I manage a lot of Ad Groups in under the Google AdWords system. I mean, a lot. Optimizing them all is a painfully manual process if I want to do it right. Each situation requires a lot of individualized attention. So the promise of a tool that could in any way enhance this process is very attractive.

AdWords Optimizer does a very simple thing: It looks at the clickthrough rates of all your text ads in a given Ad Group and then makes recommendations on which ads to keep and which ads to dump. If two ads are performing at a statistically similar level, it suggests that you pick one to keep and that you create another to test again. It also gives an estimate of the potential clickthrough gain you might achieve if you dump the losing ad(s) in favor of the winning ad.

If you only have one text ad creative running for a particular Ad Group, it chastises you for this as well (and rightly so...don't put all your eggs in one text ad kiddies).

This sounds all well and good, doesn't it? Not so fast there, my little AdWords managing friend. There's another piece of the puzzle and if you get dazzled by all the shiny objects that this tool throws at your way, you might take your eyes off the real goals.

Here is a simple question: Are you looking for clicks or are you looking for conversions? That is to say, are simply looking for people to visit your site or are you looking for people to visit your site and then take some meaningful action that you consider to be valuable (like purchasing something, downloading a trial, registering for an email list, etc.)?

If you said, "I just want clicks! Gimme gimme gimme clicks! Me want clicks! Clicks am good!" - then I would suggest you go to this site instead. You'll be happier. But if you astutely realized that clicks are just the ante and that conversions are what you are really shooting for, then you might want to read on before putting the AdWords Optimizer chamber to your temple and pulling the trigger. Click, Click, Boom!

Here is a real situation I encountered:

"Winning Ad"
CTR: 3.76%
Conversion rate: 3.7%
Cost per conversion: $74.30

"Losing Ad"
CTR: 1.31%
Conversion Rate: 25.0%
Cost per conversion: $9.74

Wow. My clickthrough gain would be well over 200%. Seems like a non-brainer. Dump the dog and go with the studly ad, right?

However, digging into the numbers more thoroughly, what you find is that the "winning ad" only had one converter and the "losing ad" had 4 converters (this campaign has only been active for a short time and is extremely narrowly focused so the low absolute number of converters is to be expected).

If I were to go with this program's suggestions blindly, I'd turn off the ad that is generating more actual customers. The AdWords Optimizer only looks at clicks and that would seem to be its major limitation.

I'd love to see them upgrade the tool to integrate conversion data, though I'm sure that it would be a trickier algorithm. But a boy can dream, can't he?

It's still a useful tool for nudging you in the right direction. But like most things, you shouldn't just follow its advice blindly. Think about what you really want to accomplish and make sure the program's recommendations jive with those goals.

Now, I need to get back to optimizing those AdWords campaigns. Ugh!

Technorati Tags: AdWords Optimizer, AdWords, Google, Clickmuse, Andy Beal, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

I simply cock my head at a jaunty angle, flash a wry smile and say, "No. No I'm not. But I did just read one of next year's best selling business books."

Surprisingly, this raises more questions than it answers. The truth of the matter is that some nice person at Random House sent me an advance, uncorrected proof of an amazing new book entitled Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die .

I'm not supposed to quote from the text because it is an advance copy, but I can only imagine that they sent it to me so I would read it and talk about it right here....which is what I'm doing. So let me try to explain to you what this book is all about.

Imagine if Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell had a baby. That baby would grow up to write this book. Oh, and the child's godparents would be Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg. And they'd all live together on a houseboat. That last part is irrelevant. Sorry.

Seriously though, Made to Stick is going to be next year's huge hit. Unfortunately, it doesn't come out until January 16, 2007.

I'll do a more complete review when I'm permitted to actually quote from the text, but I think I can safely speak in terms of the book's main themes and strengths.

The book outlines what makes some ideas stick while others fade away. Brothers Chip and Dan Heath outline 5 factors they label as SUCCESs. To stick, an idea (and message) must be:

Simple
Unexpected
Concrete
Credible
Emotional
Story (that is, employing stories)

If you like Seth Godin's work (especially All Marketers are Liars), then Made to Stick will take you a step further in teaching you how to craft your stories and make them more effective and memorable.

If you are a Malcolm Gladwell fan (especially The Tipping Point) you will enjoy this book all by itself just for the tone and anecdotes. It's an easy, pleasurable read. And I think it would be interesting even to people who aren't necessarily focused on messaging and marketing. If you have to give a PowerPoint presentation - EVER - you would do a thousand times better if you read this book and followed a couple of simple rules. I'm already beginning to employ these techniques and I'm telling you, they work.

