Internet Marketing Blog

Technology Use & Media Consumption Presentation

I've been doing a lot of presentations lately; here's the most recent. I believe that in order to most efficiently and effectively communicate online, we need to first understand the context within which we are trying to communicate. The success of communicating online depends in a large degree to the extent to which we understand the technology and devices people use to consume media, be it a newspaper or a phone or an Xbox 360 console or an iPod, and how people use those technologies.

Another important aspect to online communication is trying to anticipate trends in order to get ahead of innovation, which can profoundly change the online environment practically overnight.  Our ability to anticipate such changes depends to a large degree on our understanding of history and historical forces. Thus, my presentation begins with an overview of the history of communication:

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Separate The Blog Wheat From The Chaff With Comments Heat Maps

How To Evolve Blog Commenting In Three Easy Steps

I've been thinking about social media a lot lately  and how people interact with Web 2.0 technologies and services themselves as well the other people who use those services.

In particular, I've been thinking about the comment function of blogs. And how to improve that function.

As a football nut and a die-hard Vikings fan who still reads everything about the team despite their abysmal record this year, I spend a lot of time on Vikings blogs, especially the Star Tribune's superb Access Vikings blog by their beat writers Judd Zulgad and Kevin Seifert. 

I'm sure it's one, if not the, most popular Strib blog. There is certainly a lot of participation by its  readers. A post from yesterday about Daunte Culpepper coming back to town boasts 162 comments.

I often read the comments because there's some very good stuff in there, but wading through the crap and the banter from one reader to another is usually a waste of time. Separating the conversational wheat from the chaff is a problem for all blogs with a lot of reader participation, not just Access Vikings.

Step One

I'd love to see some smart programmers at Six Apart or Blogger or some open source guru create a plugin for WordPress that would do this: Allow me (as a registered user of the blog in question) to annotate the blog post and apply highlighting and/or my own comments in the form of, say, a sticky note(s) that I can place anywhere on the page.

Step Two

It would also have a function like the fantastic ClickTale service that gives you a "recording" of each site visitor's behavior on the page by following mouse movements. I often, for instance, click and drag my mouse over text to highlight interesting text. I don't know why I do it, but I do. That behavior could be captured.

Step Three

Combining ClickTale recordings with the sticky notes data should give you enough aggregate data to create a heat map for that page.

Apply heat maps to the blog comments and, voila, as a blog reader I've got a quick visual representation of the relative "interestingness" of blog comments. And as a blogger, I'd get extremely valuable data on how people were interacting with my blog.

Perhaps someone could come up with a semantic solution that analyzes the text of blog comments and the frequency with which blog comments refer to other comments or commenters to determine "interestingness."

However it's arrived at, we sorely need a solution and it seems to me that the technology is probably already in place to create it.

Twitter Has Abandoned Me & My Broken Twitter Account

I have not been able to post to the e-strategy.com Twitter microblog account since August 21.

I don't know if I've found a Twitter bug or not, but something sure is broken. When I try to post a message to that account, everything appears to work normally but the tweet (an individual blog post on Twitter) just does not get posted. I get no error message nor any hint that anything is wrong except for the fact that my tweet does not get posted.

I have a personal Twitter account that works just fine. I've tried posting to the e-strategy.com Twitter account from different computers and from my phone and from IM and I've even tried posting through Twitter's mobile interface at m.twitter.com, all to no avail.

I've posted a help request twice with Twitter but I've yet to hear from them, so either I'm being ignored or they are not getting my help requests. I did request help through my working personal account and I haven't heard back from them yet, so I draw your own conclusions.

The only thing that appears to be working is the email notifications that tell me when someone has started following me. The number of followers on my account does not go up accordingly, but I am getting email notifications.

I could always abandon the e-strategy.com Twitter account and start a new one but I'd rather not abandon all the time I've invested in the current one.  You'd think Twitter would want to find out what is going on with such drastic flaw.

NFL.com Redesign & Search Engine Marketing Blunder

Darren Sharper Tackles Cedric Benson 
Originally uploaded by NicelySighted

The fundamentals in football are how to block, how to tackle, how to catch and how to pass. One of the fundamentals of redesigning a web site is to preserve, or at least account for, existing inbound links to the site.

So it was odd to discover after the redesign of NFL.com was unveiled amid much fanfare, that they changed the URL structure of the pages of individual football player's profiles but failed to account for all the links that pointed to the old player profiles.

