This video is a compilation of my harvests in the agroturismos of Italy, the desert of Argentina, and the sunshine of northern California. The music is one of my favorite songs of all time, it’s called Voyageur by Enigma. I moved out to California a year ago with a bottle of GrapeThinking, a bottle of ideas I guess you could say, that started filling up 5 years ago with conversation between myself, Jacob Bohall, Ruarri Rogan, Meghan O’Malley, and many others. Over the past year, those ideas have delightfully fermented, and the time has finally come for us to have a taste…

~circuit to cell, web to water, mind to vine~

They bought a car with another girl (the rock star of the group), and were planning to head way north to work on a farm for a little bit. They invited me to go, so I left my suitcase with a friend in San Francisco and hit the road with them. The following few weeks were beyond amazing… so many serendipities. My favorite was running into one of the winemakers I worked with everyday for 2 months in Argentina earlier this year in a small grocery store parking lot in Napa, and I just so happened to have a bottle of the organic wine we worked on in my backpack. Our car turned into a sustainable circus. We worked on the farm we set out for, did a little harvest work at a winery, but mainly stayed on the road visiting sustainable farms all around northern Cali. We touched Humboldt, Mendocino, Sonoma, Napa, and Marin.

A couple of our favorites were Filigreen Farm in Anderson Valley, where Chris Tebbutt has built an amazing mixed biodynamic agriculture setup of vines and fruit orchards, it was incredible. He also had huge solar arrays setup that produce 100% of the farm’s energy… a true thinking farm. We also visited Paul Dolan at his biodynamic Dark Horse Farming Ranch in Ukiah, which was powerful. He has an “energy center” with his flow form, preparations, and a stunning “bug strip” of crazy flowers and vegetation that generates the biodiversity and balance in his vineyard. On our way south, we made a stop at Solar City somewhere on 101 south of Ukiah, which is a sustainable building/living community. We slept in a teepee and talked about what it takes to build sustainable communities.

Somewhere along the way we got tipped off about the Bioneers conference down in San Rafael so we trekked down there and crashed the conference for the weekend. I talked to Rebecca of the Biodynamics Association about heading up their booth for a day in exchange for a free pass, and she graciously accepted my offer. We got to see some amazing speakers and share even more amazing ideas, and I was able to pitch biodynamics all day Sunday at the trade show.

We just kept going, drinking, laughing, breathing, seeing how these amazing farms are changing the environment, all while staying break even along the way. We went crazy and then sane and then crazy again. It was a ride. Now, I’m back in San Francisco to soak in what this place is all about, and make some magical elixirs along the way…

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There can be no doubt that we are seeing a transition at the moment – and I’m not talking about from capitalism to socialism, but rather something less tangible and equally pervasive. This change, I think, is from an age of objects into an age of ideas. Be it an iPod, a Blackberry or an iPhone, we as a society have come to depend on our objects, but the trend toward ‘one box solutions’ and centralising our PDAs, mobile phones, e-mail and music devices shows a longing to free ourselves of the objects, devices, countless power cables and the increasingly cluttered assortment of gadgetry churned out over the years. The inevitable movement towards cloud computing shows the urge of our society to become less dependent on material objects in favour of something more powerful and less immediately tangible. It is in this very transition from physical to ideological that we can see the beginnings of a permanent change.

The definition of an idea most relevant here is: a process of cognition fed by information that leads to a conclusion, which goes on to influences either our opinion or a course of action. We hold ideas above all else. The next time you look at a £10 note you will see the Queen of England, a living monarch on one side and on the other is Darwin, long since deceased and yet still going on to influence the world and appear on currency from beyond the grave. This is the ultimate testament to the power of ideas: where genius and ideology trump royalty. But before we categorise our current time as one defined by ideas – perhaps we need to step back once and look at the raw material behind ideas: information. More than ever in our history, as a society we deal with information, statistics and data on a daily basis. One has to only look at how Wikipedia expands, as it is constantly changed, added to, subtracted from and altered – to see a living, organic, expanding model of information. What is notable about our current time is the simultaneous multiplicity of ideas – and the fuel behind this all is information.