If you didn't read the Eisenberg's Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, you are late to the party. Get your stinky butt over to Amazon and order a copy. It has been this year's must read for marketers, web jockeys, and savvy business people. There isn't another book out there (or on the horizon) that can challenge it this year for usefulness and insights. But when Made to Stick hits in early 2007, you'll have the perfect companion piece to help you refine some of the things you learned while reading Waiting for Your Cat to Bark.

Or maybe I just like marketing-type books written by brothers. Who can say? I've been accused of stranger things.

Do yourself a favor and go pre-order your copy of Made to Stick. If you will recall, I got my pre-ordered copy of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark way ahead of the official publication date, so given that Made to Stick is already being circulated to mooks like me (and it's in damn good shape as it is...hey Random House! Do you want me to send you a list of minor typos? Who do I send them too?), you just might get lucky and get this ahead of the crowd. That way, you'll have a head start in learning this stuff. And those that learn this stuff well, will be next year's marketing stars. Trust your Uncle Eric on this one.

Hey Random House! Why can't you get this out in time for Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa/Winter Solstice/Insert your own generic festival, holiday or religious observance here? This would be a huge seller. I would love to be able to give this book as my corporate business gift this year.

My dilemma is that there are about 30 people I'd love to share this book with right now, but all I have is this advance copy and I'm worried that I'll never get it back! It's just that good. Plus, I like the alternate cover on the advance copy (advance cover shown above and Amazon cover at right). The one they show at Amazon is good too (duct tape is stickier than Post-It Notes, but as an idea, Post-It Notes are both literally and figuratively "sticky" - clever!).

Sorry to tease you with this unobtainable morsel. But I couldn't resist. Have you ever had one of those books that you rapidly devour only to find that when you are through that you wish you had taken more time to savor it because now that it's over you have no other book to look forward to that even comes close to comparing to what you just read? That's what happened to me with Made to Stick. Now what should I read? Leave me a suggestion in the comments, please!

Technorati Tags: Made to Stick, Chip Heath, Dan Heath, Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, All Marketers are Liars, The Tipping Point

Did you know that there were magic words that go along with any good search optimization effort? It's true. And each set of magic words is different depending on the web page you are optimizing. I'm not talking about the keywords that you studiously research. These are other magic words. Using these magic words will become more and more important in the future. So how do you learn the magic words and how do you use them?

Let's start with a story. Aaron Wall is a well-respected blogger, author of a search engine optimization (SEO) e-book and maker of SEO tools. He's a nice guy, but is willing to take a stand when needed. About a year and a half ago, Aaron noticed a search optimization company that was doing very bad things on behalf of its clients. This company was called "Traffic Power." Aaron publicly blogged about all the bad things that Traffic Power was doing. He then warned that Traffic Power and all its clients would get banned by Google eventually.

Traffic Power took exception to this and sued Aaron.

The online search engine community is pretty close knit and this story took off like wildfire. Soon, literally hundreds of web sites reported stories like:

"Aaron Wall sued by Traffic Power"

"Traffic Power sues Aaron Wall"

The story got so big that the Wall Street Journal even picked it up.

Within a month, you could do a Google search for Aaron's name and the fifth result was for Traffic Power's web site.

Traffic Power never publicly acknowledged the lawsuit on their web site and they certainly never used Aaron's name anywhere on their web site. So how could their web site rank so highly when searching for "Aaron Wall" - a phrase that didn't even appear on their web site?

The term "Traffic Power" had become a "magic word" associated with the search phrase "Aaron Wall." Because these two terms ("Aaron Wall" and "Traffic Power") had been found together on many, many web pages all over the Internet, Google eventually began to think that these terms were related. Google believed that there was some "Traffic Power-ness" to the search term "Aaron Wall."

I used to be able to demonstrate this phenomenon directly. But Aaron was right. Traffic Power did get banned from Google. So this association no longer exists. But rest assured, it did.

So what does this have to do with optimizing your web pages?.

Everything.

You probably won't have hundreds or thousands of people writing web pages about your keywords/web sites and associating specific "magic words" with your web pages and products. So what can you do?

Let's take it backwards. Let's look for the relationships that already exist between the search terms we want to optimize for and the "magic words" that already surround that search term.

