He arrived just in time to see a bit 2011. Graham has all his fingers and seems like a healthy, normal baby.

Here are some questions though going through my mind:

1. Will you learn to type the alphabet or write it first?
2. How much of your education will you receive from a LCD screen?
3. When will you make your first Facebook post?
4. How many digital photos will be taken of you this year? Looks like 375B will be taken this year.
5. How many times will your identity try to be stolen?
6. How many hours will you spend in front of a computer screen?
7. What will your first tweet look like?
8. Will you (sadly) ever use a mouse?
9. When will you get your first phone? What will it look like, the iPhone 14? And what rationale will be used to get it, safety, convenience, texting, driving your car or something else that doesn’t exist now?
10. Will your interact more with your friends in person or online?
11. Will you just bypass all this technology and go back to the olden days of wooden teeth and wigs? If you did, know that we’d support you 100%. Just want you to be healthy and happy.

This presentation discusses some things to consider when thinking about how to better design forms with conversion rate optimization in mind.

(I ran out of time at the end of the video, so feel free to view more info in the prezi below.)

Much thanks to Bermon for getting me most of the design information for this presentation.

My-my-my-my search engine sucks hard

Come December 2011, web surfers might be singing a new song. They’ll have a new tool, a Hammer tool. To be specific, they’ll have MC Hammer’s new search tool, WireDoo. The rapper-turned-entrepreneur, born Stanley Burrell, announced his brainchild at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

Where’s the connection between a music career and a new tech launch? Creativity, says Hammer. Whether in music or in any other field, it’s all from the same side of the brain.

And how exactly will WireDoo be different? Hammer explains WireDoo’s “relationship-driven searches.” Search for zip code 90210, for example, and in addition to the standard search results, the user will find a set of related content offerings — schools, homes, and hospitals, and so on. (No word yet on whether the engine will produce the angst-ridden adventures of the new denizens of West Beverly High School.) Click on “schools,” and the user will find further offerings on areas such as performance scores, teacher credentials, parent demographics, and truancy. Each layer brings the user deeper into the search.

WireDoo, Hammer says, will bring more of what the user is looking for. A search for “car,” he explains, is “not just about the word ‘car,’ but it’s about insurance, it’s about the specs, it’s about mileage, it’s about style, it’s about all these things. So that’s the way it works.”

Rather than relying on the standard keyword spider algorithms, WireDoo, according to Hammer, will ferret out public record information and other web-available material to bring forth what the user really yearns for. The idea feels like a combination of Wolfram|Alpha but with access to more public data. Where this data will come from remains to be seen.

Both skeptics and fans can submit their names and email addresses at the WireDoo site for a chance to become beta testers. Hammer expresses faith that excited and satisfied users will spread the word through social networking and help WireDoo to really dig in and take off… then do the running man.

Being the dynamic super web hero I am, I decided to put together this slick presentation together. Hope you like it.

Here’s the original presentation:

Next thing you know, you’ve missed a meal because you were too busy watching videos or yammering away in chat rooms to notice how quickly the time was flying by.

The internet is a great resource for research, but it’s also as addictive as a slot machine, and for the same reason. It puts you on an intermittent reinforcement schedule, rewarding you at pretty much random intervals, just like B.F. Skinner randomly rewarded rats in his maze.

It doesn’t have to be the barking cat or the confused web-cam grandparents. Because the internet is such a motley collection, just about anybody with any obscure interest can suddenly hit pay dirt if only they make one more click. Presto! There’s a clip of Buster Keaton laughing! There’s a picture of the actual train that was stuck in the Tracy cut, that kept the Ingalls family near starvation during The Long Winter! There’s a video of Anna Pavlova dancing “The Dying Swan!” There’s a copy of Dale Earnhardt’s autopsy report! There’s an essay by Chuck Jones about how he became a cartoonist!

What’s worse, no matter how esoteric your interest, there’s a clique of people ready to argue with you about it. You start out just wanting to find out the caloric count of popular vegetarian foods. Suddenly you’re in the middle of a flame war between advocates of soft versus firm tofu (if there really is a debate…really!), and you’re astonished to find that you actually do have an opinion about it, even if it’s that nobody should ever eat tofu.

When you get online, the fact that you were ACTUALLY looking for something specific often falls by the wayside.

With all that temptation lurking, how do you keep yourself on task? Or if not totally on-task, at least honest about how many of those online hours you’re billing your client for?

Well…(sales pitch coming) you can make one more click to a great time tracking program. This product Worksnaps.net tracks computer usage — programs, web pages, you name it. Best of all (if you are fine with Big Brother), they takes periodic screen shots so you (and your boss/client) can see exactly what you were doing at what time.