In Digital media we have first-mover advantage in dealing with an age of information, and are all lucky to have begun to work in creative ways in trying to understand and interpret the enormous amount of data that we receive. We have also realised that our biggest challenge doesn’t only lie in increased complexity, but also in the sheer quantity of information we have access to. For anyone who has tried to condense an ad-segmentation report into a single conclusion, or looked at trying to de-duplicate display impressions from SEM clicks will know – we face the challenges set out by an age of information on a daily basis, with the majority of our time being spent re-purposing data in order to make actionable business decisions. As marketers, we know that we cannot simply segment our market in terms of the objects they choose, leaders they follow or ideas they embrace, as these monochromatic measures are outdated. If you really want to understand today’s consumer, you must first look at the information they have access to and the way they use and interact with it.

No doubt this leaves us in a world of complexity. However if there is one thing we know about the world it’s that things rarely, if ever, get less complex. A perfect example of this is IP.6. At current most IP addresses are IP.4 – and we’re beginning to run out. When the infrastructure of the internet was first laid out it was inconceivable that we would need more than 10 addresses each – but we have pushed the boundaries by assigning IP’s to our iPhones, laptops, home computers, work computers, Xbox 360s and PSPs – and such has been the uptake and rate of adoption that we’ve needed to move to IP.6 – which basically allows every single human being to have as many internet addresses as there are currently internet addresses.

A saying we have adopted at Unique Digital is ‘the future is already here, it just hasn’t been distributed evenly’ and for a glimpse at what IP.6 and the future may look like, we only have to look at cows in Japan, which are amongst the first users of IP.6. which may not be as obscure as it sounds, because if you think about it, as digital marketers one of the first things we do in the morning is get a snapshot of the previous day’ activities. All of our future plans are based on trends of what has happened before. Much as we might look at click-paths or the previous days’ conversions, Japanese farmers are able to access information about their livestock remotely at any time of day. They are able to study the impact of weather, grazing patterns and land usage – and cross-tabulate such information to deduce whether they need more land or more livestock for the following year.

Already this may challenge our current assumptions – if search engines organise the world’s information… in a world of IP.6 will also organise livestock? Suddenly Eric Schmidt’s claim from last year that Google’s next focus will be the energy sector seems far less outlandish. We will all begin to get our first taste of IP.6 this year when it comes standard in electrical appliances – and we will find that our new kettles, toasters, microwaves and fridges will come equipped with their own data feed into the world wide web. Does this mean then that search engines and the algorithms that power them will not only give access to information on click through rates and agriculture… but energy grids and energy efficiency too?

What age are we in? As marketers with unprecedented access to an ever increasing amount of information, we are in constant search of answers most of our working day. In a discussion over lunch, James, our associate MD reminded me of the part in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book Life, the Universe and Everything, where we come across a group of scientists who are obsessed with looking for ‘The Great Answer of Life.’ The quest for this answer has consumed them to point of not being able to contemplate anything else. However, after years of searching they are mortified to find that the answer is 42. 42! What they realise is that in their obsessions with finding the answer, they had forgotten the actual question. And though answers are useful, without an accompanying question they are quite useless. I think therein lies an important lesson for marketers within the age of information… if we want answers, we first need to take a step back – and understand the questions.

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Wow, what an excellent conference! A game changer. I have to thank my friends over at Village Green Energy for hooking me up with a free pass. I’ve been so passionate about this movement as long as I can remember… ever since 6th grade when I messed around with electromagenetic fields and plants. Early education for me was all about ecology and environment, and that followed with rigorous economics in college, which I didn’t quite understand about myself until now. Having not gone into banking with my degree and now seeing the state of the economy I was like shit… but David Suzuki put it so clearly… it’s (eco)nomics. I can’t believe I never recognized that. I automatically associated economics with the greedy, short-sighted mentality of Wall Street that focuses solely on the bottom line and exploiting the market for cash and egoic status. Yet you realize the bottom line is not the statement of cash flows or the balance sheet… it’s the fuckin planet. Ecology + Economics = Sustainability. This conference was absolutely buzzing! People were feeling alive and connecting and touching each other like I’ve never seen in my life. We all knew the green revolution is ready and about to change the world in a big way.