I use the term "magic words" for dramatic effect. I actually prefer the term "supporting words." And the whole concept has the egghead, super-geek name of "Latent Semantic Indexing" or LSI. Calling these things "supporting words" makes it much more accessible for the lay audience (much like we advocate changing the naming of the concept of RSS feeds into calling them "subscriptions"). I'm going to gloss over some of the gory details to make this more accessible. Those who are involved in LSI more passionately than I am will surely find my explanations lacking. But as an introduction for you to use today to help you in optimizing your web site, this level of detail will do. Trust me.

Supporting words are basically words that we aren't going to optimize for directly. For example, if we were trying to optimize for a SQL Server product, we can guess that a supporting word might be "Microsoft." Microsoft makes SQL Server so an association is reasonably to expect.

Of course, Microsoft makes a lot of stuff that isn't related to SQL Server. So we wouldn't optimize for the word "Microsoft" directly. We're not trying to rank for the word "Microsoft" on its own. But not having it on the page could hurt us because it is a word that co-occurs frequently with the phrase that we are interested in optimizing for (i.e. "SQL Server"). Make sense?

For quite a while, I have been using a beta product (actually from Microsoft, though you wouldn't know it except to look at the copyright) to gain some insight into what the geeks call "statistically co-occurring terms." In plain English: words that show up a lot together on the web.

You can use that tool here: http://rwsm.directtaps.net/

When you do a search with this tool, take a look at the list(s) of words along the left pane (you can ignore the right pane...it's just the same old MSN search results). Be sure to click the "plus" (+) signs to expand each list. This tool gives you a rough insight into what some of the supporting words may be for your selected search phrase.

Enter Quintura. This is a new (free) download that uses data from the big three search engines (as well as many, many others if you change the options) and puts this same kind of information into a visual format.

You type in a search term (like "Improving Customer Experience ") and you get sort of a solar system map of words. The closer the words are to the searched term, the more related. The bigger and bolder the word is, the more important it is. I wouldn't worry too much about these size and location attributes. Just focus on the content. The resulting image looks something like this:

Interesting, huh? There are a lot of terms that seem to co-occur with the phrase "Improving Customer Experience" that are non-obvious. Using some of these words on my web page could help me rank better for the phrase "Improving Customer Experience."

To make this tool even cooler, you can "drill down" on these supporting words a bit. For example, if I put my mouse over the term "Improving" I get this (the outline emphasis is mine):

Hey! Check that out! The word "ice" is an associated term. I'm sure that it doesn't hurt that I've associated the phrase "ICE - Improving Customer Experience" both on this site as well as within any strategic link building activities I've done. But the fact is that the word "ICE" has now become a supporting word for the phrase "Improving Customer Experience."

I know that I'm a mega geek, but you have to admit, this is way cool. This will allow you to fully understand the universe of important words related to your keyphrases in a much easier and more intuitive manner. Continue to do your regular keyword research. There is no substitute for this. Use tools like Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker if you can afford it. Otherwise, there are a number of free online tools to at least get you started. Then use this research to begin to generate supporting words (you can get some of your supporting words from the research you generate using Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker as well, but they aren't free).

You can download Quintura yourself if you want to play around with it. It's free and doesn't even require registration. Can't beat that:

http://www.quintura.com/download/

Consider yourself schooled. Now go teach someone else about "supporting words."

Technorati Tags: Supporting Words, Magic Words, Latent Semantic Indexing, LSI, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Search Results Clustering Tool, Quintura, Google, Microsoft

Our always-popular Tag and Social Bookmark creator got featured on Lifehacker.com today. That has meant a substantial rise in traffic as you might imagine. And it has also awoken me from my slumber. I promise to carve out some time to get the ideas in my head down on the blog.

Some things to look forward to:

• The Worst Vending Machine. Ever.
• A Preview of Chip & Dan Heath's forthcoming book "Made to Stick."
• "Is-ness" vs. "Does-ness" - it's important and overlooked.
• Retro book reviews for two updated classics: Cooper's The Inmates are Running the Asylum and Krug's Don't Make Me Think (I re-read both recently after having read nothing but MBA books for the last several years) .
• Much, much more.

Thanks for sticking around my little ice cubes.

Me am pointer. Me am unashamed.

Joshua Schachter rants about the lack of innovation in alarm clock UI design.

As someone who has puzzled over the setting of a number of alarm clocks in various hotel rooms, I can really relate to the sentiments here. Come to think of it, there really are very few design standards or heuristics when it comes to alarm clock design. Many a night I have just phoned for a wake-up call rather than gamble on the fact that I correctly set some foreign alarm clock...and I hate being awakened by the phone! Scares the bejeebers out of me ("bejeebers" being a technical term in this instance).

