Instead, we’d like to present our brief “Best Of” List so you can get some quick highlights from our (somewhat biased) perspective:

Here we go…

• Best Presentation: “How to Turn Your Web Analytics into a Money Making Machine.” Bryan Eisenberg, Avinash Kaushik, Jim Sterne, and moderated by Mike Grehan. I thought this presentation was great because it brought together a few of the industry’s uber-minds, and the subject matter was absolutely crucial: What’s the point of investing in search if you aren’t making money? How can you figure out how to make money off of search marketing if you aren’t properly leveraging data to drive decisions, experiments, and investments?  Great job, Bryan, Avinash, and Jim! The presentations were wonderful, but it was the Q&A that gave the session a life of its own.
• Best Booth: A 2-way tie between iProspect’s “gold mine” and Facebook’s sexy white couches and shag carpeting.
• Best Giveaway: OrangeSoda gave away a sweet orange cruiser bike. We even gave the winner some unsolicited advice on how to get it back home via car!
• Best Schwag/Tchotchkes: NO ONE.  We thought the schwag was pretty weak in general.  If you saw some great schwag that we missed, add it to the comments. One notable mention was PeoplePond’s fill in the blanks t-shirt (check out Jim Sterne and Bryan Eisenberg getting their t-shirts).
• Best Booth Outfits: SuperPages.com’s gold capes cracked us up and helped them market their new “superguarantee” concept.
• Best Announcement: Sandra Cheng’s announcement of the YouTube mega-test using Google Website Optimizer: 1,024 variations in a multivariate test on YouTube’s homepage! Not sure if they’ll be blogging about it, but stay tuned.
• Best Marketing Mantra: Another 2-way tie between People must be at the center of your search strategy–not keywords. by Charlene Li and Turn opinions into hypotheses. by Avinash Kaushik.  Both great phrases to market by; we couldn’t agree more

And to those folks we met at SES, it was nice meeting you, and keep in touch!

FutureNow is part of the public company Future Now Group, Inc [OTC BB: FUTR.OB] and from time to time we are going to publicly disclose information on this blog. GrokDotCom has wider readership than any press release we could issue. Press releases do get wide “distribution” but distribution is not the same as readership. When we include our email channel, to our rss and blog visitors GrokDotCom has more than 100,000 unique readers per month.

Practicing what we preach means we can track the difference. When we wrote our press release about “Dr. Phil” project there wasn’t nearly as much response as when we blogged about it here. In fact, the reponse was so good that we added almost all the paid alpha-testing clients we needed. We could still use three more testers in lead generation and one more retailer with a considered purchase, contact us if you want to be an alpha-tester or even if you just need to improve your results. The trials are going very well and we’re on target to launch in beta next quarter. Oops Not really a slip of the tongue. The software- as-a-service line will carry the name OnTarget (TM) – powered by Persuasion Architecture (R).

The “Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer” launch and marketing are going full steam ahead. Bryan did get writer’s cramp while hundreds stood on line at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose to have one of the 500 books Google gave away autographed. The post-release reviews match the advanced praise and are so positive that I’m glad I didn’t co-author it or I’d have to blush.

Most importantly FutureNow’s thinking shined in the book. We’re proud of the interactive marketing optimization processes and systems developed by FutureNow. We get clients great results. In fact, I just confirmed today that we have another new client, working with our newest employee, who early on in their engagement already has a 142% increase in top line sales. Natalie is sharp and because she uses our processes she is able to deliver exceptional advice.

Without that advanced thinking we could never automate to the degree that our new SaaS lines allow us to. We are able to scale the development of quality recommendations. While that may put margin pressure on other consultants; that’s not our main goal. OnTarget is a highly disruptive business model. OnTarget will make it possible for many more small-to-medium size businesses to afford quality marketing optimization systems while being simple enough that they can effectively use it. That is why we are certain that OnTarget will increase the addressable market size dramatically.

Best of all, all that publicity is really being appreciated by our sales team who are rocking and rolling with the best pipeline FutureNow ever had and they are on target to exceed our quarterly goal for new contracts signed. That’s the kind of news no company ever gets enough of. Keep up the great work team!

