo Search and Overture, GoTo brought Internet advertising to small business advertisers. In the early days of the internet before GoTo, if you wanted to advertise online you had to cut portal deals with Netscape, AOL or Doubleclick which priced out small business owners. The same scenario exists today with product placement advertising in traditional television. In order to effectively get your brand messaging out there, a brand needs to forge alliances with a television network via a product placement agency and that agency typically represents one brand in an industry (a product placement agency couldn't represent both Nike and Reebok in attempting to secure a product placement deal for instance).

In a marketplace setting, both Nike and Reebok may bid for the same branding opportunity and the true value proposition may be realized as markets dictate the true value of a placement. In an online marketplace, the placement takes on a new life since any company may bid on the opportunity, not just the agency that the studio happens to have a relationship with. In addition, just as when GoTo brought Internet advertising to the masses, an online marketplace like Storybids can bring product placement advertising to the masses and can be done with tracking, analytics and dashboard reporting and also have distribution channels built in and video search optimization techniques built in for increased viewership.

So my Storybids business partner Juan Prado and I learned all this while developing the business model and realized that this was not a whole lot different than search advertising and that we could apply the lessons and metrics we had learned doing enterprise level search optimization over the past several years. We landed a 'Series A' round of venture capital financing last August from STN Labs in Toronto and began to put the vision to reality. Which brings us to our launch this week. While it may be a bit of a departure from organic search optimization, it really isn't a whole lot different since we're applying a different twist to some proven business models and hoping to capture an entirely new market while showing video content creators how to get product placement advertising in their videos.

Here is a little bit more about our launch as reported on by my good friend and colleague at WebmasterWorld, the very sweet Vanessa Zamora.

Like Las Vegas Shows? I Have Tickets During PubCon

2007-11-28T12:25:00.000-08:00

We wanted to do something really big and really different for the WebmasterWorld PubCon conference community this year. A lot of attendees come in early to mingle before the shows and look for things to do and sometimes there are a host of private parties, the trick is finding them. There is also the attendee that isn’t necessarily into the conference party scene but still wants to experience all that Las Vegas has to offer. We also have a very unique type of attendee – the type of attendee that wields considerable influence in the World Wide Web by being very vocal about the types of products and services they consume – the blogger. That type of attendee hasn’t gone unnoticed by several Las Vegas marketers who have banded together to put a rather unusual but unique promotion together for this year’s PubCon.

So to put a twist on things, we are excited to announce that we have secured several hundred tickets to some of the best live theatre that Las Vegas has to offer. After years of having conferences in this town we’ve made a few friends and now these friends of ours at venues such as Blue Man Group, Cirque Du Soleil, MGM Grand, Treasure Island and The Wynn Las Vegas have graciously offered us tickets for our attendees in the hopes that they wouldn’t mind compiling a little review telling them what you think of their shows.

In true Hollywood fashion, where press corps get tickets to top rated venues to provide reviews and commentary, we approached these partners with an even better idea – that we have a conference full of the most innovative social media experts out there and armed with an abundance of user generated content and social media channels for which our attendees to build buzz on - the concept was considered a win win for everybody so ‘Bloggers Night Out’ was born.

Here is a summary and listing of show times for ‘Bloggers Night Out’ taking place on Monday December 3rd and Tuesday, December 4th.:

Show Information

Blue Man Group

Blue Man Group’s critically acclaimed show has been called “visually stunning,” “wildly inventive,” and “hysterically funny.” Although it is almost impossible to describe, people of all ages agree that Blue Man Group’s Venetian Show is an intensely exciting and wildly outrageous experience that leaves the entire audience in a blissful, euphoric state.

Blue Man Group takes place nightly in a brand-new 1760-seat theatre built especially for this spectacular show. Join the celebration and see the show that, USA Today calls “an absolutely ecstatic experience” and Time Magazine calls “A Sensation.”

KA

KÀ by Cirque du Soleil is an unprecedented theatrical event. A masterpiece in storytelling, KÀ uses acrobatic performances, the thrills and action of martial arts techniques from all over the world, plus innovations in puppetry and multimedia to tell the epic tale of twins on a perilous journey to fulfill their shared destiny.

Along the way, the twins confront characters and events representing the opposing forces of good and evil. Before their world comes under attack and collapses around them, the twins receive a magical talisman for protection. As the plot unfolds, danger lies in wait for them at every turn.

Mystere

Looking for some stimulation? Cirque du Soleil will satisfy with more than you could ever imagine at Mystère! Adventure into an entirely different world where fantasies are played out in vivid color right before your very eyes. Come, be part of the dream!

Honored eight times as "Best Production Show" by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Mystère has an international cast of 72 performers featuring dancers, singers, musicians and champion-caliber acrobats. The Chicago Tribune called Mystère, "one of the most innovative and exciting shows to be seen anywhere". An intriguing blend of beauty and strength, power and grace, passion and precision… this is Mystère by Cirque du Soleil. Come, live the exoticism! Directed by Franco Dragone.

SPAMALOT

Tony Winner – Best Musical 2005! Lovingly ripped off from the classic film comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail, SPAMALOT is a new musical directed by Mike Nichols, with a book by Eric Idle and entirely new score created by Eric Idle and John Du Prez.

Telling the Legendary tale of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and featuring a bevy of beautiful show girls, not to mention cows, killer rabbits and French people, Monty Python’s SPAMALOT “raises silliness to an art form” (The Sunday Times) and has been hailed as “a no-holds-barred smash hit.” (The New Yorker)

Times and Tickets

Monday, December 3rd 2007

7:00 – Mystere

8:00 – Blue Man Group

8:00 – Spamalot

9:30 – Mystere

Tuesday, December 4th 2007

8:00 – Blue Man Group

9:30 – KA

9:30 – Mystere

Rules of the Promotion

To participate you must be a WebmasterWorld PubCon attendee, and an active editorial or video blogger. You may attend more than one show provided that you write a separate review (i.e. separate blog post) about each show. These tickets are in limited supply and this is a first come first serve opportunity and we reserve the right to deny tickets to any blog or editorial that we deem inappropriate to host a review. Please R.S.V.P. to me here: ‘Joe (at) PubCon (dot) com’ with your full name, URL and the name of your blog or video hosting channel or editorial area where you will be posting your review.

We’re looking forward to a great show – see you in Vegas!

UPDATE 11/30/2007

All tickets for KA and Mystere are gone! I have a limited supply for Spamalot and Blue Man Group so if you have not RSVP'd or responded to my email request to pick a show, then please do so ASAP as I need to pick up all of these tickets ahead of time.

Yes, I just resigned as SES Official Party Coordinator

2007-08-16T20:04:00.000-07:00

Wow, thanks for all of the emails for those that read into my post at Search Engine Watch stating that it was my last time posting the *Official* SES Party & Events Schedule. It does mean that I will no longer be the party coordinator for SES. Danny Sullivan had appointed me SES Party Coordinator back during SES Chicago 2005 after we had endured a conference with no formally planned events and just following a conference (SES San Jose 2005) where either there were multiple events all at once or nights where nothing was planned. I had already been posting a party schedule for the US SES shows since I was moderator of the SEM Related Organizations & Events Forum at SEW. Danny just figured I was the guy for the job since I had insight in the social scenes at various conferences and always had a crowd with me going from one social gathering to the next.

The appointment entailed working with the search engines directly and with multiple vendors known for throwing great conference bashes to mainly avoid 'party collision' so that the parties flowed well from one to another and didn't overlap too much. It worked well and many event planners and party organizers made sure to check the list or check with me before scheduling their event. For many conferences we had more pageviews of the party thread than for the actual conference session coverage. Kind of puts it into perspective as to where the priorities of the industry lies doesn't it?

Even with that obvious importance, we have begun to see a deterioration of social events attached to SES - now what does that mean? I was speaking to someone today about this and she said to me "You know Joe, we're all growing up...". Maybe she was right, perhaps we are maturing as an industry, maybe it just isn't as new anymore and new client acquisition and branding isn't the goal of the engines and vendors and now its managing their brand and working with the audience that they have built. Years past have had a sparring between Google and Yahoo when Google had their GoogleDance and Yahoo rented out Great America Amusement park trying to compete for best conference party. Ask Jeeves retired their butler in style during SES NYC 2006's Code Red party and the revelers drank the bar dry sending the bartenders out to stores to replenish. Industry veterans will remember the Overture bashes and the dull Yahoo parties and how the Yahoo parties suddenly got better after the Overture acquisition. Coincidence? I think not. Remember the GoToast 'After Over' parties? I think those of us San Jose veterans will always remember The Flying Pig and how we drove those poor bartenders crazy.

Nowadays it seems to be all private parties as the engines and vendors try and trim their budgets, also the conference grew in size to a point where no one wants to foot the bill for a conference now numbering in the thousands of attendees. Perhaps it's the end of an era, but after compiling this years list and waiting forever for any word whatsoever to compile an even somewhat decent party schedule and getting 'we're only having a private party this show' or 'we aren't doing anything for this show' time and time again plus given that unfortunately PubCon Las Vegas 2007 and SES Chicago 2007 happen to fall during the same week (where I happen to be one of the conference organizers), I now have a good opportunity to relinquish my role as party coordinator and pass the torch on to someone else. I'm not sure who will take over my position or if there will be enough event activity to warrant an 'official person' but I wish them well and I cherish the time that I have spent in this role.

See you guys in San Jose!

The OFFICIAL SES San Jose 2007 Party & Events Schedule Has Been Posted

2007-08-16T17:29:00.000-07:00

I just posted the *Official* Party and Events Schedule for the 2007 Search Engine Strategies Conference (SES) in San Jose.

