Daily Archives: April 27, 2007

Another victim of Google’s cleverness? Zunch Marketing goes belly up.

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I don’t know Zunch, but I’d argue that it’s generally good riddance when overpriced fancy SEM firms go belly up. As Google creates easier, better, and cheaper ways to do great in-house SEM (e.g. Analytics and PPC management) it’s not surprising places are opting for this approach. For the most part the big SEM firms are dramatically overselling types of SEO that cannot be done at all or are best done in-house or with the greater expertise found in small SEM shops and freelancers. My $9600 bad experience with a fancy SEM firm last year led to a refund, but that was thanks to threatening to blog about it and the written guarantee of increased traffic. I think very few get refunds despite generally poor performance.

After a clever and intense process of selling me on the service it was frustrating to watch them apply generally good but obvious principles of SEO. Also frustrating to note that I knew more about SEO than they did from attending a few Webmaster World Conferences.

So, is Zunch the beginning of a new trend? Perhaps a good trend.

Web 2.0 adapter for Grandparents is needed.

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Don has a very insightful look at trends in Web 2.0 based on a couple of recent conference experiences.  What I found particularly interesting was the graph which correctly noted the large missing link in Web 2.0, which is a simple (ideally I’d say a seamless, one-click) way to integrate the tons of independent content “silos” out there with the collectivce online body of work that falls under the Web 2.0 categories.

For example wouldn’t it be interesting if you could unleash a program that would scour your computer for pictures and writings, then ask you “do you want to send this out to the world?”, then shoot stuff off to the legions of online content repositories that might have an interest in that topic?      Despite the growth of online photo sites like Flickr, I bet they contain less than 1 in 1000 of all existing digital pictures.

Some tech people will say “hey, I already make sure the stuff I want online makes it online”, but tech people often forget how averse a lot of regular folks are to the interactive part of the internet, let alone to figuring out how to place their own stuff online.    This aversion won’t change anytime soon, and ironically it’s often the people with the stuff of the least interest who are mose likely to post it online.  For example gossipy myspacy party pix are plentiful where an old-timers thoughtful travel recollections often are relegated to Christmas letters and photo albums only found in a dusty old file cabinet.  Unleashing this treasure trove of experience and wisdom would be neat.