Of course, this carries the risk of becoming fascinated with your browsing habits and getting sidetracked yet again. Still, it gives you the tools you need to sort out play time from work time, and bill your clients honestly. I find it particular helpful when collaborating with people that you are physically working with at the same location. So, you can turn “Did Tom really work 6 hours on the design” to “I see Tom working on 6 hours of design. Groovy!”

Then (once you are done) you can get back to the Internet Movie Database and find out which critics enjoyed “Cycle Vixins” as much as you did.

Big thanks to @shaymus for his post about Startup marketing.

When you talk to most Internet marketing companies, they’ll talk in jargon, using terms such as search engine optimization, preferred landing page and Google algorithms.

Not Fred Sexton. To let potential customers know immediately that his approach to business — and life — is whimsical, creative and playful, he named his business Mouse & Man and gave himself the title of The Big Cheese.

“If people don’t get the name or don’t like it, the business relationship probably isn’t going to work out,” says Sexton, who formed the company in 2003 in Raleigh and moved to Charlotte in 2006. “I like to be true and real about what I am.
“I do the opposite of what the crowd does,” he adds. “The people I talk to are not tech people. If I can make them laugh by being different, it often leads to success. Even if I don’t make the sale, at least I’ve had fun.”

Sexton’s whimsy is based on extensive knowledge of the business of the Internet, the subtle differences between various online marketing techniques and hard-core technical skills.

For example, he explains that while some might think a useful goal is to get 10,000 Facebook friends, it is far more effective in the long run to get 10,000 additional visitors to their website.

“There are so many more ways to get people to your website,” says Sexton, 30. “The thing is how to best utilize all the resources out there in a creative way. To master that is complex.”

Many of Sexton’s clients have limited budgets, so “I train them in best practices.”

He enjoys teaching people and often creates presentations and blogs to do that — and also to get his name out. And he keeps abreast of what’s new by reading the work of other bloggers and attending conferences and meet-ups.

You may download the pdf file here

If you need PDF reader you can download it from adobe.com

• Keyword phrase: Best NYC Hotel
• Current targeted page for this phrase for your site is: abc.com/seo-lander1
  Conversion rate on this page is 2% for traffic from the keyword phrase ‘Best NYC hotel’ 
• There is another SEO lander abc.com/seo-lander2 with a 3% conversion rate.
  Ideally, you’d want your ‘Best NYC hotel’ traffic to hit this page first (assuming it’s relevant content (see the intent quote below). So, you work on getting abc.com/seo-lander2 to rank for the phrase ‘Best NYC hotel’.

This is a very important part of Brian’s post: “Identifying user intent based on search queries is huge since certain keyword sets will have completely different conversion metrics.” You can gauge some of this just by thinking about what they are really searching for but to objectively understand you’ll need to look deep in the data to spot trends. If you know where to look it will be pretty apparent what is going on and what they are looking for.

Very relevant to larger organizations: “Telling upper management that you are being as strategic as possible will help build their trust in your abilities. This affirmation will let them know that you are focusing your efforts as efficiently as possible for the greatest amount of return on their investment in you.” So, in addition to your team work with building links, traffic, and conversion optimization…be sure you are adding this next rich layer into your work. Upper management is going to be looking at not only your department’s revenue but also your costs, to get your profitability and compare this to other channels. Doing everything to put ROI in plain business language (with pretty charts and bold numbers) will lead to a healthier environment.

Bottom line is there are many ways to increase your website’s profitability without increasing your current traffic. This responsibility is increasingly falling on the laps (and laptops) of SEOs.  Understanding PLP management is a great way to accomplish this and looks like Conductor has done a lot of the heavy lifting for you. I’ve not used this PLP management tool but looks like it would make things much more efficient for larger sites.

My question though is the reason the captchas are getting so complex is that hackers and black haters (sp?) are pushing the captchas to be more complex. So, if we are going to change this:

…to this:

…seems like the spammers are going to have a field day.

So, I guess the question is are websites willing to get paid for spam? Maybe from the increase in ad revenue that I presume Solve Media can command, they could invest in some in some better email filtering (or move to Gmail ).

What are your thoughts? Do you think company is going to challenge captcha?

Looks like there are a couple companies that are being allowed to test plus.google.com now. This is different than the +1 buttons that we are getting integrated into all M&M clients.

Either way, looks like plus.google.com is widely successful and has increased to 18 million users far quicker than Twitter or Facebook. Even some data that showing less activity in these other networks since plus.google.com has been released. There are even now programs that  easily allow you to export your ‘friends’ from Facebook and Twitter into plus.google.com.