Splashy Ad for Clorox

Clorox - a memorable ad - clear illustration - funny too.

Microsoft spreads the spirit of the season on 5th Ave

A Collection of Responsive Design Resources

I complied a collection of resources for my team so we can get our arms around the task of designing sites for multiple devices. This first link, Ten Things to Know about Responsive Design, provides a beginner's level of understanding for the concept. It’s recommended reading for the both tech and non-technical folks. I encourage you to invest 5 minutes and read through this one. Even if you are intimately familiar with responsive design, this article provides a rationale for its use and will form the basis for a common understanding. 

Some of these articles are more for tech folks to enjoy. This one provides the JQuery code for determining window width. 

This article talks about sizing fonts with CSS in responsive design. It’s one of the better ones from the many articles I read. I’d recommend tech folks read this one. 

This article points out the requirements in UI for small devices, how for example, will buttons and bigger elements make it easier for users when using small devices or tablets. Since it gives good food for thought, I’d recommend non tech and tech folks read this one. 

This last article is maybe one of the first and most important articles written on the subject of responsive design. It’s quite complicated and takes time to read and digest. It’s worthwhile for the techies and the non techies but it is likely to scare some people off because it is a mix of English and code. It’s very well written and worth a read - just ignore the scary parts.

Web Analytics - Reduces Ineffective Ad Spending

A sudden spike in web traffic and investigation into the cause and effect led me to revise a content ad campaign on Bing and Yahoo partner sites.

Traffic suddenly increased to several domains. Web analytics showed the origin of this traffic and the behavior of visitors revealed a problem with a #Bing content network ad. This traffic was alarming because of its magnitude. So much traffic would soon have some unpredictable impact on search rank or signal out of control ad spending.

There was no rise in ad spending anywhere. But reviewing the entry page tracking parameters, clearly the traffic was coming from one Bing ad campaign. The campaign was old and the link was obsolete. That provided insight to update the landing page.

The #bouncerate for this traffic was quite a bit lower than average so it looked like real visits. It looked as though visitors would arrive on a page, and continue within the site for several more pages, all fine from an SEO viewpoint at least tentatively. #Analytics showed that the referring domain was genieknowsinc.com. Clicking back to the referrers, yielded no insight at all. Our IBM NetInsight analytics showed the keyword was "railway rolling stock" on many of these visits. It's not a common term and the rise in traffic looked very suspicious.

A separate #analytics check on abandoned products – entirely unrelated to the spike in traffic - showed that many of the abandoned products were logged by visitors who came from genieknowsinc.com and the entry page was always tied to the same URL even though the search keywords had nothing to do with the landing page.  One query especially caught my attention, “how to seduce married women” which really has nothing to do with “railway rolling stock” and the abandoned products did not relate to railway rolling stock either. Digging deeper in the abandoned products report, I learned the top abandoned products were tied back to visitors searching unrelated terms and had referrers from genieknowsinc.com. Analytics are great for this kind of insight, and they led me to discover and fix part of a content campaign with a #Bing #Yahoo partner.  Eliminating these ads from spammy pages by excluding genieknowsinc.com from all campaigns saved money and squeezed out ineffective spending.

Book Review: Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment, Sterne

Sterne writes about measuring the impact of communicating via social media in his book, Social Media Metrics:  How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment. He makes good points, tells some personal stories and delivers practical advice on the tools and methods and importance of measuring the impact of social media.

Chapter one sets the stage with familiar information about early social media initiatives. By chapters two and three, experienced practioners will begin thinking they should take notes. I found myself thinking, when is the last time I checked Technorati or is Twitter Grader still operating? My colleagues agree when I say I cannot keep up with the amount of change in technology. Just when I thought I was safe with the blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, dozens of Twitter accounts and YouTube, along comes Google Plus. Another mouth to feed another in-basket, more circles, more ripples.

Sterne quotes Jodi McDermott, talking about widgets and  the difficulties of measurement when things are changing on the fly, "This market is rife with start-ups in college dorms...They like changing things on the fly daily for fun."

I decided to try some of the tools Jim wrote about. I couldn't reach Twitter Grader. Twitalyzer.com reported my main twitter account earned just a "casual" score, even though it has almost 5,000 tweets and 2,500 followers. I found the same account downright invisible on wefollow.com for the main topic of the account.

