Luke Hubbard

Have you ever wondered why the word “spam” is used to describe unwanted email or other unethical behavior online?

According to Wikipedia, in 1970, Monty Python aired a sketch that featured some pretty funny characters over using the word “spam.” Check out the original sketch below, which I later explain had a major role in the usage of the word “spam” to mean “stupid pointless annoying messages.”

Evidentially, in the early days of chat rooms, people used to quote this sketch or simply write the word SPAM a huge number of times in order to frustrate other chatters. One funny example on Wikipedia sites Star Wars and Star Trek fans sabotaging each others’ chat room with quotes from the Monty Python spam sketch. Remember, Internet connections were much slower in the early 1980s so overloading a chat room with a large amount of text caused major problems for the participants in the chat room.

I had previously believed that spam was used to describe unwanted email based on the visual of someone throwing canned SPAM meat into a fast turning metal fan blade. The fan would chop up the SPAM and throw it all over the place, which I thought was a brilliant metaphor that captures the grossness of the spamming activity. Wikipedia claims this is not the actual origin of the word.

Hormel, the maker of the canned meat SPAM, has sued several companies over the misuse of their trademark. However, due to the massive common use of the word spam in the English vernacular, Hormel has had to accept that one of their prize products will forever be associated with unethical Internet behavior. Spam is evenly commonly defined by reputable dictionaries as both the canned meat and also unwanted email. Hormel has settled with encouraging people to reserve the all capital version of the word SPAM to mean the canned meat (again according to Wikipedia).

On a final note, keep in mind that spam isn’t restricted to just unwanted email. Unethical behavior such as invading instant messaging services is a form of spam commonly called “spim.” Unfortunately, spam also reaches search engines, news rooms, mobile phones via text messages, wiki entries, and website guest books. Most annoyingly, spam also enters into blog comments, but the savvy blogger employs technology to clean up the spam.

Flixster is a social network geared around movies. Their tag line is “Watch movies. Tell friends.” This pretty much sums up the basis of Flixster.

On Flixster, you can rate movies, create your own reviews, take quizzes, and compare your movie tastes with your friends. Another cool feature is the ability to watch movies right in the interface via Flixster’s partnership with Hulu.

Flixster appears to be monetizing mainly through their display advertisements. I can’t help but wonder if they’re profitable this way, or if they’re struggling to make a profit like the other social networking giants Myspace, Facebook, and Youtube.

Last week, I attended Ad:tech in San Francisco. Ad:tech is for media, marketing, and technology professionals, which essentially means it’s a big conference for online people. I recommend Ad:tech over just about every other online conference since almost every major online vendor attends. I do like the NYC conference better than San Fran, however.

While at the conference, on April 21st, I was invited to have lunch at Google’s San Fran office. This office houses the Google agency teams, and I am fortunate enough to have many friends there. I must say that the view of the Bay Bridge from their superb dining hall is really unbelievable. Here are some pictures I found online of the Google San Fran office. The coolest feature is a fun slide that was installed into one of the stairways.

Yes, it’s true, Yahoo has a keyword match type that may as well be a mystery to most of the SEM world. It’s called the canonical match.

Princeton defines canonical as: reduced to the simplest and most significant form possible without loss of generality.

Canonical mapping is what differentiates Yahoo’s standard match type from Google and MSN’s exact keyword match. Yahoo’s standard match type includes the keyword in your account plus all of the canonical forms of that word.

Canonical versions of the keyword include basic misspells, plurals, and the keyword + noise words like “a” or “the.” Google and MSN’s exact keyword match type include only one form of the keyword advertised. To show for plurals or misspells under Google and MSN’s exact match, you must upload every single version of the keyword that you want.

Consider the following example for the keyword “tool.”

Google’s exact match maps to: tool

Yahoo’s standard match maps to: tool, tools, the tool, a tool, for tool, about tool… and possibly many other versions of the keyword and misspells

Therefore, Yahoo’s standard match is actually more like Google and MSN’s phrase match type, and Yahoo really doesn’t offer an exact match type at all!

On a side note, Yahoo’s advanced match type is very much like Google and MSN’s broad match, which includes the keyword plus anything the system thinks is closely related to the keyword. For instance, the keyword “tool” might map to: tool, keyword tool, Google tool, SEM tool, and many other relevant versions of the keyword.

There is no way to turn the canonical mapping off and unfortunately, Yahoo doesn’t allow advertisers any exposure into the canonical mapping technology before keywords are uploaded.

The basic problem, however, with the canonical mapping is that you can unknowingly upload keyword duplicates into your account several times via different adgroups. For instance, if you upload the keyword “tool” into one adgroup, but upload “tools” into another adgroup, you will in result have the keyword duplicated in your account. This may not seem like a huge issue at first glance, but if you are trying to account for the exact ROI of a keyword or ensure accurate budgets for each campaign, the canonical match can start to pose major problems.

For instance, let’s say you’re trying to figure out your top 10 keywords in order to develop a sophisticated bidding strategy. You may have no idea which keyword is actually doing best, but according to your reports, it appears that the keywords have very different performance. To you, the words appear to have different statistics and you think they have different ROIs. To the Yahoo system, the words appear to be the same and the advertising platform shows results based on what it thinks is the higher quality keyword.

My advice is to have your Yahoo account representative “dedup” or “deduplicate” your entire keyword list before uploading it into your account.

Back when Yahoo used Overture as their advertising platform, the canonical match was considered a competitive advantage since it was a more sophisticated way of thinking about keyword mapping. Now, Yahoo is discretely tearing apart canonical mapping in order to make their system more like Google and MSN.

Here’s the most important part of this article: Watch out for your Yahoo account keyword volume! If you lose significant volume off of a keyword that was formerly driving impressions & clicks, it may be because Yahoo has unmapped keywords from its former canonical match. You may need to create a keyword expansion to gain your volume back. (And let’s keep our fingers crossed that advanced match is helping cover what could be lost volume).

Yahoo appears to be quietly implementing a fix before advertisers begin to notice the flaw in their Panama system. Let’s hope this blog posting doesn’t reach too many people for their sake.