That’s all for now. Now you can ask me how are we doing. Or you can wait to read the interview with The Wall Street Transcript that I’m doing this Friday.

Thanks to the good folks over at ContentRobot, we’re the first kids on the block to beta the iWPhone WordPress Plugin:

While the iPhone does an amazing job of displaying web pages the way they were designed to be seen, often visitors want quick access to your website’s content. The “iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme” displays an optimized version of your blog’s content, formatted perfectly to fit the iPhone’s screen – no zooming in to read the content is necessary.

OK, so maybe we’ve had some fun laughing about people waiting in line for the iPhone, but it’s still pretty cool to be first.

Anyone reading this on an iPhone? How do we look?

Maybe you haven’t noticed but we’re now monitoring over 2,900 blogs at Today’s Blog Buzz. The feed updates hourly, with the “Best of the Week” & “Best of the Month” available on the right-hand column. A Day in the Life… brings you top stories from influential blogs on marketing, advertising, web analytics, search engine marketing, worth-of-mouth, and social media (click to subscribe to RSS).

Soon, we’ll be commenting actively on many of these posts in addition to our normal blogging activity. (If you’d like to know more about how we’ve distilled so many blogs into a reader-friendly format, check out MarketingStudies.net’s interview with Bryan Eisenberg.)

For a rundown of the day’s top stories, subscribe to our daily Blog Buzz podcast from WebMasterRadio.fm or get Blog Buzz on iTunes.

Our updated blog, A Day in the Life of a Persuasion Architect , now monitors over 2,200 blogs daily to bring you the most relevant topics and popular discussions in the blogosphere .
We’ve also been working on a new line of Future Now products, just launched through our new Future Now Shop.

We’ll be sending our next newsletter mailing the week of February 15. Shortly, you’ll be able to choose to receive your newsletters daily, weekly or monthly.

In the meantime, go ahead. Wander around and get the lay of the land at the new GrokDotCom. We hope you’re as excited about all the changes as we are. Because, after all, we have done it all for you!

Green regards,
The Grok

First off a gift for you – we have completed the Table of Contents and Index for the paperback version of Call to Action. You can download it in PDF format.

At Future Now we’ve hired a new president. We hope you get a chance to meet Sondra Stewart soon.

There has been a ton of new stuff we’ve been working on behind the scenes. You will be seeing some major enhancements to GrokDotCom (lots more content). We have a bunch of new extremely affordable products and services coming out early next year. If you are interested in reviewing some of them, we’ll be selecting a few people who may be interested; just contact us.

Many people have been wondering about our tactic behind unsubscribing people from GrokDotCom. Like many of you, we subscribe a bunch of newsletters. We realize many people don’t have the time to read every issue, so we planned a campaign that informed people over 3 months to resubscribe to continue getting their subscription by email or to get The Grok either through RSS or Podcast formats. The thinking is if you don’t engage at least once in a 3 month period then all those issues that come in, for many people, become annoying and it is an erosion in their mind of our brand. In the words of A.G. Lafley, CEO of P&G – the customer is boss and let it go – you are in control. The response to this has been phenomenal by the way.

Howard Kaplan and I will be judges in the ad:tech awards recognizing the talented designers and strategic thinkers that lead the industry, demonstrating excellence in interactive marketing. Over 30 winners can claim the limelight… Make sure it’s you! Visit http://www.ad-tech.com/awards for more information.

I am sure there is lots more I am missing, but we’ll be publishing more often come the New Year.

Our newest Engagement Coordinator is responsible for the first line of communication between Future Now and our prospects. This teammate begins spending time interacting with our prospects, engaging them to share their experiences and their issues, uncovering their needs and resources. The teammate is responsible for taking these customer needs to the experts and learning to plan engagements which resolve these needs within the resource constraints. Finally, the teammate will explain this engagement to our prospects, in plainly spoken English, and once their final questions have been overcome, will craft an agreement reflecting this engagement. The measures of success for this position will NOT be tied to sales, but rather satisfied customers and successfully planned engagements.

