Churbuck.com

• The #davos tag in Twitter is yielding very little good stuff other than tweets from @JOHNBYRNE the EIC of Businessweek and @thomascrampton. Sounds like Davos this year is festival of grumpiness. Would have liked to have seen the Turkish dude flip out on the Israeli dude. Temper, temper.
• Byrne posted a link to this slideshow (I need to blog on the genius of the slideshow model for churning up a site’s pageviews) on “If Google Ran Your Business” based on a Jeff Jarvis meme on those same lines.
• I had the most interesting headhunter call in a long time for a gig for which I am not qualified, but which, in the right hands, could be incredibly awesome. To the person who anonymously referred me to the “dean” deal, thanks, I am flattered.
• Churbuck’s Theater-That-Makes-You-Smarter saw two wild showings this week: Häxan by Benjamin Christensen is the strangest flick I’ve seen since John Waters’ early stuff with Divine. 1922 – Danish/Swedish, silent. About witches. Demented and The 400 Blows, Francois Truffaut. The latter is awesome, the former is weird.
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• I am about to be invaded by ten 15-year old boys and girls for a Friday night birthday party for my son. Pray for me. I already have a migraine.
• I have purchased my 2009 Massachusetts Fishing License and intend to exercise it tomorrow by ice fishing (aka “ice drinking”). Report to follow and yes I will watch my step and a) not break more bones and b) not fall through the ice.

I use a pair of Shure 210 earbuds for listening to my iPod, watching movies on my ThinkPad. Bought them for way too much money a couple summers ago from a kiosk in the US Air terminal at LaGuardia. They have done good service, but one of the channels was shorting out and it was a pain in the ass to keep fiddling with the cable to get true stereo.

I just stopped at a similar kiosk in the new American Airlines terminal at Raleigh Airport. I asked the guy if he carried spare cables. Of course not. But he did have a combo phone/music adapter — basically a microphone with that sits between the ear buds and the device. I am on a call now with the rig and the clarity is the best I have ever had on ANY call, including a land line. Not sure how I sound when I talk, there’s a weird lack of feedback through the buds and the problem with having both ears filled is I feel disconnected from the ambient noise around me (approaching attackers, gate announcements, etc.).

Still, good solution that kills two birds with one store. I get a good phone headset alternative to my flaky Jawbone bluetooth model and I get a fix to my short circuiting issue for DVD and music use. A good $48.

Amazon gets ready for second-generation Kindle – USATODAY.com.

Stand by for an announcement in early February.

I took some guff yesterday for remaining a Kindle fan. Then I read this Frost & Sullivan report on consumer electronic in the “economic winter” and this jumped out at me:

“The Amazon Kindle, a wireless reading device was the number one selling item. Due to heavy customer demand, Kindle is currently sold out. There is hope for eBook readers (see Inside Mobile, Sept. 8, 2008)”

My compatriot’s beef against the Kindle (other than its semi-plastic crappy design) is its uselessness during takeoff and landing. Hey, I want to crash as much as the guy in the next seat, so I make sure the Whispernet radio is turned off so the pilots’ won’t start reading Grisham on their instruments during the foggy approach.  In four months of frequent flying I have yet once to get told by a maurading flight attendant to turn off the book. Secret is keep it in its leather moleskine-ish cover and act like it is a book and not let the attendant get a good look at it.

Still, with a new model on the way (which I will not buy as I have a year or more before I amortize the hardware cost of V1 through e-book discounts (which generally are 40% off the paper version), I’d say Amazon has finally staked out, with eInk, the elusive electric book. And for that I am glad. Now if they would open up the platform and let other device manufacturers sic their best human factors engineers on the task, we might end with some truly ergonomic advances in reading technology.

John Updike, literary lion, went down swinging yesterday at 76. He was a good writer — not my favorite writer, but a good writer, –owner of a certain suburban middle-class zeitgeist that John Cheever couldn’t stake out, a North Shore/Essex County Ipswich-to-Georgetown world of adulterous young mutual fund managers and tired, cranky Yankees. He left us with Rabbit Angstrom, and for that we should be grateful.

He also was a Red Sox fan, and wrote one of the better essays on the game, a elegant New Yorker essay on Ted Williams’ last game in that “lyric little bandbox of a ballpark:”  Fenway Park.

