Prequel: I noticed that some pages were taking too long to load … I heard good things about WP Super Cache and I had tried it before, but it was messing up when toggling between web view and mobile view … randomly providing web users the mobile view, and mobile users the web view … I decided to give it another chance, tested, and it works … speeded up the site drastically.

Chapter 1: A week goes by and I notice a drop in site traffic … I analyze why and it’s mainly organic traffic from Google

More specifically, % Change -42.81% … ok, now I’m pissed… why all the sudden my search ranking dropped so much?!

Chapter 2: I perform a search for some of my main articles, such as Free Social Media Monitoring Tools. Result?

Buy Meridia Pill? Reliable Online Drugstore? WTF?! Where did this come from? I obviously never put that there … So I click through and it’s my regular content … but if I open the cached Google version, this is what I see:

My title, metatags, categories, links, headlines, all replaced with Meridia copy … And the only change I’ve made in months is to activate the WP Super Cache plugin.

Hell, if I search buy meridia pill my site is #5 … I hate this hack!

if you search Google for wp meridia, you’ll find other blogs suffering the same problem.

Chapter 3: I just disabled the WP Super Cache and I really hope this cloaking goes away soon and my site goes back to normal … If  you’re using the WP Super Cache plugin I suggest you check your ranking. If you know anything else about this hack, please let me know.

I’ll keep you guys posted on what comes out of this.

Thanks for listening.

[Update 1]: Just did some digging around and it appears it wasn’t WP Super Cache, it’s actually WordPress being hacked right at the same time I activated it … Some reading here, and here. Anyone running WP suffered this hack? How did you solve it?

[Update 2]: WP recommends you install the WP Secure plugin

[Update 3]: You can use Google Webmaster tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/labs-googlebot-fetch-2) to fetch the site as Google. Still messed up!

[Update 4]: After some heavy database digging and following carefully instructions from this blog, I was able to get rid of the cloaking. I had to search within my WP_Options for a bunch of keys and delete them all … really scary cuz I had no backup case I messed up … but it turned out good … Ran a few tests with the Google Webmaster tools googlebot fetch and it’s finally returning the correct results.

Sorry WP Super Cache for not trusting you, but you really came at the wrong moment. I will enable the plugin again tomorrow once Google re-fetches all the new cleaned up content and keep checking for problems within the next few days. I corrected the hack, but did not close the door for it to happen again … let’s hope it stays like that.

[Update 5]: I cleaned it, but did not patch it. The problem keeps coming back. How do you block this thing?!

[Update 6]: Changed all passwords; hack persists. Installed WP Secure and WordPress exploit scanner … run them, found nothing.

[Update 7]: I was hesitant to upgrade WP to 3.0 and all plugins in fear of something breaking and I was not going to have time to take care of it … but @Brandon gave me that confidence as he had upgraded all his blogs … status: running 3.0, upgraded all plugins, uninstalled all unused plugins … so far so good. Everything is working great, no traces on hacks. Re-enabled WP Super Cache and it’s working great. Thanks @Brandon for your time to help solve this issue.

[Update 8]: good morning, it’s still happening! Can’t get rid of this thing. So I installed WP Secure and locked down the entire installation … no more access to wp-content or wp-includes … wp-content broke my header rotator and my favico, but I added rewrite rules to work around it. The wp-includes broke the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor in the backend, so I had to edit the htaccess file to allow access to wp-tinymce.php.

It’s easy to get caught up in today’s trends or even focus on the next six months. Some of 2009′s biggest trends included an increased emphasis on real-time search and information distribution, while distribution of marketing content in widgets and other pieces of portable content that worked across devices and social spaces also saw its stake rise. Plus, there were great improvements in social-media monitoring and analytics. And most notably, marketers finally acknowledged that social media was more than just a fad, with almost complete adoption by all major marketers.

Here are the top 11 predictions for what social media will look like in 2012 (based on a full presentation which is available on my blog). Some of these items exist today in their early stages, but this list is about what I believe will become the norm in 2012. Ultimately, share of voice, point of view and community influence will be more important than brand ownership — and marketers will need to get over it if they want to stay relevant in 2012.

