Happy birthday to my blog

Recently my blog celebrated his first birthday. Blown a candle on a cake.

Writing this blog has been many things.

It's been hard: hard to start writing things, harder even to keep writing (still haven't finished my top 5 of 2009 - uuups!). Hard also to find my own voice and to find an audience.

It's been a wonderful experience: writing down ideas and purifying them to get them realy nailed down. Getting feedback and how that enriches you. Having my little own space on the big Long Tail of websites.

It's going UP: lots of new ideas, feel like putting my money were my mouth is and do something good with it.

Thanks to all for all the support!

SEM/SEO Strategy: Improve your SEO with SEM-data using Tag Clouds

Sometimes a great idea is just 2 good ideas meeting for the first time.

Avinash Kaushik on twitter, 2010

The idea for this post came when reading the following 2 posts:

In the first post, Gemma Muñoz focuses on the importance of the long tail for organic searches (or SEO): we have to look further then just the first 20 search-terms for our website. The main idea of the post is that beyond the first search-terms, there is still a pretty vast number of keywords directing traffic to your site, and hopefully converting, so this traffic deserves our attention.

The second post is by Avinash. What intereseted me for the post I'm writing is number 2: Use tag clouds, where he teaches us to use tag clouds for analysing our SEO or paid search (PPC) campaigns.

After reading these 2 posts, I did the following: I investigated the long tail of our search-engine traffic of our website. I plotted the SEO and SEM search-keywords seperately in a tag-cloud, and compared both.

It's something you want to do too!

Let's have a look at practical example. Let's say there is a zoo in Madrid, which is called 'Animal Zoo Madrid'. The Zoo also has a website: www.animalzoomadrid.com

The Marketing Department of the Zoo does paid search campaigns and organic search campaigns.

Let's first have a look at all the organic searches which drove traffic to our website. I took all the keywords driving traffic to the site, put all this data in a text file, and loaded this up on Wordle. This gave me something like this:

As you can see, 3 keywords stand out. These 3 words are actually the seperate words of the 'brand' which is the name of the zoo. There are no other words who stand out, and few even show up on the tag-cloud.

So, what does this tell us? At least we have our own keywords covered, you can say. It would be nice to have some reference to see if this cloud-tag tells something good or bad aboout our SEO.

So now have a look at the SEM keywords which generate traffic to the site.

Well, this is a whole new story, right?

We still have the 3 words from the brand name. But we have a whole range of words which are relevant for a website of a zoo. There are all the animals: bear, gorilla, koala and panda seem to be the most popular searches, but also elephant, parrot, zebra get quite some searches. Then there are the keywords related to the 'practical' issues of visiting a zoo: 'Entrance fee' is quite big, since people want to know the prices. We also see 'Buy' and 'Tickets', so most likely people want information on how to purchase tickets. We have 'Restaurant' and 'Maps', which tells us that people are looking online to plan their stay at the Zoo. There is also 'Parking' and 'Trains', so people can find out on the internet how to get there, where they can park the car, or if it's better to take the train.

This tag-cloud for SEM tells us where the SEO is going wrong: it doesn't work the long-tail. Our organic search is centered around the brandname, and we haven't taken care of all the other searches which can be a great source of (free) traffic to our site. Of course we want people who search 'See living gorilla' to come to our site www.animalzoomadrid.com. We understand that people who search this online, might want to see a living gorilla. And if our Zoo offers this, we should make sure our site ranks high on organic searches for this keyword.

So now we've got some work to do: fix your SEO. There are lots of better places to get up-to-date on how to work your SEO, but I'm sure you'll want to have a look at your meta-data, give your URLs a review and see if they've got the keywords in them, see if you're using h1, h2, … And probably you'll have to give your site-map an update. If your keyword-cloud looks like the SEO-cloud we've seen before, you might want to implement a few new pages for all animals, maybe something like this:

/animals/bears.php

/animals/panda.php

/animals/koala.php

Now, what if we swop these results? I mean – what if the SEM-cloud we've seen above was actually the SEO-cloud and vice-versa? In that case, you're SEM activities would be centered around the 3 brand-related keywords, and not much more.