Given the ubiquity of the humble alarm clock, you would think we could all agree on some standards and make our lives a bit easier. Does the little dot of light mean AM or PM? You know?

OK. I guess I'm more like a reviewer than a pointer since I couldn't keep my comments to myself. So sue me.

I got this from Om Malik who is apparently changing roles at Business 2.0 to strike out on his own...I'll be interested to see what he does next. Seems like lots of shake ups among the A-listers. First, Scoble leaves Microsoft. Now Om is leaving Business 2.0. Is there something in the water?

Technorati Tags: Customer Experience, Alarm Clock Design, UI Standards, User Interface Standards, Joshua Schachter, Om Malik, Robert Scoble

But what I think is worth noting is that Tufte is selling some pretty interesting prints from this new book as well as his other books such as The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. These limited edition prints are $500 apiece. Or you can get the whole lot of 16 for a mere $5k. Hurry! Act now. The editions are limited to print runs of 40 each.

I think it is a cool idea. I'd love to get some prints from Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think. Very pop-art. I'd be the coolest geek on my block with some blown up prints like that hanging on my wall.

Drop by the Tufte web site if you want to drop some coin on his swanky book art.

Technorati Tags: Edward Tufte, Beautiful Evidence, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Books, Art, Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think

Back in the olden days, I used to go to this establishment called "a video store." This was a place you could rent videotapes (and later DVD's) to watch at home. Occasionally, I would go to this establishment with a particular movie in mind to rent. But more often than not, I would go in to simply browse and see what was available. You see children, the "video store" only carried so many copies of each movie. Once those were all rented, you could not get the movie you wanted that night. Oh sure, you could stare at the pretty box on the shelf, but you could not actually watch the movie. Yes, we lived like savages.

The other day, I went to an even more archaic institution, the library. I've talked about my love of libraries before and I've lamented their slowness to embrace modern technologies. My favorite library has begun offering a bunch of books on tape online, so to speak. You see they aren't really on tape...you can download them. I guess they are more appropriate referred to as "audio books." I tried it out once and it was a huge pain in the ass since the software didn't support the ubiquitous iPod. Being the geek that I am, I was able to get around the Digital Rights Management (DRM) by downloading the book, burning it to CD and then re-ripping it with iTunes. Too much hassle for me, especially for something I was only going to listen to one time. But that isn't really the point of my story.

The point is that the library has set up its digitally downloadable books to be browseable. That is, they display all the titles that are available and you can peruse them at your leisure. They even have little thumbnails of the covers to enhance the browsing experience. This behavior reminds me of my browsing of the movies in the video store. I can look over what is available without having a specific title in mind. It's related to search activity, but it's really browsing. The metaphorical equivalent of telling the virtual librarian "No, thanks. I'm just looking."

Which brings me to my main point. I almost always use the library web site before visiting in person. But for two activities, I really need to just go to the branch location and browse. These activities are looking for CD's and looking for DVD's. For these two items, I'm typically interested in what is available and possibly stumbling upon something new, unexpected or forgotten. I can't search for "a movie I've always wanted to see but forgot about." I gotta browse to have that serendiptous experience.

If I know exactly what I want, using the library web search is adequate (not awesome, just adequate). But so often, I just want to browse. Why can't the library's web site allow me to browse what is currently available? Don't show me what's checked out (unless I ask...like if I want to put a reserve on something). Then let me select what I want and put a hold on it so I can come by after work and pick up what I selected without hassle.

We know they can do this because they have already done it with the audio books. Granted, the audio books system appears to be an outsourced service, but it does provide an example for libraries to follow.

I so desperately want to design a better library. Unfortunately, the economic motivations are very different for libraries. There is no profit motive for loaning out a few more books, CD's or DVD's. Therefore, it is very hard to persuade libraries that they could improve the customer experience by addressing these new-fangled technology needs. And of course, there is the issue of cost. Who is going to pay for all that techno-work? I'll tell you what, if I ever hit the lottery, one of the charitable works I will perform will be to create the most rocked-out library system the world has ever seen. It will take the best of the best from any number of disciplines and create a library that will be the envy of every library on the planet.

