If you can’t tell, I’ve abandoned this blog about a year ago. I simply don’t have the time to keep this up to the level of quality I’d want to put out. I don’t believe in doing this half-*ss, so please consider this my final post (until perhaps some time in the future when I’ve got a bit more time on my hands).

In other news, I’ve really fallen in love with About.me, a little “personal profile” service that creates an absolutely beautiful landing pages for all things “yourself.” Keep up with & connect with me at http://about.me/mjozaitis

Cheers & happy holidays,

Mike

My parents just bought me The Town And The City for Christmas; I’m really looking forward to diving into it soon. From what I’ve read about it so far it’s him finding his real literary voice and tone.

His works have had a really profound impact on my life; my point of view, take on life, excitement for what some would call “commonplace things” and my zest for travel and discovery.

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!”

I love that quote to death, so I got really excited to see that Google is using it as a springboard into their Search Stories campaign.

This is really good stuff, check it out…

I started up this blog several months ago as an outlet for some of my thoughts on marketing, advertising, economics, travel, music and life (well, maybe a rant or two or three). In any case, I’m fallen into a pattern of blogging about once every month and a half or so. Generally, having to do with marketing.

Amongst a few other resolutions this year (of which I hope to keep) I’m going to get more serious about blogging about the “life” part of my blog’s title.

Here’s to 2010 and a better year for all us Americans.

Besides my unrealistic desire to bend space and time and go back to early September (and drink pumpkin spice lattes forever) I’m kind angry about something… has America forgotten about Thanksgiving?

I was at the mall today – get in line for pictures with Santa. I was at Giant this evening – pre-oder your Christmas ham.

No turkeys on sale, no cornucopias of mulling spices, nothing. Just Christmas colors, toys and trees everywhere. Now, I’m a huge fan of Christmas; but it just feels like Thanksgiving is getting shoved out of the sandbox.

Now, here’s the marketer in me. I realize why -

• Retailers need longer periods of shelf life to move products
• The consumer buying cycle is quite a bit longer than in years past (though, I’d argue it’s shorter than last year). Remember that recession thing?
• It takes longer for a brand message to resonate with a consumer
• Retailers need $$$$$, Christmas is more profitable than Thanksgiving (why not get more milk from the cash cow?)
• …and many many more

But when the day is done, my romantic view of turkey day is surely in the minority.

Long live cranberry sauce, sausage stuffing, homemade gravy, turkey and the Thanksgiving classic!

I’m tired of you.

You’ve been here too long; please go back to rain land.

I’m all for listening to British blue records, dirty-gritty electronic and melodic grudge tunes for days on end but you’ve go to far this time Mr. Rain.

I hear theres some nice places around the globe that are experiencing droughts, I feel you could be of better use there.

Caio.

I haven’t seen this much buzz inside of two days in the search space in months; we can probably blame the Web 2.0 Summit for that.

In any case, lets get down to business – the Twitter search deal is huge.

Let me say that again…HUGE.

We’ve been hearing about real-time search for years now; the basic concept of finding information in real time. Essentially, you submit a query and you are served results as they happen. Now, Google has done a bit of this in the past with the “…in the past 24 hours” style results; but what happened yesterday is a really bold step towards true real time data diffusion.

In the worlds of SEO and social media; the synergies between the two have existed since social media platforms went open source. Twitter pages, Facebook pages, Ping.fm links, Flickr and god knows how many more sites are indexed and ranked – but the content on them is really outdated by the time they hit the SERPs.

Search and Social Hold Different Functions (at least, for now)

I, like many others, use Twitter to discover content I wouldn’t normally find via a search engine and I use search to find information that I wouldn’t normally associate with social media. But, of course there’s a very gray line to that.

…and folks, the line just got even grayer.

At The End Of The Day…

The aftermath of this is going to be fantastic; the only two real players in search (once the Yahoo! deal closes) will both be offering real-time search feeds from Twitter and Facebook. Google has long indexed Twitter’s public content but its been incorporated into their regular search results. Now this content is getting special treatment – much like how shopping results, news, pictures and videos are blended into universal search.

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Think about what the future holds; real time search of social media as a whole.

Real-time discovery of newly taken photos, newly created music and art

One really exited marketer, signing off…

So, just a warning this post is more of a rant. If you’d like something more intelligent and scholarly I’d suggest turning on BBC news or NPR right about… now.

So I came home from work today (fairly standard day; nothing major to report) and logged onto Twitter. To my horror I saw “Zach Braff” was a trending topic. Now, for those of you watch trending Twitter topics it could mean only one of two things – he’s dead or he got into a fight with Kayne West.

Today, users reported he was “dead.”

Now, I’m one of those people that think he’s a genius. I love Garden State and Scrubs – he’s a brilliant dude who has a knack for making the normal doldrums of one’s life interesting, tv-show-worthy and hilarious.

So, to see that people were saying he “died” I nearly fell out of my chair. Until I started reading…

Reading….that there was a fake CNN page published and Zach is perfectly alive and kicking. I breathed a sign of relief as I bit into my mushroom ravioli and texas toast dinner.