I got this message once on twitanlayzer.com "You have been Rate Limited by Twitter
The technical explanation is that Twitter has changed their rate limit strategy for search, dramatically limiting Twitalyzer's ability to gather data on non-client accounts. We are working through this challenge now and hope to have a solution in the near future.

The non-technical explanation is ... Twitter won't give us the Tweets we asked for, the meanies!"

Getting back to the book, it provokes, it reminds, it will encourage you to think why measurement and objectives count. Most important what I walked away with, is that while Jim is explaining metrics, he very subtly reveals a strategic approach to using social media. Read the book.

The Future is In Storage

I wasn’t going to write today. I wanted to make some coding changes to the blog and nothing more. But I noticed my prior post about eliminating email and I felt compelled to write a post today. It’s ironic that I just attended a talk about email marketing at SES by Sundeep Kapur.

In my prior post I wrote, “I have 107 MB on the local machine and 104 MB on the server. At present the inbox has 436 items and an additional 100 in the junk folder.” I predicted trusted networks would eliminate a lot of unsolicited email. But today, two years later, I have 1133 unread items in my inbox and 233 in junk mail. I also keep getting notices that my mailbox has reached almost 400MB, despite archiving anything over 30 days and burning anything over a year to DVD for “permanent archiving”. I write permanent in quotes because digital media is not permanently retrievable. I think it’s actually permanent in other ways, like permanently burned to disk or permanently lost or permanently removed from the server. So anyway, unsolicited email increased over the course of two years. I only digressed because I met an SES speaker who mentioned that he stored important files on SyQuest disks and now cannot get those files because the SyQuest drive is obsolete.  I am also in that same boat - permanent storage on magneto-optic discs - but no working drive to read them.

Another speaker reminded me about how you can send email through Facebook to people you don’t know personally. It costs one dollar per email to reach some people, more to reach other prominent people and $150 per email to Mark Zuckerberg himself. So here’s an oxymoron, Facebook Bulk Mail, a trusted network that should eliminate spam, profiting from allowing people outside your trusted network to reach your inbox!

 I got a lot of great ideas from Sundeep. He talked about great email headlines generating high email open rates; great layout and content generating better click through; timing and relationship building and so on. But here’s the big payday, if the content is relevant, people will want to read your email, engage with you and your brand and buy more stuff or join your cause, or help you out. 

Imagine the day – another prediction – when everything about you is so well understood, all your interests and friends and dining habits and location are granularly targeted by Facebook and other marketers right to the second on your truly personal, wearable computer. How will you manage storage for all that email that you’ll want to read but cannot get to in a lifetime? The future is in storage.

Ken's Email About Email

My friend Ken sent an email today with a story from Computerworld http://bit.ly/f4wWZP about a company that wants to eliminate email from it's offices. I agree. We'd be better off without 90% of email. This article reminds me of the one Ken sent a while back about the company that made all meetings optional. Only some of us read that one!

In the early days of course, email was cheaper than Telex or cables. Email put an end to the fax, telegram, telex and cable. Then came spam and anti virus and the etiquette of thanks and see you and hi. In a telex or cable those were just a waste of money and time. But if you don't use those words now in email some people think you're rude.

When I first started consulting, I sent one or two sentence emails to my closest contacts, to keep them advised what I was working on. That helped us stay in touch and led to business for me and them. That was ten years before the "status update" on LinkedIn and Facebook. Now I use those instead of email notices. Better still, Facebook and LinkedIn email is actually from people in your network. I haven't gotten any Lottery Winnings notices from either website yet.

My business email is set so your email goes to your folder, i.e. mail from Ken goes to the Ken folder, EB has a folder and all my regular contacts have a rule that brings their mail directly to their own folders. I read everything sent to me by colleagues and real business contacts. I have set every possible rule to eliminate bulk mail. The first instance of email from any unsolicited source is blacklisted at work and at home where I have yet another zillion mailboxes, not to mention all the filters provided by the ISP and the corporate rings of steel. I archive email every 2 days, archiving anything older than 30 days. I have 107 MB on the local machine and 104 MB on the server. At present the inbox has 436 items and an additional 100 in the junk folder. Chances are I won't read more than 1% of these, because all the important ones are routed into folders automatically and are not in the inbox. I have only three unread emails from colleagues.