1. Privacy expectations will (have to) change
There will be a cultural shift, whereby people will begin to find it increasingly more acceptable to expose more and more of their personal details on different forms of social media. Sharing your likes, dislikes, opinions, photos, videos and other forms of personal information will be the norm and people will become more accepting of personalized experiences, both corporate and personal, that are reacting to this dearth of personal information.

2. Complete decentralization of social networks
The concept of a friend network will be a portable experience. You’ll find most digital experiences will be able to leverage the power of your social networks in a way that leverages your readily available personal information and the relationships you’ve established. We’re already seeing the beginnings of this with Facebook Connect and Google’s FriendConnect.

3. Our interaction with search engines will be different
Real-time information in Google search, e.g. from Twitter, blog results and user reviews, will be more prominent. Google’s Social Search will change the way we interact with search engines by pushing relevant content from our personal networks to the front of search results, making them more personalized. The importance of digital-influencer marketing will increase significantly.

4. Rise of the content aggregators
The amount of content online is growing at an exponential rate, and most online users have at least three online profiles from social networks to micro-blogging to social news sites. Our ability to manage this influx is challenging, and content aggregators will be the new demi-gods, bringing method to madness (and make a killing). Filtering and managing content will be big business for those who can get it right and provide easy-to-use services.

5. Social media augmented reality
Openly accessible information from the social-media space will be used to enhance everyday experiences. For example: the contacts book in your phone links to Facebook and Twitter to show real-time updates on what the contact is doing before you put in the call, real-time reviews from friends and associates will appear in GPS-based mapping services as a standard feature, and socially enabled CRM will change the way companies manage business relationships forever.

6. Influencer marketing will be redefined
As social media continues to permeate more and more aspects of not only the way we interact with digital media but also other channels such as digital outdoor, commerce or online TV, we will see the significance of influencer marketing grow dramatically. As a basic example, the inclusion of Twitter in Google search results or Google’s soon-to-be-released Social Search will permeate search results with content that will not be managed by Google’s infamous PageRank but by social influence and relevance to your social network. Discovering people that can help you to reach your desired consumer will become exponentially more effective and important.

7. Ratings everywhere
In today’s world, having a commerce site that doesn’t have user ratings could actually prove to be a detriment to sales. In the near future, brands and businesses will more frequently place user ratings and accept open feedback on their actual websites. User ratings will become so common that marketers should expect to find them woven into most digital experiences.

8. Social media agents
Managing the customer experience offline and online is already a key concern for marketers and customer-experience advocates. As businesses continue to support customers by monitoring and engaging in the social media space, tools to optimize this experience will become more important. Expect to see a certain percentage of responses handled by natural language engines that can respond to basic commentary such as “my service is down” or “I never received my package.”

9. Riding the (Google) wave
It’s still early days as Google Wave is still primarily limited to developers but it has the potential to revolutionize collaboration and engagement. Wave offers marketers a unique way, at minimal cost, to allow consumers to engage with each other in way that is miles beyond anything we’re currently using. Savvy marketers will develop extensions for Wave that evolve its unique communication toolset into a rich brand experience that is immersive but allows for new levels of interaction from crowdsourced storytelling to crowdsourced product design.

10. Thinking beyond “nowness”
In 2009 we became very focused on the real-time nature of social media. The implications behind consumer feedback and interaction around brands using tools like Twitter or Facebook’s news stream caused marketers to re-evaluate the power of social media tools in parallel to “traditional” digital-media channels such as search. Looking into the future we’ll need to try and evaluate what’s next and the likely answer is based on the next evolution of the web as we know it: the semantic web. In a semantic web world, search engines, for example, will anticipate the best search results we’re looking for based on what they know about us (such as all our public social networking profiles). There will be an opportunity for marketers who push the limits of their imagination to anticipate what marketing will look like in this next stage of the web and creating new and compelling experiences that we’re only touching the surface of now.

11. Social media everything and the return of digital media
Social functions will become so commonplace in digital experiences that the thought of not having socially-enhanced experiences will seem illogical. Digital media by its very nature is inherently social. I hope we’re not talking about social media in 2012, and we just refer to everything as digital media again.

(This post was originally posted on AdAge’s DigitalNext Blog.)