Pro Football Bloggers' Links To NFL.com

According to Google, there are 22,800 inbound links to the root NFL.com domain. As of this writing, Technorati lists more than 67,000 blog posts linking to NFL.com. That's a lot of links representing a lot of traffic and a major marketing blunder.

As someone who blogs quite a bit about pro football, the league's failure to account for existing links to their site is especially annoying because all of the links I have to player profiles prior to the redesign are now broken.  This is obviously lost traffic to NFL.com, but, more importantly to me, the broken links create a horrible user experience for the readers of my blog posts. They get is an error page rather than the player profile they were expecting.

The extremely frustrating thing for me is that long ago I made it policy to link to a player's NFL profile under the reasonable assumption that the links wouldn't change. The problem of linking to team profiles is that players change teams though trades, free agency, and cuts and that results in broken links. It's reasonable to assume that many other football bloggers came to the same conclusion.

Perhaps I should only link to Wikipedia player bios from now on.

But it is not just links from blogs that have been broken, the links from the search engines are broken, too, and that's a user experience and branding problem for the NFL.

NFL.com's Search Engine Optimization

I'll use Minnesota Vikings safety Darren Sharper to illustrate NFL.com's previous URL structure for player profiles. The URL for Sharper's profile on NFL.com was http://www.nfl.com/players/4249.htm. The new URL is http://www.nfl.com/players/darrensharper/profile?id=SHA500479. Note that they've included the player's name in the URL itself, while the old URL only used an ID number.

As of this writing, this is what the Google search results look like for "Darren Sharper":

You'll notice from the screenshot above that the link for Sharper's old profile reads "NFL.com #42 Darren Sharper." That text is taken from the HTML TITLE Tag of the page. The new player profile pages use only the player's name in the TITLE Tag. Couple that with the inclusion of the player's name in the URL and it becomes obvious that the redesigned site is intended to be search optimized in order to boost the page's rankings on the search engine results pages.

If the NFL knew enough to optimize the redesigned site for search engines, wouldn't they know enough to account for existing inbound links? Apparently not.

When you click on the link to Sharper's profile from the search results, you get an error page. That creates a frustrating user experience for NFL.com and that frustration hurts the NFL brand.

Site Redesign Fundamentals

The fundamentals for dealing with an issue that many site's must deal with are well known and relatively painless: 1) permanent 301 redirects to seamlessly point an old page to a new one in a "search engine friendly" manner so that you do not lose your search ranking, and 2) using an XML sitemap to tell the search engines about your new pages. NFL.com does neither.

The NFL certainly doesn't need search engines to drive traffic to NFL.com. They've got television to do that. But the fact remains that NFL.com is listed in the search engines and accounting for broken links should have been done with the redesign. It's obvious the NFL has a pretty sizable Internet marketing budget, so you'd think their Internet marketing team would have planned for that.

Blogger Liaisons

Any organization with mass popular appeal that is likely to have a lot of people blogging about them--which is especially applicable to professional sports leagues--should think seriously of creating a blogger liaison. This person would have a blog themselves and reach out to bloggers, solicit their feedback, inform them of issues that may affect them and answer questions, etc.

An obvious example that will immediately spring to mind for those in the search marketing industry, is Matt Cutts who performs that very function for Google's relations with the search engine marketing community.

If the NFL had a blogger liaison and informed pro football bloggers about an upcoming site redesign, I'm absolutely certain those bloggers would have worried about broken links and the NFL would have become aware of the issue prior to the launch of their redesigned site.

Internet Branding With Icons

Some time ago I was scrolling through my Twitter friends list on my smart phone and the importance of icons suddenly became obvious.

I was frustrated because I was trying to find a particular friend but his Twitter account had the default logo; he hadn't yet customized it. I couldn't find him at a glance. I had to click on each of the people in my friends list who had default icons until I found the friend for whom I was looking.

Time is the one thing everyone has the least of, so when yours is wasted, you tend to get annoyed. It's worse on mobile devices because they generally have slower Internet connections. Because the screen is so small, there is less information available to you at a glance and you therefore have to wade through more of it until you find what you are looking for.

Customized icons are a usability issue and a branding tool. A customized icon allows your audience to identify your content at a glance and with ease. I may love your content and want to consume it but scanning text for it takes much longer than recognizing your graphical icon.

If you're using a tabbed browser, look up at the open tab and you'll see my icon: a gold letter e on a white background with a thin gold border. Look at your browser's address bar and you'll see that very same icon to the left of the http:// part of this blog's URL.

