Speaking Engagements – Scott Fish

This page will be updated as I am invited to speak at various search marketing and travel events.

Full Set of Presentations and presentation details after the JUMP.

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Looming Commercial Real Estate Crash: Where did all that content go?

I recently tried to look up where a Hallmark store was in Portland and of course I first searched online.  Perfect… I found one that was close enough to stop by and grab a card.  We headed out and went to the mall where the Hallmark was listed to be at, and much to our surprise, when we asked a local mall employee they said it wasn’t there any more.

That got me thinking, with all the commercial foreclosures that are piling up, there’s a ton of incorrect content online – so where does this content go when a business closes its doors?  Who’s responsible for taking down a business listing or updating a new address for that business listing?

The current commercial real estate market is a nearly $8 trillion industry that is having its troubles.  “Really since the start of the year the trouble is coming out of the woodwork as far as notices of default, foreclosures, bankruptcies,” said Bob White, founder and president of Real Capital Analytics, a real estate market research firm. “It’s growing alarmingly fast.” Currently, some $50 billion worth of commercial mortgages are in default or foreclosure. White and others in the industry say the worst is yet to come.

With $1.72 trillion of commercial real-estate loans outstanding in the U.S. today, and $300 million of that sum coming due this year alone, the Federal Reserve hopes to launch a program by next month to refinance large commercial properties such as office towers and malls. Although the sector isn’t in big trouble yet, rents and occupancies are starting to fall, and the Fed aims to provide up to $1 trillion of new credit to head off a “looming crisis” of spiraling commercial foreclosures.

It sure looks like a lot of commercial property address listings are going to be changing over the next few years.

My $4/day Isn’t Enough: Starbucks to cut up to 12,000 jobs, close 600 stores

Starbucks Corp announced today it plans to close 600 underperforming stores and eliminate as many as 12,000 full- and part-time positions.

Howard Schultz, the coffee chain’s founder and chief executive, retook the helm in January and quickly announced plans to shutter 100 underperforming outlets. With U.S. sales growth slowing, he slashed plans for store openings and shifted the company’s most ambitious expansion efforts to international markets.

Starbucks said the closures are spread across all major U.S. markets and that 70 percent of the targeted stores have been open since the beginning of fiscal 2006. The accompanying job losses would represent about 7 percent of the company’s global work force.Starbucks estimated that total pretax charges associated with the planned U.S. company-operated store closures, including costs associated with severance, would be in the range of $328 million to $348 million.

The Seattle-based company aggressively opened stores in areas such as California and Florida, which have been hardest hit by the U.S. housing downturn. Some investors, worried that the company had built too many outlets in the United States, pushed the company to increase the number of store closures.

Starbucks also said it will open fewer than 200 new U.S. company-operated stores in fiscal 2009, down from 250 previously.

Donald Trump Sells his $100 Million Dollar Home

Donald Trump sells his $100 million dollar home to a Russian fertilizer billionaire, Dmitry Rybolovlev”:

“This acquisition is simply an investment in real estate by one of the companies in which I have an interest,” Mr. Rybolovlev said in a statement released by Alan Basiev, the head spokesman for Uralkali. It “does not represent a decision by me to live in the U.S.”

If the deal closes in the next few weeks, as planned, it is likely to be the most expensive sale of a U.S. single-family home. “This is the highest price ever paid for a house. And I think it’s a bargain,” said Mr. Trump.

The developer paid $41.4 million for the estate at a bankruptcy-court auction in 2004 and did a cosmetic renovation. Some brokers describe the house as a teardown, saying the property, among Palm Beach’s largest parcels, would be more valuable if subdivided

Are You a Leader? Just look at Your Shoes

Got a passion for buying sneakers? It could be a good sign, with a poll finding that people who buy three pairs of sneakers or more a year are far more likely to be a leadership type that other people.

Mindset Media, a media company that examines personality traits of different consumers, found that people who buy more than three pairs of sneakers a year are 61 percent more likely to have the qualities of a modern leader.

These qualities were defined as having ideas and vision, and a style with others that is both inclusive and decisive.

The survey of 7,500 people, using market research group Nielsen’s online panel, found multi-sneaker buyers were 50 percent more likely to be very assertive and 47 percent more likely to be spontaneous.

Lauren Arvonio, a spokeswoman for Mindset Media, said sneaker buyers were more likely to fly by the seat of their pants.

“It is often said you can tell a lot about a person by the shoes they wear, and now we have some hard data to back that up,” Arvonio told Reuters.

“What is interesting is that these personality traits held true across the board, regardless of age, income, or gender.”