“One of the scholasticists behind me said, “Let’s go. We’ve seen everything. I don’t want to spoil it.” This seemed a sound aesthetic decision. Williams’ last word had been so exquisitely chosen, such a perfect fusion of expectation, intention, and execution, that already it felt a little unreal in my head, and I wanted to get out before the castle collapsed. But the game, though played by clumsy midgets under the feeble glow of the arc lights, began to tug at my attention, and I loitered in the runway until it was over. Williams’ homer had, quite incidentally, made the score 4-3. In the bottom of the ninth inning, with one out, Marlin Coughtry, the second-base juggler, singled. Vic Wertz, pinch-hitting, doubled off the left-field wall, Coughtry advancing to third. Pumpsie Green walked, to load the bases. Willie Tasby hit a double-play ball to the third baseman, but in making the pivot throw Billy Klaus, an ex-Red Sox infielder, reverted to form and threw the ball past the first baseman and into the Red Sox dugout. The Sox won, 5-4. On the car radio as I drove home I heard that Williams had decided not to accompany the team to New York. So he knew how to do even that, the hardest thing. Quit.”

American Express reported its cardholders spent 10% less in the last quarter — that’s my card, I despise credit card balances, I’m a total Membership Rewards miles whore — ten percent less than the previous year’s holiday quarter. That says a lot. Ten percent.

Now retail sales are forecast to also decline this calendar year. The news was delivered on NPR this morning like it was the end of the world, but it begs the question: why do we need to buy more crap each year than the year before? Sure, growth is good, but at some point the world needs to leave the SkyMall catalogue in the seat pocket and not commit credit card seppuku for that solar powered garden gnome or waterproof iPod dock.

For baseball fans it is hot stove season, the interregnum between the World Series and the call up of pitchers and catchers to spring training. I’ve got my wood stove roaring and my bookshelf groaning with winter reading. Here’s a quick list of what’s in the backpack, on the nightstand, and on the Kindle these days; and then what I’m watching on the DVD player.

What We Had:  A brief memoir by James Chace of life growing up in the southeastern Massachusetts city of Fall River — once the largest cotton spinning city in the world — now a sad hulk and husk of its former self. This is where Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her father forty whacks, but Chace writes an amazingly poignant story of the decline of a Yankee family from privilege to irrelevance. From his grandfather, the former president of the Massachusetts State Senate to his brother, a crazed World War II war hero, Chace tells a elegant story of a family, a city, and a society in decline.

Not on the par of “Goodbye to All That” — but nevertheless a good book about the slide of a Yankee family and one man’s determination to make sense of it.

Going to See the Elephant: Rodes Fishburne’s first novel. He worked at Forbes ASAP when I was at Forbes.com but I didn’t know him. He edited the annual “Big Issue” — a compendium of essays by big thinkers and celebs — and that most shows in his brilliant portrayal of the mad scientist/big thinker that seems like an amalgamation of Dean Kamen, Nathan Myhrvold, Esther and Freeman Dyson, and every other digital visionary to draw breath and haunt a podium the last twenty years. This is a good San Francisco novel — worthy of the canon that includes McTeague and rolls through the ages — but being a comical effort, it may irritate on occasion as it reaches for laughs that are not always (but occasionally) there.

Movies

I decided to dig through my son’s amazing 50 DVD collection — Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films, and have been toting around some discs as I travel. This past week I viewed:

Brief Encounter: 1945 David Lean directed this Noel Coward weepie starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson. Listed among the best efforts of all time in British cinema. Amazingly effective, melodrama aside, in terms of Lean camera work and impeccable editing, but mostly in the pre-WWII depiction of adultry and morals in suburban England. I wasn’t boo-hooing in my hankie, but it’s interesting to see how to do a weepie right.

Ballad of a Soldier: directed by Grigory Chukhraj. 19-year old Russian soldier in World War II destroys two tanks, is hailed a hero, asks for a leave to go home to fix his mother’s leaking roof. Makes his way through peril and travail, falling in love along the way with the awesome Zhanna Prokhorenko (with whom I have a crush now). Interesting flick released in 1959 during the post-Stalin thaw, so not a lot of propaganda weirdness. Apparently a major sentimental favorite in Russia to this day.

Richard III: Laurence Olivier as the deformed evil tyrant and usurper Richard in Shakespeare’s masterpiece of treachery and lust for power. All I can say, is whoa, I mean I know Olivier had the reputation, but for some reason I had never full appreciated why (and it isn’t for his role as the Nazi dentist Dr. Zell in Marathon Man). This confirms why. The dude can act. Directed by him, this is considered his cinematic Shakespearean masterpiece. Technicolor makes the sets and costumes bizarrely gorgeous.

I wish I could memorize his “Now is the winter of our discontent …” soliloqy for my next staff meeting. Watch this piece of acting:

M. Hulot’s Holiday: Faithful French readers will doubtlessly say, “Duh, where have you been?” — but this is the funniest movie I have seen in a very long, long time. Jacque Tati, director and star, has to be one of the greatest physical comedians ever — up there with Chaplin and Keaton. The tennis scene made me pee my pants.  See this.