There is one VIP Private party on Monday evening and three private parties on Wednesday nights but here is a recap of all of the public events:

Sunday August 19

Marriott Bar

Downstairs to right of reception at Marriott is usually the place to be.

Monday August 20

Women In Internet Marketing Luncheon

Time: 12:30pm - 2:00pm

Location: The Grill on the Alley

172 S Market St (at The Fairmont Hotel)

Space is limited, to rsvp send an email to Li Evans at smg@searchmarketinggurus.com

Monday Evening

SEMPO The Search is Right Night

6:00 - 7:00 PM

Come on down to “The Search Is Right Night” Following brief
remarks about the state of the organization, attendees are invited to learn how they can get involved with the various SEMPO committees and enter for a chance to win door prizes such as an iPhone, gift certificates and more.

The event is open to SEMPO members and non-members alike, so brush up on your Plinko skills!

Location: Room B at the Conference Facility

Open Bar.

SEMPO In-House Search Marketer Networking Event

7:30 to 9:30 p.m.

Drinks and snacks to be provided, but come early or the snacks will run out.

This event is for In-House SEMs only. We will be checking folks at the door - agency reps will be politely asked to leave.

This event is an excellent opportunity for In-House SEMs to meet and grow their network of contacts. No sense going it alone when there are folks just like you who are happy to share what they know.

Location: St. Claire Hotel

Tuesday August 21

3rd Annual San Jose Classic

9:00 a.m. to ???

Once again, random golfers are welcomed to take some time out from SES San Jose (only if you have a permission slip) and join the organizers of this informal golf outing -- Chris Boggs, Andrew Goodman, John Krystynak -- for 18 holes of rather mellow semi-sporting activity.

Location: Sinnabar Hills, 25 minutes from downtown SJ

Leave a post on the classic thread if interested.

AOL Search Lunch

12:00 - 1:15 p.m.

Watch a demo of the new AOL Mobile Search, enjoy free lunch and network with other search engine professionals. Also, enter for a chance to win an iPhone! This free event is open to all registered SES San Jose attendees, but RSVP is required since space is limited. Please bring your SES badge, photo ID and your RSVP confirmation for admittance.

Location: Room J (next to the Keynote Hall)

RSVP: http://www.ersvp.com/r/aolsearchlunch082107

Google's GoogleDance VI

7:00 - 11:00 p.m.

Come party the night away at the Google Dance 2007 at SES San Jose.

For registered SES attendees, buses will depart from the San Jose Convention Center beginning at 7:00pm and run continuously until 11pm. Parking will be available at the Shoreline Amphitheatre parking lot "C", across the street from the Google campus.

**SES badge and photo ID are required for admittance.

Location: GooglePlex

1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

RSVP: http://services.google.com/events/googledance07

Wednesday Night August 22

Webmaster Radio's SEARCHBASH 3

7:00 - ???

SEARCHBASH continues in their quest for the ongoing lubrication of the SES set. Vivid Night Club is located just a few blocks from the Convention Center.

Open Bar, food, Music, and all sorts of fun surprises should be expected. To ensure you get in the door, stop by one of our awesome sponsor booths. The following companies are again contributing to our delinquency:

Ask.com
Bruce Clay, Inc.
Epiar
Moniker
Network Solutions
Webmaster Radio

Location: Vivid Night Club (Same club as last year)

8 South First Street
San Jose, CA 95113

RSVP Here

Thursday Night August 23

Nothing yet!

I know the schedule is a lot lighter than normal and that is the reason for the delay of this post. I'm feeling that the search industry is changing and maturing and we are now seeing far less activity on the social scene. With that said, this will be my last 'Official Party & Events Schedule' post. I'm moving on to other things in my career and I'm finding my time limited - also I wont be involved with SES Chicago this year due to my involvement as a conference organizer with PubCon Las Vegas 2007.

It was a fun ride while it lasted. ;)

Deliver Great Speeches with a Hangover - and Other Good Advice From Brett Tabke

2007-08-14T20:46:00.001-07:00

Brett Tabke from WebmasterWorld.com blogs on how to give a killer presentation, including how to pull it off with a hangover. Great preparation for PubCon speakers.

read more | digg story

I Returned My iPhone Back to The Apple Store...

2007-07-09T18:50:00.000-07:00

I was anxiously awaiting the coming of the Apple iPhone like everybody else and I even waited in line for two hours on opening night and was relieved when the Irvine store hadn't run out and I was able to get my hands on one - forget relieved - more like extremely excited. I travel a LOT so this was to be my great new travel gadget that I could use on flights to now watch my movies in landscape mode, listen to music and just plain play with, all of the cool features are too numerous to mention and I'm sure everybody has now heard of how unbelievably cool this thing is. So it is with unusual trepidation that I make the following statement:

I just took back my iPhone - and it's hard to explain why...

Know when you love something SO MUCH, that when you find a flaw you are more disappointed than with something less ordinary that you would normally be more accepting of?

I just couldn't get past:

1). The slow Edge network

2). The no GPS on Google maps (which my Samsung SCH-i730 has and it ROCKS! - shows traffic patterns and I can be somewhere - and hit connect and it tells me where I am)

3). The 8GB capacity

4). No swappable battery plus Apple just announced that after 300 - 400 charges you have to send in your phone to have Apple replace it for $79.00 and a loss of your phone for three days (which I cannot do)

5). No external memory and no swappable SIM (which is why you get GSM in the first place - so you can swap it out in Europe)

6). No compatibility with Microsoft Exchange Server and Active Sync - my perhaps favorite feature on my current PDA the Samsung i730 - even though rich text emails on the iPhone looked incredible and my Gmail worked especially well

7). More of my friends, family and daily calls are on Verizon - or 'In my network'

8). The text/email portion didn’t adjust to landscape mode when turned sideways which would make the keys larger and easier to text

9). The recessed headphone input - rendering my $400 Westone UM2 audiophile headphones obsolete - unless I bought a silly adapter

10). No stereo support via Bluetooth. (OK - now I'm nitpicking, but did I mention the slow Edge network???)

Even still, this was not going to be my primary phone! I actually have an ATT account and phone (RAZR) that I maintain to take WebmasterWorld/PubCon calls on and also use primarily when I travel to Europe.

All things considered, I really, really loved this phone (the user interface was out of this world), I am becoming more of an Apple fan because of it and I'm seriously considering getting a MacBook Pro now. Also to complicate my feelings about the iPhone and my incessant raving while pointing out its flaws, I dropped it on the pavement once while showing it to a friend and scratched the top, bottom and a little bit of the screen (!!!), further pushing me apart from it (I know - I have tons of scratches on my Samsung SCH-i730, yet seeing ONE scratch on my iPhone really, really hurt).

To make myself feel better about returning it, I exchanged two thirds of what I paid for my iPhone ($599) for a 180GB Apple TV ($399) - now THAT thing really rocks - I can't tell you how cool it is to have all of the contents of my audio and a lot of my video library readily available not to mention slideshows of all of my pics set to music as a screensaver for my plasma TV...way cool! All wirelessly streamed via my home network without having to manually sync like I do with my iPod.

If Apple were to fix even half of these things, they would have even more of a real winner on their hands. In the meantime, I anxiously await the arrival of the new Samsung SCH-i760 which is supposed to be out any day now. I firmly stand in the camp of waiting for the second generation of the iPhone to come out before I will break down. Before that happens however, I have a feeling that I will be first in line for the new sixth generation iPod player - which is hey, what I was really looking for in the first place now wasn't I?

Update 7/23/2007:

Perhaps the best pro/con review I have read on the iPhone yet...and we come to just about all of the same conclusions. ;)

Pubcon Las Vegas or SES Chicago?

2007-04-25T23:51:00.000-07:00

Barry has posted a poll over at SERoundtable on whether people will be attending WebmasterWorld's PubCon in Las Vegas or Search Engine Strategies in Chicago this upcoming December. Now granted I am a little bit biased since I am one of the conference organizers for PubCon. However, I am also a Moderator at Search Engine Watch and the Official SES Party Coordinator as well as a long time speaker at both venues.

I will say however that last year, out of 18 conferences that I attended worldwide, PubCon Vegas was my favorite. It helped having great keynotes and having Danny Sullivan there was an added bonus so it was really almost a twofer ;) Barry gives reference to several facors to help attendees decide including:

Weather
Venue
Business Opportunities
Networking
Educational Experience

I'll let you decide on your own which one to attend and how to give weighting to each category, but there are a few other factors to add to your decision making. Consider the 'Three P's':

Programming - SES Chicago won't be programmed by Danny even though he will be moderating - it won't be his show as he won't be the conference Chair. Brett Tabke does a fantastic job with the programming so I'm giving a hat tip towards PubCon.

Price - SES is typically a more expensive show and when compared to PubCon Vegas all around - the conference price will be considerably less, hotel rooms in Las Vegas are fairly inexpensive in relation to Chicago and flights to Vegas can usually be found on the cheap - especially in the off season. Once again, nod towards PubCon.

Parties - Typically, Chicago SES is terribly lacking on the social front and for the past couple of years the parties have been failry dismal and if it weren't for last minute contributions by a few folks there wouldn't have been anything party wise, whereas with PubCon, there are usually several good sponsored bashes and the last day of the conference is devoted to the 'Pub' portion of 'PubCon' which is where the conference actually originated so staying true to its roots, the 'Pub' is open to all for a great time networking. 'Nuff said - PubCon!