So if you think about it, with just 20-25 emails per day on business days from people we don't have any interest in dealing with and who somehow bypass all the filters, you or I will have 500 emails per month. Trusted networks are changing the way email works just the same way as email made the fax obsolete. This day's been a long time coming.

AdWords Advice

There's an article in the NY Times about Google AdWords http://nyti.ms/frofsb. I often tell clients the same things. "First start small and second don't give up, but AdWords is not for everyone."

Many times I tell clients that they should begin with just $25 a month. That's about a dollar a day. And of course everyone says, well that won't have any effect on revenue. Of course it probably won't increase revenues at that level of spending. But it will give us good direction on what ads and keywords drive traffic and revenue. What you learn in the beginning, you can apply to a much bigger program later.

Russotti's Paradox

Generally in marketing, whether its a specific consumer segment, a particular geographic target, a particular price point or a demographic, seasonal promotions or event driven demand - assumptions can become self fulfilling prophesies.

For example, people join gyms to get ready for the beach and to lose weight after the holidays. When do gyms advertise? Then all people join gyms when the advertising runs. Then advertising that runs during these periods is more effective than ads at other times. So no ads run outside these periods.

Women take more photos than men. So who are photo advertisements targeted to? Then more women buy cameras. Then over time ads are directed at women and less and less men buy cameras.

The Paradox:

Assumptions whether true or false - are self fulfilling - call it Russotti's Paradox.

The Memex

I am researching collaboration software as background for an upcoming talk I'll be giving at SES Standards Engineering Society, in Boston. During the course of researching synchronous and asynchronous document editing software, I found an interesting reference to a 1945 article in Atlantic Monthly describing a microfilm library, the memex, and you will have to read this yourself to understand that collaborative tools, the concept of hypertext itself, social bookmarking and much more date back to this very interesting article by Vannear Bush, As We May Think.

In part Bush was reacting to the destructive application of science in creating weapons and he conceived of a machine that would compress a whole library into a piece of furniture, allow people to create a new kind of encyclopedia and unlock knowledge. He advocates that scientists should devote their post world war efforts to the peaceful application of technology.

I particularly like this quote from Bush and I plan to use it in my upcoming talk and in my daily work advocating the use of new technology. "The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships."

I'll end here with a recommendation - please stop what you are doing and take a few minutes to read Vannear Bush, As We May Think.

StudioEIS

Museum Figures are sculpted for museums and public institutions around the world. Our good friends at StudioEIS have a wonderful website in Flash which showcases not only their museum figures but also many great pieces from their extensive portfolio.

Used to great effect by museums and exhibition designers, museum figures impact the visual stories museums create. StudioEIS has been creating sculpted museum figures for more than three decades for History, Anthropology, Natural History, Science & Technology museums, Sports museums and Expositions large and small.

We encourage you to get to know StudioEIS.

Find Out More About SEMPO Emerging Technologies Committee

SEMPO Emerging Technologies Committee is a forum for SEMPO members to share information about search as it relates to new platforms like mobile, voice and interactive television.

Open to participation from all SEMPO members, the Emerging Technologies committee is looking for participants with experience in new and emerging technologies.

SEMPO Emerging Technologies Committee is a worthwhile group and participation is a good way to share your experience with others. You can help:

• Develop educational website materials to demystify new technologies for SEMPO members.
• Collect case studies that exemplify successful SEO strategies for emerging medias.
• Host webinars and seminars for education and awareness.
• Conduct research and produce studies that are beneficial to members and to the industry at large. Sample topics: User Acceptance of Mobile Paid Media, Mobile Search: What Users Want and How They are Finding It.
• Develop course material for the SEMPO institute.

Relearning Semantics from Humans

So many people ask me how to optimize a page for search. What are the fundamentals? There are so many articles and blog posts on the fundamentals, but for starters I'd recommend reading the SEO guidelines directly from the main search engines. Google has great SEO advice on their site. Lycos, Yahoo and MSN have SEO advice too. Google's basic instruction is to make the page useful and trust the algorithm. While there's no substitute for good writing, it's still fun to know how Google makes its decisions.

This morning I read an article in Wired,"How Google's Algorithm Rules the Web", and I want to share it with you so you can understand how complicated and how elegant Google's algorithm actually is.