Again, you'll have work to do, but now for your paid campaigns. I'd start by bidding on all these words like 'bears' or 'entrance fee'. I'd put a fairly low daily limit on the bidding, and you want to check after a few days what your cost per conversion is. Some words will convert, other might not. You'll be happy enough to find out.

You might find that these 'long tail' keywords can be a bit more expensive then your brand-related terms. But that's OK: people searching for 'Animal Zoo Madrid' are likely to be closer to purchasing a ticket then people looking for 'see living koala's'. But you surely want to open up your website for people who're a bit lower on the purchase funnel and who might not know that you're zoo has got some living koalas.

So what can we learn from this

1. Work together SEM and SEO

Like the example shows, paid and organic searches are very closely related and you need to work them together. You can (and should) learn a lot by crossing te data of both activities.

SEM and SEO require different ways of working. I know a lot of companies where SEM and SEO are the responsabililties of different agencies or of different departments. If this is the case for your company then you're probably missing a great opportunity. Start working these 2 together now! Don't forget that taking care of your SEO will help you to better your quality-score, which will bring down your Cost Per Click (CPC) for SEM.

2. Be self-critical

I've heard quite some companies say: 'Our brand-related search terms come up pretty good in SEO, but not the more generic keywords'. I think this reasoning shows a lack knowledge of what SEO actually is. If you search Nike and it comes up as first in the organic results, then this is because the search robot is doing it's work, not because Nike is doing good SEO-work. The job of seach engines like Google, is to show the most relevant results of a search. Your job for SEO is to work beyond your own brand-related keywords and make an impact there.

3. Be ambitious

Some keywords can give you a hint to something bigger, to go the extra mile. In the example, we've seen that 'Buy' and 'Tickets' are giving quite some visits. So you try to position your site for these keywords.

But when there are some many people typing 'Buy Ticket for the Zoo', then this means more. Don't forget, that's your customer talking to you. That's your client saying that he wants to buy tickets. So why not start thinking of an on-line ticketing service? The keywords show the personal needs and desires of your customers, so we better start listening to what they want.

4. Go beyond visits

In this example, we've just talked about traffic coming from search engines.

But of course, you could plot your SEM and SEO campaigns seperately, but segmented not by visits but by conversions. Now that might give you even more actionable insights. Anybody wants to have a go and share the results?

My Internet 2009 Top 5: All kinds of Sports

Boy o boy o boy. Has 2009 been the year where sports has embraced the web and has turned it into it's perfect ally to make it so much more excited - or what?

I'm sure we all have are favourite sports and I haven't had my eye on everything that happened on sports coverage on the web. But the things I saw, I liked very much. I'm sure I missed out on so much more, but here are just 3 examples of how I have enjoyed sports on-line in 2009, and I hope I'll be enjoying it even more in the future thanks to internet.

There are at least 2 things which make sports and the web such great partners.

First there are the numbers and figures which make sports so great. I'm not talking about advanced mathematics, but there are the points in the league, the average per match and the time differences. It might be a boy's thing, or maybe it's just me: it's just so much fun to look at scores, calculate how many points your team are trailing or compare distances. It's even more fun to chat with your friends on what happened 4 years ago and who scored the last 3 points with just 2 seconds on the clock. The numbers tell the tale in such a way that for me it makes it more interesting to see the box-plot of a match or the scorecard, than to read an article on what happened during the match.

And that's where the internet comes in: you can find as good as any scores or stats in no time, doesn't matter if it's from the '97-'98 season or if it's live. You get a quick look at the standings; a nice interactive graph shows the story. It's all there on the web for free, right there for you. It's great to consult: just a few clicks will learn you where this player was 4 years ago and how well he bowled back then. An excellent match, if you ask me: the sports numbers are all there on the web.