Are you, or do you know, someone who has a college degree, ideally with a Psychology or Communications background? Someone who’s extremely sociable, an excellent communicator, both orally and in writing; someone who’s had some work experience (at least one year); most importantly, someone who’s interested in Marketing Consulting in this brave new world of overwhelming customer power where the push marketing and advertising strategies of yesteryear are dead? 

Are you up to the challenge? Please send an email to pleasehiremefuturenow@gmail.com
and spend a few minutes letting us know why you’re interested in being included in this hiring search. Let us know what exceptional skills you bring to the table that make you worthy of this opportunity. Please do NOT send any attachments or resumes, as they will not be considered at this time. We appreciate and thank you for your interest in this position.

Your bat essay demonstrates ignorance and seems absurd in this time of instant knowledge via the Web. Why didn’t you search baseball bats on the net? At www.baseball-bats.net you’d learn all the things that you found enigmatic.

I’ve got hundreds of letters like this … well, actually, most aren’t this confrontational. Nevertheless, I’ve replied to every one. So I wrote my reply:

Hey there Dude,

Ummm … I did search for baseball bats on the net (Google is the net, right?). In fact, I purposely conducted my “search” exactly as millions of Internet users approach similar problems every day. Why should I have to go to some outside source to get the information that is central to making my decision to buy from you? How would I know, from the 1,730,000 Google results produced in 0.21 seconds where the really useful baseball bat information was?

If you really do sell bats … or rather, if you want to sell bats … then you need to be the font of knowledge that helps me make my decision. Wouldn’t you rather be the authority for the information your customers counted on? Suppose you walked into a store, asked a question about bats, and the clerk told you to go read Baseball for Dummies before you bothered him again?

This indifference to the needs of their visitors is precisely why online businesses turn their noses up at billions of dollars a day. Pity. Thing is, nobody here is suggesting you have to pay attention to this stuff. We merely offer it as advice on the chance you might want to be more successful.

green regards,
The Grok

Sent it off to discover that my publishers had made a preemptive decision. My dude got this reply instead of mine:

Thank you. We have unsubscribed you from the newsletter.

Okay, I’ll admit it. I popped a few of my eyeball stalks when I read this. My stubby fingers flew over the keyboard:

I disagree completely with this course of action. Nobody deserves to be written off without a chance. We have had people come back from a reply like this one thanking us for taking the time to clear something up. This is about education, not whether or not someone agrees with us. I’m not happy that we’ve simply judged him and found him lacking, ergo we’ve ditched him.

He continues to be a jerk, then we dump him. But not before we offer him an opportunity to say, “Hey, I never thought of it quite that way. Gee, thanks.” It happens.

You’d like to think you had the ability to persuade a fish to snow ski – that is, after all, the business we’re in. But I wasn’t very persuasive. My dude remains unsubscribed.

The opposing team in this intellectual debate reminds me that sometimes you have to write somebody off without a chance. And when someone approaches you in an obviously nasty, belligerent way, that’s when you draw the line.

Because, when all’s said and done, it’s really about who holds the purse strings. We produce this newsletter at absolutely no charge to anyone. We don’t flash third-party ads to help underwrite this expense. In fact, we can’t even give you a hard and fast numerical justification for the ROI of what we offer for free.

My debating partners continue: GrokDotCom is our forum … folks read it to learn what we have to say. On top of that, we are genuinely dedicated to helping people understand – we’ve donated tons of our time free. But while we bend over backwards to be nice, that niceness is not a right. Nobody pays us a penny; we don’t have to put up with anybody’s … um … bovine scatological stuff when we find it monumentally offensive. But hey, he can resubscribe under another name if he really wants to … or read us on the Web.

The office is divided today (by what I hasten to characterise as a healthy debate – we may buzz loud, but we’re happy hornets). I’m hangin’ on tight to my assertion. My dude deserved a reply, even if he was less than politic in his phraseology.

What say you?