The following is a screenshot of my personal twitter page with my friends list on the right. See how long it takes you to find the e-strategy.com "e" icon among my friends:

Blog Branding With Favicons

For all intents and purposes, favicons are no different from the icons I've been talking about.  (Wikipedia provides a full explanation of favicons.)

It is particularly important to use favicons with your blog because it helps brand your content offsite through RSS distribution.  In Minnesota, we have a local blog aggregator hosted by the MNSpeaks site. The MNSpeak aggregator recognizes when you update your blog and then includes a summary of and a link to your blog post among it's recently updated blogs list. The following graphic shows a portion of that aggregator with a listing from this blog. The orange icons are the default icon for Google's Blogger platform.

Many people subscribe to their favorite blogs through custom start pages such as MyYahoo. This is an example of how a subscription to e-strategy.com's Internet Marketing Blog looks on MyYahoo.

Popular feed readers like Bloglines use icons to identify source blogs:

Finally, the icon can help identify your content on the primary tool people use every time they go online, the browser. If someone bookmarks your site, the icon will display next to your listing in their bookmarks:

Tabbed browsing is now a standard feature of all browsers. The icon will display on tabs, as well, so it is a great tool for helping your visitor quickly identify your content amongst the pages she has open. The following screenshot shows a browser with many tabs open. The orange icons are blogs that use the default Blogger favicon; the blue and white icons are the default favicon for TypePad blogs; this blog is located on the tab furthest to the left:

So How Do I Do It?

I've convinced you of the importance of using icons, you probably want to know how to do it.  thesitewizard.com provides an excellent tutorial about how to create and implement a favicon.

The favicon works for your blog or web site, but you'll need to create a .jpg or .gif graphic to use with services such as Twitter and other web services like MySpace and Flickr and Technorati. The graphic's dimensions vary with each service and they will usually tell you at the upload step the dimensions they require. If not, check their documentation. A stretched out graphic can look pretty bad, so you'll want to comply with their size requirements.

Finally, if you use the Feedburner RSS service, be sure to optimize your feed with your graphic because that's where services like MyYahoo and Bloglines find your icon.

Microsoft Surface

Hot on the heels of my Minority Report computer user interface post comes this: Microsoft Surface (see Engadget's hands-on photos). Microsoft Surface is a table-top, multi-touch sensitive computer user interface. This explains what Jeff Han has been doing since his TED Conference presentation:

Microsoft Surface Promotional Video

Microsoft Surface Demonstration

Minority Report Computer User Interface Demonstration At TED

This isn't necessarily directly related to Internet marketing, but it is pertinent because those of us in the field need to know how people interact with technology. This video clip is a demonstration at the TED Conference by Jeff Han, a research scientist for New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, of an interface-free, touch sensitive computer screen.

Yesterday, I blogged about Sony's Flexible OLED Video Screen and it's potential fulfillment of the electronic newspaper as portrayed in the film Minority Report. Han's computer interface is very much like the one found in that very same film:

Flash MP3 Player

Last Friday I discussed the changing expectations on the multimedia web and how people are increasingly expecting to be able to take control over online content.

With the explosion of online audio and, specifically, the MP3 files that populate music blogs and podcasts, there is really no excuse for not making those files playable directly from your web site or blog so that your visitors don't have to download the file to play it.

Fortunately, the popular social bookmarking service del.icio.us provides free for anyone who wants to use it, a nice little strip of JavaScript code they call Play Tagger that will enable a lightweight and elegant Flash MP3 player on your site any time you link directly to an MP3 file.

We include the script by default in the blogs we set up for clients and there's no reason you shouldn't use it as well if you ever link to an MP3 file. It is well worth the minimal time it requires to paste it into your site in order to vastly improve the usability of your site.

The links below demonstrate the del.icio.us Flash MP3 Player. Click on the blue arrow icon to play the file and you'll see it start working; you can pause and stop the player as well as tag the file into your del.icio.us account.

If you hover your cursor over one of the hyperlinks below, you'll see in the status bar at the bottom of your browser that they are direct links to MP3 files, so your visitors could actuall right-click on the link and download the file directly to your computer.

• Engadget Podcast 082 - 07.16.2006 - My favorite technology/gadgets podcast.
• Daily SearchCast Podcast - July 18, 2006 - Search podcast from Search Engine Watch.

Expectations On The Multimedia Web

A couple of weeks ago I had an epiphany.