The second reason why the web and sports go together so well is sharing: sports, like so much more things in life, are better when shared. The experience of seeing the same event with your friends gives it an extra angle, and feeling that you belong to a club or feel you share a match or a track with your sports idol makes it a more profound experience then ever before. And the web has become instrumental in sharing and living the experiences of sports in recent years beyond any doubt.

This said, let's have a look at my favourite moments.

1. European Basketball and a bit NBA

Maybe you'll call me crazy, but I prefer European basketball to NBA. The reason is that I like a good defence - the NBA has only 2 teams who play defence - and I prefer basketball as a team sport – not as a sport where you have 1 or 2 superstars per team who don't think of playing together with their team-mates. Basketball is of course a numbers game, so as a fan I just have to check the stats during and after every match. I used to watch matches on my TV with my laptop opened on live scores, and more often than not, I looked more at the stats. I admit that some sites on NBA are better at representing these stats – like including a plot of the position in which every shot was taken - but that's because working the numbers in sports has a longer history in the US than in Europe. Today I don't even need my TV any more while watching basketball. My favourite Spanish league is being aired on the internet by Orange, one of the sponsors of the ACB for free. It's just all there, on your screen: coverage, comments, stats. Now how great is that? The only thing maybe missing in ACB360 is the sharing part: you can't (yet?) post comments or join the experience.

2. The great communicator ends third in Le Tour

Even if he didn't win it, Lance Armstrong was the lead rider in the Tour de France. Maybe it's not so much for his comeback, but for the way in which Lance communicates that he became the lead of the play. Armstrong is one of the biggest users on twitter, and this brings your hero (or not) so close to the public, that as a fan you feel so much more part of the Tour. You actually experience with him, day in day out, how he's telling what he does and that helps you to get involved and live the experience. He posts very regularly pictures on twitpic, so you can even see what his day looks like. I remember a picture on his livestrong site of a team briefing before a race in the tour bus. You didn't get to see these things when it was a reporter who stood between you and the sportsmen. This only seems possible when the sportsmen start communicating themselves, directly to the public.

A lot of sites give live updates of events like The Tour: you see regular comments on what's happening in the race and you see a plot of the track live with the live time differences. People can log in to post live comments via Facebook or other social media, so you really get involved in the race without having to watch the live coverage. This is all very great and a big difference with what we had before internet arrived. But once the riders like Armstrong start giving you almost-live coverage of what they're up to, you really get absorbed within the sport and you even feel more pat of it then ever before.

Team meeting Astana

3. Cricket and more cricket.

I am born and I live in a country where cricket doesn't exist. I spent some time living in the UK at one stage of my life, and the combination of too much time and SkyTv made me fall for the sport: without anything else to do, I looked at 5-day Test matches during the day and that made me become a fan.

Following cricket where I live would be as good as impossible if it weren't for internet, and I must say that feeling so involved with the sport is only because the on-line cricket coverage has got it all.

First of all there are the stats: cricket is also a numbers game, and it's all there. BBC website has all scorecards – also the old ones - and extensive live scores. There are several other websites which give you even more detailed stats, with plots, fielding schemes, bowling tracking (hawkeye-style): the whole lot.

The sharing is also there: the bbc websites has a live text for most of the England matches. These involve live updates from the match. Since the sport is rather slow and takes various days in finishing, there is time to involve former players or specialists, you see reactions from people tuning in via SMS or email, there is time for some discussions on the rules, you get a picture from the action every now and then. This is all very engaging: you don't have to go to a cricket ground or have a TV in front of you to see the action. Just with your internet connection you can experience everything what's going on the field, besides the track and in the minds of a lot of spectators just like you. I haven't seen a TV footage for a very long time of cricket but I can say I was sweating as much as everybody else in Cardiff or in South Africa with Onions batting at 11 to save the match. I don't really miss the TV images: thanks to all this internet work, I have been enjoying so much of cricket the past years, and hope to do so.