I’ve been really struggling to keep up with my blogging and professional writing lately. Hopefully I’ll get some more time in December when I take some time off. In the meantime I’ll share a very simple funny email my friend Jill Schoen shared at the office.  I’m assuming these are real, either way they’re absolutely classic.

As the title says… “Some People Should Not Have Facebook”…

ENJOY!

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Bob Garfield wrote a passionate article today about why he thinks Cannes is dead. Although I agree with Bob that many of the ads that have been celebrated at Cannes don’t represent the future of advertising, I don’t believe for one second that Cannes is dead.

The last year has been a rough year in advertising and this coming year is likely to be just as bad or worse, but I don’t feel this has left a gaping void in advertising. It only left a gaping void if you’re staring in the same direction you were last year and the years before that. We’ve all recognized that digital has been a catalyst for a massive change in the way we market, but our industry’s biggest challenge, after dealing with technological and cultural implications of our new wired world, has been learning how to deal with a world in a true global recession. It’s not just our budgets that have been reduced or shifted, but the consumer has fundamentally changed.

Like those that had lived through the great depression, the people that are experiencing this global recession are learning the value of frugality and economic maturity that comes with these experiences. It’s forcing us, as marketers, to evolve our message in conjunction with the way we’re delivering our message.

Broadcast, print and radio will continue to suffer as it becomes increasingly hard to be innovative in these mediums, especially when you compare each to the digital or any of the other emerging media channels. With that said, and in support of what I believe Bob is really looking for, watch the Titanium and Integrated short list. These lists will feature fully integrated campaigns and the most exciting marketing innovations where agencies demonstrate how they’ve evolved in this significantly different environment since the Lions in 2008.

I’ve always been firmly entrenched in the digital and emerging media world and believe that all major award shows are in a state of transition. From what I’ve seen, the Lions are more in touch with the digital world than all the other awards including the Clios, One Show or D&AD awards, which are miles behind on digital. Combine that with their international jury system that prevents any one country (like the US or UK) from swaying the vote and I believe you have a better chance of real global work pushing itself to the top.

Crispin certainly does get more then there fair share of attention at Cannes, but my hat is off to them, as they’re not only willing to explore any new medium as a form of advertising but in my opinion will also inspire others to try something new, bend the rules, and challenge conventional thinking. The shift I in work is happening already, although not quick enough in my opinion, and I’m just interested to see how Crispin will like sharing the spot light. Hopefully we’ll have another great winner like UNIQLO this year. My hopes are on Nitro’s “Best Job In The World” campaign.

Like any festival you have to get past the “creative masturbation,” after which you will find out that there is still some great work being done out there. Some festivals are going to survive this transition and I for one will be putting my money on the Lions. In the meantime I look forward to my time at Cannes this year. The main party might be a kegger on the beach or they may end up serving Natural Light and Cheese Doodles at the Calton. I’m not sure I care. The bottom line is that I’m still going to get to run into some of the best and brightest creative minds in the industry – and while I’m there, instead of discussing the industry’s doom, I’m going to talk about the things we can do to change the industry and discuss new and innovate ways to connect with consumers.

Maybe this recession is just the taste of reality we all needed.

It has been suggested that Google is looking to acquire Twitter because it views it as a threat. That line of thinking is completely insane because Google isn’t going anywhere. The company is still the top dog in terms of financial stability, commitment to innovation and business strategy. Depending on what research firm you ask, Google owns roughly 80 percent of the search engine market and is still gobbling up market share. In terms of users, Twitter doesn’t even match Facebook’s potential as a rival. Twitter is simply not a threat to Google; in fact, the search giant could simply consume the Twitter API. The good news is that it probably won’t because Twitter is a piece of the greater problem Google is looking to solve.

There’s no question that the Web is getting crowded with content. The user-generated era is spawning such a huge amount of data that it’s nearly impossible to find anything with traditional keyword-based search anymore. The ideal search should be personalized and capable of referencing search history, relevance, social bookmarking, micro-blogging and contextual relevance with each search. Google has been working on this semantic Web model for a while because it will theoretically allow search engines to tell you what you’re looking for before you try to find it. As Twitter has created an online collective consciousness on virtually any topic, it makes sense that as Google labors toward its Web 3.0 ambition to organize all of the world’s data, that it would be interested in this new data stream. Real-time search is the catalyst to this goal, a cultural paradigm shift, but data without context is useless, and this is where Google excels.

