Retro logo porn

For youse designers out there…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_carl/sets/72157604144345854/

First day on the job

So as it happens my first day on the job happened a day before I started… On top of a conference call about some handover notes I had yesterday I attended the annual event (top level results and plans for the year and bowling). And of course I managed to make a complete fool of myself by losing footing on the lane and falling flat on my arse in front of every one. Well, it broke the ice.

Instead of the ‘normal’ two week shadowing process as one of the other consultants is away I will be on the clients account and charging from the minute I walk in the door. I knew it was going to different from the public sector but that is very very different indeed – and in a good way.

So now begins a month of head down work on a retail contract where the FIVE brand managers involved apparently can’t figure out what they want, we can’t seen to help them and the spec document and designs are due in a week. So it’s all on…

Get this and you will make your company real money

From the rather wonderful http://stuffthathappens.com

New Optional Benchmarking Feature Available in Google Analytics

That was the entire message line (no body) on an email from google.com. Ok, assuming it’s a good email what the hell does it mean?!

Ah, yes, here’s the announcement on the GA blog and the basic idea is you can compare your site to others in your same ‘vertical’ (ie Industry) BUT – and it’s a biggie – only if you OPT-IN and share your anonominised data with Google.

A couple of things strike me here:

1. Will it be capable of being regionalised?
2. Who decides what vertical a site is in?
3. Um, weren’t we sharing this data anyway!?!?!

But if it pans out and you are in a clear vertical then this might be wonderful and something of an analysts holy grail – indeed if it does work then you are going to have to run GA alongside your other packages as no one else will have this kind of hitting power on the data.

Very interesting…

4Q

Avinash Kaushik

Is a very clever man. If you are an analytics person he needs zero introduction:

• He knows his stuff
• He writes a killer blog
• His book it terrific

What he has that other analysts don’t have is the ability (not merely the desire) to push beyond the ‘what’ or analytics and into the ‘why’. And we all know that the why is much harder, it requires interpretation and insight.

One of the best ways to get some quality into your work is to ask people basic satisfaction questions:

1. What is the purpose of your visit to our website today?
2. Were you able to complete your task today?
3. If you were not able to complete your task today, why not?

Aking those questions will tell you a VAST amount about your site.

Well he’s teamed up with a company called iperceptions to launch a post-visit opt-in survey service which is FREE. It’s simple, it asks the right questions, it’s FREE.

I will sure as hell be using it soon…

http://4q.iperceptions.com/

Does this read like a straight press release?! Maybe there is a goblin in there somewhere – I’ll have a look at it and get backto you…

Google Page Rank – and yet another reason just to build a great site

Here’s a nice intro article into the mysteries of the Google Page Ranking system. It explains how it works and outlines the importance of the only bit of the complexity they actually publish – the sporadically updated Page Rank in Google tool bar. The conclusion is not to get too obsessed by it – quality and relevance of linkage is better than spiking linkage by buying it. Also worth noting is Googles factoring in bought linking (how does it do that?) and lowering ranking sites that are using bought links as opposed to organic links.

As always – make a straight useful site that people like is the best solution to most web questions that begin “How can we get more traffic?”. People’s crap detectors are just too good, you can’t beat that, the ‘Customer Site Rank’ algorithm.

Why does the US kick the UK’s arse when it comes to the web?

Short answer; they move faster and play more. Stanford runs a course for students on creating Facebook applications.

Actually just about everyone in the world moves faster than the UK. It’s a real problem, from the slowing of social mobility to the glacial pace in the public sector – actually when were either of these things FAST in the UK? The short answer is that question (I’m in a rush!) is the industrial revolution, not exactly a paradigm of happy social change it must be said…

Still the opportunities for fast moving companies in the UK is immense.

However here’s one thing not to do, move really fast and don’t think about the people you left behind: I phones a company about getting some hosting for secret project number five – they sounded good and mentioned that they were rebranding to garble garble garble. I didn’t think I would really need to bother to know what garble garble garble actually meant. So I looked up their web address last night to discover that they had indeed rebranded and completely removed material from their old URLs: No redirect, no ‘we are now here’ links, nothing. This is an ISP for gods sake and I literally can’t find them again… duh!

Anti-marketing

There seems to be a strong backlash against old-school marketing at the moment. This extends from the slowly-failing mass media advertising industry to the ‘word of mouth’ marketeers and all those who think that ‘applying’ an ethos to a company is a waste of time if you don’t live it. This even seems to be extending into the charity sector: Lose the Marketing Department a blog post from the rather wonderful Stanford University Center for Social Innovation.

Maybe it’s time to change what marketing is about – not creating or fooling markets but participating in them as equals with consumers; the goal now is not only to get the message in front of the right person at the right time, it’s to listen to what they say next, and then ‘reply’ by being more useful to that person if appropriate… Oh yeah, that’s called a conversation.

While we are talking about marketing, here’s a nice swipe at the RED campaign from the same place. It does seem perverse to spend more on advertising your commitment to RED than is raised for charity by the scheme. And that, I’m afraid, is the whole problem with cause related marketing – it looks is mostly spin and consumers literally don’t buy it.

Just do what Bill Gates did, give people money, lots of it, in big doses, tied to specific goals. Microsoft don’t put a label on Windows “A percentage of your purchase will go to stamping out Malaria”. But, guess what, we know it anyway…

Inspiration…

I will read this post every now and then- from Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchis. It’s an address to the business school at Waikato University. Kinda Tom Peters via the Pacific…

And a stolen image…

A couple of quick links on keywords and widgets

A couple of good basics: This googlekeywords site does something I don’t understand and can’t make work but they do have a useful guide and links to choosing keywords: http://googlerankings.com/top_keyword_research.php

And a simple but I guess useful glossary of widget terms covering basic metrics and so on: http://www.clearspring.com/docs/reporting/glossary

I hope this isn’t the peak of my day, but this is the kind of stuff I need to be accumulating at the moment – quick crib sheets.