Footnote: Everybody working in marketing and dealing with the issue of 'engaging' on-line with your clients: you should have a look at what sports has done to pull even more fans on board and engage with them. As a key rule, you should think 'sharing', you should think 'direct and clear communication' - don't think 'banner ads'.

Related posts:

- My internet 2009 top 5: the best of the year

- My internet 2009 top 5: Reading

- My internet 2009 top 5: Spotify

- My internet 2009 top 5: DavidLynch.com's Interview Project

The end of Spotify?

Only a few weeks ago I wrote in this blog that Spotify was one of my internet highlights of 2009. Today Warner Music announces that it's retreating from free music streaming services and this might just mean the end of Spotify.

When I first heard the news that Warner will no longer license their music to streaming sites, my first reaction was to have a look at what we will miss if Warner takes off its songs of Spotify. I looked up 'Label:Warner' to see which artist are on Warner's label and can be listened to on Spotify. The first 15 results included Paris Hilton and Van Halen, so I thought: no real harm done – we can do without Warner on free music streaming.

But of course my reasoning is beside the point: The greatness of Spotify is that it has everything and for the service it doesn't make any difference what artists you like. Of course, when I investigated a bit more, I learned that some of my favourite artists are with Warner, and I'm sure R.E.M, Madonna and Prince will be badly missed on streaming sites by a lot of people.

So what does this mean for Spotify? In my opinion - and this is of course very preliminary – I think Spotify is virtually dead. Not that the news of Warner will take of Spotify from the internet as per tomorrow, but I've got a feeling that Spotify will easily slip into yet another forgotten web based music service just like Deezer or MySpace. They had their time and we were big fans of them. We thought they were what the future would look like. And they did give us a good idea of what the future for music in internet would look like and they helped shaping that same future. But now that we're here, they're not around any more. OK, they are still on-line, but when was the last time you discovered a new band on MySpace and how many of your friends still listen to Deezer? The piracy P2P sites have been changing constantly over the years – moving from Napster to Kazaa and on to eMule and BitTorrent. It looks like legal platforms share the same faith.

First the reasons not to panic: Warner did not (yet) say it's going to take off its tracks of Spotify. So there is still a possibility that Warner will keep his music on existing sites, but maybe they will not upload new material, or they can stop working with new platforms.

The thing is: when they do decide to take off their music, it will be a hell of a blow for streaming services. Once you can't find the music you want to hear, you'll start looking for other ways of listening to the music. And most likely people will choose illegal P2P sites to download their music again.

Even if only Warner drops out, it's still one of the 4 majors, so you can roughly estimate that you won't have access to 25% of your favourite tracks.

In their statement, Warner told that free streaming service is 'clearly not positive for the industry'. Said in another way: we don't get enough money out of our catalogue from free streaming.

Free streaming services are funded by advertising: you hear ads in between the music you hear. The business model sounds good, but advertising revenue doesn't add up to a profitable model for the labels. They just receive the royalties for their tracks, and there doesn't seem to be big money in that.

From a business point of view, the free streaming model with advertising is equal to listening to a radio station. The only issue is that when everybody was still listening to the radio, the labels were selling lots of CDs with big profit margins. So in that time, radio was supposed to help them sell records and didn't need to produce a direct profit for the labels. Now that the industry is heavily damaged, the streaming services aren't perceived as help for their sales. The industry sees it as a threat.

I guess Warner will stay on paying streaming services. Spotify and other services offer a premium subscription, in which you pay a monthly fee to have access to the music without the advertising. If the labels get their share of these subscriptions, they'll get a share of a hugely profitable market.

So here's the big question: since I love Spotify so much: would I pay a monthly fee for it to keep it service? I am inclined to say that I wouldn't.

