Ideas, connectivity and community. Those elements are the essence of One Degree.
When Ken me to Five Questions about a year ago, I was honored to be included on the list. I was the eighth person to be interviewed, only four removed from marketing guru Seth Godin . (That’s is likely as close to 15 minutes of fame as I will probably get.) The roster of individuals for Five Questions has become a who’s who of the digital industry – a huge accomplishment in just over a year.
But there is a glaring omission on the list. It dawned on me that no one has interviewed Ken Schafer. So, after becoming a One Degree contributor myself recently, I told Ken that my next contribution would involve rallying up five industry leaders (also One Degree contributors) and turn the table on him – interviewing the brains behind it all.
So, without further adieu, here are Five Questions for Ken Schafer, one each asked in order by Michael Seaton, Kate Trgovac , Sulemaan Ahmed , Mitch Joel Bill Sweetman .
Seaton: “Ken, what are two major changes you have witnessed in the digital world since launching One Degree that you believe will change marketing forever, and why?
Two major changes in the last 18 months, huh? I know online marketing changes fast, but I’m not sure it changes _that_ fast. 🙂
The two things that weren’t on my radar a year ago were the importance of social media sites and video.
18 months ago when we launched I would have cited “LinkedIn”:http://www.linkedin.com/ and “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com/ as my prime examples of social networking. But the concept has now exploded and we’re seeing community, communication, colloboration, and shared wisdom flowering all over the place. I’ve been expecting this for ages but now that the “hive mind” is starting to emerge it is truly exciting.
Video has been on the Net for ages of course but the ascendence of “YouTube”:http://www.youtube.com/, “Google Video”:http://video.google.com/ and video content via “iTunes”:http://www.itunes.com/ has reshaped the online landscape this year in ways I wouldn’t have expected.
My guess is that we’re seeing an acceleration in adoption of new services and business models that will make business that much harder. How do we keep up when sites go from not existing to the top ten most trafficked on the net in a year or two?
Trgovac: “What is your career-planning advice for a high school grad that comes to you and says “I want to get into marketing.”
Month: September 2006
Recently the kind folks over at SEOmoz developed a slick new tool which allows you to calculate what they refer to as your “Page Strength”.
According to the creators of the Page Strength Tool (Matt Inman and Rand Fishman):
“SEOmoz’s Page Strength tool is intended to serve as an alternative to Google’s PageRank score in the toolbar, offering insight into how valuable, important and popular a site or page is as compared to others on the web…The tool is designed to satisfy the curiosity of webmasters, surfers and web marketing professionals seeking a better metric to quickly assess a site/page’s relative importance and visibility.”
What will the tool tell you?
- The relative importance and visibility of a webpage
- The potential strength and ability of a page to rank in the search engines
- Data on popularity, links, and mentions of the page across the web
How does it work?
Simply enter your URL and let the tool do the rest. You will receive a calculation of your overall page strength along with a report card outlining how well you are doing in each of the areas that contribute to the score, including:
- Number of links pointing to the full URL
- Number of links pointing to the domain
- Position at Google for the first four words of the title tag on the target URL
- Age of the Domain
- Number of links from domains with .edu TLDs
- Number of links from domains with .gov TLDs
- Alexa Rank and Google PageRank of full URL and Domain
- Domain name visibility
- Internal link percentage
- Number of search results for a URL search at del.icio.us
- Number of Listings in DMOZ (ODP)
- Number of links found in Wikipedia
After trying it out – I think this tool is great! It supplies you with a nice snapshot of your SEO efforts and helps you identify the areas that need improvement. You can also use the tool to strengthen your competitive analysis (apply it to your competitor’s sites to see how you measure up) and to rate potential link partners within your industry.
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