So, who’s to blame here? No one, absolutely no one.

Twitter has become a new syndication service and it’s done something that news stations have struggled to do for years – deliver news online in real time. Yes, of course you can log onto CNN.com or news.yahoo.com and find out exactly what is happening throughout the day; and now-a-days you can even Google a football game and find the score instantly.

Now is Twitter a 12 year old gossip girl? Of course not. It’s human nature, people share information and people believe each other without fact checking.

Just because it’s trending doesn’t make it true – fact check as you would when someone brings up a half-truth at the office.

By the way, Twitter; thanks for making search real time. I appreciate it!

Make a commercial people like; and they will buy my product.

Pick a flavor of the month celebrity, stick them in a funny scenario (say a desert island or a night club), come up with a catchy line and BAM: you’ve converted a viewer into a sale.

I’m happy to say this practice is either shrinking or marketers are getting smarter about how they spend $$$ on high priced endorsements.

Seth Godin has long explored, commented and written on this topic. “Built it & they will come” holds little water in a recession.

Current Commercials I like (by like  I mean; I find them funny, memorable or interesting) include -

• Dos Equi’s “The Most Interesting Man In The World”
• Bud Light’s “Billy Mays-style Infomercials”
• Progressive’s “Personalized Service”

Now, I love these commercials – they are smart, witty, innovative and have one thing in common – they poke fun at themselves. These are commercials I actually remember; now I’m in advertising so I tend to think I’ve got a trained eye for this stuff.

But for all the commercials I’m exposed to over the course of a day, month or even year – this are the ones I predominately remember? That’s pretty sad.

Now, I’m only talking about TV – of which I only watch about two hours a day and stick to four or five core channels; so I’m pretty much in line with the Gen Y demo: we only consume what we like and we consume a lot of it.

There are products I buy that have ads I don’t care for at all, or that I’ve never seen on TV; simple things like face wash, socks and jeans (utility items, I’d say).

But then there are the products I actually buy that say something about who I am – Sneakers, tshirts, dress shirts, music, dvds, a car, etc.

And of those things I wouldn’t say it’s the number of times I’ve seen that ad or the length of the spot it comes down; but more so the story the product is telling me and the way it makes me feel.

It’s emotional – why do I want to buy your product?

So what does it take to sell something to me? Write a story, tell me how this is going to effect my life and get the message in front of my face. Traditional media is shrinking and engagement messaging is growing.

You do the math.

Well, months later we have a pretty clear picture of the soon to be two-player search space is goign to look. Google & Bing. Yes, two brands that have become rivals (or friends, depending on how you look at it) faster than the bully and the dork in 2nd grade. Google is synonymous with search, just as Bing hopes to be as well.

PS – I’m assuming you all know about the Bing/Yahoo! deal

You don’t “use a search engine” to find something, you “Google it.” Yes, oh yes Bing wants to place the “G” in our heads and have us raise our hands (or fingers) and triumphantly “Bing it.”

Now, let me tell you a little bit more about why I was at first confused about Bing’s positioning and goals:

Long before MSN search morphed into “Live Search” the search space was jam packed with players all offering a “unique” market differentiator. ASK Jeeves (you asked a question, simple enough), AOL (fairly easy extension of your then “internet provider”, DogPile (mashed together major engines into one “search dashboard”) and dozens others told you this was “how to search.” Then came along a little college thesis project called “Google” – and the game changed.

Not to mention Yahoo was so well established in those days, it was hard to do anything online without that iconic yodel echoing through your head (hell, it was my ringtone when I worked in eCommerce).

All of these search providers had a “unique stance”. MSN was kind of setting out in the corner, mildly entertaining all the traffic IE 5/6/7 was sending it . This was the case until they realized there was a big problem at hand: MSN had no real search positioning or brand value – IE – people were jumping ship. MSN Search sat in that awkward space as a content publisher that happened to have a search engine. Oh yes, do you remember when the portal was king?

Anycase, the idea was hatched – all Microsoft properties would bare the “Live” branding moniker -  a symbol of living your life online – Live ID, Live Search, XBOX 360 Live, Live Office (and many others) were born!

Just when I thought Live was beginning to cultivate a search culture & build a brand (adCenter improved it’s UI, the Live Search twitter team became a force) market share began to drop; month after month. The obvious problem – lackluster product and the 800 pound gorilla in the room (the name starts with Goo…)

No amount of ad spend can fix a branding problem (or a flawed business model). Just ask WaMU, Vonage or Kmart how effective their ad campiagns are.

So, what was the lifeless and brandless “Live Search” to do? Well, we all know now…go the way of our favorite bird, the dodo.

ComScore and Hitwise are in the business of publishing search market share figures – and even with millions in spend to promote and blanket the earth in all things Bing market share really isnt increaseing…yet.

My take on how to increase market share – innovate, innovate, innovate (and promote it). Couple key examples of this recently – Visual Search & Bing Travel.

Now theres a novel idea – create quality features and promote them.

Now, after all the “new kid on the block” media buzz has ended lets really see what Bing can bring to the table.

MJ, Singing off