We'll see you in Vegas!

SES NYC 2007 Official Party and Events Schedule Now Posted

2007-04-02T09:46:00.000-07:00

I've just posted the Offical SES Party Guide for SES New York over at Search Engine Watch Forums but here is the summary:

Sunday April 8th, 2007

Easter Sunday but many do arrive early (including myself) so if you're one of the early to arrive - meet up at the downstairs bar ('Lobby Lounge' near the reception desk). That way you can see who is arriving. Bridges - the bar around the corner is usually closed on Sunday evenings.

Monday April 9th 2007

Pre-conference.

Hitwise

3:00pm Hitwise University Live Search Marketing Workshop begins

Time: 5:00pm - 7:00pm Private Cocktail Mixer

This cocktail party is in conjunction with Search Engine Strategies and our Hitwise University Live Search Marketing Workshop. If you'd like to attend the complimentary session, hosted by Bill Tancer, please contact your account manager.

Invitation only event.
RSVP required to gain entry.

Internet Marketers of New York

Time: 7:00pm-10:00pm

Internet Marketers of New York is hosting a Charity Party to raise money for Ronald McDonald House Charity. Best of The Web and Text Link Ads are generously covering the cost so the $40 donation at the door goes all to charity.

Join us for this 3 hour open bar party with cocktail food and raffles. Why not have a good time while also doing a good thing and talking with fellow internet marketers?

Location: Town Tavern

134 W 3rd St & 6th Ave.

Tuesday April 10th 2007

Private Party - Search Engine

Time: 6:30pm - 8:30pm

If you know about it, then you may get in if you're lucky!

Private Party

Time: 7:00pm - 10:00pm or ?

VIP Private Dinner Party

Wednesday April 11th 2007

SEMPO SES NY In-House SEM Networking Event

Time: 6:30pm - 8:30pm

SEM Networking Event

Location: Playwright Tavern

8th AVE (between 45th & 46th)

The tavern is roughly 10 minutes walk from the Hilton (one mile).

Private room booked for this event upstairs.

SEMPO is covering the tab for a bit, folks, so get there early, grab a drink and meet some new and familiar faces! If you’re In-House, this is YOUR event and shouldn’t be missed.

Marchex / Industry Brains

Time: 6:30pm - 9:00pm

Marchex (IndustryBrains, TrafficLeader, Enhance Interactive and GoClick.com) presents the – “Skyline Cocktail Party”:

Mingle with fellow advertisers, senior executives from premier publishing partners, members of the media community, and the teams from Marchex, IndustryBrains, TrafficLeader, Enhance Interactive and GoClick.com, over intimate cocktails and hors d'oeuvres. This event is invitation only. Attendees must RSVP.

Location: AVA Lounge at the Dream Hotel

210 West 55th Street, New York, NY 10019

located two blocks from the Hilton where SES is held.

Thursday April 12th 2007

Private Party

Time: 7:00pm - 10:00pm or ?

Private Dinner Party + bar crawl

See you guys in NYC!

Joe

JP Proposal Commercial

2007-02-06T21:58:00.000-08:00

JP to Propose Tonight via 'Veronica Mars'

2007-02-06T18:29:00.000-08:00

Well it's finally over. For everyone finally wanting to know the end result and the answer to "Did she say Yes?" will be able to find the answer tonight at iFilm.com after 10:00 p.m. Pacific /1:00 a.m. Eastern. The show Veronica Mars was chosen to air the commercial locally because that is the bride-to-be's favorite show. All in all this whole project will have a happy ending.

Good Luck JP. ;)

Click here for more information at MySuperProposal

JP wins AdWeek Superbowl Commercial Poll

2007-02-01T19:14:00.000-08:00

"That Marriage Proposal Guy" was voted #1 as the Superbowl Advertisement you would most look forward to see during the Superbowl.

Wow and what good company to be named against.

The contenders were:

That marriage proposal guy 36%
CareerBuilder.com 21%
Anheuser-Busch/Bud 18%
Nationwide 10%
Coca-Cola 5%
GoDaddy.com 5%
Pepsi 3%
Taco Bell 3%
General Motors 1%

My SuperProposal's JP Featured on 'Entertainment Tonight'

2007-01-26T08:39:00.000-08:00

Our anonymous and mysterious groom-to-be 'JP' was featured on a segment of Entertainment Tonight (click to play video) last night. He appeared a bit nervous from what I could tell from his mannerisms and I wish that they hadn't shown so much of him. I would have preferred just a sit down shot with his face darkened out and voice altered. ET had shots of him walking (neck down) and from behind so I'm hoping that people wont try guessing who he is. At least they didn't make him sound like a South Park character with a high squeaky voice and made him sound more manly with a low guttural alteration...lol.

So I'd like to clarify a few things to any reporters who read my blog for details. There has been a lot of mis-information printed out there about several possible identifying traits or characteristics about JP.

Location

Its been reported that JP is from Nashville, Illinois/Wisconsin area, 'A West Coast Man' and 'from Southern CA'. OK, reporters and disc jockey's - pay attention - I am the one from Southern CA. Just because the website contact information lists me in Southern CA, Jamie O'Donnell in Northern CA and Greg Jarboe from Boston doesn't necessarily mean that JP hails from these areas. We are the media and adverting contacts who have been helping JP in his quest so please take the time to read the posts more carefully when trying to pinpoint and then go printing it.

The Official answer that we have constantly given out is:

JP is from the 'lower 48 States'.

Age

I've seen in print that JP has an age range listed anywhere from 'A 21 Year Old Man' to 'A Man in his Mid Thirties'.

All we have ever stated is:

JP is between the ages of 25 and 35.

Occupation

I've read blogs and online newspaper reports that indicate that JP is an 'Internet Entrepreneur', a 'Web Developer' or in the 'Internet industry'.

Funny because our official statement is:

JP is Internet Savvy. No occupation given.

I understand that CBS wants to put out a series of clues leading up to the game, we don't know what were going to come up with yet if we do that because it is still very important for us to maintain anonymity right up until the game.

Seriously though, with all of the attempts at his identity, its amazing that his girlfriend still has not found out.

Wish us luck.

Who is 'JP' from My Super Proposal?

2007-01-12T07:47:00.000-08:00

I'm receiving a LOT of mail, phone calls and press calls about my involvment with MySuperProposal.com. To give a little bit of information on how this has changed my day to day routine, one must know that being listed as one of the contact persons for JP, especially after a live interview or the Good Morning America Show - creates a flood of phone calls and emails with requests for more media interviews (I spoke to 8 reporters or newscasters yesterday), companies wanting me to push their creative or sometimes kooky idea, sponsors interested in giving JP everything from a diamond to a honeymoon to spa treatments for his future fiance. I've taken phone calls ranging from 4:00 in the morning until midnight, and I estimated yesterday that since January 1st, I'm averaging 16 hours a day on the project. The battery on my cordless office line and the 2 batteries for my cell phone constantly seem to be drained and are beeping from a lack of battery power. The emails of course never stop. I've done interviews with reporters from foreign countries wanting 'their countries exclusive'. I've put my whole agency behind this effort (and then some, we actually have 9 people working some sort of angle on this project and not everybody has full knowledge - everything is on a 'need to know' basis) and my business partner Juan Prado is working as many hours on this as I am. Greg Jarboe and Jamie O'Donnell of SEO-PR have been working the phones tirelessly and fielding press and sponsor requests to the team. I haven't shaved in a week.

But the biggest question I constantly receive, the one question I hear over and over in interviews while I'm either silent in the background or participating with JP or asked when dealing with a media producer is:

"Who is JP"?

Yesterday I listened to a radio broadcast after JP had hung up and heard the morning show radio personalities banter back and forth trying to pinpoint what part of the United States JP was from. When asked, he simply responded "Somewhere in the lower 48 states". They analyzed his somewhat disguised voice for accents and also picked apart his statement from carefully crafted questions in order to summise clues as to his whereabouts. Putting all of their clues together, one disk jockey staked his reputation that he was from the Michigan/Wisconson area, while the other was trying to determine whether he heard a Southern twang or not.

We will be shooting a video of her response and immediately upload it online for viewers to see her reaction to the world's first ever proposal during the largest televised event of the year which has prompted several girls to call me, desperately trying to figure out if JP is in fact their boyfriend and if they really should get themselves prepared mentally for the Big Game (forget player preparation - this year the fans are getting prepared!). One girl wanted to know if she should have a suitcase prepared in order to appear on 'Good Morning America' the very next day, since she was so convinced that JP was in fact her boyfriend of many years since he is "creative, over the top, and romantic and this is something he would do". One guy emailed me and sent pictures of he and his girlfriend and wanted to join JP and propose to his girlfriend at the same time. A very large ad agency called me representing one of the current Superbowl advertisers lamenting the fact that they already had commited air time and had spent a small fortune on their ads but perhaps if we weren't able to pull this off, did we want to air a commercial during the Pro Bowl?

More to the question though, we have taken many, many steps in order to protect JP's identity because the surprise would be ruined if she found out. On several occasions his voice has been electronically garbled and his face was blacked out for his Good Morning America segment. He has had many phone interviews at odd hours and when we conduct a phone interview, I have the interviewer dial into a conference call bridge that I arrange in advance so all they get is an 800 number and when that cant be arranged, JP masks his caller ID in order to protect his location. Early on before my involvement, JP told me that on his very first interview, he laid in the back of his vehicle, head upside down with a t-shirt over his head in order to disguise his voice. We've put out some disinformation in order to throw people off as to his location or employment, the domain is listed in an aquaintance's name, the site hosted elsewhere, and in the beginning, an anonymous email account set up. JP's girlfriend wouldn't be able to make the connection between my involvement or the PR guys from SEO-PR since I was the one who brought them in.