Searching real-time content in its current state finds millions of stream-of-consciousness, rants, and blurbs that are largely irrelevant in their raw data format. However given the right context on the aggregated whole based on desired filters it could provide real-time opinions, sentiment, and behavioral data. If Google finds a way to track it back to the Web search it could be one of the aspects that help the semantic prediction model.

As online utilities, tools and content are created daily, search will have to adapt as well. Many people seem to think that Twitter will become the de facto medium of the common voice. This isn’t true. How does a 140-character opinion replace a full-length article on Wikipedia, a 30-second video spot, a corporate site or even financial or stock information? Humans interact with different channels because of varied contextual factors; relying on Twitter as the end-all be-all simply isn’t realistic.

Twitter is a single service, not the final piece of the puzzle for Google as an increasing number of companies publish real-time, user-generated content. A comprehensive real-time search engine would need to monitor a host of user-generated content from sites including Twitter, FriendFeed, Plaxo, Loopt, Brightkite, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace as a baseline. There are companies already doing this but it’s still data with no context for the most part. These companies are currently charging some good money for their services, but it’s only a matter of time until someone like Google taps into this and makes it available for free.

Another fact that has flown under the radar is that Google has technically already entered the micro-blogging space via latitude. The service combines geographic data with micro-blogging and taps into the company’s existing gmail and Android platform user base as well as its deal with Apple’s iPhone. More than anything, this shows Google understands that context is king and will be the future of search.

Initiatives like micro-blogging, mobile and social media are helping companies get closer to the user experience to provide users with information when they need it most. Innovation is the key to success and whoever figures out how to combine social data with contextual information will have an opportunity to fundamentally alter the search engine landscape.

As featured on AdWeek.

This week I had a friend make a digital copy of my log book that I’ve been keeping since I was a kid. It has every flight I’ve ever taken in it since I was just over 3 months old. I’ve accumulated over 700 flights and 150 trans Atlantic crossings and I still take it on every flight. When I board the plane I give the book to the captain (typically through a flight attendant) and have the book recorded and signed in their own hand writing.

It is truly my most prized possession in the world as it’s the only material possession I own that’s not replaceable.

I thought it was about time I did this for safety’s sake if nothing else.

Check it out here: http://takemetoyourleader.com/logbook/

I recommend jumping to the 20th page where all the flights start, but the comments the captains leave are really classic ranging from funny to sentimental and they get better and better as time goes on and the book becomes a rich piece of history. I’ve had captains tell me their father’s had signed it or that they signed it once before 10 years ago.

I’m going to add a permanent menu link to the site to access the book and will keep it updated. I’m doing about 80 flights a year right now so it changes pretty rapidly.

Sapient launched the first part of it’s digital campaign for Coca-Cola’s Happiness Factory 3 last week. The project, one of my lifetime favorites, was truly built on the blood, sweat, tears, ingenuity, and smiles of a lot of people. The site took a very large team of creatives, designers, developers, IA, project managers, animators, and 3d specialists to create. Check it out here.

I’m thrilled to announce that it won an FWA today! Hopefully this is a good sign and indication of a successful campaign that resonates with all who see it.

I also recommend checking out the HF3 MSN Messenger games we created with Microsoft. Microsoft said they pushed the boundaries of the platform and the multi-player experience is pretty amazing.

We’ve got some more stuff in the cooker, but you’ll just have to wait till it launches.

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The following is an excerpt from a recent piece, titled “A CMO’s Dual Imperatives – Driving Organizational and Technological Change,” on the Propelling Brands blog.  Click here to read the full piece.

No member of the C-suite has a riskier or more-short-lived term than the chief marketing officer (CMO).  The average tenure of a CMO at the ‘100 most advertised’ US brands is 28.4 months, according to recruiting firm Spencer Stuart in a recent Advertising Age column by John Quelch.  In fact, as a marketer, few things are as much of a sure-fire, eventual career killer as being named CMO.

The challenges faced by the CMO are not unique to this position.  In fact, they speak to many of the fundamental strategic problems underlying marketing organizations and marketing science today and that are linked to a permanent shift in power from brand-company to customer and to a proliferation of communication channels and information sources.