The keynotes were superb with Al Gore, Jerrry Brown, and David Suzuki really leaving a moving impact on me. Nobody was afraid to go deep. Sure there was plenty of talk about clean tech innovations or green building or policy changes.. but more so people were incredibly open about spiritual and conciousness based changes that are going to take place around the world to solve this crisis. Sarah Susanka even brought the crowd to tears with her moving presentation. It’s so much bigger than green or solar or oil… it’s about enlightening the human race that we are one and we share the same spirit with each other and with the world as a whole. I found it to be quite the religious experience to be at this conference. A few others being recently when I went into the wild of Alaska for a few weeks and when I saw the Dalai Lama speak in Bethlehem, Pa.

Aside from the heavy stuff, there were tons of innovative companies doing everything from cutting edge solar installs, to green acrhitecture consulting, to new age battery storage, smart grid stuff, efficiency software, New Resource Bank (which is exploding with business during this banking crisis… lol gotta love it!) and sooo much more. You had builders, utility reps, entrepreneurs, mad scientists, engineers, and everyone was so open and loving and connecting. I was blown away… it took me 3 full days to digest it all.

There were also brilliant seminars and panels, the best one for me being the State of Investing in Clean Tech, where partners from KPCB, Foundation, Sigma, and DFJ (all the big Menlo Park firms) talked about what companies they’re investing in and what technology is working… and yet something was different. These are VCs and of course money is there first concern, but with this clean green movement we are finally going to enter into a phase of social… or better yet eco-capitalism… where we benefit the environment and the social welfare of all while making a shitload of money and creating a shitload of jobs. This is an unprecendented opportunity in economic human history. Create a concentrically cyclical supply chain and pass the prosperity around the world. I was inspired by the VCs stories of how they’re going green in their own lives and their deep personal commitment.

A few themes from the conference to leave you with:

1) Nature to the grid baby – energy, health, architecture

2) Ecology + Economics = Sustainability (Eco-Capitalism)

3) Sky power will fuel the earth

4) The only thing special about humans is our foresight… our ability to see and shape the future. So lets use it.

5) A new connected conciousness is emerging that will limit the individual ego that has evolved and scorched our earth with fragmented, disjointed, greedy agendas. The only chance at eternal life is if we live together as one.

6) Be the change you want to see in the world!

In my humble opinion, these are unprecedented and magical times in the history of our race and our planet. There’s no better place to be then right here, and right now.

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These cases are generally the result of bad linkbuilding. There are so many varying opinions and resources for linkbuilding that as a novice web marketer, you can easily travel down the wrong path. The problem with all of the advice you find across the web, is that most of it is outdated.

For example: A year ago, it was extremely popular for marketers to try and use deep-linking (linking to pages inside of their site instead of the homepage) as a means to boost the rankings for those particular pages. Well.. this became common knowledge, spammers took advantage, and now that tactic raises red flags. If you are a blogger reading this, you know that more often than not, when you link to a website, you reference the name of the site, and link to the homepage ( e.g. Fermentation Wine Blog ).

Here are some more linkbuilding concepts that you should avoid:

1. Reciprocal Linking – Yes.. it is great for cross promotion and comradery among bloggers and other sites, but it serves very littly, if any, purpose for SEO. If I give you an apple, and you give it back to me, we net 0.
2. Directory Submissions – Unless it is a high quality directory, you’ll most likely be establishing a relationship with spammers, and do much more harm than good.
3. E-zine articles – If you want to write content to increase your SEO, write it for your own site. The rss feeds from E-zine articles get scraped by spammers, and duplicated thousands of times across the web. Next thing you know, it looks like YOU duplicated the same article and put it out everywhere, and YOU are the spammer.
4. Excessive Submissions to Social Bookmarking Sites, Commenting on Blogs and Forums – ONLY do this if you have legitimate comments and stories. Otherwise, your site is reported as spam.
5. Links that cost less than $10 – If someone tries to sell you links for less than $10, they are most likely going to do all of the things that I just said not to do, and charge you for it. Then you have to hire someone to clean it up.
6. Rapid Linkbuilding – If you are using legitimate means to linkbuild, but do it too quickly, the search engine Gods feel cheated, and you will get banned from the search engine.. (your site doesn’t even get indexed anymore)

Obviously the overarching concept here is that if you want to do linkbuilding, you should do it legitimately by having a great site with great content. If you need some help, let us know.  If you want to try linkbuilding on your own, we recommend Blogsvertise… please be sure to use this affiliate link so we get credit for telling you about their great service!