Anyway, sorry to be so vague and not answer any specifics and give any clues, but we have to do this in order to add to the mystique and intrigue of this project. I do predict one thing though, I think that among this years single female viewers watching (thinking it might be them being proposed to and in the response video), it will be a very well dressed Superbowl!

Video of 'JP' of MySuperProposal on Good Morning America

2007-01-10T19:14:00.000-08:00

The video segment of JP on the Good Morning America Show aired this morning. This link shows that JP is real and unfortunately he sounds like a South Park Character with the way GMA altered his voice in order to keep his identity a secret. Check out our groom to be in his first live television appearance!

MySuperProposal.com to be featured on the Good Morning America Show

2007-01-08T19:33:00.000-08:00

I've just confirmed with a Producer for the Good Morning America Show that they will be doing a story on MySuperProposal.com and our quest to go from a blog post to a Superbowl ad. We will be featured this next Wednesday morning 01/10/2007. They have agreed to have JP live on the show but to use a silhouette of him and to also alter his voice so as not to be recognized. JP has already been altering his voice when he does radio interviews.

Thanks for all of your support in our quest to help 'J.P.' propose to his girlfriend during the Superbowl and be sure to tune in to the Good Morning America Show to see their coverage of our little project.

Update: the segment will air during the 8:30 a.m. timeslot of the show. It is live in New York time-wise but taped in all other timezones so that it is at 8:30 in all timezones.

My Super Proposal - Super Bowl Commercial Proposal Update

2007-01-05T11:49:00.000-08:00

It's been awhile since my plea to help promote 'J.P.' in his quest for a 30 second commercial spot during next February's Super Bowl game in order to propose to his girlfriend so its time for a long overdue update.

The response has been tremendous.

The intial blogosphere bang was first launched by Danny, Lee, David, Jeremy, Liane and many more and followed up by a press release by Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR. Although we had some initial coverage before my involvement, the combined efforts led to the 'tipping point' - an article written by Abbey Klaassen of AdAge Magazine. The AdAge article led to a flurry of coverage from radio, print and tv inquiries and also a lot of inquiries from potential sponsors and advertisers including 7 diamond ring retailers or manufacturers!

To sum all of the exposure up, here is a list of media and press that has happened to date:

Radio Interviews and Coverage:

Radio Station in Virginia (prior to my involvement - no call station info)
Radio Station in California (prior to my involvement)
107.5 The River, radio station in Nashville
710 KIRO Newsradio The Ron & Don Show, Seattle.
KKND - New Orleans
STAR 94 Radio in Atlanta
Saint Louis morning drive time talk show
Ken and Tammy Show on WOXL in Asheville NC
WRMF South Florida
Howard Stern Show
Daily Search Cast
94.3 FOX Northern Michagan
KROQ Los Angeles Kevin and Bean show

Newpaper and Online Media Coverage:

AdRants
AdJab
AdAge
AdAge Garfield: The Blog
New York Post
Netscape
Media Buyer Planner
MediaPost
MarketingProfs Daily Fix
Entrepreneur.com Blog
Business 2.0 Blog
Corpus Christi Caller-Times
ABC News / ESPN Sports
ESPN - The Magazine
Chicago Tribune
ABC News - GMA

International Media Coverage:

Sweden
Denmark
Norway
Mexico
Spain

Television Coverage:

Fox News (National - on a Sunday afternoon)
MSNBC (Tomorrow morning 7:30 a.m. PST)
Good Morning America (multiple video segment starting next week)

We've also had inquiries but haven't done interviews with NPR Radio, USA Today, Inside Edition, Rocky Mountain News and a few others.

My initial goal was to show Madison Avenue how a few bloggers could help to get the word out and hopefully give this project some legs. I'm now getting emails from people outside of my industry who've learned of my involvement and are sending well wishes and in several instances in conversations, emails or in forums when the project is brought up - the response is "Oh, I heard about that". If anything, we've already succeeded with our goal, to yell loud enough in the blogosphere to make Madison Avenue take note and to raise a substantial amount of money for the Vanderbilt Children's Hospital.

Our next goal of course is to actually get 'J.P' his moment on the largest Nationally televised sports show in history with an audience hoping to beat last year's 90.7 MM viewers. As Bob Garfield from AdAge Magazine puts it:

"Everybody and his brother thinks their Super Bowl ad is an event within an event. Every year, almost all of them are wrong. Super Bowl ads are mainly just overproduced comedy blackouts without much of a selling point. But a marriage proposal -- followed (somehow) by an answer -- is real drama, especially if the answer is "no." It's worth the money for the publicity alone, but just imagine the traffic to a properly designed website. "

Now knowing the proposer and proposee I can almost assuredly say that her response will be "YES!" and with that brings up another goal. This year, the NFL is on a push to increase viewership of the Superbowl and the demographic where they see the biggest increase is in female viewership. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell recently stated:

"It's a very big initiative," he said. "(Women) fans want to be treated as real fans because they love the game, understand the game and want to have the opportunity to experience the game just as anyone else does."

While women comprise about 40 percent of the U.S. television audience for the Super Bowl, media watchers note the broadcasts fail to address them.

Commercials during the game, the most expensive television advertising event of the year in the U.S., are dominated by beer, cars and electronics."

Andrea Learned, The co-author of Don't Think Pink: What Really Makes Women Buy – And How To Increase Your Share of this Crucial Market recently wrote in her blog:

" So this is my marketing to women nudge for the cause: For those brands interested in gaining the attention of the women who watch the Superbowl as well as the men, consider these reasons:

You will be connecting people to one another around your brand. (You sponsor it, and consumers will make note of who aligned with this intriguing event.)
You will be presenting an emotion-filled event with which lots of Superbowl watchers - and many of your consumers - can relate.
You will offer something very different in a "same-old" saturated several hour timeframe that is all the more likely to catch viewers off guard, and keep them from running to the kitchen for the chips.

So what are you waiting for?!"

Exactly Andrea - and combine this viewpoint with what MediaBuyerPlanner calls a "Rare Opportunity for Sponsorship", the potential that this yields for anticipation of the event and also with the ever frustrating problem of offline to online brand integration. We've kept the identity of 'J.P.' a secret for multiple reasons, primarily to keep his girlfriend from finding out and spoiling the surprise but also, to add to the mystique of the project.

Now imagine this - What if every girl in America who is involved in a serious relationship is aware that a proposal is taking place? What if the intrigue that we generate can keep her watching the game, well into the 4th quarter sitting on the edge of her seat, breathlessly anticipating and wondering if it's her? Then when the proposal airs and our bachelor has made his heartfelt plea, the commercial finishes with a "find out if she says YES...go to www.adsponsor.com/proposal" Can you now imagine the branding opportunity of taking users from offline to online - all with measurable statistics?

Combined with all of that emotion, we can also add the following benefits for a major sponsor to take up in their initiative:

ROI for an advertiser; with massive media coverage of their ad and the proposal in addition to the Superbowl and the response video (far greater than any normal commercial) ROI could be greater than a 'normal' Superbowl ad.
Direct measurement of traffic via the web; links from MySuperProposal.com and from a video site (hosting the response video) will show the advertiser the direct page views and unique visits. You can't get that with normal TV ads.
Branding that lasts a long, long time; it will still be a video people watch and still talk about in six months. Most likely, press would continue after the proposal up to, including and after the wedding (Good Morning America has already expressed an interest in interviewing the couple the following day in New York).

Well that just about covers my request for additional sponsors now. ;) My feed subscribers will probably get this in time to note that we will be on MSNBC at 10:30 a.m. Eastern tomorrow January 6th. I will continue to keep you up to date as to our progress, I figure we've got a couple of weeks to go in our efforts so wish us luck. I'd also like to thank all of my fellow bloggers and search buddies who helped us out in numerous ways with links, blog posts, emails and verbal mentions - without you we wouldn't have made it this far!

A Superbowl Commercial Marriage Proposal - And How We Can Help Make It Happen

2006-11-27T13:08:00.000-08:00

I ran across the most interesting blog a little while back, MySuperProposal.com - there is this blogger – ‘JP’ who is attempting to raise money via his blog in order to buy a 30 second commercial spot during next year’s Superbowl on February 4^th. He doesn’t stop there, if by chance he goes over in his fund raising efforts or is picked up by an existing Superbowl advertiser – anything beyond his goal or 100% of the money raised not used for the commercial – will go to Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital - one of the top rated children’s hospitals in the nation. While at first I thought “Wow, that’s really neat, I hope this guy makes it and pulls it off”, I began to mull over the possibilities and how I would promote this because granted, this is an amazingly large project and in order for him to be successful, he would have to raise $2.5 million or generate enough buzz in both the blogosphere as well as through traditional channels.

Well, it worked for Alex Tews and his Million Dollar Homepage idea, he ended up raising $1,037,000.00 by selling pixels on his homepage creating such a buzz that traditional advertisers jumped into the fray and he ended up auctioning the final few pixels off on eBay. Then there was Kyle MacDonald and his One Red Paperclip blog where he aspired to ‘trade up’ to see what he might be able to get and he ended up doing a series of 14 trades culminated with him receiving as a final trade - a house in Canada.

So, I contacted ‘JP’ as he calls himself on his blog in order to protect his anonymity so that his girlfriend doesn’t find out his intentions and sent him a marketing plan that utilized every resource that I had learned over the past several years doing Internet marketing for a lot of very large web properties using techniques ranging from search engine optimization to Pay Per Click marketing to social media optimization to buzz marketing to traditional media advertising.