Previous Mindset Media surveys found that people who pay their credit card bills off each month were more likely to be “highly deliberate,” thinking through their actions, but also less modest than others, likely to brag about their habits.

Hybrid car owners were found to be 78 percent more likely to be highly creative than other people and less dogmatic.

(source)

7 Types of Advertising To Drive Sales

What Kind of Advertising Do You Do?
There are millions of ads online every minute of the day that are pounding your eyes and your pocketbook with messages to try and persuade you.

As an advertiser you have to decide how to get through all that noise and put the story of your product in front of potential consumers. Here’s a list of the different types of ads that people are using right now to sell their products. Some of these may be new to you, consider them, they may lead to the bulls-eye that you’re looking for.

Page Takeover Advertising – I love these! Myspace was one of the first large advertisers to really use these and they were highly effective. Gawker Media also offers these type of ads across all of their properties. So why do these ads do so well? – simple, they’re a brand play. In the advertising world, we like brand plays because they the simply need to catch your attention and make an impression on your to be successful. They cant be ignored unless you surf off of the site that you’re visiting, which may be a drawback, but again, if these ads are targeted well, they will do well.

Audible Advertising – These are some of the most annoying but the most attention gaining ads that you will encounter online. We’ve all surfed onto a site and within a few seconds we find out speaker blaring a song or an advertiser’s message. I would stay away from these ads since they tend to give users a horrible experience… unless you can find a creative way to use them. Yes, they may seen temping, but using audible ads is a really good way to have your end-user fire-up their ad blocker.

Animated Flash Advertising – These ads bring in a huge amount of revenue for advertisers, simply because they are so eye catching. But does that make these ads any less annoying than other ads such as audible ads? The ads that jump onto your screen and seemingly float around your browser are of course some of the most difficult ads to close or stop. Again, these ads can be very effective, but only if highly targeted and not intrusive.

Advertorials Advertising – These ads are really good for SEOs to consider. There has been all kinds of controversy surrounding paid links in the last few years, but at the end of the day, there are many companies that pay another company to feature content on their site. Yahoo Finance, for example partners with content providers such as Forbes.com and CNN.com. This is a large partnership, but there’s other opportunities out there to put your company’s story in-front of a site owner and have them write about your site and give you several links. Yes, you may have to pay for it, donate a few $s, send them a product or 2, or other tricks, but at the end of the day, these are really good ways to promote your brand and company.

Video Advertising – This growing market is basically going straight up. Since Google bought YouTube, advertisers have been itching to get into video ads and content publishers are answering their interest. Video ads have 2 different types, pre-roll or interstitial ads. Yahoo uses a lot of pre-roll ads whenever you click a video on their network, while the CW TV network uses a lot of interstitial ads when you watch old episodes of your favorite TV show. There are also text ads that are starting to show up in videos. Google announced in February that advertisers can now do AdSense with ads. Launch participant Brightcove said in a release that “Publishers and content providers can control which videos get which ads and when the ads play in each video.”

Pay Per Click Advertising – these ads are the bread and butter of Google’s market share and there’s a reason that they are – its because they work! PPC ads can be some of the most targeted and trackable ads online. My company offers PPC Management as one if its services, and with that service you get an entire team of people optimizing your campaign. One of the nice things about PPC ads is that they can be tested and tested and tested. I’m talking about all kinds of things such as…GEO targeting, broad keywords, negative keywords, A & B testing, landing page optimization, arbitrage and many other strategies that can lead to your success.

Affiliate Advertising – This is an amazing concept…take your product and give it to 100s of people who want to promote it and then give them a small percentage of the sales that they bring in. Now, that’s a powerful concept and its one that is a win-win situation for the advertiser and the affiliate. Granted, there are ways to inflate affiliate earnings ( I just did a quick talk about this to a company in Oregon last week!) but if managed correctly, you can minimize your risk by using an affiliate program to have other people promote your product. Affiliate programs shift the risk and the capital ($) investment that would normally be spent on an advertising campaign.
Lots of Options!
I hope you have some ideas brewing in your head after reading this post. More than anything, I just wanted to get my readers thinking about how to tap into the consumers that need their products in a different way.

Some additional reading:

3 Types of Advertisng Users don’t like
Types of Ads that people block
An Interview with Friendster Marketing VP

Forbes Billionaires 2008 List – New Leader

The number 13 has long been considered unlucky by superstitious people around the globe. How fitting, then, that Bill Gates’ reign as the world’s richest person ends after his 13th year at the top.