In this perfect library, I will use RFID too. I will tag every piece of media. One of the things that pisses me off more than anything else is having the computer say that something is available and then locating where it is supposed to be on the shelf only to find it missing. Oh, it's probably in the building somewhere, but who knows where it got shelved. A librarian friend of mine once told me that she believed that between 10-25% of all the materials in the library were mis-shelved. Granted, she thought that the vast majority of those were just a few spaces out of place, but what about those books and other materials that land so far out of their element that they become essentially lost. No one looking in these sections is looking for that mis-shelved book and so the likelihood that they resurface on their own is minimal. I'm sure librarians must do some mass checking of the shelves a couple of times a year to find these misplaced books. RFID would solve this problem a lot more efficiently.

But I digress. Here is the main point:

Are there elements of your customers' real world behavior that could be replicated or supported online? In my example, browsing available videos without searching for a specific title is something easily done in a brick and mortar store. And it could be replicated online without too much fuss....but it isn't in most cases. Supporting real world behavior, habits and patterns in the online space can be a good idea sometimes. It can also be a horrible idea in other ways. For example, it is bad to extend a real world metaphor too rigidly or inappropriately to the online world...anyone remember Southwest Airlines first web site that used the metaphor of the check-in counter very literally? Bad idea.

But don't let that stop you from thinking about this issue. What are your customers doing offline that they might like to online? It might be slightly different in execution, but if you nail the core of the right idea, you'll hit a homerun with your customers.

Technorati Tags: Customer Experience, User Experience, Library, Libraries, Browsing, Searching, Offline Behavior, Online Behavior, RFID, iPod, DRM, Digital Rights Management, iTunes

Yesterday, I was honored to be recognized as the Fisher College of Business Executive MBA Valedictorian. Given the outstanding quality of my classmates, I consider this a singular honor. I guess that makes me the "Alpha Type A."

But I also want to recognize the members of my MBA team. Getting this degree was a team sport and I, in no way, got through it alone. And in every way possible, I share my Valedictory honors with my team:

Jack Harper: CEO, First Service Credit Union
Nancy Barcalow: Nationwide Insurance
Brett BeGole: GE
Greg Sheehan: Dentsply
Ryan Murray: Murray Energy Corporation

This is an awesome group of people and I am honored to have been able to have experienced this program with them by my side. We were finalists in the Business Plan Competition and I am convinced that we would have won if we had not had to withdraw because of scheduling conflicts (each of us were either traveling or otherwise unavailable at the time of the competition due to the demands of our jobs). In short, we rocked the program from top to bottom. Kicked ass. Took names. Got the degree.

Thanks to all my other classmates and the professors that honored us with their time, knowledge and experience.

And finally, thanks most of all to my wife and my family who supported me more than they even know. I couldn't have done it without them.

Technorati Tags: No tags today.

In an earlier post, I prattled on about some guidelines and best practices for improving the user experience of RSS feeds. In my own consumption of feeds, I have found a combination of RSS elements that make for a pretty sub-optimal experience.

The RSS feed in question belongs to the Good Experience site, run by Mark Hurst. Before I get to the critique, let me preface by saying that I've been reading Mark's work for years now and it's well worth your time to visit. Mark is also the founder of the GEL conference (Good Experience Live = GEL). Although I've never had the opportunity to attend, I understand that these events are great meetings of some of the best minds in the experience community.

The Good Experience RSS feed suffers from an unfortunate confluence of two factors. First, it is a summary or brief feed. That means that to read the entire post, you will need to click a link to visit the web site. In and of itself, this is not a bad thing. Despite religious debates to the contrary, I think this is a user preference issue and I believe that RSS Designers should strive to support both options in a single feed. Then the user can decide.

The second factor is that when you actually click on a post's link in the Good Experience feed, it takes you to the top of an archive page of the entire month's postings. You then have to scroll down to find the post your were interested in. Ouch. I might as well have just visited the web site to begin with.

This situation reduces the value of using an RSS feed significantly. I don't want to dog Mark's site unfairly. To his credit, Mark's other site, This is Broken, has a feed that is both full text and directs users to the permalink when a post is clicked on. That does make it a little confusing as to why the main Good Experience blog works differently...and in my opinion, sub-optimally.

I hope that Mark will eventually address this issue (it can be solved by adding a "link" element to the RSS feed using the permalink URL as content). I also hope that Mark will continue to share his thoughts on experience issues in his blog and rely less on job postings and GEL updates....but that's just my preference.

