Konamoxt, Inc.

I was recently approached by a friend who has an interesting idea for a new business. He wanted to pick my brain about what domain name he should buy to best position himself for search engine optimization. I won’t tell you his business idea, but suffice to say that a key strategy for his business will be to compete effectively on SEO. Hint: that probably should be a key part of anyone’s business strategy these days!

The good news for him is that the market he’s going after has very nice long tail characteristics, and no estabilished players. So he’s got a real shot at growing a nice little side business with some well optimized pages and an obvious monetization strategy.

But he’s a guy with brand marketing experience, and so the list of names he wanted to bounce off me had a very “brand” feel to them. He was thinking about the logo and the corporate mission statement and the feel good intagibles that a brand name leaves with a consumer.

After quickly looking through his list I asked him a really simple question: ”Have you checked out any domains that might have built in SEO strength already?”… ”What?” he said… “What are you talking about?”

If you don’t already have an account with SEOMoz.org, you either need to get one, or you need to make friends with someone who has one. SEOMoz has the most amazing set of tools for really analyzing what you’re doing right or wrong with SEO. I’m not going to tell you I’m an expert at SEO, heck, I make plenty of mistakes, but I can tell you that SEOMoz’s tools are some of the easiest and clearest tools to use, and they’re great for telling me about the mistake I make, so I can go fix them.

If you are considering building a site that has a long tail SEO strategy to it, then you have to check out SEOMoz’s Trifecta tool. One of the ways to use this tool is to ask the question: all else being equal, where does “this domain” rank from a raw SEO potential. One great way to use this would be to compair two potential domains against each other.

My buddies business isn’t trading cards, but I’ll use that market as an example. Let’s say my buddy had come up with the domain name http://www.tradingcardcollectorcentral.com. Sounds like a reasonable name right? It’s got some good key words in the domain, it might be a little long, but hey, he could buy it and start rolling.

Instead, let’s take a look at DMOZ.org. DMOZ, for those of you who haven’t heard of it is an open directory of websites. It was orginally designed by the open source community as a competitor to Yahoo’s directory of sites. It was a great idea at the time, but unfortunately it’s become very difficult to get any sites listed in it.

The bad news is, your new site is not likely to get listed. The good news is, that if you can pick up a site that is already listed, then you get the trust benefit that comes from being listed in DMOZ. Trust me, this is SEO gold.

After checking out DMOZ for a couple minutes, I’ve found two interesting candidates.

http://tradingcardhobbyist.com - This site has been around for almost 7 years, it has a google page rank of 3, and several hundred previously indexed pages in google. But it gets no traffic, and doesn’t seem to have a web based monetization strategy at all.

http://www.collector-link.com - This site has also been around for almost 7 years, it has a google page rank of 5, and also has several hundred pages indexed in google. Like Trading Card Hobbyist, it doesn’t get much traffic, and appears to only monetize through Google Ad Sense.

All else being equal, either of these domains would be a far better choice to start a trading card business online than a brand new domain. Good news for my buddy is that he’s got madd negotiating skillz, so now he’s off negotiating with a couple domain name owners to see if he can pick up a “prime” chunk of realestate for cheap. We’ll see if he succeeds. In the mean time, if you’re thinking about starting a new online business, take some time up front to see if you can get a better domain name. Where better is less defined by “brand strategy” and more directly defined by “SEO Strategy”!

In this case, a rose by some other domain name, may in fact smell more sweet!

Filed by Brad Hefta-Gaub at 11:04 am under Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization
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I often hear people ask “What’s the deal with Twitter? Isn’t that just like the Status feed feature of Facebook? Isn’t it just a feature?” On the surface this may seem to be the case. Twitter’s main purpose and functionality is indeed a micro-blogging feed, much like Facebook’s status feature.

But comparing Twitter to Facebook status because the are both micro-blogging platforms is a little like comparing UPS Trucks to Taxis because they are both automobiles.

