Vinny Lingham’s Blog

I’ll be globe trotting for the next 10 days, here is my schedule, if I’m going to be near you and you’d like to meet up, let me know.

November 30th - Johannesburg
December 1st, 2nd & 3rd - London
December 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th & 7th - Chicago, attending Search Engine Strategies
December 7th & 8th - San Francisco/San Jose (Silicon Valley)
December 9th - London
December 10th - Cape Town!!!!

I’ll be attending SES Chicago 2005 next week. If you’re going to be at the conference, please drop me a mail and let’s try to meet up. My email is vlingham@gmail.com.

I’ll be attending the sessions, so stay tuned for up-to-the-minute reports of what’s happening at the conference.

I’ve just arrived in London for Search Engine Strategies. I’ll be manning the SEMPO Booth on Wednesday morning from 10am - 12pm, so if you’re at the event, please stop by, I’d love to meet with you.

The trip to London was pretty easy - quick overnight flight on SAA.

On a slightly different note:

Companies that retail numerous products often have an XML product feed that they distribute to partners. We use these feeds to produce websites such as ThatShoe. The problem we as marketers face is that the companies which produce the feeds, do not necessarily have the inhouse skills to do so. The result is poor quality product feeds that lead to poor user experience, and ultimately, a negative brand experience. We believe strongly in the vertical search market, however, the limitations are simply that the merchants in the vertical do not always understand what their users are searching for.

Don’t get me wrong, some merchants are fantastic about providing better feeds with more information, but others couldn’t care - they have their feed built, and that’s that. No maintenance, no adjustment, no enhancement.

I think that eventually the people who deploy product feeds will have to start answering to their superiors as to why their existing and potential customers have had negative brand experiences as it relates to their product catalogs.

With content syndication playing a greater role in online marketing - don’t you think that the content that merchants distribute needs to be at a high level of quality?