JP jumped at the idea, especially because part of my plan was to use this as a case study much like Jennifer Laycock’s very interesting study for the promotion of Lactivist.com where she attempted to see how much she could raise for breastfeeding awareness. I realize that I can’t do this alone but perhaps with a little help from my friends, I can help make JP’s dream a reality. I think that this would be an incredible case study to show Madison Avenue and traditional broadcast media the power of the search marketing community – after all this is the Superbowl and to the best of my knowledge, there has never been a search marketer who has undertaken promoting a project on a scale like this in a timeframe that this would require.

So my first thought was to determine if this kid is marketable – I mean, not to sound harsh, but to rally America behind JP, I needed to make sure that advertisers would jump on this as if JP were the next Jarrod from Subway, plus I wanted to be able to quell any critics, including the few posting ‘Is this a scam?’. I asked JP if he’d meet with me and I literally jumped the next available flight when we were both available (to an undisclosed location in America) so that we could meet and talk face to face. Once I got to my hotel, I shot JP a note and we arranged to meet in the hotel lobby. When JP arrived I sighed a collective sigh of relief – this kid was perfect! Traditional Baseball cap wearing, football jersey wearing, middle of the road average Joe so to speak and very marketable and a great personality to boot! Not only that but when he showed me pictures of his girlfriend she was as cute as a button! Ok, we had our story, now we had to kick start our plan.

So here I am calling out to my fellow search and Internet marketers to help make this incredibly difficult project a reality and of course by contributing, also helping a worthy cause – the Vanderbilt Children’s hospital. I’ll be showing progress on any marketer that wants to contribute whether it be funds, links, mentions, press releases whatever. JP has agreed to place a roster of those helping to get the word out on his site www.mysuperproposal.com and I’ll include all efforts in a journal both mentioned online as well as in a final document – maybe an ebook on how we collectively did a project this large. On last year’s Superbowl, Doritos received 400 million impressions from their commercial. I’m guessing that those of us who contribute and are listed will get an enormous amount of impressions based on this years 90 million viewership projections.

Let’s get started.

Joe Morin

PubCon Las Vegas 2006 Wrap Up

2006-11-23T10:57:00.000-08:00

Last week's PubCon Conference at the Las Vegas Convention Center was a roaring success with a record setting 2,100+ attendee count. To give an indication of how much of a success I believe that it was and to provide a good basis for comparison, one should know that I spoke at or attended 16 conferences all over the world last year (more international than this year) and I've already hit 17 this year (next months SES Chicago will mark 18 this year for me). So far this year I've hit:

Affiliate Summit - Las Vegas
Search Engine Strategies - New York (speaking engagement)
OMMA West - Hollywood
Webmasters in the Sun - San Diego
PubCon - Boston (speaking engagement)
Search Engine Strategies - Toronto (speaking engagement)
Ad:Tech - San Francisco
Search Engine Watch LIVE - Seattle (speaking engagement)
Search Engine Strategies - London (speaking engagement)
Search Engine Strategies Latino - Miami (speaking engagement)
HostingCon - Las Vegas
Search Engine Strategies - San Jose (speaking engagement)
Casino Affiliate Conference - Las Vegas
Direct Marketing Association - San Francisco
Digital Hollywood - Santa Monica
Ad:Tech - New York
PubCon - Las Vegas (speaking engagement)

Now I may be a little bit biased because I'm one of the conference organizers of PubCon, but taking off my PubCon (tinfoil) hat, I can say that last week's show was without a doubt the best show this year thus far. Some excellent coverage of the event has been posted by Barry Schwartz, Chris Tolles, Greg Jarboe, Andrew Goodman and Matt Cutts.

Lee Odden and Yahoo's own Marc Levin provide coverage of the Search Party of the Year when Yahoo's YPN group rented out Hugh Hefner's Playboy Fantasy Sky Villa - complete with a huge terraced jacuzzi overlooking the Las Vegas skyline and a rotating bed where a playful pillowfight between three beautiful unnamed female search marketers took place. Danny Sullivan even provides some excellent party coverage on his blog detailing the three parties at various suites within the Palms Hotel and Casino thrown by Yahoo, MSN and Greg Boser. Pay no attention to bathtub comments made by Lyndsay Walker on her blog - I have no idea what she's talking about! ;)

All in all, the conference keynotes were superb and informative, I really enjoyed Guy Kawasaki's opening keynote (there's your link Guy!) ;) It was really great seeing Danny Sullivan at his first US PubCon and his keynote was fantastic as usual. The sessions were great, I received a lot of great feedback, the networking was probably the best yet at a conference. The ingenious PubCon Drinking Game put on by Nathaniel Broughton of SEO Thursday was eclipsed only by the creativity of Chris Hooley, whose out of the box thinking won the contest. Check out Rand Fishkin's video interview by Lee Odden (I did my best to make Rand look famous with all of the flashbulb effects - lol)

You have no idea how much I'm looking forward to the next one ;)

See you then!

Update,

I think the best coverage of the conference was delivered by the 'J Crew' (Jane and Jeff) of SEOmoz.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2006-11-23T10:38:00.000-08:00

I just wanted to wish everyone in the blogosphere and my search and Internet marketing brethren a very happy Thanksgiving! Its been a great year thus far and looking forward to finishing off the rest of the year in a little more relaxed state...starting right now....with turkey. ;)

WebmasterWorld's PubCon Las Vegas Breaks Attendance Registration Record

2006-11-10T13:53:00.000-08:00

Next week's PubCon Internet Marketing Conference by WebmasterWorld at the Las Vegas Convention Center is officially set to be the biggest show in the history of the conference. We officially blew past our largest show numbers in recent history (Las Vegas 2005) about a month ago and the numbers have been rising ever since. With several hundred attendees coming through the registration pages in just the past 24 hours before the online registration sign up goes away (for you procrastinators, I believe that we will keep it open until maybe early tomorrow morning before the staff empties out of the Austin offices and heads out to Vegas).

I think that this show will be similar to Orlando a few years back when the number of attendees surprised everyone at the time - including Brett - who had only planned for a few hundred and more than double expected turned up. Well this show is going to be even more than double those numbers and is shaping up to be the best show ever with a lot of major sponsors, Four fantastic keynotes addressing the ever changing internet marketing marketplace, and of course a lot of great informative sessions, several parties put on at some GREAT locales and of course the whole reason the conference series began - the actual PubCon event on Friday afternoon.

See you guys next week!

PS. How could I forget? There's also the infamous PubCon Drinking Game!!!

Google to Hit $208 Billion in Sales?

2006-10-19T09:09:00.000-07:00

My good buddy Gord Hotchkiss, the Chaiman of SEMPO (also known as the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization), makes some very astute observations in today's Search Insider by Mediapost. In short, at a SEMPO planning retreat in New York recently, Gord made note of several recent trends that may indicate our little cottage industry of search marketing may be 'crossing the chasm' into mainstream marketing:

"Observations included the current build-or-buy-search- marketing-capabilities dilemma faced by the big agencies, the red-hot demand for anyone with search marketing experience, the sudden development of search marketing in-house groups in large organizations, and the current push for industry-wide certification of SEM practitioners. Also, more than a few at the table mentioned that they've noticed a significant change in the prospects they're talking to--and the contact points within those companies. Today, our sales leads are more often Fortune 1000s than the latest online start-up. With increasing frequency, we're starting to get C-level interest at the table when talk turns to search."

I have to agree with Gord and the SEMPO planning committee, I have seen a radical shift towards a change in attitude towards search from Fortune 1000 and enterprise level companies and the types of people in charge of online marketing are increasingly more sophisticated and offer up highly intelligent questions regarding their online marketing strategy. In fact I remember one week in particular recently where in some meetings for new client engagements, in three of the meetings, the CEO was in attendance and this includes a venture capital funded start-up, an Inc. 500 major ecommerce player and a NASDAQ listed publicly held company. At the last meeting of the week, a SVP at the meeting leaned over to me and stated "I'll bet it's not everyday you get the CEO to one of these meetings eh?", to which I quickly blurted out without thinking "Actually it happens all the time, in fact this is the third time this week!". So much for playing it low key. Good one Joe.

Also with running the In-House Forum over at Search Engine Watch and through working with several of my clients Ive noticed a much stronger uptick in SEO and SEM related titles and many of them with more power within their organizations than before. I'm also seeing a level of expertise of these in house marketers that I never saw 3 or even 2 years ago.

So how does this equate with Google hitting $208 Billion in sales? Referencing Geoff Moore's book, 'Crossing the Chasm' (still a must read!) where Geoff discusses early adoptors who migrate into mainstream markets, search is closely following the patterns that Geoff outlines in his book. Gord also does some interesting back of the napkin calculations to come up with his potential forecast:

"According to InfoUSA and the Kelsey Group, there are about 350,000 Web-based businesses in the US, and 4 million businesses with a brochure-ware site. That leaves almost 10 million businesses without a Web site at all. That's a total of almost 15 million businesses. There are no hard numbers for Google's advertiser base, but an educated guess would put it somewhat north of 300,000. So, even with businesses with a Web site, that means Google only has 6.9% market penetration currently...

...Based on Google's reported revenue of approximately $6 billion, that averages out to about $20,000 per advertiser. That may sound impressive until you remember that a substantial portion of Google's advertisers are large, multi-million-dollar companies.