Facebook and Twitter are different not because of their features, but because of how people use them. Specifically, they are different because of the differences in how people manage their social networks on Twitter and Facebook. Understanding this difference is critical to your effective use of both as a marketing or professional networking tool. I’ve also talked about how important it is for technology startups to think about how they can leverage these platforms to help virally spread awareness of their product. In order to successfully develop a viral strategy around these platforms, you have to understand how people use them.

The vast majority of Facebook users treat their friends list as a narrowly scoped list of people they know in the “real world”. They are their school friends, their work colleagues, their family members. They have a prior connection with the person in the off-line world, and they’ve extended that connection into the online world. There’s nothing wrong with this use of a social network, in fact many people would argue this is the point behind social networks. But this is very different from how most people use Twitter.

Users of Twitter tend to be much more generous in making connections with people they’ve never met in the “off-line” world. This isn’t to say that the connections made on Twitter aren’t as substantive as those from prior off-line relationships. It’s not lesser or greater, just different. I suspect this difference is primarily due to two distinctions. First of all the “creation myth” of these platforms are very different.

Facebook (as the name implies) was created to emulate the social network of a college yearbook, it was designed around personal connections at school. Twitter was created around the idea of highly wired/connection people who needed to communicate in real time with larger groups of people.

Beyond just the creation myth, these products have slightly different features that make social network growth and expansion operate very differently. One encourages public dialogs and broad reaching nets of friends, while the other makes it easy to find real people you know from the real world.

Twitter for example allows you to have unidirectional follow/following relationships, follow/following lists are public, and by default tweets are either broadcasts or narrowly scoped to an individual recipient, but still presented in the public forum. Facebook on the other hand has tools for quickly finding people by name, location, and association that you’ve already indicated your affiliation with. Facebook has a plethora of features to dial in the scope of a dialog to one, several, or all of your friends.

So what? How does this effect me? It’s important to understand these differences in order to understand how to utilize these platforms. How should this awareness effect product integration? How would it effect using these platforms as broadcast mediums for things like product launches? In upcoming posts I will talk about how these differences can and should inform your strategies for using these platforms. Stay tuned.

Filed by Brad Hefta-Gaub at 10:21 am under Social Media, Technology
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In today’s House Financial Services Committee hearing, several CEOs of the largest and most prominent banks to receive TARP money were grilled by Congressman. 

On interesting bit of news was Vikram Pandit’s announcement that he has instructed his board that his salary should be set at $1/year and he should receive NO BONUS until his company has returned to profitability.

This is particularly interesting when you consider the debate that has been brewing about executive compensation and the recent rules set by the Obama administration that companies receiving TARP funds must cap their executive compensation at $500k per year.

Many people have argued that this cap will cause “brain drain” and a flight of talent away from an industry where talent is most needed. When I posted the comment “Executive pay caps for TARP, your thoughts?” on my twitter/facebook feed, I got a received a fair amount of debate from my friends and colleagues.

Bob: I’m not supportive of exec pay caps. Regulation-yes, accountability-yes, but pay must be based on performance to be competitive globally. Unlimited upside and unlimited downside. We’re shooting ourselves in the foot with pay caps. Motivation issue. Clearly, no compensation for failure. But the talent will always follow the money - to other industries or even other countries

Me: I agree that we should allow performance to guide compensation, but the results from 2008 suggest that we had a system of unlimited upside and limited downside. Multidecamillion payouts for bankruptcy is not an incentive to make SMART risks, its just an incentive to take bigger risks.

Interestingly Larry Kudlow (can’t get more free market then him can you) said he liked all the elements of Obama’s plan. Basically:

• Small base salary (check)
• Incentive “bonus” through restricted stock options (check)
• No golden parachutes (check)

This sounds like upside for success, and downside for failure to me.

Chris: These top execs have been over-paid for so long and now they’re just making sure that they’re not being over-paid with tax payer money. Makes perfect sense to me.