My service would cost me 120€ per year. This is not much compared to the price I used to pay for a CD: I can buy 8 CDs of 15€ with that amount, and this includes the services for one year. Considering this, Spotify Premium is pretty cheap.

But moving from a free service to a paid one is kind of hard after one year free streaming and some more years free and illegal downloading. Ans moving to a paying service should give you a better product. Though in this case, the only change would be not to hear the ads, which is not a big improvement.

It looks like we're used to the fact that we will find our music somewhere for free: we find the video on YouTube, we have P2P downloading. When Spotify arrived, we swapped the lousy interface of P2P for free streaming and the price we paid was listening to advertising. That was acceptable. But now, is the interface worth its money? You also have to consider that the 120€ is streaming only, so you can't put the music on your iPod to listen to it on the metro. The only option is installing it on you mobile, which is still a pretty expensive way to use internet services.

I think it will be the same story like the ones we had before: first a couple of songs are taken off Spotify, then some more, and then a big artist's whole catalogue. We'll get Facebook groups named 'I bet I can find 1.000.000 people who want Madonna in Spotify'. Then you drop out once, because your favourite artist has a new album, and you can't find it streamed. And bit by bit, we'll turn again to P2P, I suppose. I will, if I'm not offered some (free) alternative. And within a year or so, somebody will mention Spotify, and I'll remember I used to like that service but I'll find that I'm not using it any more.

Related Posts:

- My internet 2009 top 5: Spotify

My Internet 2009 Top 5: DavidLynch.com's Interview Project

2009 wasn't a good year for the entertainment sector. I wish it were otherwise, but it's not. When I talk about the entertainment business, I'm not referring to the music industry, which I already discussed here. I'm neither referring to the sports industry which will be the topic of my next post. I'm talking about everything related to film and television.

First the good news: I think the display advertising for films has been really great this year. Video has become something really big on the internet in general, and in on-line display advertising specifically. Of course the film industry benefits widely from this trend, since their main marketing has been releasing trailers. So it's just a small step to put these trailers into a banner. More often than not, these banners are very elegantly produced and they tend to be expandable, with some really special extras, some nice interaction.

Unfortunately, the good news ends here. First of all, too much campaigns are promoted by some flash mini-site: they include long loading times, annoying navigation and they completely lack any relevant content. More than often they have a game, some links to social media, even a mobile application of some sort. It looks like somebody from the studios has heard what is hip today (advergaming - yeah! Social media - wow! iPhone app - sweet), and they just need to have it, without thinking it through. A good example is this site for 2012 – you'll get my point right away. Marketing is not about having the next big thing, it's what you do with it.

More importantly: for as good as the new ways of showing film-trailers might be, it's still old-skool advertising and it doesn't reflect a clever way of understanding what the internet is about.

The entertainment industry should have learned by now that you can't fight the internet, but that you have to embrace it's model and find your way in it. The music industry has been fighting the internet for a long time, and every time a P2P website was closed, another one opened. People wanted their songs available on the internet, and piracy was the only viable option for a lot of people for a long time. Until – at last – something like Spotify or Pandora came around with a good model of a streaming-based music service.

So my question is: when will we be able to watch our films and series on a similar platform? Since I'm on Spotify I haven't downloaded one single illegal song. OK, I also stopped buying records, but if the business model of Spotify works, I've heard my fair share of advertising, and this advertising should generate income for the artists I listen to.

On the other hand I am still watching films and series on illegal streaming or downloading sites. This is basically so since there is no real alternative on-line. OK, there is Amazon where you can buy the DVD's (and before you all want to lock me up, I must say I'm one of the few people I know who still actually buy DVDs), but that's no real option, since you don't have the option to see it streamed in real-time.

