Internet Marketing Blog

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.

Google Conversion University Video

Google does a great job at producing instructional and educational video. This one was released yesterday by the Google Analytics team and was shot at the first Google Conversion University event. Analytics is Google's free web site traffic statistics service. I love it; it's got amazing depth and sophistication that allows you to analyze in detail how people are arriving at and using your site. This video gives you a nice overview of the service:

See also:

• Google Analytics Video Tutorial

TypePad's Embeddable Maps Bug Work Around

I am impressed with SixApart's customer service. 

I got an email last night from them providing a workaround for the problem I detailed in my post on Wednesday, TypePad's Embeddable Maps Bug, a mere day later.  This is the solution they gave me:

At Weblogs > Posts, click on the title of the post to go to the Compose page. Click on the "Customize the display of this page." link toward the end of the page. Select Plain Text and click Save Changes. The page will refresh and display only the HTML for the post which will allow you to edit the post. Click Save changes when you are done editing. More information is available in the Customizing the Post Page Display article.

When adding complex HTML, including embed code, to your posts, we highly recommend using the Plain Text editor. More information on adding HTML to posts is available here.

It works perfectly.

The Google Maps embed code uses the IFRAME tag, which I suspect is what is causing the problem in TypePad.

TypePad's Embeddable Maps Bug

I've discovered a bug in TypePad's blogging system. I believe it has not yet been discovered by SixApart because I couldn't find reference to it in TypePad's Knowledge Base nor on their Everything TypePad blog.

You'll notice at the beginning of my last post, Gmail - Customer Generated Video, the first line begins with this typo: "ofIn mid-July Google asked their Gmail users to submit video clips that..."

I cannot go back and fix that "of" at the beginning of my first sentence because TypePad won't allow me to. When I click on the post to edit it, the text from the post displays briefly but then displays the post as follows:

I cannot access the posts using the Edit HTML feature nor can I get at it by making the editing canvas bigger.

The post contains text, hyperlinks, an image of the Gmail logo, an embedded YouTube video and an embedded Google Map. I have never had any problems with using any of these elements within a blog post except with Google Maps.

I came across the bug first on August 23, when I wrote about Google Maps' new embeddable code in a post titled Google Makes Embedding Maps A Breeze.

I have not tested using another map service like Microsoft's, so I don't know if it is embeddable maps in general that are causing the problem, or Google Maps in particular.

Regardless, it's an annoying little bug that I hope SixApart gets fixed right away. And while they're at it, maybe they could make their system much more accessible to smart phones.

I want to use the web interface on my Pocket PC phone.

See Also:

• TypePad's Embeddable Maps Bug Workaround

Explanation Of Web 2.0 Video

This is a very good explanation of Web 2.0 by Andy Gutmans, the Co-founder of Zend. He explains the technologies that power Web 2.0, the applications and services that comprise Web 2.0, and the role of the end-user in Web 2.0.

Open Source Vs. Proprietary?

I've recently been looking into a lot of open source web-based technology and I've become more and more impressed with the solutions. Most of the Web 2.0 technology is built using open source software or platforms of one type or another.  Open source solutions can be particularly appealing to small businesses and nonprofits, primarily because they are free.

There are basically  three types of open source products: 1) Actual software like Linux or OpenOffice, 2)  scripting languages like PHP, or web services or applications like WordPress.  Despite my previously discussed gripe about the lack of documentation, I can give you several reasons to consider using open source:

1. It's free.
2. The premise of open source is that by taking advantage of a global community of developers, and because the code is available to anyone, you can more quickly create stable software and more quickly identify problems/bugs/glitches and more quickly fix them. And, because you have a global pool of talent that is contributing plug-ins and extensions back to a given project, the features and functions are expanded a great deal at the same great price.
3. The open source Web platforms I've looked at and/or worked with a extremely sophisticated and in most cases, match commercial products feature for feature.
4. Open source just looks like the future to me. Who would've thought, but it is pure communism! If people are willing to give such sophisticated solutions away for free, businesses are going to adopt them and there's no way commercial products will be able to compete. I'm not suggesting you switch over without a thorough consideration of your needs and capabilities, but there's a reason Google uses the Linux operating system.
5. In many cases, open source offers you an out-of-the-box solution so it makes no sense to try and build one from scratch when you've got one already available for free.
6. I've been increasingly seeing more and better open source Web platform solutions written in PHP than stuff written in Microsoft's development languages like ASP.