Bob: “Overpaid” is relative. Was Bill Gates overpaid? 25 years of MSFT shareholders would probably say no. Many other examples. The issue is regulation, oversight, accountability where the public good is at risk, e.g. banking. Clearly we’ve got serious housecleaning to do. But I believe in the power of the individual and great execs are not commodities. If compensation is a motivating factor in an exec’s decision to join/stay with a company, then it is highly likely they will follow the money to companies without compensation caps, which will ultimately hurt or even destroy the capped companies that are now funded by our taxes.

Me: I agree with Bob, that “overpaid” is relative. Also, clearly, the market has allowed the current state of affairs to exist/expand. Not unlike pay in Major League Baseball, companies have been chasing star executives with more and more lucrative packages for fear that the “great manager” will go to the next firm that offers a better package.

So, I agree that we should let the market set compensation…

However, we have long since left the free markets when these companies, managed by these start managers, imploded and required tax payer support to keep themselves afloat.

It’s a little like the young adult who after leaving home, partied away all his inheritance on sex, drugs, and rock’n'roll, and now has come crawling back to live with/off his parents. The idea that their would be new rules in the house: no parties, no hookers, no drunken metal fests at 3am… doesn’t seem unreasonable if you’re gonna live in my house.

Also, heard a great line on NPR yesterday…

“But if we don’t pay these executive market compensation, don’t we run the risk of the ‘best and brightest’ going somewhere else? Won’t the replacements perform worse?”

“How could the replacement perform worse? The current batch has produced the worse results in more than three generations. It’s very unlikely anyone will perform worse.”

Chad: the Obama plan looks pretty sharp - market decides incentives through stock options.

Do a great job, stock goes up. Rake in your duly earned merit bonus. now shut up and row!

Bob: Agree. Punish bad behavior, reward good behavior. But fix/regulate the playing field, not the reward-punishment system. Match the medicine to the disease.

Me: Great point Bob, but… I’m starting to think that compensation structure may actually be part of the disease.

Follow me on this:

• The circa 2007 comp structure rewarded taking bigger and bigger risks, and had little or no downside for failure.
• This resulted in smart people coming up with ways to take astronomical risks (massive leveraging) but since there was no downside for failure they stopped paying attention to the potential ramifications of the risks.
• This sense of all greed for the upside (ok if balanced with fear) and no fear of the downside (whoops, what’s balancing the greed?) fueled the sub-prime bubble.

Regulation - requiring more disclosure of the risk, more transparency, etc… might have helped slow it down, but, I doubt that really would have done much.

I like the idea of giving shareholders a vote on comp packages, at least that would create more transparency. In this case, for TARP, tax payers are the share holders, seems reasonable to Obama the proxy vote.

Chris: Great CEO’s in this generation work for pride and getting their companies where they want them to be. Both Gates and Jobs both take $1 annual salaries. Gates was actually in front of congress and when pressed on his salary he did comment that today’s executives make too much for too little.

Bob: There are so many factors behind our economic problems that I would never claim to understand even a fraction of them but I know that corporate CEOs are definitely not the only issue. Obviously, a big issue is how we keep score as a culture, which created these guys in the first place. I am a bit of an idealist myself but I’ve been around long enough to know that money talks, and for better or worse, we’ve got to compete with China, India, the EU and Russia. I want the companies we bailout to succeed and I just hope that salary caps don’t result in the next generation of management superstars passing over certain companies and industries that we need as a nation.

The news that Pandit is willing to work for free, would seem to suggest that the idea that brain drain will occur if we enforce salary caps is not true. Now, to be fair, there are plenty of people who are detractors of Vikram Pandit. And so he may be a case of exactly the wrong kind of person we want leading out of this mess. But if we believe that the market knows how to pick good leaders, than Pandit is a product of that exact same market we seem to trust. We can’t have it both ways.

Independent of what you may think of Pandit as a man or Citi as a company. I am pleased to see a business leader who is willing to stand up and really put his money where his mouth is.

Filed by Brad Hefta-Gaub at 11:58 am under Entrepreneurship, Leadership
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