Fester sent along this interesting photo of the inauguration of President Obama. Fun to zoom and pick out the protocol and pecking order of the seating plan on the dais.

Monday – Jan 26: Cotuit
Tuesday – Jan 27: Cotuit to Morrisville, NC
Wed. – Jan 28: Morrisville, NC
Thurs – Jan 39: Morrisville, NC to Cotuit
Friday-Sunday: Jan 30-Feb 2

Quick trip to North Carolina this week to handle some transitional stuff, Project Mayhem, and then girding loins for some mega-intra USA biz dev travel in February. Domestic travel+Feb.=delays, woes, and coats in overhead compartments.

Randall Stross writes today in the Sunday New York Times about the fine line between camp and hell when it comes to corporate video.

In it he calls attention to the wonderful internal video made by some Microsoft researchers for a product technology called Songsmith — apparently a “song generator” that one sings into and which then infers from the lyrics what the electro-synth soundtrack should be.  It is indeed awesome in its awfulness. Watch the first 30 seconds, get the idea, and skip to the video at the end of this post for its real contribution to society.

The payoff on Stross’ story is the pointer to what some clever souls have done with the Songsmith technology, feeding into it well known head bangers such as Metallica, and my personal favorite, Van Halen. This has made my day, almost as much as the discovery earlier this week of what the acronyms SIaS and FIaT mean in conjunction with Yankee’s owner, George Steinbrenner.

Disclosure: I am on Interwoven’s customer advisory board

I’ve known Tom Wentworth at Interwoven since 2005 when I was part of the team bringing Interwoven Teamsite (a very capable enterprise level content management system) into CXO Media at IDG.

I’ve posted in the past on the impact of WordPress — the leading open blogging environment — as a free CMS alternative. I was happy to see Tom tackle this topic in a Dec 30 post:

“As a blogging platform, it’s amazing.  Having been in the CMS space at Interwoven for roughly 8 years I really appreciate it any time I see innovation in or around the CMS market.  WordPress is one of the most innovative and impressive applications I’ve used in quite some time- WordPress changed the game for blogging.   I’ve spent a lot of time with WordPress and although I’m not an expert- I’ve spent enough time with it to get a good feel for what it can (and can’t) do.

 

So- is WordPress a CMS?  Well, no.  Although Matt Mullenweg might disagree, WordPress is not a CMS- at least not an enterprise CMS.   I won’t get into the limitations in this post but suffice it to say that WordPress isn’t ready to tackle the content challenges faced by Interwoven customers.  But as a blogging platform, WordPress does many things well.  Here are four things I think CMS vendors can learn from WordPress: …

Hat’s off to Tom for tackling the elephant in the room. I need to post in the future from the point of view of a global enterprise customer concerned with expense challenges and asked, on a regular basis, if there is an open (read “free”) alternative to things like metrics and analytics engines and content management systems. Right now, open isn’t ready for prime time, but for SMB and mid-market, the open allure is undeniable.

Snow in the south apparently causes total pandemonium so I came down to Morrisville a day early. I think there is one snow plow and there are already preemptive school closings and cries to batten down the hatches.

This ought to be interesting.

Thursday afternoon, snow storm on Cape Cod, nice fluffy pretty snow flakes. The birds are standing around the grape arbor looking dismal and hungry, so out I go to fill the feeders from the barrels of seed in the garage. As I walked across the driveway I spaced out on the fact that most of the yard is covered by four inches of solid shiny ice deposited there by a big rain storm on Tuesday night. Fluffy snow + black ice = slapstick fun.

One second I am shuffling along in the crisp New England air, three birdfeeders in my hands. The next I am on my back, staring at the sky, my mouth filled with black thistle seeds.

I look to my right and the thistle tube is shattered. I realize, in order:
a) my head really hurts and I do indeed see stars.
b) my left elbow won’t bend
c) my left knee hurts
d) I feel something very wrong on the right side of my back.

So I slowly stand up. Look around, think, “That must be what it’s like to get run over by a car.”

And I hobbled inside, covered with snow, to tweet: “just absolutely nuked myself – slipped on icy driveway, flipped in air, landed on head …. chugging advil”

Friday morning I woke up feeling very beaten and bruised, but it wasn’t until I sneezed that I realized there was something significantly wrong with my rib-cage somewhere low on my back. The pain was cosmic. So I called the doctor, went to see him, and yep, broken rib.

How broken? When I move I can feel the broken ends grind against each other.

Impact on life? No CRASH-B sprints in February. No serious exercise. Too many pain killers. And I’m pissed off.