I work on search a fair amount, a lot actually, for someone who is more involved in search optimization (than  in search algorithms) for an occupation. We've tested a zillion different things with our search tools and with our data and our page layouts and content. After years of testing I've concluded there's always tradeoffs and no one way to do search "right". But at the end of the day, if you return relevant results, you've done a good job; and suffice to say that means you've got a good search if for most of the people most of the time, the results are what they want. Every kind of data has peculiarities that make one-size-fits-all approaches problematic. The Wired article refers to this aspect of search saying in effect that Twitter and Bing are trying to exploit niches where Google is not that strong.

If you are expert at search, or optimization or if you are just starting out, please read the article from Wired.

The Science of Managing Search Ads

A colleague forwarded me an article about Google AdWords from the NY Times. I especially liked this part, "For more than one million businesses, Google’s search advertising system is like a hose inundating Web sites with traffic. Managing it effectively, though, is as much art as it is science. It requires a mix of analytics and gamesmanship, a combination of skills that has become vitally important in the Internet age."

You know I agree with this and liken pay per click advertising to commodities trading. Not that I've done commodities trading personally - but there's bidding and competition and risk and return, so there's definitely similarities.

I've got the sense that most of 2009 was like a hose innundating me with information, traffic, decisions.

The intersection of art and science, gamesmanship and analytics at the tip of a firehose - what a place to be!

10 Things You Can Do with Social Media and Some Common Perceptions

Here are 10 things you can do with social media:

• join a group or invite people to join a group
• post a news item or job to LinkedIn
• write a blog article
• tweet
• post a blog comment
• mine leads, find information
• read comments
• respond to comments
• post a video
• make connections with other people

In the last two years I’ve heard many objections to social media. Here are some common perceptions about using social media

• I won’t have time: it’s playtime; there’s no revenue opportunity; I don’t get excited about cost avoidance; I’ll be better off spending time on something else; sitting in front of a computer is for people with lots of free time; we don’t want to appear unresponsive
• My audience doesn’t use social media: e.g. Facebook is for kids; decision makers don’t use social media; CEOs and top executives don’t use Twitter
• I already communicate with my audience: people should meet face to face or communicate by phone; I use listserve and email
• It should be centralized; it is a function for the Marketing Communication team; it has to be monitored; there should be rules; we don’t want public criticism

No doubt in some situations there is an element of truth in each of these perceptions. Engaging in any activity means some time commitment. If it isn’t done well, there won’t be a worthwhile revenue opportunity. It’s true Linkedin is a more likely demographic for certain target audiences than Facebook at present. Certain interactions are more productive face to face and a corporate entity has to protect its brand identity and messaging.

The flip side to this is that all of these perceptions are also partially false. I’ve actually heard people who say that there’s no opportunity reverse course and say they fear they will be flooded with inquiries and won’t have time enough to respond. Being unresponsive can have consequences but social media is not a two way dialogue between the company and the group. Group members are relying on other group members to contribute and respond as well. A good practice would be to listen to what people are saying, facilitate the discussion and correct misperceptions. Plenty of busy CEOs, board members and top decision makers at the most prestigious organizations use Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook for personal and business reasons to stay in touch with colleagues, to follow developments in their field and to keep tabs on competitors. And no doubt meetings, email, telephone and traditional media are all important but as a matter of fact, they aren’t all really centralized under Marketing Communications. On top of that, communications about your company go on all the time between your customers and competitors without involvement or approval by your company. An online forum or group gives companies a chance to be part of the conversation.

Entity is An Authorized Verio Hosting Reseller

Quantifying ROI on Advertising Expense

When measuring ROI on advertising, we should look at immediate sales revenue plus the longer term benefits to branding.

How do you determine ROI on advertising expense or what should you expect from a marketing campaign? These are deceptively difficult questions because a buyer makes decisions based on awareness of a company or its products that likely was built by multiple contacts over a period of time. There is some debate about the influence of TV advertising driving people to search online for a product or a company. Accepting for the moment that people will search a store circular or search online for something they remember seeing on TV, is it fair to credit the TV ad with all the ROI for a given sale?