Let's assume that over the next three years search marketing does cross the chasm, and Google manages to capture 50% of businesses with a Web site. Also, let's assume that budgets loosen up substantially as search moves into the mainstream and more advertising options are open, increasing average spend up to $50,000. Neither of these predictions is overly optimistic, given a chasm-crossing scenario. And that doesn't even touch the 10 million Web-less businesses that are likely prospects of local search, or the global market. That puts Google's potential revenue at $208 billion. Currently, that would put Google at number 3 on the Fortune 500, right behind Exxon and Wal-Mart, and ahead of GM and Ford. Even if I'm wildly optimistic, those are numbers to pay attention to."

Even if Gord is only close to being right, I think those of us in the online advertising business have a lot to smile about right now.

Gizmodo: Lexus LS 460L Self Parking Car

2006-10-12T18:55:00.000-07:00

Pretty amazing, from the Gizmodo blog, the new Lexus LS 460L has a feature that automatically backs up the car and parallel parks for you.

Incisive Media acquired by Apax Partners for $375MM

2006-09-26T08:39:00.000-07:00

Ah, now the puzzle is looking more complete. Many of us in the search industry were shocked over Danny Sullivan's recent decision to leave Search Engine Watch citing:

Last year, Jupitermedia sold the site and the series to Incisive Media. I wasn't unhappy with the sale and chose to let my contract be extended through the end of 2006 as part of it.

I was concerned about moving forward with Incisive, however. I'm far from the only reason behind the success of SEW and SES, but I've played a major role. I helped build both of those assets. Then I watched one company sell them to another without me having any formal capital stake in the sale. That left me wary of history repeating itself. I wasn't going to help this new company grow the business out of the sheer kindness of my heart.

Last Thursday, Incisive Media agreed to a buyout by Apax Partners for 199 MM pounds sterling or $375MM US. Apax Partners is a private equity firm with $20 Billion under management and over the last 30 years has taken 65 firms to the global markets with a combined market capitalization of $34 Billion. According to Reuters the deal represents a multiple of around 23.6 times Incisive Media's earnings per share before exceptionals and amortisation for 2005.

Now with Incisive Media itself having been on the auction block with a subsequent sale to Apax Partners, its beginning to make more sense and their overall rationale in not retaining Danny's services. Why negotiate to disperse additional equity percentages when you are on the verge of cashing out?

Tim Weller, Incisive's CEO garnered $20.8MM US on the sale. Since Search Engine Strategies was a small percentage of Incisive's overall holdings, one can sense their strategy in not negotiating with Danny.

Danny I applaud your foresight in getting out while you could, you certainly deserved some equity in that deal and to your words: Why watch history repeat itself?

It also makes sense as to why Incisive didnt reach out with more of an effort after all of the outcry from Danny's departure - they knew they were in play. I do wonder however if Danny's move caused the deal to be sold for less than it could have? I can't imagine that it would when dealing at that kind of level but it certainly is food for thought.

More on Apax Partners.

Danny Sullivan's Departure from SES/SEW

2006-08-29T21:39:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot of activity already mentioned about Danny's sudden announcement that he is leaving SES/SEW so I'm not going to excerpt any of Danny's comments on why he is leaving. I first got a hint that this might be the case during SES Latino in Miami when I went sailing with Danny along with Daron and Brandy from Webmaster Radio, Massimo Burgio, Jessie Stricchiola, Vanessa Fox from Google and Rebecca Kelley from SEOMoz.

When you have a tight group sail for hours on end watching the sun dance on the horizon, race a few dolphins across the bay and eat fabulous seafood at a seaside restaurant, you cant help but have some great conversation and gossip just a little bit about the industry, and after a lightning storm held us captive onboard Daron and Brandy's beautiful yacht (until 4:00 a.m.!) a LOT of industry gossip was bantered about. It was the first time that I began to imagine life without Danny on the SES circuit, a circuit that I have been a part of for many years and have been intimately involved with during the past several.

I've also been lucky enough to work along side Danny as a SEW Forum Moderator, participate as a speaker at Search Engine Strategies, work the SES after hours crowd as the 'Official SES Party Coordinator' and even attend his 40th birthday party.

Through the years, I've had the priviledge and honor to call Danny both a friend and colleague and the impact Danny has had on a big part of the SEM community is far reaching and quite amazing. I think that I owe the successes that I've had today to two men, two great resources and one great community - Danny Sullivan and Search Engine Watch and Brett Tabke and WebmasterWorld and their respective forum community members both those I've learned from online, but more importantly to those that I've learned from offline - where the real nuggets of information are and the best introductions that can be made happen and can potentially be life changing. The best information that I've ever gleaned has been from the conference circuit and from the participants of the global conference community. The first SES conference that I ever attended was SES San Jose at the Doubletree hotel when GoogleDance I was held and there were maybe 600 attendees...now there are around 6,000.

I had been contacted by Jefferson Graham - the author of the USA Today article on Danny that had recently come out, unfortunately between travelling and working on a very large new project (more on that later) I didn't have the time to spend with Jefferson talking about Danny and his impact on the search community, I'm rather wishing I had made the time now. Anyway, I might have talked about how SES has had quite a pattern of growth and Danny Sullivan has been a major part of that growth... so I agree with Danny 100% and fully support his decision to leave and understand his reasons and rationale why. I truly don't think Incisive Media knew how big of a repercussion this is going to have in the search community. But they will.

So what's in store for Danny? Well for one, Danny has many, many resources, resources that I'm very certain Incisive Media underestimated and did not factor in to their decision to not keep Danny on board whatever the stake. Danny has the respect of the SEM community and if the blog explosion that occured today is any example, then we're sure to see a loyal following behind Danny in his next foray. He would also have access to a major contact list that is an enviable who's who in corporate America as well as in the mass media in order to get the word out. Many venture capitalists would back Danny in a heartbeat, I know this because I've got several VC's as clients. ;)

As a conference promoter for the PubCon conferences by WebmasterWorld I know first hand how difficult it is to throw a search marketing event. First you need a venue, and one that can accomodate the number of attendees that most assuredly will make a showing, then you have to find a date that doesnt go head to head with another internet marketing venue that may possibly split attendees, sponsors and exhibitors between two major events (very difficult), then once that is finalized, is the venue even available during your prime conference timeslot? Many of these venues demand 18 months of planning time to coordinate large crowds, not to mention hotel availability or any hotel guarantees that the venue may demand (regardless of natural disaster or terrorist threats). Let's not even get into speaker scheduling, keynote availability, vacations, transportation logistics, airfare cost consideration to attendees (conference in Bora Bora anyone?) and then marketing costs to actually push the event.

Unfortunately for Incisive Media, they ultimately shot themselves in the foot, because the most logical thing that Danny could do if he were to compete head to head with Incisive - is to compete head to head with Incisive by coordinating a competing conference on the exact same dates that SES shows are scheduled and force the speakers, attendees and sponsors and exhibitors choose which venue to align themselves with. Its gutsy, but who do you think all of the aforementioned would go with? I know where I would go and judging by all of the outcries in the blogosphere by the search community, I'm guessing thats where they would too. This would make sense for several reasons, (1) Most larger companies have already factored the SES timeslots and locations into their budgets. So no difference to attendees and we already know these cities work. (2) Competitor elimination - a new conference run by Danny at the same times could literally kill the existing SES show, especially if attendance declines dramatically and SES is on the hook for a large scale venue, (these hotel/convention center contracts are negotiated 18 months in advance).

I'm sure that Danny is going to write a book or just maintain a low profile for awhile while he sorts things out. In a note that I received from him today he states "At the moment, I'm just kind of sitting back to get comfortable with the leaving part". So I dont think that he is going to rush into anything and I imagine that he will spend a lot of time sorting through offers and opportunities. I do hope he stays with the conferences though.

As for me, I'm not sure that I will stay on with SEW as a moderator or continue to run the party circuit for SES, I'm waiting to see what Elisabeth Osmeloski and Chris Sherman do, whether they will stay on board and run the forums without Danny or follow Danny's lead. Regardless, it will be a very different place

Search Engine Strategies Party Thread now Posted

2006-07-21T09:35:00.000-07:00

Due to the size that SES is now growing to and as we've started to see occuring from the SES New York 2005 party scene there are now a rash of 'private parties' that are invite only to a particular company's set of clients, vendors and partners. Therefore, the best advice I can offer is to contact all of your vendors and hit them up to see if they are sponsoring any events this year.

Sunday Night August 6

Marriott Bar

Downstairs to right of reception at Marriott is usually the place to be.

One known private party.

Monday Night August 7

Two known private parties.

Tuesday Night August 8

Google's GoogleDance V

7:00 - 11:00 p.m.

Come party the night away at the Google Dance at SES San Jose.

Can you believe that it´s the fifth annual Google Dance? We host this event every year to show you, the loyal SES attendee, our appreciation. The theme for the event is "Google Labs," so bring your lab coat if you have one and stop by for goodies, great food and drinks. You´ll get into the swing of things in Club G, where you´ll be able to listen to cool sounds coming from our own Google DJ´s, as well as enjoy some live music. We think you´ll have fun in the Google Labs technology playground area, where you´ll be able to meet people who work on our products, and test drive our latest creations. If you´re lucky, you may even get to play with a robot or two.

Location: Google Headquarters

1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

RSVP: www.google.com/ses2006

Wednesday Night August 9

Webmaster Radio's SEARCHBASH 3

7:30 - 10:30 p.m.

