I’ve been to a few automobile and airplane exhibitions. Pearl Harbor, Taoyuan airport (Taiwan), Museo dell’Automobile (Turin)… fascinating collections. I thought I couldn’t be surprised by another one. Turns out the Germans really do it better.
In the southwestern german state of Baden-WĆ¼rttemberg lies Sinsheim’s Auto & Technik Museum, the largest privately owned museum in Europe. It features cars, motorcycles, airplanes, trains, tanks – you name it.
The outstanding thing about the Sinsheim collection, besides feeling more like a fun park than a museum, is that it features two supersonic airplanes – which you can board! Both the french Concorde and the soviet Tupolev Tu-144 are accessible through spiraling stairs, and you can walk your way up, through their narrow corridors into their intimidating cockpits, past the tiniest toilet rooms ever.
I didn’t have a camera with me that day, but it didn’t really matter. All those shots on Flickr still can’t make it justice. Boarding these classic supersonic airplanes is an actual experience. I loved their Caddilacs too. If you’re ever around Baden-WĆ¼rttemberg, don’t miss it.
Yes: I spent a day with Pharrell Williams’ videoclip; only pausing it for sleep, meals and football. This is what reading Jack Kerouac (On the Road) can do to you. Riding Kerouac’s wave of spontaneity/experimentation, as soon as I got wind of the videoclip, it was promptly decided that I had to challenge myself to 24 hours of happy working.
Challenge accepted! Is Pharrell Williams implicit claim of being able to provide 24h of joy actually true? I tested this on a working day for a real challenge. This is how it went…
First day:
12pm – smiles
2pm – still smiles
15:30 – best idea ever
4pm – a little repetitive maybe
6:30pm – still a great idea
10pm – I actually missed this stuff after dinner and footy time, so much that I’m playing it off work too.
10:30 – wow, this stuff is the best when you’re dimming the lights before sleep
Second day:
8:30 – ha!
10:30 – t’was a good idea
12pm – I made it!
3pm … starting to miss the damn song
fun, fun, fun
Yes, it was worth it and I definitely got the happies. Particularly since I didn’t pull an all-nighter like these guys did. But if you’d like to know a few of the highlights from the videoclip beforehand, their article is a good reference.
More interesting, yet, is the crew’s description of the process:
This interview from Rand at Mixergy is quite fascinating, particularly when it ventures into one of the main things I’ve been thinking about: how much you should grow your business to a scale where you’re mostly managing a company instead of its product or service:
Rand: Well, for me at least, and I think for a lot of entrepreneurs who love the early stage, weāre the same kinds of people who love artisanal things in the world. Artisanal things in life. And that can be, you know, hey, this shirt was handmade in Scotland in this store that I stopped into, and I met the owner. And thatās the same woman who designed the pattern and sourced the fabric. God, thatās so cool.
Andrew: Yeah.
Rand: Right. Or the craft cocktail movement. Itās like, yeah, this drink was invented in this bar last year when this crazy guy came up with this thing and, by the way, he also won the world beer championship two years in a row. That artisanal style of creation is something thatās really beautiful. And it doesnāt scale tremendously well. Or let me put it this way, itās really, really hard to make it scale well.
The point is: being a true CEO is not for everyone. For that entails running a large scale business and not just a product or service. And not every product/service is adequate to scale up to the point of even having one, despite so many people calling themselves CEO of this or that.
Still, well done Rand! You might not have enjoyed the CEO role so much, but you built a business to that level, and that’s something to be proud of.
Leadership is the one competency that cannot be learnt in management school. A manager is trained to do things right; a leader does the right things. It is not a matter of training and preparation, but one of instinct and conscience.
Photo Credit: [phil h]The world of Search Engine Optimization is being rocked again by Google. With most searches now being done securely over the HTTPS protocol, some valuable referral data is being lost by traffic analysts. Now there is no way to know whether a visit to a certain page, coming from Google, is due to a search about X or about Y or Z. We can easily know we have visits to certain pages, and we can estimate how our pages are ranking, but not what kind of searches our visitors were doing exactly.
There was a lot of commotion about this, but there’s no point in resenting Google nor even eagerly gathering keywords another way. The truth is that referral keywords are overrated because they lead to optimizing for search visibility instead of goal completion (user conversion). Why? Because you only get data for stuff that is ranking.
It’s time to look ahead and realize that the fixation on keyword data is actually restrictive and blocking the evolution of Search Engine Optimization. Professional SEOs need to adapt in order to remain in business, but not on a wild goose chase of keyword data, wasting valuable time trying to micro-manage Web Analytics. Instead, the same time could be applied on actually improving the site, its popularity and (consequently) its backlinks.
Then what should be done on the Analytics side?
Predictive research is of the utmost importance. Getting keyword research done thoroughly beforehand. Investigating all possible searches that users are doing and that aren’t too competitive to rank for.
When unsure about focusing your pages on keywords X or Y, we can always make small changes later and test their impact. Instead of working passively, based on what we think our Analytics software told us to do, we work actively and measure the traffic impact later.
Optionally use AdWords with broad queries and specific keywords, in order to test which specific keywords drive more goal completions. Some say we’re falling prey to the conspiracy theory that Google is driving us to spend more in AdWords, but the truth is… it’s a great method to choose from a few specific keyword variations that we identify in predictive research. It can be done much quicker and probably with less chance of skewing than using Analytics for this purpose.
But what really, really matters?
SEOs should already be broadening their perspective and strategies, even before today, and now more so. We should all view Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, general Online Marketing and Social Media Management as a holistic field that can be explored for the benefit of clients. The goal of any of these marketing sub-fields is to make your clients richer, more successful. Not simply to make them visible to search engines and people. For this, an online strategy should have multiple defined goals for the business it applies to, and performance indicators to evaluate the effectiveness of that strategy at some point.
Now, with keywords not provided, the experience of good SEOs becomes invaluable because they know what works… this at a time where it’s more difficult to prove what works. So, the future is in the hands of those who know what they’re doing and are confident in their abilities to drive targeted traffic. More than ever, reputation and experience will be key values, and so will be the ability to convince clients about the added value of our SEO.