Open Source Manual Writers

Open source and I did not start out on the right foot.

Open source is software that is developed globally via the Internet by anyone who wants to contribute through freely available source code. Developers can contribute by fixing bugs, adding features, or extending functionality with the understanding that the resulting software will be free for anyone to use and modify, if they want.

My first experience with open source was a project that required we use ChiliSoft, the open source version of Microsoft's Active Server Pages scripting language for building dynamic web sites.

It was a nightmare because there was no documentation you could consult when you ran into a problem. If you encountered an error or bug, you had to just sorta figure it out yourself. Microsoft, by comparison, has extensive documentation for ASP.  If you encounter a problem, there's a place for you to find a definitive answer to solve your problem.

While I've warmed considerably to open source solutions, the lack of documentation is still a major drawback if you decide to use open source. If there is a user manual included, it's most likely bare bones.

What generally passes for documentation for a given open source project is an online discussion board where you can find threads that typically begin with "Has anyone had this problem...?" followed by a discussion of the board members trying to diagnose the problem and sometimes arriving at a solution, sometimes not.

The open source movement has a lot going for it: Full featured, sophisticated, extensible, and stable software solutions that, by the way, are free. But the major flaw is that because of the lack of adequate documentation, you end up spending a lot more labor diagnosing and solving problems than you would with proprietary software.

What the open source movement desperately needs are open source writers. Not coders. Coders are usually not experts at the written word and, because they're technically proficient, they often take for granted that the people reading the manuals will have the same technical acumen as themselves. When coders write manuals, the manuals are often unreadable.

What the open source movement needs are people who can write software manuals in lay language. You occasionally see a wiki  that's been set up to serve as the documentation for an open source project.

That's a great idea, but the wiki's I've seen used for this purpose have been hit and miss, often incomplete and inadequate. It seems to me that there should be some agreed-upon standard for open source documentation that people working on open source projects can come to expect.

Perhaps the solution is to include within the message board software prompts to encourage users to contribute their solutions to the wiki manual.

I just don't think that open source software can really gain mainstream adoption until this particular problem is solved.

Apple's Safari Web Browser For Windows

When I read yesterday that Apple had released a Windows version of their Safari browser, I rolled my eyes. The last thing I need to worry about his how clients' web sites display in a browser that uses a fundamentally different rendering engine than the two dominant browsers, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

I've worked on projects that required a "Safari compatible" web site and I gotta tell you, it's no fun at all. Since the browser displays web sites often radically differently than Internet Explorer and Firefox, you end up spending a massive amount of time testing and refining the code to display properly in all browsers. It is just a phenomenal amount of work for such a tiny audience.

So I downloaded Safari and tried it out and so far so good but I've only used it on a few sites. Despite what Steve Jobs says, it just ain't all that fast. It hasn't crashed on me yet but I am apparently the exception.

Safari will apparently be the development platform for the iPhone; if that device takes off, then, Safari testing may become routine for anyone doing mobile web marketing.

Ugh.

Sony's Flexible OLED Video Screen

Sony has developed the first flexible, full-color organic light-emitting diode (OLED) video display built on organic thin-film transistor (TFT) technology.

This technological breakthrough brings us that much closer to the elusive science fiction vision of the electronic newspaper, such as the one portrayed in the movie Minority Report:

A practical electronic newspaper technology could very well revive the moribund dead-tree based media and has some rather obvious and profound implications for online PR and mobile marketing.

