Recruiting Process Advice from Tallahassee.com: Try beRecruited

beRecruited had another great press mention - this time by Tallahssee.com's Corey Clark in "Athletes offer tips on the recruiting process." It is a thorough, encouraging article about the proactive role that athletes and their families need to play in the recruiting process. I could not agree more - and this is the fundamental reason I started beRecruited: unless your name is Carmelo Anthony or Kobe Bryant (both of whom are on my television right now), the recruiting process relies on your proactiveness (even for top rated athletes)... particularly in an economic environment where collegiate budgets are suffering. Furthermore, the most successful beRecruited users are the most active ones (take a look at beRecruited's Recently Committed section):

If you're good enough, they'll find you. That's the old saying about college recruiting, right? It's been repeated over the years so much by sports fans, writers and announcers that it's become a mantra of sorts.

It's a mantra however that is completely untrue for 99.9 percent of high school athletes looking for a scholarship.

Because the reality is this: If you think you're good enough, you need to go find them.

"The best advice I can give is to be active," said FSU softball player Carly Wynn.

This doesn't mean cold-calling college coaches and blindly sending out resumes and videotapes. It means making sure to put yourself in a position to be found....

With websites like www.berecruited.com (which has hundreds of thousands of registered athletes – in 18 sports - and more than 10,000 registered college coaches) , you can upload resumes, photos, videos, stats and any other information about yourself you deem worthy. For free.

Sprint's Meet the Palm Pre Launch Campaign is Terrific

11 days and 7 hours remain until the much-anticipated Palm Pre launch... at least that's what Sprint's ad campaign has drilled in my head (again and again). The ads are running on sponsorships across major blogs, through Google AdSense, on Facebook & social media sites and now on TV. And hats off to Sprint - who I have criticized before for poor marketing and being out of touch with consumers.

Meet the Palm Pre campaign:

- the campaign is savvy and dynamic (including countdown timers, Twitter searches, media mentions, etc)

- the ad layouts (see now.sprint.com) give the appearance of desktop / mobile widgets... which is what makes the Palm Pre so appealing to consumers

- terrific utilization of social media - from YouTube, to Twitter to popular blogs (like Engadget and CNET)

- sharp, integrated ad units that connect with one another and the on-Sprint.com efforts

- the larger "This is Now" campaign, under which the Palm Pre campaign is nested, does a better job than RIM's efforts of conveying the aliveness of the network - and the handset's ability to play a role in managing your activities (from critical events like email and calendaring to social events like video and Twitter)

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Of course, it is also great that Sprint has an integrated widget campaign... although: - they do not use Widgetbox (!) and their homemade widget installer is clunky and unintuitive - before grabbing the widget, a user needs to agree to terms & conditions... bizarre and clearly not good for virality - users cannot grab the widget "in the wild" - they must visit Sprint, agree to terms and then take the embed code

NBA Launches Player Cam, Facebook Connect for Conference Finals

The NBA clearly has MLB.tv envy...And it's not a bad thing! (now if only the NFL would start experimenting)

I have written before that Major League Baseball is the only major sports league to grasp the web and really innovate with MLB.tv and their successful iPhone App. Well the NBA is starting to test the waters.

During tonight's Conference Finals, viewers can actually follow the game entirely on NBA.com with:

Four-Way Player Cams - Follow Dwight Howard or Lebron James directly - You can also choose between Robo Cam and Action Cam - Swap audio and customize the tiled screen layout (very much like MLB.tv) - No high definition option - but you can view in full screen

Socialize with Facebook, Twitter & MySpace While watching the in-game player cams, you can login with Facebook, Twitter or MySpace and converse on NBA.com. The integration doesn't look great and is far from YouTube's Facebook Connect implementation, but it's a good first step and, I believe, the first pro league integration of Facebook Connect.

Sponsorship Of course, the experience is ad-supported (by Axe Dry) but the integration is slick and non-intrusive.

iPhone Game Play Goes Retro; Gets Mixed Results

In late March, I wrote that the next step for iPhone game developers was to go 'backwards' by mimicking control pads found on old gaming systems like Nintendo NES and GameBoy:

Well the iPhone has really gone retro by releasing Sonic the Hedgehog with a two-button control pad. TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid isn't a fan: "I’m not a fan of the control scheme some developers are adopting to port these classic games, which typically consists of a virtual joypad in the bottom left hand corner of the screen with a few virtual buttons on the right side. Visually the buttons successully mimic the gamepads of yore, but they lack any tactile feedback at all, which gets frustrating when you’re trying to dodge bullets or leap from cliffs and you accidentally hit the wrong button."

Similar feedback was given in the comments from my earlier post. Commenters pointed out that some other games have virtual "d-pads" that have similar issues:

"It's already out there. Though having used these apps, this setup is still difficult to actually play with. There's no tactile feedback to the buttons, making playing very difficult."

If tactical feedback is the primary issue, perhaps the pad / buttons need to be more prominently displayed and provide more obvious visual feedback upon touch.

... Or you could always buy the new Sony PSP that featured a slide-out controller pad, carry yet another device in your pocket and purchase more expensive games. My bet - iPhone developers will figure it out and users will get accustomed to it.

iPhone Push Notifications Screenshot (aka The Mobile Stream)

MacRumors has screenshots of Apple's new iPhone Push Notifications (running through the new iPhone 3.0 software).