There are some platforms showing streaming content, like Hulu in the US, Pixbox in Spain or Joost all over the place, but it all comes down to the same thing: if you don't have a big enough catalogue with a decent share of films and series, you're not likely to convince a big audience. And of course these catalogues are owned by the producers of film and video. So it's a real shame 2009 was not yet the year when entertainment came legally to our houses via our internet connection. And I must say, it doesn't look like it will happen in 2010. So we will have to endure some more time watching bad streaming services with horrible interfaces and bad subtitles. Not because we don't want to pay, it's because there is no legal way to watch content on-line.

Just watching series or films streamed on-line is just one step where the entertainment business is missing out. But we're even farther away of having a mayor production being based on the internet.

DavidLynch.com's Interview Project is something which might give a glimpse of what the future might be of on-line centered entertainment content.

The Interview Project doesn't aspire to be a whole lot – it's just a team of David Lynch who travel a route in the US and every now and then they stop for an interview with somebody they meet. The interviews of about 4' bring a short introduction into the lives of the people that are interviewed and their ideas and values. It's really David Lynch: you get to see the human being in all it's uniqueness.

David Lynch is a good example of how the film and TV business can adapt to a new medium such as internet. Lynch has been making films and programs for a very long time, long before the internet showed up. But he's been showing for a long time now on DavidLynch.com that you don't have to loose strength by embracing the new laws of the internet. Let's just hope that the next 'The Wire' or the next 'Avatar' will be developed on the internet. By working over time and count on the collaboration of the people, you can get a new, strong format, and above all: it can be something really engaging. Nowadays, we watch an episode of our favourite series, and there isn't much in between episodes apart from some trailer for next week's episode. In film that's even worse: you just go to the cinema, plunge into a world for 2 hours, and then finish with that world. The best you can hope for might be a sequel in 2 years time. There is so much time between episodes which we can spend engaging with our favourite show, which gets lost right now.

The best thing about the site DavidLynch.com Interview Project is it's usage of time. On the internet, time is everything. I believe that engagement on the internet comes by using time in your projects: let people come back to your site for a bit more. Reward them for their loyalty. Be fair to them, and give them a voice. Work towards a relationship. Get involved, and don't believe in a one-off.

Interview Project really understands this element of time, and has regular updates, with every time the publication of a new interview. This makes you come back to the site, enjoy it every time a little more.

Last but not least, and also considering the element of time: Interview Project has a very healthy slowness about it, which is pretty unusual on internet. Every episode lets your watch run just that little bit slower, and gives you a welcome break before we move on to our millions of status-updates, or real-time tweets or RSS-feeds.

Related Posts:

- My internet 2009 top 5: the best of the year

- My internet 2009 top 5: Reading

- My internet 2009 top 5: Spotify

- My internet 2009 top 5: All kinds of Sports

My Internet 2009 Top 5: Spotify

If you live in a country where you don't have Spotify, then I feel sorry for you. Of course it's not your fault, but it's a real drag. Spotify has really been the new launch of 2009, a web-application that I can say changed my daily life.

For those who don't know it: spotify is a web-based application which you

download on your computer. The application gives you access to a huge amount of music. It works with streaming, so you can only listen to the songs, you don't actually 'have' the music at any stage. So you can't upload it onto your mp4.

The good things about spotify are:

There is a massive amount of music to listen to. It's not all there, but you can find as good as anything.

You can listen to exactly those songs you want to hear. So it's not like LastFM where the app is only recommending music to you all the time.

It's free. Spotify gets funded by advertising which is heard while you put on your songs. You hear about 1 spot every 20'. There is also display advertising on the application.

It's legal. Spotify has made deals with the 4 majors and some other labels to get the rights for the music. It looks like Spotify is paying the labels for each subscriber or for the streaming of the catalogue.

You have the possibility to make your lists with favourite songs. These lists are linked to your account, so if you log-on to another computer with your account, the lists will be uploaded there as well. You can share these lists with friends. You can even make collaborative lists, in which you can make lists together with your friends.

The user interface is really nice. And the streaming of the songs is flawless. So it's not like watching YouTube videos where the streaming is still pretty lousy.