The number 13 has long been considered unlucky by superstitious people around the globe. How fitting, then, that Bill Gates’ reign as the world’s richest person ends after his 13th year at the top. Despite being worth $58 billion, $2 billion more than last year, Gates is now just the world’s third-richest person, ceding the top spot ranking to his good friend and partner in philanthropy, Warren Buffett, whose net worth jumped $10 billion to $62 billion. (All stock prices and net worth valuations were locked in on Feb. 11.) Ranked No. 2 is Mexican telecom tycoon Carlos Slim Helú, whose fortune has doubled in just two years to $60 billion.

Related searches:
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Read more about Forbe’s List of Billionaires in 2008….It is certainly a dawning of a new era. But not just because of Gates’ fall. The 22nd annual rankings of the World’s Billionaires reflects all sorts of upheavals in the list’s makeup. Two years ago, half of the world’s 20 richest were from the U.S. Now only four are. India wins bragging rights for having four among the top 10, more than any other country.

For the first time ever, the number of billionaires Forbes could identify crossed into four figures, reaching 1,125. The total net worth of the group is $4.4 trillion, up $900 billion from last year. Despite the turbulence in the U.S. markets, Americans account for 42% of the world’s billionaires and 37%, of the total wealth; those shares are down two and three percentage points, respectively, from last year.

Sixteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia, with 87 billionaires, is the new No. 2 country behind the U.S., easily overtaking Germany, with 59 billionaires, which held the honor for six years.

The rankings include 226 newcomers. Seventy-seven of the new faces come from the U.S., half of whom made their fortunes in finance and investments, including John Paulson and Philip Falcone, both of whom became wealthy shorting subprime debt. Another third of the new billionaires comes from Russia (35), China (28) and India (19). Two of the most noteworthy new entrants are South Africa’s Patrice Motsepe and Nigeria’s Aliko Dangote, the first black Africans to make their debut among the world’s richest. Dangote is also the first-ever Nigerian billionaire.

It is also a record-breaking year for young billionaires, with Forbes finding 50 under the age of 40, 25 of whom are new to the list. Sixty-eight percent of these under-age-40 tycoons built their 10-figure fortunes from scratch, including Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page; former Enron trader John Arnold, who now runs a hedge fund; India’s Sameer Gehlaut, who started online brokerage Indiabulls; and, last but not least, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who at age 23 might just be the youngest self-made billionaire in history.

Zuckerberg is probably destined to be the most talked about newcomer of the year because of his age and ingenious social-networking site, but there are fascinating entrepreneurs of all ages climbing into the ranks. Some of the more notable ones include China’s Gao Dekang, who is one of the world’s biggest makers of down jackets and vests; Portugal’s Americo Amorim, who turned his grandfather’s small cork operation into the world’s largest; and Brazil’s Eike Batista, who built and lost a gold mining fortune, before hitting it big in iron ore. He is now the world’s richest mining billionaire.

With all the rosy news of the past year and the overall gains, it is easy to lose sight of the volatility that has been wreaking havoc on these fortunes on a daily basis for months. For instance, Hong Kong’s richest person, Li Ka-shing, lost $5.5 billion of his net worth, all tied to publicly held stocks, in the 37 days between Jan. 4 and Feb. 11.

Meanwhile, mainland China’s richest person, 26-year-old Yang Huiyan, fell from $17.3 billion in September to $7.4 billion in the rankings. Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s fortune touched $25.5 billion in the past year but is now down to $18.7 billion. Others were hit much harder, falling off the list entirely, including Lehman Brothers chief Richard Fuld and Bear Stearns ex-chief James Cayne (he was sacked), both victims of the world’s credit crunch, and Pulte Homes’ William Pulte, whose stock collapsed along with the housing market.

What will happen in the next 12 months as we continue our wealth watching? There will likely be some big losers, some big winners and a lot of ups and downs in between. The only certainty is change itself.

Related Searches: Forbes Magazine, Forbes 400, Forbes 500, Forbes March, Forbes List Forbes Richest People, Forbes 100, Forbes Billionare List, Forbes Billionaires, Forbes 2008 Richest People

Facebook Phishing – Your Friends may have hacked accounts

I have been spending some time catching up on facebook today and noticed that a few of my friends have WALL postings that include a url that LOOKS LIKE it goes to a facebook account. But in reality it is really a Numerical Chinese domain name that has subdomains tucked onto it to look like it’s a facebook url.

An example is this one: http://www.facebook.com.profile.php.id.371233.cn

Some of the messages being posted through friends of friends account look like this:

“lol i cant believe these pics got posted….its going to be BADDDD when her boyfriend sees these- http://www.facebook.com.profile.php.id.371233.cn”

You’ll notice that the domain name is reall 371233.cn and is made to look like a profile # page on facebook.com – The best solution it to tell your friends through a non-facebook messaging system.