Technorati Tags: Customer Experience, User Experience, RSS, RSS Feed, Good Experience, Mark Hurst, This is Broken, Best Practices

As part of the Voices of Experience project, I'm going to begin doing some book reviews. Actually, this probably has more to do with my completion of my MBA studies than anything else. I now have time to read something other than Harvard Business School cases and whatnot. One of my professors told me that "Crown Cork & Seal" is the "secret handshake" of MBA's. Any other MBA's out there want to confirm or deny this? *grin*

Anyway, what better way to kick off this new review feature than with a book by long time experience advocates, Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg? Their new book, "Waiting for your Cat to Bark?" is their latest attempt to smack some sense into the business world and marketers in particular.

Head on over to our newly minted book review section or jump right into the review of Waiting for your Cat to Bark?

There are a ton of extras included with this book as well, including a $50 credit good for Yahoo! Search Marketing. But there's a slight catch. You'll have to read the review to find out more (that's what is know as the "teaser").

Even if you don't read the review, you should definitely consider purchasing this book. It is jam-packed with information on improving your business' customer experience. Granted, the Eisenberg's and I share a specific world-view about the value of experience so I am unabashedly biased in favor of this book's main thesis. I can't remember if I knew about the Eisenbergs back in 2001 when I first wrote up my ideas on the value of experience vs. advertising (PDF) . Even if I wasn't aware of them by name, they are the godfathers of this movement and deserve a lot of credit in helping advance the cause of "experience." Waiting for your Cat to Bark is an excellent next step in pursuit of this goal.

Technorati Tags: Customer Experience, User Experience, Voices of Experience, Book Review, Waiting for your Cat to Bark, Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffery Eisenberg, Lisa T. Davis, Seth Godin, Steve Krug

There I was, just reading my RSS feeds, minding my own business when something struck me. It didn't strike me in the manner that I my wife strikes me when I make a horrible pun or ask her to pull my finger, but it had the metaphorical impact that was just as weighty.

I was reading a post by Philipp Lenssen of Google Blog-o-scoped fame. It was about the Slashdot redesign contest winner. I had the same reaction that Philipp had: Hmmm...I didn't know that Slashdot had redesigned. And actually, they apparently haven't...at least not yet....but they sure needed a redesign. Or did they?

That's when it hit me. I hadn't been to Slashdot in I don't know how long. Slashdot's been coming to me through my Bloglines newsreader for what seems like forever now. But I went and visited the actual web site to see the new design. Nice enough I suppose...but I don't think I care. What doesn't seem to have changed is the difficulty in actually finding out how to subscribe to a feed at Slashdot. But that's another issue.

I had this same type of experience when hearing about all the melodrama over at Michael Arrington's TechCrunch and CrunchNotes. I won't go into all the sordid details, but suffice it to say that TechCrunch's designer resigned after Michael posted a fan's redesign mockup just after the real site had been redesigned. Sounds like a tempest in a teacup and a little too high school drama queen for me, but if you want the gory details, blow-by-blow can be found at ValleyWag. In essence, my reaction was the same as above. I hadn't been to TechCrunch in I don't know how long. I only read the feed.

I'm not going to go so far as to say "Web Design Doesn't Matter Anymore." But I will say that it matters less. What is beginning to matter more is "Feed Design."

I wrote my own feed (with lots of online help, tutorials and liberal usage of duct tape and alcohol) so I think I can consider myself a feed designer. I'm tweaking my feed on a monthly basis typically. I tried adding the bookmarklets to the feed but that caused problems. I switched to Feedburner to help with metrics. I love messing with the feed. I'm a tinkerer.

We've examined the user experience of web sites ad naseum. But what about the user experience of an RSS feed?

At a root level, there is a good old religious debate about "Full Feeds" vs. "Teaser Feeds." With full feeds, you can read everything from your feed reader. With teaser feeds, you have to actually visit the web site to read the full post. Microsoft's Robert Scoble says he won't subscribe to any feed that isn't a full feed. I subscribe to some of both, but I have certainly come to prefer full text feeds. I think this comes down to personal preference. Seems like folks should be able to choose. And after just 2 seconds of tinkering with my Bloglines account, it seems as though you can choose. I'm not exactly sure how to do it, but according to my feed options in Bloglines, you can choose to display a Summary if available, complete entries or even just the title. It's something for everyone! Note to self: Gotta figure out how to add summaries to feed.

So let's start some rules for feeds. I'm going to state these things below as facts, but just between you and me, they are actually just my opinions. But it's infinitely more fun to act like a pundit and pontificate on these issues with some imagined authority. Plus, you get to type words like "pundit" and "pontificate."