SEARCHBASH continues in their quest for the ongoing lubrication of the SES set. The following companies are again contributing to our delinquency:

Bruce Clay, Inc.
Looksmart
Moniker
True Local
Webmaster Radio

Location: Studio 8

8 South First Street
San Jose, CA 95113

Thursday Night August 10

Nothing yet!

There is a rumour of another major party to be added to this list with details coming early next week so keep checking back for new information, I will update this list as I get more information.

Hope to see everyone there! If I have left any party event off, please PM me and I will add it to the schedule.

Joe

GoogleButt

2006-05-01T15:52:00.000-07:00

I heard the funniest thing in an elevator during SES Toronto. Apparently Google has finally replaced Chef Charlie Ayers - the former CFO (Chief Food Officer). For some reason we got to talking about it and Danny Sullivan mentioned an affliction that affects some of the GoogleGals at the 'plex as 'GoogleButt' or the widening of the posterior due to the three gourmet meals a day served up in the Google cafeteria....

Too funny

April - 15 Nights, 7 Cities, 3 Countries

2006-04-30T13:29:00.000-07:00

I just noticed that I tied my friend Rae's month at 15 nights in hotel rooms for April. Funny thing is that I saw her and Jake in many of those cities and for most of those nights. I would have beaten her with 17 nights except that I was sick for the first two nights of Webmasters In the Sun 5 and came down late. Rae threw in the towel in Toronto and didn't make it out to San Francisco Ad:Tech.

So my month looked like this:

Home -> Pre-WITS in Las Vegas (with Champagne Jimmy) -> Home -> San Diego WITS -> Tijuana B.C. Mexico (also WITS) -> Home -> Silicon Valley (client meeting) -> Home -> Boston PubCon -> Home -> Toronto SES -> San Francisco Ad:Tech -> Home

Stats:

Miles flown: 10,600
Hotel nights: 15
Cities visited: 7
Cities I was also in with Jake Baille: 7
Countries visited: 3
Countries I was also in with Jake Baille: 3
First Class segments flown: 5
Hotel Suite upgrades scored: 5
Parties thrown in my suite: 4
Limo rides: 7
Bottles of $700 Dom Perignon: 1 (Jimmy thanks for splitting that one!)
Industry luminaries I managed to get interesting photos of: 13
Number of those photos I can post safely: 0

It doesn't usually get this busy until 4th quarter. We'll now its time to play catch up and attend to the very long list of client engagements I have looming before me so if you dont hear from me for awhile its because I'm buried!

Happy Birthday Matt!

2006-04-16T07:56:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to send a shout to Mr. Cutts to wish ya a happy birthday...oh and a happy Easter too. ;) You look amazingly young for forty!

Update - OK Matt's not really 40 but when Danny pinged me to ask if he really was 40 I figured I had better make the correction. ;)

Official SES Party Schedule is Now Posted

2006-02-14T13:34:00.000-08:00

For those of you heading out to New York for the upcoming Search Engine Strategies Conference February 27 through March 2nd, I have posted and updated the "Official SES Party Schedule" much like I did for SES last August in San Jose.

For SES Chicago this past December, there were no planned, sponsored parties and if it werent for BruceClay, TrueLocal and WebmasterRadio who pitched in for a last minute party at BuddyGuys Jazz Club near the conference hotel, we wouldnt have had a single party during SES. This after the previous SES where we had four competing parties on one night and majors battling it out to outdo each other with Google hosting their annual GoogleDance and Yahoo actually renting out Great America amusement park for party revelers to get as much roller coaster action as they could muster.

So here it is - check out the Official SES Party and Events Schedule and make plans to be at all conference networking events. ASK.com was the first to announce a major party. I heard from Jim Lanzone, Senior Vice President of Search Properties at Ask.com (they will officially drop the 'Jeeves' name at the end of this month) who wanted me to remind folks that this year they are going to outdo previous parties that have included music, food and festivities and names such as 'William Hung' and 'The Dan Band' and that this was going to be a MAJOR bash. I'm guessing that this coincides with their new branding effort to promote ASK.com and wish Jeeves a fond farewell.

I hope to see everybody there!

Joe

Monster Commerce Acquired by Network Solutions

2005-12-16T08:58:00.000-08:00

I have really good news to report. Some of my best friends in the search marketing industry - the crew at MonsterCommerce have announced this morning via an interview with Brett Tabke of WebmasterWorld that they have been acquired by Network Solutions. My good friend Stephanie Leffler will give up the CEO reigns to Champ Mitchell (CEO of Network Solutions) and will run the organization as President and General Manager. Ryan Noble (formerly President) will be Senior Vice President of Monster Commerce.

I have been following this company since I first met Steph at PubCon IV in Boston March 2003. At the time they had 18 employees and Steph introduced herself as Director of Sales. Steph got into the business as an ecommerce owner herself selling UV protective clothing and found the original MonsterCommerce software and saw a business opportunity so she became an investor and joined the team. As she ramped up the company, she took a more active role and along with her business partner Ryan Noble, grew the organization to over 100 people strong. I'm happy to say that over the years, not only have I consulted with Steph and the MC team on business matters and worked with her on occasion, but have become a part of the Monster Commerce family myself and have made many close friends with the team members so this is especially exciting for me. More about the acquisition can be found on the Monster Commerce website. So I just want to say CONGRATULATIONS to all the guys at MonsterCommerce and share a few of my favorite pics. ;)

Lindsay Rust, Matt Cutts and Stephanie Leffler in Boston - PubCon IV March 2003

Ryan Noble, Stephanie Leffler and Craig Paddock - SES Chicago December 2003

Craig Paddock, Steph, Me and Rob Snell at Universal CityWalk from PubCon VI Orlando, March 2004

Danny Sullivan's 40th Birthday Party!

2005-11-04T12:58:00.000-08:00

On Saturday, I made the long 3.5 mile commute to the Irvine Spectrum to meet up with local (and a few long distance) search marketers in wishing Danny Sullivan a happy 40th birthday. Danny had been vacationing in Southern California with his family and had also been kind enough to join the moderating staff present at the Search Engine Watch LIVE event held at The Disneyland Hotel two days prior. Danny's wife Lorna was nice enough to arrange a shindig for Danny at Dave and Busters where we could celebrate in style amidst gaming, drinking and eating.

Several of the SES speaking crew swung by for well wishes. Pictured below are Jennifer Slegg, Greg Boser, me, Danny Sullivan, Dana Todd, Jessie Stricchiolla and Laura Thieme.

A lot of Danny's non-search friends were also in attendance from his days as a newspaper journalist with the Orange County Register and LA Times and even from high school. It was nice to see everybody in such a casual setting and playing video games with each other. One really disconcerting image I have though is tough-guy Web Guerrilla Greg Boser with a pink gun:

Tim Mayer (Yahoo) and his family stopped by while they were spending time in Southern California also:

Jennifer Slegg (Jenstar), Tim and Laura Thieme

Also in attendance were search marketers Alex Bennert and Todd (Oilman) Freisen. Danny did manage to blow out all 40 candles proving that he is full of hot air ;)
Thanks for making Orange County your place for celebrating your 40th Danny!

Search Engine Watch Forums LIVE Anaheim, CA

2005-11-03T06:45:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday, Search Engine Strategies brought it's new shorter half day format to The Disneyland Hotel for its second LIVE conference which in a nutshell is kind of a cross between SES and speed dating. Instead of several sessions with multiple panelists all talking about a particular topic, here you have several topics being discussed at once by several panelists - all of whom have a broad range of experience levels across the search marketing and advertising spectrum. The panelists included Danny Sullivan, our own esteemed Editor of Search Engine Watch, and fellow Forum Moderators Elisabeth Osmeloski, Editor of Search Engine Watch Forums, Nacho Hernandez from iHispanic Marketing Group, Jennifer Slegg of JenSense fame, Alex Bennert from Beyond Ink, David Wallace of SearchRank and of course Yours Truly.

We attempted to keep to the forum format by trying to engage the audience as much as possible and keep an informal but lively discussion of particular search topics of interest. We asked a lot of questions of the audience and we pretty much nailed the demographic of the participants by type of SEM/SEO practiced, what language set sites were optimized for, size of sites, types of revenue models and what role our attendees played within their organizations and what type of organization they represented. What surprised me was the number of attendees representing agencies (about 15 - 20%) and how many in-house search marketers were in attendance (about 40% of the room). Pure affiliate marketers (25% or so) was a much lower percentage that I anticipated.

Once we had our demographics, I noticed the panelists attempt to focus as much toward the majority of their particular area of expertise as possible. Nacho Hernandez focused on multi-cultural online marketing as is his specialty, I carried over my presentation from Stockholm - "Site ECG, Does Your Site Have a Healthy Heartbeat" which although I didn't speak on this topic, I understand was a popular presentation from the last San Jose SES. I focused more on my area of expertise - big brands, and enterprise level sites and I tried to use examples from large sites that I have worked on with millions of pages and millions of pageviews to get my point across. Jennifer Slegg spoke on Contextual Advertising and did a good talk on Yahoo's new Publisher's Network. Yahoo YPN was also in attendance and sponsored the cocktail mixer right after the show. Alex Bennert focused on the conversion and usability of a website and went into deeper detail than I did on specific topics such as site search engine analysis and using information on hand to drive more sales. David Wallace and Danny Sullivan didn't have formal presentations but were both on hand to answer Q & A topics which they did.