Think of it as the real-time feed (or stream) going mobile. Just as Facebook's feed opening sparked new innovation and successes, push will do the same. And also like Facebook, developers and applications will have to walk the fine line of too-much vs. too-little information (usually solved by customization / personalization):

Google Chrome Ad Takes Over New York Times Homepage

Google continues to advertise aggressively for their web browser, Google Chrome. Today, they took over the right side of the New York Times homepage with an expanding video ad that rotates through different Chrome commercials (called "Chrome Shorts"). In itself, it is interesting that Google is marketing the browser so prominently... but never really mentioning the product, benefits, and so forth (entirely the opposite approach of the new Microsoft ads, for instance).

Here is where the campaign is bizarre though:

1. I use Google Chrome. Why pay to promote Google Chrome to me... when I have already converted? Seems wasteful...

2. The ad interaction is actually broken within Google Chrome. The ad expands but will not play - rather, it collapses when you try to hover over any of the videos... which in turn is not the greatest selling point for the product it is trying to promote

Edmund Andrews' "Personal Credit Crisis" is our National Crisis

The New York Times Edmund Andrews' "My Personal Credit Crisis" is a candid recap of how a respected economic reporter for a respected news source entered into the same world of subprime mortgages and credit trouble that our nation did. Very much worth the read - if only to get a individual understanding of the far wider problem:

The only problem was money. Having separated from my wife of 21 years, who had physical custody of our sons, I was handing over $4,000 a month in alimony and child-support payments. That left me with take-home pay of $2,777, barely enough to make ends meet in a one-bedroom rental apartment. Patty had yet to even look for a job. At any other time in history, the idea of someone like me borrowing more than $400,000 would have seemed insane.

But this was unlike any other time in history. My real estate agent gave me the number of Bob Andrews, a loan officer at American Home Mortgage Corporation. Bob wasn’t related to me, and I had never heard of his company. “Bob can be very helpful,” my agent explained. “He specializes in unusual situations.”

....

Bob called back the next morning. “Your credit scores are almost perfect,” he said happily. “Based on your income, you can qualify for a mortgage of about $500,000.”

What about my alimony and child-support obligations? No need to mention them. What would happen when they saw the automatic withholdings in my paycheck? No need to show them. If I wanted to buy a house, Bob figured, it was my job to decide whether I could afford it. His job was to make it happen.

beRecruited Hits A Milestone: 500,000 Registered Users

This past Tuesday, beRecruited.com reached a major milestone: we registered our 500,000th user - representing 3x growth in the last year. beRecruited now has: - more than 450,000 are student-athletes - over 16,000 college coaches and 17,000 high school and club coaches - 19,000 high schools have active athletes registered with beRecruited, representing more than 100,000 different high school teams As beRecruited's community grows, so do the number of successful recruiting connections... and as the community grows, beRecruited continues to see network effects and continues to be the best, most powerful recruiting tool.

"Coaches from across the country were able to find me on beRecruited.com. Without beRecruited, I can't imagine having even made half of these contacts. It was a great feeling each time I logged on and saw another coach had viewed my profile," said Caelie Fish, a rower from St. Francis HS (Folsom, CA). She is committed to San Diego State University.

"I cannot emphasize enough how helpful beRecruited.com benefited me to get recognized. The most valuable and significant feature of the beRecruited website was that it enabled me to really put myself out there to colleges. Being able to post photos and video clips enabled coaches to see the skills I possess," said Kaygan Hutchison, a Lincoln County HS (Branchlan, WV) basketball player now committed to West Virginia University Institute of Technology.

"Every feature on beRecruited helped me out in some way. I came from a small town, so I had to put myself out there and basically help myself get recruited. My advice would be to do anything you can to help yourself out. And beRecruited will help you out," said Alex Valdivieso, a football player from Braxton County HS (Sutton, WV) who is now committed to Glenville State College.

The Changing AdWords, Paid Search Landscape - And What it Means

Interesting data out of Comscore and TechCrunch this morning that points to the slowing growth of paid search activity despite a rise in search activity. Comscore believes it is a consequence of longer search queries, but Michael Arrington has a larger picture answer (which I agree with):

U.S. Search queries are up 68% in the last year, but paid clicks are up only 18% in the same period...

he reason there are less ads on search results, I believe, is that there are, simply, less advertisers. Far less. Big spenders, the category leaders, are just gone. Sharper Image, Wickes Furniture, Levitz, Foot Locker, Wilson’s Leather, Ann Taylor, Zales, Mervyn’s, Macy’s, Circuit City and a ton of other retailers are either shutting down entirely or closing lots of stores. And more are on the way. All of these companies used to spend tons of money on paid search ads. Those budgets don’t exist any more.

Combine that with the fact that, as any paid search advertiser knows, it is downright hard to spend more money effectively. SMBs face the same problem: scaling paid search spend in both click volume and conversions.

And - let's not forget that the affiliate landscape is rapidly changing. Affiliates once accounted for a major portion of AdWords spend (either directly or by indirectly bloating the prices of keywords). As major affiliate programs have changed their policies (ie Amazin prohibiting paid search), an entire tier of sophisticated marketers disappeared.

So in a move that certainly is not coincidental, Google yesterday announced that AdWords advertisers can now bid on brand terms. Wow. That is a very significant change - both directionally and operationally (for advertisers and Google alike).

Brands spend countless hours protecting themselves. And that, until now, has included protecting themselves in paid search. Meanwhile, competitors or savvy arbitragers (affiliates, etc) have long capitalized on branded keywords. Early on at eBay, for instance, we had to specifically prohibit bidding on eBay's brand - which included numerous derivatives of eBay, Half.com, etc.

I am sure Google has operational reasons to allow brand bidding: it is both messy and intensive to protect the brand names (and not always accurate or fair). But this is clearly a move that is intended to drive revenue by reopening high-traffic keywords.

Expect related CPCs to rise, brands to complain loudly, and affiliates to scramble immediately.