RSS Feed Best Practices

1. Thou shalt have a feed. I guess you have to start with the obvious. Any feed is better than no feed. If you have no idea what a feed is, you had better fire up Google and search for "Introduction to RSS."
2. Thou shalt have a link in your feed to comments. I don't do this (yet) but I think this is a good idea. I often want to see the comments after reading the post. Why make me visit the web site, scroll down and find the comments link?
3. This one might be controversial, but I'm going to put it out there anyway. I think we might need a convention for linking to feeds within blog posts. This takes several forms. The first is under the author's control. I think it would be courteous to offer a direct feed link to blogs you reference in your posts. For example, if I was going to point you to my colleague Chris' blog (feed) I might include this little referential link to his feed in parentheses. Sort of like reference citations in scholarly papers. The other thing I might suggest is adding an attribute to the feed link such as rel="feed" This could be used by feed reader software to recognize that a link in one feed is a link to another user's feed (like Technorati uses the rel="tag" attribute). If clicked, the feed could be rendered a bit (sort of how Feedburner does) by using a rudimentary stylesheet. The feed reader software could also include an easy "Subscribe to this Feed" link in that feed preview just to make it super easy for users to subscribe to feeds they discover in other people's feeds.
4. If you are going to use images in your feed (which I like for the most part) use a fully qualified URL. This means the whole shebang including the "http://", the "www.yourdomainname.com" , and all. If you don't do this, there is a chance that your images won't show up in some feed readers. They may look fine on your blog web site, but we are concerned with your feed here.
5. Stop using the term RSS. This is a geeky, cheeky acronym and we are getting beyond it now. It was fun while it lasted but we need to use a more mass-market friendly name. As Asa Dotzler (feed) says: "We don't call web pages 'HTML+CSS+JavaScript Pages' and we don't identify them in the browser using little icons containing 'HTML' and 'CSS' acronyms; We shouldn't do it for feeds either" (via Matt Brett - feed). I think using the term "Feed" is fine. Critics might object that Joe Average doesn't know what a "feed" is. Well, Joe didn't know what the "web" was in 1994 either. So there.

That's enough to get us started. What else do we need to consider when trying to address the burgeoning field of RSS Feed User Experience?

Feed Designer. I like the ring of that.

Technorati Tags: Customer Experience, User Experience, RSS Feeds, Feed Designer, Philipp Lenssen, Google Blog-o-scoped, Slashdot, Michael Arrington, TechCrunch, CrunchNotes, ValleyWag, Feedburner, Robert Scoble, Best Practices, Asa Dotzler, Matt Brett

I've laid out a couple of organizing principles as possibilities or seeds for discussion. But I bet you smart folks have a few even better ideas.

Any chance you would consider sharing your wisdom, gentle ICE cube?

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Technorati Tags: User Experience, Customer Experience, Prioritizing Experience Issues, Voices of Experience, Discussion Board

Did you ever work really hard on a project, win some battles, have some successes and then, for whatever reason, you left the project? Then, did you ever go back to that project (like a web site) and see what had happened a year or two after your involvement ended? I did that recently. It reminded me that designing experiences is an ongoing process that needs almost constant attention. It is not a specific activity undertaken at a specific point in time.

I once heard a quote about air travel. I think it was a pilot who said that an airplane is off course 90% (or more) of the time, but the pilot is always course-correcting. I kind of feel the same way about experience design, especially for the web where things are so fluid.

In revisiting this web site I had once worked so hard on, I had the distinct vision of the pilot strapping on a parachute and giving a final salute to the passengers as he leaped from the plane. This plane (web site) had clearly crash landed. It looked like there were survivors, but they were few and far between.

That is to say, many of the good things that I (and my team) had worked so hard to do had been undone or redone in a much crappier way. We worked on site design, e-commerce optimization & flow, and search engine optimization. From where we started (which was a site that had been designed in 1997 and never updated) we really rocked the house. By the end our my tenure on the project, the web site had become the most profitable channel for the company and was on track to generate nearly 25% of all company revenues.

We fought long and hard to make the site search friendly and worked our way to the top of the search engines for our most valuable keyphrases. When we needed to, we used AdWords to fill the gaps.

In short, it was one very successful project.

But I visited it again recently and I was surprised at how far off the rails it had gone. Where to begin?

