Blog

Actually no! It isn’t a re-brand or anything, but a little test to see what people would think of Windows Vista if it wasn’t called Windows Vista.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a letter from Bill Veghte with the official word on the OS.

I often get asked about Vista by family and friends who’ve “heard” it’s bad news or that it “crashes all the time”. It’s funny how these myths carry on well past the point when any issues there may have been have been fixed.

The Mojave Experiment is quite well done. Their faces are a picture when they realise the truth of what they’ve been seeing!

I’m in the middle of the adCenter Analytics Beta refresh fever at the moment so have only had a brief look at Cuil.com

I notice some folks have said they do or don’t like the layout of the results. It does give you a bit more info to go on plus some universal search-type images. But whether it’s to your taste or not it’s not that new as Tafiti.com was experimenting with a similar kind of layout when it when that launched last year.

Categories are an interesting one as I thought they went out with the LookSmart directories many moons ago. Guess they supposed to be like Related Searches on Live Search?

A search for Google throws up some employees but alas no Matt Cutts 🙁

As Danny says it’s difficult to measure relevancy on just a few searches so I think they should be given some time to tweak before diving in properly.

It’s one year since I started blogging for Media Week – check out my thoughts here!

PS: Note my favourite post being about Liz Jones….

The long anticipated deal with Facebook to provide its users with Live Search functionality has happened.

In an announcement this morning Satya Nadella has announced the extension to the deal in the US to provide search tools powered by Live Search and Ads powered by Microsoft adCenter.

No news on them looking to evolve the deal internationally, but with 45% of the UK market it’ll do very nicely over here thankyou very much!

This is great, great news!!!

After 10 months and 226 posts I decided I needed to move away from the rather RED theme I’d been using and get a bit more funky with its design.

So with the help of Dave and the guys from Bronco plus some priceless advice from the fabulous Shari, we came up with what you see today! Thanks to them and everyone else I’ve bothered by asking for their opinion.

 The first stab was a bit greener than I’d have liked so we evolved it to be bluer with green elements, like the heading for instance.

The pictures are supposed to show a British/London flavour…..

….and the Twitter widget is simply fabulous – http://twitter.com/melcarson

It’s been an fascinating experience as there are so many elements and thought processes that go into designing a blog. From SEO to accessibility and design, colouring and mood creation etc….

I’ll now be pouring over Jen’s blog advice and ticking off her check list!

Would love to get your feedback – so let me know what you think….

How not to treat an unhappy customer!

Cheers to Matt for the Tweet 🙂

Last week saw my 3^rd anniversary of joining Microsoft. I remember my first day well, meeting my boss at Waterloo Station at 5am and hurtling to Paris on Eurostar to witness the first ever ad served by adCenter go live on MSN Search in France.

The first year was a bit of a blur. We were very much in start up mode in the UK. adCenter was developing all the time, we had people to hire in London and Dublin, processes needed ironing out, advertisers and agencies needed to be seen and talked to about our plans. It was a very exciting time.

Then shortly after we launched in the UK in August 2006, I got a new gig as adCenter Community Manager. Breaking new ground, we decided to dedicate a team to supporting advertisers online through blogs and forums. A whole new learning process started again. I spent many days away in Europe and the US at conferences, talking about adCenter and our online advertising plans in sessions, on panels and to individuals. I’ve made many friends in the process too.

The last year was very much about consolidating our successes – working out what we did well and continuing with that and ditching anything that didn’t work out. Anyone read The Dip?

We launched the adCenter Community Site including: Web Analytics Blog – API Blog – PPC Blog and all the associated user forums.

Answering pleas for educational materials we delivered adExcellence too, a comprehensive learning program for adCenter advertisers.

The next year will see more of the same only better.

On reflection I’ve made three observations during my time here:

· People are your greatest asset – sounds corny I know, but I’ve been amazed by the drive, enthusiasm, intelligence and sheer brain power of many of my colleagues. In most companies I’ve worked in these kind of people are counted on one hand. At Microsoft there are very few people that don’t fall into this category.

· You have to take responsibility – chatting to a mate from a company we recently acquired, he’s been amazed at how accountable you have to be working at Microsoft. Within days of starting here my boss said to me, “Don’t come to me with problems, come to me with issues that you’ve solved or some solutions we can choose from together.” Working in a big company is not all about waiting for miles of red tape to unravel. It’s about being empowered to make decisions quickly and with the best of intentions – that’s why we were hired!

· Microsoft adCenter is getting there! Sure it had opportunities earlier in its life-time but did people really expect an AdWords beater straight out of the gate?

I’m very proud to have been working on the product for the last three years and love to get feedback like:

Microsoft Live Search Changes Gears

I came away from Friday’s Microsoft Adchamps event with a surprising feeling of confidence around their ability to make inroads into this market. On the day, they unveiled a raft of new tools to aid the serious search marketer and addressed some major concerns we’d all had about editorial approval, speed of the UI and policing of poor ads.

Microsoft Do Listen

Last year we asked for a desktop tool like adwords desktop.. and whoa did adCenter provide and provide well, on Friday we saw it in action and it kicked arse !!…….

Microsoft Quality Index

Microsoft are to start filtering PPC advertisers by market segment and website type in the UK, so that they can better use this segmentation to improve their “Quality Index”, the equivalent of the Google AdWords “Quality Score”. The news was met mostly with approval at AdChamps Europe.

Yahoo Google & Microsoft

So, on Friday, I heard all the right things on where live and adCenter are going, I did get a feeling more “what a shame for Yahoo”, than “F*** you Google”……

The MSN Desktop Editor Coming Soon… Screenshots!

The time has come for MSN AdCenter to make advertiser’s life soo much easier. I was particularly impressed by the fact that it seemed to have a more functionality than Google – hey, it’s Microsoft after all…. Massive Kudos to MSN for developing this tool!

Here’s to the next three……

Just posted details of the adCenter Analytics Beta refresh on our Web Analytics Blog

Some new funky electronic meeting/message point at Heathrow Terminal 4

It’s not working yet but I couldn’t figure out how it would either – bet it costs though!

I’ll be right here…..no phone…..no internet……just fine red wine and foie gras 🙂

Missing you already!