Spotify has been launched at the end of 2008 and therefore it's still very young. But it did manage to get 1 million of subscribers in 1 year in Spain. That is in a country where internet penetration hasn't exceeded 60% yet. The rise and the value proposition of Spotify has been so important that the BBC included it in his list of the cultural elements which defined the passed decade.

In a more broad sense, spotify is just a part of a long story about how the internet changed the music industry. And it's an important story and one which hasn't finished yet. It's a story about social networks like MySpace, piracy, P2P file-sharing sites like E-mule and Napster and about new opportunities for music fan, artists and business, like the live streaming of a U2 concert on YouTube.

The whole history of music and the digital era in the past decade is outlined very clearly over here by MusicAlly.com and spotify is mentioned as one of the trends of 2009, noting that 'consumers like streaming music when it’s done well'

Since I'm on spotify, I have bought just 1 CD. That was a birthday present. So spotify actually stopped me buying music, which could be seen as something bad for the music industry. But at the same time I have to admit that I haven't downloaded one song from illegal sites this year. So that's a good sign for the music industry too. During the same year I have spent quite some euros on concert tickets. Since the prices for these concerts have all gone up, I'm still spending my fare share on music. And since we all have expensive iPods, we can't say that we're not paying anymore to listen to music. We've just made a shift from paying a lot for software (music albums) to paying a lot more for hardware (mp4 players).

Another good thing for spotify, is that I have discovered a lot of new music. Some people argued that Spotify didn't have the recommendation algorithm like LastFM. First of all this isn't true: Spotify has a very decent player, in which you can build your own radio, depending on type of music and the decades of music you want to hear. Second of all: I must say I haven't discovered so much new music for a very long time, and this even since I don't use the player of Spotify. The good thing is that you have a whole catalogue of songs and artist at your disposal and you can find almost any song in no time. You read an article or blogpost mentioning a song, and within seconds you can listen to see if you like the song. You also find a lot of music because of the nice search function within the catalogue. So, if you want to know who has a version of 'Thunder Road', the search function will give you the whole list of every artist in spotify who sings this Springsteen classic.

Last but not least: spotify works as a very good social media platform. It combines genuinely on- and off-line interaction with your friends. This looks like the real power of social media, and spotify gives a good value from this point of view. Spotify is enabled with direct share-functions so you can publish songs in facebook of twitter. But is has also the collaborative list in which you can build a list with your friends. For my birthday party this year, we had such a list and the invitees could upload the songs they wanted to hear on that list. When the party kicked in good, we put on the list and people could dance to the songs of their choice.

So where will it take spotify from here on? Since spotify has been on-line they are continually adding songs and artist to their catalogue. This is of course a good thing, and is quite the opposite of what happened to deezer.com, where since the launch they were continuously taking of songs. Various artist have also been presenting their new albums on spotify. Alicia Keys had her latest CD a week before the official release date on spotify. She's not my favourite artist, but I listened to it, even if I wouldn't care for it otherwise. But having it exclusively on spotify had me to give it a try.

More recent developments have been centred around their advertising. They've created new and innovative formats for display ads. It's understandable that they focus on this area, since they have to focus on creating revenue for this start-up.

But I would be more happy if spotify centered more around their innovative aspect. Like I said: they have a very good and powerful social media tool. So why don't they try to develop this more? Youtube shows that people like to add comments to their favourite songs, and that a reliable count of how much I listen to this or that song, gives an extra dimension to the platform. So if my favourite brand makes a list together with it's customers, it would be nice to see how many times this list has been played.

This year U2 broadcasted a concert on YouTube, which had an enormous impact on thousands of fans and had a lot of press in social media. If I were spotify, I would think on this example. Artists look ready to innovate, and being spotify you have the audience and the platform to start building something really powerful.

Here's maybe my favourite list on spotify: Songs for a roadtrip through Arizon from the Coca and Lola Blog.