MySpace Presidential Primary

I was a guest on The Loop, a segment of G4 TV's Attack of the Show video game program. The segment aired on the 24th and it addressed the MySpace Primary. They asked me to be a guest because of my role as co-publisher of Politics In Minnesota and because I cover online politics quite a bit.

The other guest was Sarah Wheaton, a political reporter and blogger for the New York Times. The host is Kevin Pereira. The appearance was a bit of a treat for me because I'm a fan of the show and, though we didn't talk video games, I'm a fan of G4 TV's video game channel, as well. 

Watch the episode.

Yahoo! & Netscape Get Facelifts

If you hadn't noticed yet, both Yahoo! and Netscape have unvield their redesigned home pages.

Yahoo! is going with the highly customizable, AJAXy Web 2.0 approach.

Netscape, on the other hand, is taking an entirely different approach with their digg-like interface where users can submit news stories and actively promote or demote what stories get top billing. As with digg, this is another potential traffic-driver site.

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.

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."

Micro Marketing On The Tiny Screen

The New York Times had an interesting article on the future of television-type advertising on Monday, making the case that microvideo advertisements will soon be coming to a cell phone near you.

You might want to add the iPod and Playstation Portable to the mix.

With Apple's introduction of the wildly successful video iPod and the additon of $1.99 video downloads from their iTunes store, and Sony's success with their wi-fi-enabled handheld video game system, the PSP, microvideo marketing is poised to take off.

Consider that Google's video search makes it easy for video content creators to find an audience and Google searchers to easily find the video they want, clever maketers will start thinking about compelling video content to push their message through this new channel.

Blog Search Engine Technorati Adds Features

Blog search engine Technorati rolled out some great improvements on Monday.

The best feature is a topic popularity chart that displays the number of posts that contain your search term per day for the past 30 days. When you search, for example, for posts about the movie King Kong, you'll see an accompanying chart on the left hand side of the page showing the relative interest in the topic within the blogosphere for the past month.

With the addition of a topic popularity chart, Technorati can be used to take the temperature of the blogosphere for your favorite topic.

Other blog search engines have such topic popularity charts, so It's nice that the 800 pound gorilla of blog search decided to provide such a feature. Now, if they could only expand on the idea.

Website Redesign

Business Website Redesign Planning

The reasons organizations redesign their website can range anywhere from simply improving the functionality and look of their current site, to adding ecommerce, to meeting the heightened expectations of customers.

A website redesign can be an exciting endeavor for an organization, but it is also a potentially perilous project. Since the vast majority of traffic to most websites comes through search engines, it is essential that organizations take this into account when planning a redesign.

There are several important things you should keep in mind as you plan your redesign:

Your Current Online Presence

Website Traffic

Examine your website's traffic statistics closely before you embark on your redesign. Ideally, you should have a year's worth of data to examine in order to account for any seasonal fluctuations in traffic, such as holiday shopping seasons. Pay close attention to such things as the number of visitors and page views and average visitors and page views, both monthly and daily; most popular pages; most popular exit and entry pages; most popular paths through your site; the websites (including search engines) that drive the most traffic to your site; and the most popular search phrases that are used to find your site.

These statistics will tell you the areas of your site's structure that should not be altered, and what areas of your site you can afford to change or eliminate. The stats will also give you a baseline for measuring the relative success of the redesigned site after it is launched.

Existing Links To Your Web Site

Determine which external websites currently link to your site and the specific pages to which they link.

External links are an important factor that search engines consider when deciding where to rank a given website in their search results pages.

They give special weight to "on-topic" links from "authority" sites. So, for example, A New York Times story about vintage cars that links to your vintage cars website is given more weight than a car enthusiast's personal website that links to your site.

Among the recent changes that Google has made in their method for ranking websites, it is believed that they give added weight for links that have been in place over a long period of time. The reasoning behind this change is that it combats against site owners who go out and buy a ton of unrelated links for their newly launched website.