Interesting Logo Redsigns by Comcast, RubyTuesday & Applebees

Underconsideration.com has a really sweet section of their site called “Brand New” where they look at brand changes and logo updates from large companies and websites.

Here’s a few that are pretty interesting:

COMCAST 

[Here is a fun one for the beginning of the holiday season. Sent in by a brand tipster — have I told you all already how much I love the tips? If not, well, let me be thankful for that this Thanksgiving — this is an almost impercebtible before/after of the Comcast logo. It is not uncommon to have logos redrawn for performance and legibility issues, but I am not convinced Comcast needed this treatment. Sure, the old "t" was ghastly, but still understandable, and I think I may like the old "s" better, although it looks like a transplant from Helvetica into Avenir, approximately typeguessing, as all the characters (old and new) feel customized.]  Read The Post

APPLEBEE’S

[There are a million restaurants out there, and of those millions thousands are national franchises. Of these, unfortunately, there aren't too many that really stand out — they all seem to blend together for some reason. Chili's, T.G.I. Friday's, Ruby Tuesdays (yes, they have a new logo too, to be reviewed here soon), and, the cause of this post, Appleebee's, are only a few of them. They all have roughly the same vast menu, same average price, and same lackluster service. Most of these places are so cookie-cutter from the decor to the menu, it's hard to differentiate between them. Close your eyes at any of them and take a sample of the food and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. But this is the exact thing Applebee's hopes to fix. Applebee's goal is to make a "special place for people to come together."]  Read The Post

RUBYTUESDAY

[Ruby Tuesday, the international restaurant chain known for its casual dining menu and impressive salad bar, has been implementing a new, “fresh” (a word emphasized over and over) identity over the past several months to coincide with an update of the brand’s interior. Gone are black- and white- checkered tablecloths and the hodge-podge of sports memorabilia that adorned the walls and were reminiscent of Applebee’s or TGI Friday’s In their place is a more upscale and elegant look and feel.] Read The Post

 It’s always interesting to see how companies rebrand themselves, have you seen any logo changes being made at companies that you shop at or eat at?

Who Owns the Holiday .com Domains?

Today I was reading Sahar Sarid’s post about Thanksgiving.com and I started to wonder who owns the the Holiday domain names. Granted, these are 1 day domains, or in the true sense, “seasonal” but during the right time of the year, they probably generate more PPC revenue than most domainer’s portfolios do over an entire year.

Christmas.com
GLobalAccess, a nice company that resides in the Isle of Man. They’ve got this one parked and have owned it since 1994-08-05.

Thanksgiving.com
Scott Day owns this one, registered on 1997-12-29, I’m sure that this domain had a great year this year!

Easter.com
Hallmark owns this great domain, perfect for a company that sells a lot of easter cards! Registered on 1998-03-14, this one was probably drop-caught at one point.

Halloween.com
This is a very interesting domain, looks like it has been owned since 1994-08-30 and it’s partially developed, the owner also owns halloween.biz, santaclaus.com, santaclaus.info, hurricane.com, PhoneBook.com, scholarships.net, thanksgiving.info, easter.biz, find.biz, court.com, diving.com, jacksonville.biz. Quite the Holiday Collection!

AprilFools.com
InfoSpace owns this one, it was registered on 1996-05-28. It seems to be a pseudo-parked page put together by InfoSpace.

NewYears.com
Domain Capital shows up as the owner in whois, but it looks like this domain is being used by CLUBPLANET, an end user. Originally registered on 1997-12-12.

MemorialDay.com
Jeff Reynolds, aka precision marketing owns this domain, registered on 1996-10-11, the site promotes AmericanFlags.com, which Jeff also owns AmericanFlags.com.

IndepenceDay.com
It was registered in 2004. I noticed that the .net/org/info/us arent taken yet.

LaborDay.com
Versimedia owns this domain, registered on 1997-08-10, it forwards to Greetingcards.com.

ColumbusDay.com
Versimedia also owns this domain, picked up on 1999-03-13.

VeteransDay.com
Versimedia scores again, registering this name on 1997-08-10, the same day as LaborDay.com.

MartinLutherKingJr.com
Its a name and a holiday, Frank Schilling owns this one, registered on 2002-05-23.

Hanukkah.com
Registered on 1997-10-23, this name is owned by Versimedia, which also owns GreetingCards.com and several ofther big domains.

And Finally…

Holidays.com
Owned by P. Gordon, owner of Getaway.com and UnitedStates.com.

Holiday.com
Registered on 1998-11-06 by Holiday.com, Inc. which is a Japanese Company, this domain is sort-of a parked/directory site.