It’s natural to focus on ROI and it’s easy enough to set a revenue target for an ad campaign, or for that matter, any category of expense such as labor or equipment. Tracking the revenue from an ad campaign can be quite easy in many cases, if your campaign uses any specific tracking parameter: a promotion code, unique product codes or catalog tracking ID, a unique landing page or a pay per click ad. Asking, “Where did you hear about us?” is pretty much automatic in ecommerce and direct marketing. But if you run a car dealership or a dry cleaner or you build houses, it’s not always automatic. Salespeople can ask the same question, “How did you hear about us?” but often the mechanisms for collecting and reporting the answers are not really in place. What’s more in almost any business, maybe the ad was the proximate cause of today’s inquiry or sale, but maybe many other factors were taken into consideration before the ad triggered an action. If your sales cycle is long, then is it realistic to expect immediate revenue from advertising?

Advertising builds awareness, loyalty and credibility, promotes trials or drives repeat purchases. But product quality or store location, customer service and recommendations play a role in purchase decisions too along with myriad other factors. Measurement of advertising effectiveness can attempt to quantify the increase in brand recognition or those types of factors too. Establish clear, realistic goals. Would it be reasonable to set the same ROI objectives for an established product in a competitive market as you would for a new product without any campaign history? Would ROI on print media be the same as an email campaign or outdoor signage? Should you use only the media with the highest ROI for your product and how will that impact market share and target demographics?

So what is a business line manager supposed to do? Set goals, measure, test and constantly improve. When any one of these four elements are weak, advertising is usually cut; and without advertising the business will likely decline. Focus on tracking when designing ads so the performance can be measured; test different ad copy and different media with different target audiences; and try to improve with every iteration.

Original Art and Backups

A small accounting firm called one day because a hard drive crashed. The caller said that years of work had been lost and wanted to know if it could be recovered. Yes, we'd send it to a data recovery firm, they'd open the drive in a cleanroom and probably recover upwards of 95% of the data. It would be around $5,000.

And the moral of the story is that you should keep multiple backups of critical files, client work and original art. I recently had a whole directory damaged by a power outage. But I restored 7,500 files from backup, stress free!

Logos, banner ads, stationery and photos are edited and sized for specific applications. A photo that starts out at 30MB might be scaled down to 20kb for the web and then won't be suitable for printing at 300 dpi at 8.5" x 11". Logos or other files created in Illustrator may wind up in a specific size as a JPG or some other format. Not to mention that artwork can be extremely complicated with layers of text and graphics in the original Illustrator file that are easy to edit in Illustrator but later won't be easily edited as JPGs. It's best to keep the original vector art files so edits can be made later. Getting copies of the original art at the conclusion of a project is a good practice you should consider before working with designers. And then, keeping them organized and backed up is going to save time and money.

Listen to Your Customers

My law professor taught me one of the most important lessons ever, "listen to people who disagree with you." It's as relevant to law as it is to product development.

New product ideas are constantly coming to my attention. Someone has an idea and devises a market for it. Unfortunately, a lot of times it works better if the market tells you what it wants and the product development teams go about making a product to suit the needs of the end users. In market research we fall victim to "confirmation bias". That's our tendency to hear what we want to hear, to ignore things that don't fit our way of thinking and to hear more of what confirms what we may already believe. And worse still we want to make things happen so we are predisposed to say yes. I find it very liberating to say no these days. Next time someone proposes a new product ask them, "Can you prove there's a big enough market for this product?"

Search Optimization Tips

Search optimization comes down to the content on the page. So when designing a website, it's helpful to keep in mind a few search optimization tips. Keep the most important words up front, make important keywords the subjects in the first sentence, put keywords first in the paragraphs. Don't use articles and pronouns like "them", "him", "the" and use nouns instead if you want to emphasize the relevance of a particular noun. Or do the opposite if you want to deemphasize a particular word.

Search is based in part on weight, proximity, frequency and prominence. So the first word, the first sentence and the first paragraph tell readers the most important things and to a search engine they have the most prominence.

Let's take a word like "wings". Wings has different meanings: like wings at Super Bowl; wings on things that fly; wings of buildings and so on. Search engines may gain insight into the connotation of the word based on very advanced algorithms. A reader understands wings in context based in part on the proximity of wings to other words in the sentence or paragraph and a search engine does too.

The first paragraph is about search optimization and keywords. The second paragraph is about search. The third is very heavily weighted to wings. If "wings" were replaced by "it" the weight and frequency of "wings" would go down.