Obviously, then, you'll want to know what pages people are linking to and to be careful about breaking those links by deleting or altering those pages. Websites that have been around a long time will generally have more sites linking to them than newer sites.

Website Structure

The layout of the individual web pages on your site and the folder structure and file-naming convention can all affect how search engines rank your website.

Search Engine Hostile Technology

There are several technologies that create obstacles--some insurmountable--to successful search engine marketing. While redesigning your Web site, you should be aware of the following dangers:

Portable Document File (PDF):

Organizations will often upload new content to their Web site in the form of Adobe's popular PDF format, usually in the form of a press release or a newsletter. The reason organizations do this is fairly obvious: 1) The format is widely popular, so most people can read the files, and 2) the PDF format allows for more design flexibility than web pages, so you can offer more visually appealing documents.

There are, however, a few problems with using PDFs on your website.
First and foremost, while search engines such as Google are getting better at reading these files, they are not nearly as good at it as they are at reading what they were originally designed to do, read ordinary web pages.

What that means from a search marketing standpoint is that you have less control over what elements of the document the search engines read than you do with an ordinary web page.

Another danger of uploading new content only in PDF format, is that if done incorrectly, the user experience of your visitors will suffer.

Ideally, you want your visitors' experience on your website to be as smooth and seamless as possible. When a visitor on your site clicks on a link to a PDF document and hasn't been forewarned that it's a PDF, it creates an abrupt and unexpected interruption to the visitor's experience because the Acrobat PDF program must first launch before the file can be viewed, and this process takes much longer than it does for a Web page to download, forcing the visitor to wait unnecessarily. Try downloading tax forms from your state government website, and you'll know what I mean.

Further, they often defeat the aim of creating a unified brand experience through the website because these PDF documents often do not look like the design of the Website to which they belong.

Finally, when a visitor clicks on a PDF link, all of the website's navigational elements disappear, forcing your visitors to use their browser's back button in order to return to your website proper, rather than using the navigational system to which they've grown accustomed.

While the scenario above does present a negative user experience, at least your visitor is already familiar with your website and presumably knows they can return to it by using their back button. The same cannot be said for a visitor who arrives at your site by clicking on a PDF link from a search engine.

A first-time visitor who comes to your website through a search engine's PDF link is often stranded once that document loads because, as I said above, there are no navigational elements to the rest of your website. It is unsafe to assume that your visitors are savvy enough to strip the web page address in their browser's address bar down to your domain name in order to get to your home page. Failing that option, then, the only thing the visitor can do to move on in their surfing session is to either click on their browser's home or back buttons--in either case, they've left your website and you've most likely lost a repeat visitor.

If you absolutely must have PDFs on your site, label them as such in the link to them and offer a web version.

Flash

Macromedia's Flash technology is great for many purposes but more often than not, it is the culprit in preventing more than one page from your website from getting listed in search results.

Let me say from the outset that I love Flash technology--when it is used properly and when it is used to accomplish a specific purpose. But I don't think using Flash simply to use it is a good idea. Websites that are built entirely in Flash should be avoided at all costs--unless you're Nike and you've got a huge TV advertising budget to drive traffic to your site and don't care about search engine traffic.

I have seen companies pay thousands of dollars for a beautiful Flash website and then wonder why they get only a handful of visitors a month. It is because a website done entirely in Flash usually consists of one Flash file and the search engines essentially treat that file as a graphics file, which they cannot read.

Search engines eat text for a living. It is the text of a website that search engines examine in order to best mach your search query with a given web page. The words in graphics files are embedded within that graphic file and are therefore invisible to search engines. They cannot read it. The same principle holds true for Flash files.

If your website is done entirely in Flash, all of your content will be invisible to the search engines, so when people search using keywords that would normally be associated with your website, you will not have any links in their search engine results.