It was a real treat having Danny on our panel and it was kind of a fluke that he was even there at all. Fortunately, he was vacationing in Orange County (where he is from originally) with his family and actually came straight to the event from Disneyland that morning. Danny spoke on a variety of things such as Google's recent stock price surge after earnings (340 that day, now 383 as I write this) and could the market sustain such a large market cap for Google and could there still be room for growth. Danny gave an example of a stock analyst quizzing him recently who had done incredible research into Google's company performance and had charts and spreadsheets mapping out hopeful targets to track where Google's stock price could go, but as Danny mentioned, he couldn't account for Google changing its revenue model or adding new products or services and therefore was entirely unpredictable. We live in a fast changing industry and nothing quite frankly surprises me anymore.

The Q & A sessions went surprisingly well and I thought that the wide diversity of experience on the panel led us all to be able to almost know who was going to answer the next question based on what topic it was on. Danny jumped in and gave a lot of credibility to a lot of what was asked and answered by expanding on certain topics and Elizabeth really did a fine job of moderating the event by asking a lot of thought provoking questions that certainly engaged the audience - to the point in fact of almost tears by one audience member who had experienced a high percentgage of click fraud.

The cocktail mixer went well and I would guess that a good percentage of the audience stuck around to ask questions, I did notice that the panelists werent hanging around each other as everyone had a crowd around them - especially Danny ;) it's rare to have that kind of access to Danny at an event and even rarer at a SES show where several thousand people are milling about and Danny is literally running between sessions and obviously sidetracked by everything going on. By his being on vacation, his relaxed mood continued into the pace of his discussion and aterwards participation.

After the show, the panalists reqrouped (we really are all good friends outside of the panel) and went up to the Jazz Kitchen in Downtown Disney and a few of the audience members joined us for really great New Orleans style food. I got home maybe around midnight from a great day of conferencing and networking and eating. Cant wait for the next one, I've heard a few rumours about where the next one will be but nothing has been confirmed yet. I did run across a couple of write ups from audience members - Michael Nguyen covered the event in his blog Social Patterns and Mike Banks from Web Pro News wrote how we engaged the audience forum style during the event. I will post pictures from the event as soon as I get them.

Tallinn, Estonia Trip Review Part 2

2005-10-30T14:41:00.000-08:00

Day 2 of our trip to Tallinn comprised of sleeping in since we had stayed out late the night before. I didn't bother calling Jimmy's room since I knew he would still be out and I went and explored the sights on foot and took some pictures while it was still morning:

Tallinn is a very historic and medieval city and it was refreshing to find a lack of commercialization with no signs of McDonalds or a Starbucks. After awhile Jimmy and I went off to explore the Olde Towne part of the city and had a great lunch in a rustic cafe off to one side of a large courtyard area. We then set off to explore some castles that were very old having been built around 1000 A.D.

This particular street sign looks like it could be painful - Ouch!

One of my favorite pictures from the trip:

Pictures of a very old and beautiful church:

For dinner, Jimmy and I headed back to Klafira for some more Russian food because the food and the service was excellent and once again we posed for a picture with our new Estonian friends:

The menu included an interesting caption for ordering Black Beluga Caviar - maybe they just meant to say "Feel like a Czar"????

All in all a great trip, would definately return to Tallinn, Estonia - maybe when it's a bit warmer too!

Tallinn, Estonia Trip Review Part 1

2005-10-29T12:19:00.000-07:00

After the Stockholm SES show, Jimmy Furland and I decided to head out to Eastern Europe and experience Tallinn, Estonia. The flight on Saturday afternoon was short and uneventful and the ride into town from TLL airport was extremely short. Tallinn is a very small yet wonderfully quaint and very historic. We checked into the Radisson Hotel right in the center of town and then decided on Russian food for dinner. The hotel concierge suggested Klafira Russian Cuisine and we made our way over by foot. Once inside, the atmosphere was amazing with Russian ornamentation throughout and elaborate colorful costumes worn by the staff. Jimmy ordered Black Beluga Caviar for a starter while I had the chicken noodle soup. Both were fantastic!

While dining, every so often a dance troop would come out to entertain us with accordian music and Russian dancing and the dancers would change costumes with every set:

The main courses were also fantastic, I had a steak and Jimmy had salmon and we also ordered some traditional russian vodka to add to the authentic Russian experience. The staff was very helpful and extremely friendly and after several hours of dining, we finally departed for the evening but not before preserving the memory of our new found friends from Estonia:

What a dining experience! All in all, a great first night in Eastern Europe!

Search Engine Strategies Stockholm Part 4

2005-10-29T11:23:00.000-07:00

On my final day in Stockholm, I slept in rather late but did manage to make it to the club lounge just in time for breakfast and got to explore the hotel a little bit more, I rediscovered the gym and hot sauna that I remember using last year during the Stockholm conference and opted for an executive in-room massage to complete the Swedish experience.

I had planned to meet up with Nate Elliot from Jupiter Research and Jimmy Furland to go out that night and we all met up in the hotel lobby around 7 to have dinner at the hotel restaurant - Die Ecke - where the german sausages were superb.

So we started off the night at a nightclub called Hoteles which was a crowded multi-leveled club and proceeded to get the night going. After about an hour or so we began to notice the crowd thinning so Jimmy suggested we head into Stureplan which is the party central point of the city with a lot of well known nightclubs such as Koket, Kharma and Sturecampagniet.

Here I am with Nate Elliott and Jimmy Furland at Sturecampagniet:

Search Engine Strategies Stockholm Part 3

2005-10-29T10:44:00.000-07:00

After a late night out with the gang I slept in and then made may way back to the club lounge on the 8th floor for some breakfast. The lounge had a nice balcony which was a much nicer view than the one from my room since even though as a Starwood platinum menber they had upgraded me to a suite, it was on the 1st floor. At 11:00 the view looked like this:

So after finishing coffee and my view, I figured I had better work on my presentation since I was speaking at 1:15.

I was speaking on "Site ECG - Does Your Site Have a Healthy Heartbeat" with Anne Kennedy from Beyond Ink

and Thomas Svensson from Mirago. The presentation went well even though the audience was rather small and we received some intelligent and thought compelling questions on a variety of topics.

After my session I sat in on "Writing for Search Engines" with Chris Sherman from Searchwise and Heather Lloyd-Martin from Successworks International.

So after my long day ;) I joined my fellow speakers in the hotel bar and tried to figure out what to do next and opted to explore the city a bit and have dinner with new found friend Susann that I met during my session
where once again I feasted on Swedish meatballs. :)
A lot of the speakers were leaving in the morning and I had already said my goodbyes to several of the gang so I ended up calling it an early night, at least by SES standards.

Search Engine Strategies Stockholm Part 2

2005-10-21T02:45:00.000-07:00

First day of the conference was ok and probably would have been much better had I gotten more sleep, so zombieness aside, I poked my head into a few sessions and joined Mikkel, Jimmy Furland, Martin S, Dave N, Christine Churchill and a few others for lunch. I didn't speak today so I didn't bother throwing a suit on and the highlight of the day was my brief nap but I felt much better afterwards.

For the evening festivities, there was a cocktail mixer put on by Jupiter/Incisive in the exhibit hall (whopping 6 booths!). After that, several of us headed to dinner where I feasted on Toast Skaagen and traditional Swedish Meatballs.

After dinner, three cabs full of conference attendees pulled up to Cafe Opera, a hip and trendy nightclub in downtown Stockholm where Jupiter had given conference attendees access prior to 11:00 p.m. so we didnt have to wait in line.

Once inside, Jimmy Furland and I managed to secure a private table by ordering bottle service and had a couple of bottles of Champagne delivered. Here I am with Danny Sullivan (London), Thomas Bindl (Munich), Jimmy Furland (Stockholm) and Dave Naylor (Leeds):

After awhile Mike Grehan showed up with yet another bottle of Champagne in hand so of course he was invited to sit down - mostly because it was a nice bottle of Moet & Chandon but also because we like him ;) Andrew Goodman stopped by and I spun around on the dancefloor for a bit with Christine Churchill.

Since most of us had to speak the next day, we called it an early night (by our normal standards) and went back home (hotel) by around 2:00 a.m. I guess we'll save the hard charging night for later in the week. When I got back to the hotel, I saw Danny, Thomas, Andrew and Dave in the lobby so I joined in on the gossip and stole one of Danny's donuts. Ok, so now its 3:00 a.m. but at least I dont have to speak until 1:15 p.m. Time for bed...

Search Engine Strategies - Stockholm

2005-10-19T08:42:00.000-07:00

Well I've arrived into Stockholm for SES and I'm beginning to get acclimated. So far, I've had a wonderful dinner with friends Jimmy Furland, Thomas Bindle, Mike Grehan, Anne Kennedy and Chris Sherman. Last night we hung out at the lounge at The Sheraton Stockholm and Towers. One of the highlights of the evening was listening to David Naylor (DaveN) strke up a fascinating rendition of "Great Balls O' Fire" on the piano.

Danny Sullivan and Brett Tabke Embrace SPAM

2005-10-13T19:04:00.000-07:00

Just returned a few days ago from Ad:Tech and PubCon in London. I couldn't resist the opportunity when I saw all three parties in close proximity so I seized the moment... ;) Who would've thought?

Finally

2004-08-27T17:53:00.000-07:00

Ok, after reading enough of my friend's blogs and *ahem* being in the search marketing industry, perhaps I should have my own little piece of online real estate here. So here I am. My intention is to use this as a photo diary of my travels around the world while speaking or attending conferences related to internet marketing. There is a lot here already on the 'how to' in relation to search marketing so I'm going to focus on the 'why not?'. ;)

I really enjoy what I do and I frequently come across funny and/or adventurous situations so I thought I'd share some of the experiences that come along with globehopping for a living...

Joe