Archive for the 'Ideas' Category
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A quick search of Google News shows dozens of cases where homeowners, business owners, and community code enforcement officials are embroiled in battles over improper building permits. In many cases, the builder is forced to tear down the structure - at great expense. Communities put permitting procedures in place so that an even-handed process is applied and ensure safety, prevent shoddy workmanship, and preserve home values. You must stand in line, fill out forms, and pay fees when your project is already complex enough, they reason. So lots of people try to get around it, and some succeed. Houses crack. Fires start. Communities get uglier.

In the website construction industry, we can draw a parallel between SEO advice and building permitting. Pressures placed on any web development project can cause marketing goals to be ignored or at least diluted. The builder doesn’t have to “live” with the results. They get paid and can easily vanish independent of the commercial success of the venture. The SEO gets called to come fix the mess. But the mess is already sealed in the walls. The cracking foundation has already been built upon.

Many companies invest heavily in their web design and construction, and then call on SEO experts to come in after the fact to make suggestions to help traffic flow. Unfortunately this often results in bad news. The website was not designed with search in mind, and you have to re-build it if you want organic traffic to flow. This is the equivalent to being forced to tear down that addition to your home, or that big warehouse building you just put together. You’re stuck. The expense to rebuild it is too high. The expense not to build it is too high (paid search.) I’d like to make the plea to the business community to consider thinking about SEO earlier.

I propose that people involved in web development look to the construction industry for guidance. Involving an SEO/SEM consultant before, during, and after your web development plans are in place can be a money-making proposition. I think that in some ways this is like permitting your building project. In my opinion, SEO/SEM experts should be project managers for any web development project where marketing the site is a core business directive. Decisions will be made with the social, search, and traffic goals take center stage, not the aesthetic “high” of the site being finished and wowing a committee. (more…)

Former Technorati CEO David Sifry has launched Web Hot or Not?, a Hot or Not site for websites.

It’s fun-cool, and has been done before, but it spooks me out in the world of multivariate testing and conversions optimization.

What’s hot:

Studies have shown that sites get only 50 milliseconds to give an impression to users. This site may help us learn what sites are attractive and appealing in a new way. The trouble is our assessment of any site is based on the context of that site, and how it was found. Personalized search results further refine these buckets of intent so the site is more likely to be found by certain people.

What’s not:

Anyone involved in web marketing knows that only through testing can we achieve the beauty of conversions and success for the site owner. To skim over websites and vote entirely on how they appear free from any other information (e.g. the search, PPC or organic, inbound link, intended audience, etc.) is to miss the point. It’s true, often “ugly” landing pages outconvert snazzy flash-based slot machines 3:1. Why encourage sites that look pretty but may not perform or worse, distract business owners from testable designs? I hate to see ego-designers who spend entire web budgets on snazz before knowing if the approach is right.

The ScanAlert “HackerSafe” logo is a credibility indicator for commerce based websites. Anti-virus and anti-hacker companies are losing ground against financially-well-backed hacker groups looking to exploit faults for money, not just thrills.

But Informationweek reported that a “HackerSafe” website had been compromised on December 5th and some customer information stolen. Geeks.com, who had the vulnerability, is handling things this way:

Geeks.com has reported the incident to federal authorities and Visa, and is encouraging customers to review their credit card statements for unauthorized charges. The company has set up two help numbers — 1-888-529-6261 or 1-212-560-5108 for non-US customers — that will be active starting on Tuesday for those with questions about the incident. It is also providing contact information for the major credit agencies to make it easier to report any identity theft fraud arising from the incident.

Consumers see the “Hackersafe tested daily” logo as being a sentinel. It is constantly scrutinizing the website for vulnerabilities. But it’s often past vulnerabilities that matter. As seems to be the case here:

“…Nigel Ravenhill, a ScanAlert spokesman, said today via e-mail that the vendor had withdrawn the Hacker Safe certification from Geeks.com “several times” last year due to the existence of vulnerabilities in the retailer’s systems. Geeks.com fell out of compliance with ScanAlert’s security requirements last June and then again in December, according to Ravenhill.

During these periods, the Hacker Safe seal was not allowed to appear on their Web site,” Ravenhill wrote in the e-mail. “Preliminary evidence uncovered while investigating this matter suggests that the breach most likely occurred during one of these periods.”

The headlines leave things up in the air “‘Hacker Safe’ website gets hit by hacker” and “‘Hacker Safe’ Geeks.com Hacked” certainly get people’s attention, but in some ways are irresponsible. Unfortunately that’s how Journalism sometimes works. It’s up to McAfee to save the story. I don’t think they did.