But the birds got their bird seed.

Monday – 1.19 Cotuit
Tuesday – Friday 1.20-1.23, Morrisville, NC
Busy week, re-org work, 2009 agenda setting, then back to chilly NE. NYC to follow in early Feb. — otherwise, no significant air miles expected to be logged

In the world of advertising, the “Call to Action” is what you want the customer to do after viewing or suffering through your ad.

“Call now!”

“Mention WMVY and receive 10% off”

etc.

In the web world, it used to be called “CHA” for “click here a$$hole.”

Then it was punch the monkey.

Now Microsoft gives us ….

As part of the occasional series of how to survive this evil, ugly economy with digital marketing, let me acknowledge the need of a lot of experienced marketers, to get smart — and fast — on all this Digital Stuff. Because a colleague just asked me for a bibliography to help teach himself digital, I figured a blog post and an invitation to you dear reader to suggest some additions would kill several birds with the same post.

Let’s start by saying I am not a fan of  “business” books. Sure, I’ve read Tipping Point and Execution and Blue Ocean/Red Ocean … I was even  involved in the writing of a business book when I was associated with Gartner’s editorial board in 2004.  (Multisourcing) I tend to order and read a so-called “business book” only when I need to, and then only if I need to get smart fast on a specific function.

There is no omnibus guide to digital marketing. Maybe I should write one, but it would be out of date before it was even outlined: for the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed.*

Later on I will try to compile a blog roll of essential digital marketing blogs, but the genre of digital marketing blogs is a mess, and I’d say I personally only can read three or four on an ongoing basis.

This is a only a bibliography. Here is an “aStore” in Amazon if you want to buy them.

Search

Where to begin? Let’s begin at the center of digital, the very hub of where it all begins, and that is search. If you don’t understand search and how it works, then digital marketing in all of its forms and variants is going to be lost on you.

The best explanation of the history, the process, and the impact of search was written several years ago, but still is valid, and that’s John Battelle’s The Search. Trust me, but if you want to understand digital marketing you must understand search. Everything digital starts with a search.

Battelle gives you the history and theory, Moran and Hunt give you the nuts and bolts of how to run a search campaign from both the paid (SEM) and the organic (SEO) side. Search Engine Marketing, Inc. is out in a revised edition and gives a strong step-by-step cookbook for running a paid search campaign and developing a website that will rank high in any search engine’s organic rankings.

Metrics

The heart of digital marketing, the reason we care about it, is its accountability through metrics. One strong recommendation here is Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics: An Hour a Day. There are also some specific titles around Google Analytics, which isn’t a bad idea for some trying to master that environment specificially. Avinash is where you start.

Landing Pages

Tim Ash has a decent book on landing pages and the art/science of optimization.  Landing pages make the world go round in terms of improving “cse” or customer success events, so take some time and read Tim’s Landing Page Optimization

Display and banner media

I don’t know of a single book in this genre, but I would say that there is lot of good stuff at the Internet Advertising Bureau’s site. Especially on standards and practices.

If you are trying to make a case to stop doing dumb-ass traditional advertising and move it online, then read Joseph Jaffe’s Life After the 30-Second Spot.

Online branding

There a few good books out there on this topic. Allen Adamson quotes me in BrandDigital. Andy Beal quotes me in Radically Transparent, a good book on reputation monitoring and management. Rohit Bhargava’s Personality Not Included is a good read. Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s Groundswell. Scoble and Israel’s Naked Conversations is worth mentioning in the context of corporate blogging … so many books, so little time. Seth Godin is an industry unto himself. Meatball Sundae is a good change-agent manifesto, but the granddaddy of all manifestos is Cluetrain.

I’ll tackle blogs later. This is just a quick lunchtime post for a colleague. I’ll revise this as time goes by — please give me some recommendations in the comments and be sure to only suggest books that you’ve actually read and would force me to read.

Design

This is a weird suggestion, but it did have an impact on me back in 1995 when I was developing and designing my first two sites: Reel-Time and Forbes.com. That is A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander. Richard Duffy, a friend from PC Week and the early early days of Forbes Digital Media recommended that book and it had more of an effect on how I think about functionality and usability than anything that followed.

*: William Gibson

Capt. C.B. “Sully” Sullenberger, the US Airways pilot who made an emergency landing in the Hudson River.

As soon as I heard on the car radio I turned to my son and said, “Betcha he was a fighter pilot.”

From his LinkedIn profile:

“USAF officer and fighter pilot on F-4 aircraft. Experience in Europe, Asia and at Nellis AFB, Nevada, where I served as Blue Force Mission Commander in Red Flag joint exercises. Was a member of a USAF aircraft accident investigation board. Served as a flight training officer and unit deployment and war plans officer. Commended for writing wing after action report.”