PS - If you you live in a country where you can have spotify and you need an invitation: pop me an e-mail, and I'll see if I can help you out.

Related Posts:

- My internet 2009 top 5: the best of the year

- My internet 2009 top 5: Reading

- My internet 2009 top 5: DavidLynch.com's Interview Project

- My internet 2009 top 5: All kinds of Sports

My Internet 2009 Top 5: Reading

During the first part of 2009 I spent time doing a masters. I was working during this time, so I didn't have that much time to see friends, to sleep in or to go out. But I must say, the master proved to be very enriching and I would tell everybody to consider the option of doing a masters. It's very rewarding and gives you a lot of energy and insights in a very short time.

The master I did was in Marketing Intelligence. We learned different methods to use data in order to make better business decisions and to optimize our marketing budget. To put it in another way: we learned how to turn faith-based decision making into a data-driven business culture. It wasn't a master specialized in on-line marketing, but we've seen a lot of internet-based examples. And you'll understand that when I read a post like this, I get reminded a lot of what we studied during the master .

In our master we learned a lot of hard techniques. We did a lot of SAS and SPSS to really crunch those numbers and databases. Of course we also used a lot of excel, because, you know, excel has it. So we learned how to apply stats and maths to get the numbers right and deduce the right marketing decisions from this.

Besides these 'hard' methods in which we learned how to work towards a data driven business culture, we also learned a lot of, say, 'soft' methods. One of these softer methods were our professors. It's amazing how a experienced professional can get so much out of a couple of hours teaching. A second 'soft' method of learning are the other students. It's equally great how much comes out of a group of professionals spending some months together, everybody with his views, his ideas, his experience.

Another 'soft' method for learning how to work something like on-line marketing is reading. During the master we had to read quite a lot, but I must say since the master stopped, my reading list has actually exploded. It looks like I can't stop.

First of all the books: since this year, my Amazon orders have started to change. A while back, they had some CDs, some copy of The Wire and a couple of novels. Since this year quite some business books have appeared on my order lists. Of course I have some catching up to do, like reading The Long Tail. But also new stuff like Avinash's 2.0 are waiting for me to be read. My interest for reading doesn't come alone: I've read quite some 'Reading lists' in blogposts the last couple of months. Next on my list are of course Avinash and Cult of Analytics by Steve Jackson. But let me first finish Actionable Web Analytics by Burby and Atchison.

Favourite Business Book 2009

Scoring Points by Humby, Hunt and Phillips. It first came out in 2003, a second edition came in 2007. It's about Tesco and the huge CRM strategy they launched with their Clubcard. Tesco and their data-crunching consultant Dunnhumby are still the reference when it comes to use

business intelligence and turn it into marketing actions and profits. A must read for everybody who's looking to use data in their business.

Reading blogs has been a more chaotic history. In 2008 I just read 2 blogs. In 2009, I've got 15 RSS feeds on my netvibes, I receive various blog updates in my e-mail and read several blogs daily thanks to retweets or other references. When I start reading a blog, I open at least 3 links of other posts which are included into the post I read, checking twitter gives me at least 5 new posts I want to read, and by the end of the day I tend to end up with a browser full of tabs with posts-I-should-read.

The good thing is that there is so much out there. Everyday, you can read so much info which is shared all over the internet. It keeps you up-to-date, and the way a constant discussion is held is very enriching.

The only problem is the overload I sketched earlier on. There is too much going on, and you just can't read everything that is out there. Sometimes my browser with those various open tabs of post I need to read, get just shut down. There is only so much time to read everything.

Favourite blog post of 2009

A lot of amazing posts this year, of course, but this might just be my favourite: A comparison between 2 commercials, one by GM, the other by Toyota. It gives some great insight on how we can connect with women in advertising. Just go on and read it, and say, just like I did: 'Holly Buchanan, you're so right'.

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- My internet 2009 top 5: All kinds of Sports