Three things are wrong with the Hackersafe / Scanalert situation

• “Tested Daily” should show “Scanned since” or “Secured since” — along with the last day the logo was “taken offline” for any reason.
• “Hacker Safe” tells a story of invincibility that simply doesn’t exist. Hacker Safer doesn’t have the same marketing punch, but is more accurate.
• A better PR response from Mcafee was needed here. No comment was given on the informationweek article, and the one given above to Computing magazine was not very informative to most. It would seem that ScanAlert would be ready to address these things when they happen in a well-crafted way.

Seth Godin says that marketing is all about promises.  Brutal honesty, authenticity and ethics are critical as well.

“If you must overpomise to get the sale, don’t do it.” says Godin. 

I have turned down four requests for new work today.  They were all “meatballs.” I could not keep the promises that the requesters wanted because the ideas were horrible or there was a swarm of well-funded competition all over them.   If I would have started these projects, I would have been lying.  I would have been breaking a promise (implied) that I could make it work.

A great website cannot save a poor/ordinary/boring product or idea.
And great SEO/SEM cannot save a poorly done website.

You cannot thrive online imitating an entrenched, well-done competitor.  You must be different and tell a better story about better stuff.  You must introduce scarcity and value.  If you can’t, you’re in the wrong business.

Admit it.  Quit, Fail, whatever… and move on to a new idea.  They are out there - millions of them. 

In September, Yahoo! closed down their Podcasting search service. Odeo is still languishing in my opinion. Podcast Alley is well designed and easy to use, but is full of horrible horrible content leaving me to question the voting system they have as being seriously gamed. Google’s stayed pretty much out of the game, but there is a Google custom search that’s pretty good.

So what is going on?

• Has iTunes declawed podcasting with it’s search tool and lack of features?
• Is it too hard to get current podcasts onto listening devices?
• Are we seeing a “normal” hype-cool-settle cycle?
• What about the new in-car technologies?
• Will the iPhone and wireless iPod help?
• Are podcasts inherently non-viral?

What’s even more perplexing is that our on-demand society craves time-shifted, portable entertainment. Podcatchers are the ultimate web audio “Tivo” equivalent. You can isolate items of interest and let it fill up unaided…then listen to a stream of custom audio.

The Google Trends chart to the right could be slightly misleading when it comes to the “Christmas Spikes.” Since more people have MP3 players already, the height of the spike, and thus the novelty of podcasts, will probably be shorter, but the overall trend is compelling and consistent with the premise of this post.

Wizzard.tv claims 1 billion downloads in 2007. That’s big.

My suggestions to improve podcasting include:

• Podcasters must create content people want. Please quit spewing poorly-tagged, over-hyped garbage.
• Connect podcasts to GPS and stream local content (especially for the tourism industry)
• Podcasts should STOP when there is nothing else to talk about. They are too long! Get to the point already.
• Make it easy to find podcasts based on your interests? Hasn’t behavioral targeting come far enough for this yet?
• Podcasters should prepare for their shows. I’m so sick of “I didn’t have time to get ready” type shows. If that happens. Don’t do it!
• Podcasters need an easy way to translate their shows to non-English.
• Stop with the fancy, 3-minute long intros. I don’t want to hear the tractor-pull-style hype buildup.
• We need to improve tagging and chapter marks. Podcast producers must take the time to tag their work as well as isolate sections when the subjects change drastically.
• Itunes must improve podcast search. Top-ten podcasts within a genre would be a good start. Editor’s Picks and better identification of video podcasts would help too. Someone should raise the barrier to entry into iTunes podcasting. If the podcast doesn’t get subscribers, kill it.
• Make it simpler to subscribe, right from the device. More explanation to the newbie of what’s going to happen when they click subscribe would help. Why must I surf the web for 30 minutes to find a good show? Why not let me set up my interests (ala Tivo) and just let the system fill up my podcast-allocated area on my player?
• “New Podcast Suggestion” tools need to be developed based on meta search.
• Auto-transcription systems or Human-transcribed systems will help with indexing content (though they may not be terribly useful to users as readable text) and, if well-engineered, allow “fast forwarding” to a certain point in the podcast as well as enabling translation to other languages.

Postscript:  Complete post that PodShow Podcasting Network Grew 29144% in 2007.

During 2007, my firm received hundreds of inquiries for services. The vast majority, perhaps 80% were in the “just make me a website like this one” camp. Many were carrying a previous designers’ handiwork with them in complete wonderment of how such a large investment could fail to produce results. As an design-by-testing developer, this pattern was highly discouraging.

The confusion among businesses about what is required to develop a web business is widespread.