Monday – Sunday, Jan 12-19 Cotuit
Week following — Morrisville, NC. No other travel on the horizon which is a good thing because it is black ice and blizzard season in eastern Massachusetts and I seem to travel in my own personal version of a snow-globe paperweight.

Writing from the airport with blessedly free wifi but no AC power, I get ready for that middle seat back to Boston and an alleged snow storm. Last night’s blogger dinner went well. I got to meet Greg Verdino, Steve Garfield,  and Joseph Jaffe in person. Had some interesting conversations about monitoring, advertising, media, new products, clouds, gadgets, porn stars and old french brandy.

I demoed a few products, but more importantly received some great feedback from Jaffe on the art of hosting a blogger event.

1. Involve a strong connector. The Social Media Club was looking for a sponsor of a blogger dinner. I had a restaurant that needed some bloggers. That is an easy win.
2. Work the invite list. I should have been more involved in lighting up my network and doing a lot of investigation of who would be blogging from CES. We had a list provided by the show’s press office, there were the obvious people to consider (I need to do a detailed post on the ever-shifting definition of a blogger as the blog CMS revolution and the ascent of the big gadget blogs makes some “blogs” more “media” than ever before, with large staffss and operations, versus one man bloggers like yours truly). We missed some good people, I should have been a little more involved, but ….
3. Don’t be a dickhead with the agenda. Inviting people to hang out doesn’t mean asking them at some point to shush and listen to an executive suit with the microphone. When I was a reporter I hated the dog and pony aspect of marketing “parties.”
4. The loud CPR music? Loud music in a bar or nightclub is an attempt by the owner of said establishment to make civil conversation impossible. After a few dozen attempts to communicate with someone interesting the frustrated person gives up and does one of two things:  orders a drink or dances, gets thirsty, and orders a drink.
5. It never hurts to have one’s products lying around to be touched. Don’t have a bunch of over helpful people hovering with the old “may I help you?” Let people discover stuff on their own and if they have a question, be available to answer it.

Just read a good post by Rob O’Regan at Magnosticism about budget cuts and social giving way to the tried and true world of demand generation. He makes good points which I pledge won’t become the rule at Lenovo. The point of the post — survey shows marketers are sick of hearing Web 2.0 buzzwords but still feel the need to know more.

Which reminds me — a new role for me at the company. I’m now more focused on social media, less on “demand” generation (paid search, banners, metrics) and a project I can’t talk about. So, will my title change from VP of Global Web Marketing to something else? I dunno. Not a title person. Basically if it happens in web 2.0 it is my problem.

So I have that going for me.

I landed in Vegas last night, went directly to the Ultimate Blogger Dinner hosted by the Social Media Club (massive thanks to Chris Heuer and Kristie Welles, the founders of the SMC, for organizing the event).

Lenovo provided the space, a restaurant in the Venetian called Aquaknox and we provided the food, the drink, and the wireless. The SMC did the rest, filling the place with some great bloggers and personalities. The entire agenda is to have no agenda, avoid forcing people to stop talking and listen to some person with a microphone bloviate, and just give people a place to hang out.

Chris live streamed last night and stuck me on camera for a fun-filledten minutes, demonstrating product features I didn’t know about on an IdeaPad (must spend more time playing with product).

I had a somber day earlier with the layoffs we announced (2,500 worldwide) and am walking around today in a semi-foul funk exacerbated by a lost crown somewhere in my back molars, erg-abused knees, and homesickness over not being able to say goodbye to my daughter tomorrow when she heads back to college after the holiday break.

But that is minor compared to what some good friends and colleagues are feeling today.

CNET party: geeked out on the Red Sox with Tim Daloisio which was a good thing. In bed at 2:30. Phone rings at 4:30 am — is wife wanting to chat.  Hang up.  Back to bed. Ring. Colleague call. Turn off phone. Back to bed.

I spent an hour on the show floor and saw a start up called Fugoo: Cool device optimized computing thing. Otherwise, been in our lounge working on stuff, and stressing about the snow storm awaiting me back in Boston tomorrow night. Final blogger night tonight.

Anyone looking for an invite — tweet me @dchurbuck.

Ford  CEO Alan Mulally and Chris Heuer photo Britopian

I really need to understand the Amazon business model better — but I want to know why the Kindle format isn’t being evangelized to other readers. Peter Kafka blogs at AllThingsD that the buzz out of Verizon is that Kindle Klones are coming — what isn’t clear is if they are just eInk devices, or Kinle compatible.