For CMOs to succeed they must sit at the top of a newly-agile marketing organization – balancing constantly-changing priorities, being technologically savvy and delivering closed-loop insights into the impact of marketing programs – but too often, such an organization does not exist.  The imperative for the CMO, thus, is to drive change.

Driving effective change and achieving these goals requires a two-pronged attack – addressing both organizational and technological change.

Organizational change

Part one of this change is holistic and gets into issues of how marketing is organized and operates, how it defines its objectives and how it integrates with sales channels and the rest of the enterprise.

A CMO’s checklist for organizational change should address the following:

•    Customers must be moved to the center, not the periphery; brands must be re-invigorated in terms of aligning the company with its customers’ needs:  CMOs must be the voice inside the company that challenges the tradition of product-centric, supply-chain systems and that re-orients the company’s processes and systems around the customer.  CMOs also must re-position and re-invigorate their brands with a sense of customer purpose.

•    Revenue must become part of the marketing mission and the link between marketing and sales; brand must be re-framed as an asset:  CMOs must ensure not only that every marketer in their organization embraces their role in, and understands the risks related to, generating revenue; they must also be compensated to live up to this idea.  Where does brand building fit into this?  CMOs are often charged with being stewards of the corporate brand and/or the total brand portfolio.  But building the brand, per se, will not lead to revenues; instead, it will provide us with a critical asset that we must understand how best to leverage.

•    Best practices must BE practices:  CMOs must not only raise the bar for their organization’s marketing practices and but also make sure that this standard is pervasive.

•    Creative/abstract approaches and an analytical/concrete mindset must be guided to equilibrium:  CMOs must actively cultivate this equilibrium – ensuring their organization is driving fresh, new ideas while maintaining analytical accountability –  through hiring, training and cultural imperatives.

•    Marketing technology and marketing systems must be viewed as a strategic asset, rather than a ‘problem for IT’:  CMOs must be the champion of a technologically-savvy, data-centric marketing culture.

•    Marketing system ‘architecture’ must reinforce marketing sustainability and be designed with a longer-term perspective:  CMOs must focus their companies on investing in and building marketing organizations that do not sacrifice longer-term opportunity for short-term gain and that can scale delivery to customers in a repeatable and value-added way over time.

Technological change

Part two of this change is technology-focused and gets into a critical topic – the need for CMOs to make sure their marketing information systems are up to the task of dynamic, scalable and integrated marketing management.

A CMO’s checklist for driving technological change includes:

•    Breaking ground and leading the charge on enterprises’ build-out of customer-centric information systems:  The CMO must be the chief advocate for not only transforming his/her company into a more customer-centric organization but also for ensuring that enterprise systems mirror this objective, rather than hindering it or sacrificing it to short-term profitability.

•    Focusing the spotlight on strategic vs. tactical marketing technology:  CMOs must question their organizations’ existing marketing systems and push for investments that balance priorities and help achieve what I like to refer to as ‘holistic agility’ – i.e., effective and detail-oriented execution at the periphery that remains constantly guided and bounded by the strategic whole.  CMOs must also make sure their teams to not become bogged down in tactical, communication-channel specific technology or data.

•    Investing in an integrated marketing management platform:  CMOs must work to understand and champion investments in these systems.  Integrated marketing management platforms are critical to the success of their marketing organizations in responding to a dynamic customer environment; they are a key step toward becoming more customer-centric; and they are the critical link to ensuring real-time accountability of marketing.  Plus, “[i]t’s insurance for the CMO,” commented John Rotheray, a mobile software entrepreneur.  I might take it a step further:  An integrated marketing management framework is the strategic infrastructure a CMO requires to succeed.

•    Making sure business intelligence and predictive analytics are pervasive throughout marketing systems:  CMOs must be aware of and push for business intelligence and predictive analytics being a critical element of their marketing technology infrastructure.

•    Pushing for a balanced picture of both online and offline marketing activities:  CMOs must push for marketing technology infrastructure that balances the total picture and integrates both online and offline pictures of customer-brand interaction.

•    Integrating with other enterprise systems:  CMOs must lead the charge on this integration and remind their peers that the type of real-time insight they demand into marketing activities is not possible without total integration.

