Filed under: Abraham Harrison LLC, Ad Budgets, Ad Buys, Ad Sales, Google, Google AdSense, Google AdWords, Google Applications, Google Apps, Google Apps Premier, Google Gears, Google Juice, Google PageRank, Measurements, Open Kimono

So Google launched Ad Planner yesterday at an Advertising Research Foundation event in New York City. Ad Planner is an online analytical tool that gives advertisers deep information on which sites their targeted audience is visiting. Designed to make media buying more efficient, it puts Google in direct competition with comScore and Nielsen Online. A key difference here is that Ad Planner is free.

Ad Planner allows users to enter demographics of target audiences along with potential sites on which to advertise into its system.  The system then, presumably through data gleaned from web servers, will then spit out sites that an advertiser should consider for a media plan.  It would seem that it is an easy to use, inexpensive system to use.

Subscription fees from survey based services such as comScore and Nielsen can be exorbitant.  This further democratizes the web.

But free can come with a cost and that’s what others are worried about.

Google, in this capacity, may not be acting as an independently-owned third party delivering unbiased information.  There’s always a chance that the system may be tweaked to produce results that favor Google-owned property.  And, and the launch yesterday, Google product manager told a questioner that Google will get its data from a “fusion” of different data sources.  A follow up question as to whether or not Google will accept external audits was left unanswered.

That’s not a great sign.  But Google is now powerful enough that they can get away with not answering that while it brings in users.  Users like, quite frankly, me.

Thus is the nature of the web.

No Comments » Posted on June 26th, 2008 by Jonathan Trenn

Filed under: Abraham Harrison LLC, Abraham Harrison Staff, Google Apps, Google Apps Premier, Google Docs, Google Earth Outreach, Popular Culture, Search Engine Strategy, Search Engines, Search Moptimization, Second Life, Second Life Marketing

Eric Schonfeld of TechCrunch poses the question as to whether Google Trend result will be a good predictor of the 2008 presidential election. He points to past statistics that show a relative symmetry between searches for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the results for the Democratic primary.null

Blue = Barack Obama Red = John McCain

I think you can take all this with a grain of salt. Sure, there will be some relevance, but there are too many other factors involved that could skew the results. There are also a bunch of unrelated factors that can’t be prescribed to online search.

The electoral college is the deciding factor in elections and while you can break down searched by state, each state will have its own factors relating to voters and internet usage. And voters will vary as to how they get their political information. Evangelical voters will differ from young urban single people who will differ from Latinos who will differ from suburban housewives.

How thiis wold be helpful is to also measure terms such as health care, immigration, tax policy, and Iraq…and match them with each candidate. Better yet, match them by candidate and state. You’ll start to see what issues are important where.

Candidates then should create issue focused minisites that can directly address a candidates interests.

Hopefully, campaign advisors will look to do this as opposed to primarily run on slogans and attack ads that teach us very little.

1 Comment » Posted on June 8th, 2008 by Jonathan Trenn

Filed under: Abraham Harrison, Abraham Harrison LLC, Abraham Harrison Staff, Google Applications, Google Apps, Google Apps Premier, Mark Harrison

Last week, Mark was contacted by a reporter from IDG who wanted to know about how Abraham Harrison LLC uses Google Apps Premier, and Mark Harrison, our CEO, obliged. The article was published online today, For Web Apps, Get a Service Guarantee, in PC World:

For example, the Google Apps Premier Edition suite contains an availability guarantee only for its Gmail portion (for 99.9 percent uptime) and offers no commitment for the other components, which include word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software.

“It would be comforting to have an SLA that covered the entire suite,” says Mark Harrison, founding partner of Abraham Harrison LLC, provider of online marketing services.

Abraham Harrison, founded in 2007, has been using Google Apps Premier Edition for about one year, and the uptime of its hosted applications and services, though not 100 percent, has been excellent, according to Harrison. Downtime incidents have been rare and brief, and have never proven disruptive to the company’s operations, he says. “We’ve never been crippled by an outage,” Harrison says.

Still, should a significant Google Apps outage occur, it certainly would impact the company, which is highly dependent on the suite. The company chose Google Apps in order to give its geographically-dispersed staff an array of software to use for communication and collaboration. In addition to the suite’s productivity applications, the company also uses Google Talk instant messenger and Gmail for e-mail. The company’s 22 employees, located in six countries and four continents, operate in 14 different time zones, and since most of their work is collaborative, Google Apps–which lets users jointly edit documents located on a central server–was a better alternative than e-mailing Microsoft Office documents back and forth.

Harrison would also like to see Google Apps provide an offline component that would allow users to work on their local PCs when disconnected from the Internet, a capability he knows Google is pursuing with its Gears technology.

That Harrison would feel more at ease with an SLA is telling. His company isn’t an ordinary Google Apps customer. Although the relationship between Google and Abraham Harrison is purely of the vendor-client type, meaning that the company receives no compensation from Google, the Google Apps team has singled it out as a model small business whose feedback it regularly seeks. As a result, Harrison is in close contact with the Google Apps team.

No Comments » Posted on February 28th, 2008 by Chris Abraham

Filed under: Google, Google Applications, Google Apps, Google Apps Premier, Google Docs

We here at Abraham Harrison, LLC, use Google Apps every day.  We’re always aching to keep on top of the cool new tools Google introduces on the DL, and here’s one via Mashable and  Google Operating System.

Google today released a simple Windows compatible utility to simplify the sometimes annoying task of importing multiple documents into Google Docs. Google released it to demonstrate some of the functionality within the Google Docs API (download the app here).

No Comments » Posted on January 25th, 2008 by Chris Abraham

Filed under: 3rd Party Apps, Abraham Harrison, Abraham Harrison LLC, Abraham Harrison Staff, Google, Google Applications, Google Apps, Google Apps Premier, Google Talk, Online Applications, Web Applications, Web Apps, Web Services

Business student Andrew Houshian of the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business sent us some questions, asking us how we like Google Apps. We have been hankering to answer this question publicly, so here we go!

Read more…

2 Comments » Posted on November 27th, 2007 by Chris Abraham

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