JavaScript & HTML

Like Flash, JavaScript and DHTML are useful technologies, when used correctly. But they are often implemented in a fashion that will prevent search engines from easily reading your website and, as a result, keep your content from getting listed in the search engines. The foremost problem with these technologies is when they are used to create a dynamic navigation system, such as drop-down menus: They often break up links to the interior pages of your website in a way that prevents search engines from reaching those pages, and therefore, from listing them in their search results.

Professional Website Redesign Roadmap

These are a few of the important pitfalls you should avoid when redesigning your website. In order to ensure that your new website performs well in the search engines, you should hire a design firm that has expertise in search marketing or you should hire a professional search marketer to help you build your website redesign roadmap and to work with your website redesign team.

The Meaning Of Colors - Color Psychology & Internet Marketing

A subscriber to one of the email newsletters we manage wrote to the client asking why they used blue text instead of black for the body copy. The client didn't know if it was just a silly question so they asked us if there was a specific reason why we decided upon blue rather than black text.

These are the types of things we're paid to pay attention to, so we did have a response for them:

We decided on the color blue because it represents wisdom, trust, and loyalty. People wear blue outfits for job interviews because the color suggests dedication and loyalty. Blue is the favorite color of the majority of both men and women. The color relaxes our nervous system and has a sobering effect on the mind; it can cause people to be more contemplative. Studies show that students score higher and weightlifters lift heavier weights in blue rooms. People retain more when reading information written in blue text.

Black, on the other hand, is a controversial color. It is associated with demons, witches and the devil. It is the color of despair and morning. It symbolizes evil characters and criminal activities—think of the black-hatted villains of Westerns.

You may think difference between black and blue text in an email newsletter to be a distinction without much of a difference. But think about how people consume information online. When reading a print publication, people tend to devote much more concentration to read more words. When people consume online information, however, they tend to devote far less concentration--scanning instead of reading--perhaps because of the sheer volume of information at their fingertips.

Given the short attention spans of people online and one of the primary goals of email newsletters--to build a relationship with subscribers--any minute edge can be the difference between subscribers opening your email or ignoring it. One of the primary reasons people open one email over another is that it comes from a trusted source. Any way you can reinforce that trust--even if it's through blue text--will help your email newsletter efforts succeed.

More reading on color psychology:

• Color Wheel Pro - Color Meaning
• FactMonster.com - What colors mean
• About.com Desktop Publishing - Color Meanings
• ColorMatters.com
• Sibagraphics.com - Colors in cultural context
• WebWhirlers.com - Colors on the Web

Yahoo's My Web

Many web sites, particularly news web sites, do not permanently archive their content even though they offer it free to the public. I've never quite understood the logic, especially in this day of bloggers linking to new stories, of not maintaining a permanent archive, but there it is. 

Likewise, I subscribe to some email newsletters that tease content in my inbox and provide a link to the full story that expires after a week. If I ignore the their emails for a couple of weeks and then go back to catch up, I'm out of luck.

My solution is Yahoo!'s My Web. Currently in beta, the service allows anyone with a Yahoo! account to save, categorize, and annotate specific web pages. The service actually allows you to save entire web pages, graphics and all, to your account. You can add notes to the page and "tag" it with a category you create. All of your saved items are searchable and sortable by tags. Yahoo calls My Web a "social search engine." You can share "your web" with everyone using the service, only with "your community" of people you've invited to the service, or just for yourself.

Tags are categories you supply to identify a given web page as a member of that group. Tags are also, essentially, free meta information about the page in question that you are providing the search engine. Tags help Yahoo! better understand that web page, which in turn helps them provide more accurate search results.

Yahoo is not alone, or even the first, to use tagging of web pages. The blog search engine Technorati uses tagging, as do the social bookmarking site del.icio.us, and the online photo album service Flickr.

For anyone who does a lot of online research, Yahoo's My Web is a wonderful tool.