I was scrolling through the hundreds of headlines I have to scan every day and noticed an interview with an Internet marketing luminary on a current topic that I knew I must read. The blub beneath the headline said it was a telephone interview.

I clicked on the headline, got to the web page, noticed the Q & A format, noticed the interview was long, and then immediately began looking for the play button so I could listen to it instead of having to read it. To my great annoyance, I coudn't find a play button and I had to go on to other things, interview unread, because I simply did not have the time to devote to so much text.

The blogger who conducted the interview had said it was a telephone interview. So, in this digital age, why was there not an audio file to accompany the Q & A? I mean, c'mon. He had to transcribe the thing so I can't imagine he didn't record it. What gives?

I realized that my annoyance and frustration with the lack of audio was due to two factors: 1) the ubiquity now of broadband audio and video has conditioned me to expect it, and 2) I have only so much time in my 31-hour day; I wanted to multitask yet the site didn't allow me to do that.

For years I've been using the phrase the "Impatience Economy" with clients to illustrate the need to deliver quickly to your audience. If you don't, they'll leave and you'll lose them.

And it seems their impatience is growing greater with each passing year.

Of Online Forms & Frustration

Karl Long has a great post at ExperienceCurve about sign-up forms.

As a marketer, my natural inclination is to get as much demographic data as possible and forms are one way of doing that. But I learned early on that less is much more where forms are concerned.

As a general rule, the less information you ask for in an online form, the more likely you'll get someone to fill one out and submit it. If the minimum requirement of an online form is an email address, then you always have the ability to follow up with an email survey if you want to collect more demographic data on your visitors.

But the last thing you want to do is annoy your potential customers, so design your forms keeping that in mind. Always ask yourself what is the absolute minimum information you need to complete the purpose of the form. Keep it simple and easy for your visitors.

A Practical Use For A Google Mashup

We just launched a Google Maps mashup for our client, Minnesota Martinizing Dry Cleaning. If you're unfamiliar with the concept, a "Google Maps mashup" is simply putting one source of online data on top of a Google map, so you have data points on the map.

In the case of our client, we created a Minnesota dry cleaners map that features all of their Minnesota locations. If you click on one of the balloons on the map, you get a pop up window with the address and telephone number of the location, as well as a text box to enter your starting location so you can get directions. This is an example of a very practicle use for Google Maps that can add value and usability to your online presence.

For an example of a Google Maps mashup that is purely a marketing vehicle, check out HBO's absolutely amazingly done Sopranos Map. Click on a location on the map and you get a short video clip from season five of what happened at that location, a text blurb explaining the context, and other information that is tightly integrated into the Sopranos section of HBO's site.

The Soprano's map created a lot of online buzz when it was released and that buzz helps create excitement for season six that begins this Sunday.

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Ecommerce Web Site Design

A new study by web development firm Questus using their online survey service BigLook, finds that web site design and usability are critical factors that influence online transactions. Though the findings are based on an Internet survey of a puny sample size of 425 employed American adults, the results corroborate an October 2002 Consumer Reports WebWatch survey of 2600 Americans. Because of that, I believe the Questus study has validity.

The Questus study found that good design leads to better sales. Specifically, though price was the most influential factor when making a decision to buy a product on a web site (68% said it was), other factors such as shipping options (44%), product descriptions (38%), site navigation (37%), and the checkout process (32%) were critical factors as well.

Fifty-one percent of the respondents said that they had purchased something from a web site this holiday season from whom they had never purchased before.

Sixty-eight percent of the respondents said that they would distrust a web site that did not have a professional appearance, compared to the 8% who said they'd trust a web site that did not look professional and the 24% who said it didn't matter either way.

A clean, easy-to-use site is important in closing the online sale. Jeff Rosenblum, co-founder and research and strategy director of Questus, says that customers want an uncluttered, obvious site design that doesn't overwhelm them with choices. Surfers were more likely to complain of a site having too many links rather than too few.

The study found that 29% left a site without buying something because they did not want to register with the site; 22% felt it too difficult to find products on the site; and 17% did not believe the site was trustworthy or secure.

The Questus survey is in line with the comprehensive 2002 WebWatch report, How do people evaluate a web site's credibility?

The WebWatch report found that "nearly half of all consumers (or 46.1%) in the study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size and color schemes."

Further, "consumer credibility-related comments about visual design issues occurred with more frequency with finance (54.6%), search engines (52.6%), travel (50.5%), and e-commerce sites (46.2%), and with less frequency when assessing health (41.8%), news (39.6%), and nonprofit (39.4%) sites."