It is only by addressing the need for both organizational and technological change that CMOs can position themselves and their marketing organizations for success in a newly-challenging marketing environment.

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Adam Needles is an entrepreneurial marketing leader, who is passionate about two areas — brand strategy and technology innovation.  And he both researches and writes regularly on the intersection of the two.  You can read his regular posts on his Propelling Brands blog or via his Twitter stream @abneedles.  He is also the former head of marketing for technology-industry analysis firm The 451 Group (and knows what it means to be challenged as a CMO).

And you thought my giant robot prediction was crazy....

Earlier this month I was able to visit CeBIT, the world’s largest technology show case, in Hannover, Germany. The exhibition space is absolutely enormous totally over 5,000,000 square feet. Imagine the biggest convention center building you’ve ever seen then imagine at least 20 buildings of that size and you’ll have an idea of how big CeBIT is.

I was able to meet some brilliant people from around the world, speak on a panel about social media, and be exposed to some great bleeding edge technology. All in all it was a great couple of days (even though I missed my flight on the way back).

Most buildings were focused on one subject that included green technologies, security, enterprise network technology, mobile, GPS, computers, gaming, or my personal favorite “the future parc”. The future parc was focused on innovative new technologies whether they had been productised or not. You could look at technologies at an early stage with the potential that you might see a new opportunity for it’s use.

I’ve highlighted some of my favorite items below that I saw during the conference. Some are really far out and some are fairly simple – I hope you enjoy the quick summary.

AIPTEK – This German company has produced a very small lightweight project that fits into the palm of your hand. It’s got no where near the kind of power you’d need to do a full blow presentation at good quality, but it would be great for projecting movies from an portable device like an iPod or iPhone onto the wall. Another nifty feature includes an oboard memory card so you can just store movies in the device and avoid the third party portable device all together. It’s still early days, but very cool none the less.

Global Emotion – This wasn’t actually a piece of technology, but it stood out to me for two reasons. One, I have full intentions of living in Asia this year and two I just thought it addressed a very interesting issue for westerners trying to do business in China. iWays is offering a course that allows you to learn to understand the body language and facial expressions of the Chinese people in comparision to some western body language that might cause you to mis-understand a business situation. I could see how this could be invaluable in today’s world.

GestureTek – These guys are doing some amazing interactive displays. They’re doing everything from massive table top displays that allow you to drag content around with your finger and close and expand additional content at will to touchless screens that react just based on the movement of your hands. It’s starting to feel really futuristic.

Another cool product they had on display was called “The Cube”. It was a self contained and portable system for doing projected interactive displays that react to gesture control. Imagine for example projecting a bunch of lilly pads onto the floor that when you moved near them with your feet bounced and rippled in reaction to your motion. This is definitely eye catching stuff. I still think they haven’t unleashed some top level creative talent onto it yet, so they’re still a lot of room to do some amazing things.

Fraunhofer Institute – The Fraunhofer Institute booth took the cake for me for most mind blowing innovations (with actual working prototypes). Some of the highlights included:

• Flat panel TVs that displayed near perfect 3D imagery without the need for 3D glasses.
• 3D digital dashboards for automobiles that also reacted and tracked your eye movement.
• Real-time facial expression analysis that could identify your gender and mood.
• A digital wardrobe where you could change the color and design on your clothes by just standing in front of  a special mirror.
• A bathroom designed to help manage the elderly (for example) in terms of making sure they’ve been doing their bathroom routine and taking the appropriate medications. It then reports back to any caregivers to alert them of abnormalities.
• An image search that allowed you to dynamically search for “simliar images”. The system was smart enough to identify properties like number of people in the image, consistent colors, a positioning of objects in the frame.

I’ve included some of the photos I did manage to take. I should probably also do a quick shout out to the people that invented the massage chair with matching audio and light stimulation. I couldn’t relax as well as I would have liked while testing their product because I kept thinking about how much I wanted to buy one…

Photos after the jump…

What does that mean for you? For starters you’re missing out on some really fun, innovative, and/or inspiring work. I’ve decided I’m going to try and pass along at least 3 a day from now on.

If you want to follow me on twitter visit http://twitter.com/TMTYL.