Click here to read about our SEO Services

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Enjoy!

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What do you think about this change in wine marketing? Does a can make wine more sexy and appealing in a club atmosphere?

Beyond this diatribe of what I like to call the dumbification of wine, I changed the channel to Jay Leno and saw one of best performances on Late Night TV in a while. “In January 2007, an unlikely pair teamed up for two nights of concerts in New York City: Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis. Or maybe not so unlikely: Mr. Marsalis and Mr. Nelson came together to celebrate and play the blues, a musical tradition with ties to both jazz and country.” They played Bright Lights, Big City which was amazing not only because Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis are two of the most accomplished musicians of our time, but because it was done in a traditional jazz style where each player: guitar, trumpet, saxophone, harmonica, keys, and drums, all got to solo. Check the album out!

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Are you tracking visitors to your website? If the answer is NO, then you have to catch up with the times. If you owned a hardware store, and I could tell you information about:

• who your customers are
• how many customers you have
• how they find you
• how long each of them are in your store
• what they are looking at
• how long someone is in a particular section
• is this their first visit
• what they bought
• at what point did they decide to leave

Would you not practically beg me for this?
Not only is this information available to you, but you can get this information daily.. FOR FREE.. granted it does take some work to set up. We generally charge clients a set-up fee to incorporate Google Analytics into all of the pages of their website, and charge an additional monthly reporting fee to show this information in a “friendlier” format than Google provides. (tying traffic stats to sales statistics and other “key performance indicators”)

There are many different products that offer Site Statistics… some use embedded code, some you have to install on the site yourself. Here are some we have experience using.

• Google Analytics – Almost any question you could ask can be answered with Google Analytics. HOWEVER, for the beginner, it seems almost as if you need to go take a class to figure out where everything is. There is also a delay in reporting, so you don’t see your stats until the next day. On the bright side, everything you need to know can be found… and its FREE.
• OneStatFree – I found this while looking to find a live stat counter, and have loved it for its simplicity. The free version doesn’t offer too much information, but it provides the basics. My favorite option is to click the recent visitors tab, and see all of the information provided, like a snapshot of each visitor. If the traffic comes from some corporation it is listed.. very cool to see, tells you the entry page, duration, location, etc.. etc.. Again, this is live tracking, so I can watch my traffic flow real-time.
• Open Web Analytics – My experience with OWA has been very positive. They have some cool features such as heat-map, which shows where visitors are clicking on a page (our usability experts also love this). It also has some other nice features such as for the referring site, it will tell you the anchor text that was used, as well as the context text (ha!) surrounding the link. This is a pretty cool if you are a blogger using wordpress, as they have a simple plugin that you can use, and they have integrated RSS and ATOM feed statistics. This is an open source analytics program, and I don’t believe they have a hosted solution.. aka .. all of the reporting is done on your site.
• Woopra – I found a link to this cool looking site while tweeting yesterday. It is still in Beta, and I’m not in just yet, but it looks really cool, and has my attention. We’ll see how it works.

There are lots of other tracking tools out there with great reputations (though not necessarily free). Omniture for example, is a very popular tool, and of course, because you pay for it, you get a lot more. I wouldn’t recommend Omniture for just anyone, it is more of a solution used by big names like Ebay, WalMart, Microsoft, and PayPal… just to name a few.

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Step 1 - What are you promoting? – Login to Facebook, then go to the Create Ad page and enter the url you want your traffic to go to. (For our clients, we customize a landing page for each ad in an effort to better convert the traffic).

Step 2 – Select your demographic – I love the functionality here. As you are selecting your audience, and using the auto-suggest for keywords, watch the top of the page. You will see it is construction a paragraph that explains your target audience, and displays the approximate market size for that demographic. I do wish there was a feature so you could choose all BUT high school students.