“We just want to find someone to put up a site like our competitors’ ” was a very common request that, to me, is a horrible way to approach the problem. I think it is often a panic reaction to the competitor’s first-mover advantage or to a drop in ones site performance. It is too easy to assume that a snazzy site is also meeting the needs of the customers and reaching full potential. Intuition has its place, but you could be very, very wrong. Even experts get this wrong much of the time. I have evaluated the analytics data from some hot-shot designs and found exit rates over 80% and time-on-site under one minute for most visitors.

Unless you intimately know the market, which most web designers do not, designing “from the hip” is an irresponsible way to spend clients’ money. Every web developer worth their salt should be doing rudimentary testing of a business’ feasibility before heading down a given design path if one could even begin to achieve high conversion rates.

You can, to some extent, predict customers’ movements if you observe through testing and extrapolate the results into the larger design. Observation requires a laboratory, even if it takes the form of analytics on a screen. Lightweight page development with good experimental design can serve that role. While the sample sizes are often too small to achieve “true” statistical validity, even pseudo experiments with repeatable results can help you get into the right quadrant.

Why is it that small to medium businesses have not embraced the value of experimentation in web design and marketing? What has caused companies to embrace the myth of the superstar web designer or the fire and forget web marketing program?

Testing the idea’s potential before spending huge amounts of effort on web development or SEO is critically important, yet rarely done. I received at least 20 requests in 2007 for people wanting to do gift basket websites and at least 20 wanting to sell personalized products (as resellers of the same corporate gifts catalog!) None of these entrepreneurs had even considered the landscape in which they wanted to be painted was full of others doing exactly the same thing and the over-crowded search results pages served as direct evidence.

I am giving much thought to how we might do a better job packaging this story for future clients. I encouarge your ideas in the comments.

Related: conversion rates for some online retailers.

Let the top 10/20/30 lists begin! Here’s my top stories round-up, using information I collected as I write my latest article for Business Lexington. I’m almost certain to come back and adjust links, so bookmark me, and add your own - cause I know I’m missing some!

iPhone Stirred the Mobile Internet marketplace. While the iPhone earned raves for its interface and sleek styling, it still was designed to operate only on the AT&T/Cingular wireless network, lacked a keyboard and did not operate on 3G broadband networks. Buyers still swooped in after the device, buying one million iPhones in 74 days. The iPhone platform readily integrates a number of Internet technologies that will benefit greatly from the planned 3G version in 2008. Still, it’s worth keeping in mind that the iPhone is still only around 1% of the marketshare. Later it was announced that a 3G iPhone will be available soon.

Merger and Aquisition Madness in the Search Advertising Google acquired Internet Advertising Company Doubleclick for $3.1B, Microsoft bought Ad Agency aQuantive (including Avenue A/Razorfish) for $6B, and Yahoo! bought Right Media creating a potential for conflict of interest in the web search advertising giants that some see as an unfair monopoly.

Google’s Street-Level View Google’s “Street View” solutions for Google maps allows a “virtual drive” of certain cities via 360-degree images captured by specially equipped cars. Privacy advocates quickly found people in compromising positions on some images and Google offered a “blur-out request form” on their website. Microsoft’s version garnered some attention as well, showing scenes through the windows of a race car.

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One of the most difficult challenges is tracking paid search performance via telephone calls for the small business. While a few will spring for a new 800 number or IVR system to get some of that information and train phone staff in its use, many cannot due to the workaday reality. Often the busy office environment means metrics go out the window in favor of just getting the order out, so the company continues to guess.

This is especially true for companies who are struggling to find their sweet spot in the paid search world. During the day-to-day chaos, few are thinking about the cost of each call - they just want to answer it and do their best to change the caller into a customer. If the staff is so busy, do you really think they’ll drill down and get the “how you found us” information accurately recorded. It doesn’t happen. Pay-per-call and click-to-call offer “embedded” tracking, but are plagued with inventory and adoption challenges. My friend Christine (CC: Nice to see you at SMX!) created a great post on Offline Conversion Tracking, which covers some of the same ground, and this issue has often come up in conference sessions.

As Greg Sterling points out, the vast majority of purchases are made offline, yet the tracking solutions are only just maturing, and others have a very healthy skepticism about some of the new solutions.

The real result of this is the “leaking” of marketing budgets that happens with a lack of tracking. The dynamics of the purchase cycle are mysterious, making strategic and tactical solutions little better than guesses.

I see basically four flavors of off-line conversion tracking from pay-per-click ads, and would like to introduce a hybrid.

anecdotal
customer question at point of sale, catalog IDs, coupons, offers
poor man’s IVR (multiple phone numbers)
cookied IVR
…and a hybrid…
cookied part number modification

CLICK MORE to see the rest of this article.