Step 3 - Create your Ad-Copy. Here are Facebook’s guidelines for ad copy. Keep in mind what you are trying to accomplish. If you just write something crazy in an effort to get traffic, your conversion rates will be low. If you are specific, and enticing, visitors to your site will know why they are there, and will be more like to join your site, or purchase your products. They will even let you upload a photo to attach to the ad. Your logo, or an image of the product works best here.. but mind the size, you don’t want a distorted image.

You can also specify social actions that relate to your ad here. If you are a member of a group, or have an application, Facebook will enhance your ad with associations to the actions of those groups or apps.

Step 4 - How Much Do you Want to Spend – The first choice you have to make is whether you want to pay based on the number of views (cost-per-impression) or on the number of actual clicks your ad receives. The cost per impression (CPM) is a good idea if you are just trying to spread awareness, as it carries an overall lesser cost. Keep in mind though, your ad can receive a lot of impressions on a site like Facebook, and just because it is loading on the page, doesn’t mean that eager eyes waiting to see your ad.

A good portion of Facebook users are going to be blind to advertising. This is why I generally recommend taking the cost-per-click (CPC) route, as you truly “get what you pay for”. Facebook will recomend a CPC price based on what others are suggesting, and as a general rule, put the most you are willing to pay for a click to ensure you get the best positioning.

You have a final option to specify if you want the ad to run continuously starting upon approval (Facebook does check the ads before they go live) or if you would rather the ad run only during a specified time. This is in case you only want to test out the service for weekdays, weekends, holidays, or special events.

Step 5 - Review and Pay – Alright… now just review the ad to make sure everything looks in order, enter your credit card information (if it isn’t already stored), and click Place Order. Facebook will review your ad, and unless you did something bad, like advertise for porn or ignore their guidlines, you’re ad will soon be sending traffic to your site.

You might also be interested in Millennial Marketing and Facebook Ads

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You can only narrow your targeted advertising down so far when using some of the traditional online advertising strategies. Google Adwords allows you to target specific keywords (a proven method), and they will use IP addresses to geo-target your ads to people in specific areas. You can roughly determine the demographics of a particular website for your CPM (cost-per-impression) advertising based on content..e.g. the most frequent visitors of dating sites are single males between 30 and 45 years of age, and they are interested in …

Like many advertising services, Facebook offers you the option to pay on a CPC (cost-per-click) basis, which means exactly that. You only pay when someone clicks on the ad. You can also choose the CPM method, which can save you money and offer more overall exposure for your $. They launched the program in November, and have received both positive and negative criticisms.

The real (and almost only) benefits at this point are the advanced targeting which can narrow down a demographic well enough that you are almost ensured a great conversion rate from the advertising. Obviously, the more advanced your targeting, the less amount of impressions, but if your conversion rate is up.. who cares? There are also some creative marketing techniques to using Facebook as a market research tool, and tapping into the opinions of the Millennial Generation.

To get a feel for what kind of information Facebook has in relation to a particular demographic, login, go to your network page, and click network stats. Here you can view the stats for Raleigh/Durham (one of my networks)

On Monday, I’ll post the simple walkthrough for creating facebook ads.

It has been an exciting experience watching the reaction of Facebook users as they integrated the advertising into the site. I’m really curious to see how the recent decision to make SocialAds (another feature they had launched) opt-out.

A couple of great links for more reading on this topic:

Red Orbit – A 101 Course on Facebook, just in case you’re still trying to figure out “what the Facebook fuss is all about”.

Facebook Business – This page sums up quite well all of the solutions that facebook offers for businesses looking to gain exposure to their rapidly growing user base.

Read Write Web – This is an opposing view to Facebook advertising. Though I agree with Alex at RWW on a couple of points relating to Facebook needing to spruce the algorithm to better consider contextual placement, I tend to feel that he has grossly underestimated the potential, and failed to recognize the possibility that the advertisers he mentioned may have chosen a broad and even unrelated demographic for the sake of additional exposure.

We have a really interesting article coming up soon relating to Facebook, as we announce an application we have been developing for a client. If you need help with your marketing efforts, we would be glad to assist you.

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