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From an article on Final Call:

Two dolls sit on the table, one Black, and One White. Every feature other than race is identical. The reassuring female voice asks the preschool-aged Black Girl a question “Can you show me the doll that looks bad?” She chose the Black doll over a White one that is identical in every respect except complexion. “And why does that look bad?” “Because she’s Black,” the little girl answers emphatically. “And why is this the nice doll?” the voice continues. “Because she’s White.” “And can you give me the doll that looks like you?” The little girl hesitates for a split second before handing over the Black doll that she has just designated as the uglier one.

New research has been released lately.

The Pew Research Center finds that 67% of black men and 74% of black women think rap music is a bad influence on black America. In fact, 59% of black men and 63% of black women think the whole hip-hop industry from fashion to attitude is detrimental to African-American progress in the US.

The proportion of young black people in the 18-29 age group who condemn the current media images of black people is 31 percent — higher than the 25 percent of blacks between the ages of 30-49, and the 17 percent of blacks in the 50-64 age group with similar disdain for black images in the media.

Similarly, when asked if the portrayal of black people on television and in the movies is harmful, it is young black people who agree most. More than half of 18- to 29-year-old African Americans agree that black people are presented in a negative way in popular media. 50% of black people ages 34-49 agree. White and Hispanic Americans agree, too. The Pew poll finds 64% of whites and 59% of Hispanics agree on the damaging impact of hip hop (including the one writing this blog post.

The full report from Pew is here.

While hardly as sophisticated as the testing that Malcolm Gladwell refers to in “Blink” the results are more than troubling. Many think that this comes from subtle cultural clues, such as microaggressions.

But one must be careful about these surveys, as well as experiments like the one with the little girl. Since they had to explain much during the survey, did they answer with their hearts? Did she?

Since the little girl anticipated being asked “why” did she automatically go for the answer that would be easiest to explain (in terms of forming an explanation, not in explaining society.)
This scrutiny of such results is frequently discussed by Gladwell. If you’ve not read “Blink” you simply must.

Gladwell on Oprah: “Those kinds of snap decisions that make up so much discrimination or … our thoughts and feelings, they’re a product of the worlds we live in,” Malcolm says. “And if you live in a world, as we do, where you … turn on the television and you see a TV show and the crack dealer’s always a black guy and the judge is always a white person … those images start to matter. They start to change the way the software in your head works. And that’s regardless of what race you are.

One of my clients has drawn my attention back to the split-second racial stereotype issues in recent weeks. The maker of the Eithidolls has an African Doll perfectly suited for African American Girls and other races too! Everything about it is in support of African micro-industry, fair trade, and authenticity. The story of Makeda, Queen of Sheba is inspiring and perfect bedtime material. It won’t change the world alone, but it’s nice to see a positive step. If my girls weren’t bursting at the seams with such toys I’d definitely have one here.

I worry that lots of people, especially white people, avoid the truly extraordinary products if they must explain their purchases to others.  If you buy a black doll for a white girl, you must explain yourself to many in our culture.   That should not be.

I came across these links related to this Topic. I hope you enjoy them.

Kwanzaa Kidz
Offers African centered childrens products and online games that educate and entertain.

A Caramel Kids eStore
A Caramel Kids eStore is one of the best multicultural e-Stores for African American,.

Dolls Like Me: Multicultural Dolls
Toy store featuring African American, Asian, Biracial, and Latino dolls and puppets.

Street Legends Ink
Hip-Hop Store specializing in High Quality Urban Comics and collectible toys.

Black Toys and Games
Find websites that showcase Black - African - Ethnic Toys and Games.

Queens of Africa Project
The Queens of Africa Project

Tyrone Geter
Dolls by one of the curators of Ponder Gallery at Benedict College, the fourth large HBCU (Historical Black Colleges and Universities) in the United States

The African Queen
Photos of an amazing African Queen Doll

Kwanzaa
A Great Page of Information

Kwanzaa - A Celebration of African Culture
All About The Holiday

Jasmyne Cannick
A Powerful, Well-Written Blog that digs into issues that are dividing us. Lots of thoughtful commentary. Allow some time to go through her posts.

Kwanzaa on Second Life

eShopAfrica
African Fair Trade

PLEASE DIGG THIS STORY

I Snapped this From a T-Shirt shop in Gatlinburg, TN, smack dab in the Bible Belt.

Tolerated, I suppose by legal departments of real brands. I can’t imagine they have permission.  Protected as a parody?

Hyper tacky IMO.