The Design:

Who ever is managing this site now has apparently subscribed to "If a Little is Good, A Lot More Would Be Awesome" magazine. What was once a pretty tight design is now overcrowded and stuffed with lots of content-free (or at least content-lite) images. And the basic HTML is all fuckered up too. What happened to our carefully planned spacing and whitespace use? I feel like a city planner who carefully set aside green space only to find a parking lot constructed in his absence...with a big advertisement on the side.

The other thing that struck me is that, although the basic design structure is still in use, it is the little things that matter. There is no one single reason the design that once worked is now failing. It is a collection of little injuries collected over time. I'm sure that with each change, the people behind it thought, "This is just a small change. It won't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things." And they would have been right. However, when you make these small changes over and over, the injuries accumulate until the patient is crippled.

Let me stress, these are little issues. The text used in navigation links is changed and now wraps to a second line causing the whole nav bar to be twice as tall as it was designed. A graphic is added that shifts the text down and now doesn't align properly. Stuff like that.

It's beginning to look like a slightly run down neighborhood. Not too awful yet, but you can see the imminent decay.

Search Issues:

This is probably the biggest tragedy of all. This organization had many content stakeholders, all of whom wanted their fair share of valuable home page real estate to showcase their division. We were constantly fighting the good fight to help users find what they wanted without overwhelming them with links. After we stopped working on the project, someone decided that they had found the perfect solution: a series of drop-down menus. Ugh. And these aren't some search engine friendly DHTML/CSS concoction. No, these are straight HTML form drop-downs. Ugly and search engine resistant. A great combo.

Then someone decided to make most of the text on the page into images. Not even great images. Just mediocre images with a bunch of text on them. Uggity, Ugh, Ugh, Ugh.

Even the AdWords campaigns appear to be on autopilot. The landing pages are decaying and only partially effective.

All the phrases we worked so hard to rank for are nowhere to be found in the search engine results today. The site has become an effective search engine spider repellant.

I could go on and on, but I won't. Let's skip to the lessons.

NUMBER 1: User/Customer Experience issues need constant care and feeding. As soon as you think you are done with these issues, your plane is on the way down. Trust me.

I was bidding on a job once. It was mostly straight web design work, but I was trying to emphasize my interest and expertise in the areas of user experience design and usability. The manager in charge said something like, "Oh, we did the usability stuff when we first launched so we're all good with that." Um. No.

NUMBER 2: If everyone is in charge of User/Customer Experience issues, then no one is in charge. If I have learned one thing, it is that people act in their own self interest. If a manager's bonus is based on selling a certain number of widgets and they believe that a prominent ad on the main page will help them achieve this goal, it doesn't matter that it interferes with user experience. They are going to demand it. And when you don't have someone acting as the advocate of user experience (the voice of the customer if you will), other forces will dominate. Trust me.

NUMBER 3: When managing User/Customer Experience issues, you have to manage the whole, not just the parts. It's the gestalt not just the pieces. Having a really good e-commerce checkout doesn't really count for much if your entire site navigation is FUBAR.

I'm saddened by this whole turn of events. This organization has taken a different path than I would have chosen. I wish them well, but I fear that there are some other warning lights going off in their business cockpit. I wonder if there is a pilot on board who can right the plane in time. If not, the whole enterprise (not just the web site) is gonna crash.

Technorati Tags: Customer Experience, User Experience, Web Design, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Google AdWords

As I mentioned earlier this week, I'm working on something called the Voices of Experience project. While the core of the project is still a little ways off, I wanted to begin to create some community by releasing components of the project as they are completed. To that end, I have put up an intial pass at creating a forum/community/discussion board. I want to invite you all to stop on by and introduce yourself.

My idea is to develop this project with the direct input of the community itself. I want to co-create this community with you.

Yes, you. Don't be a lurker. We all want to get to know you. And while I've had the opportunity to interact with some fabulous people as a result of this little blog, I really want to open up the dialog to the world. Whereas a blog directs the conversation to some degree, a forum allows for the conversation to go where it needs to go.

When you visit the new forum, you will notice that I have only created 2 categories to start: One is for introductions and welcomes and the other is simply labeled as General Discussion. I'm very interested in getting input from the community on how we might further develop these categories. Should we divide it up by online vs offline experience? Tips and tricks? A topic for those seeking advice with a particularly thorny experience issue? Divide it up by topic area like Usability, Design, IA, etc.?

Of course, I have some thoughts on these types of issues, but I would rather hold back on sharing until we can develop a base of interested users. I don't want to bias anything or discourage ideas that could become far greater than anything I might have imagined.

I'm also going to personally write to the people I respect the most in the experience blogosphere and invite them to join us here. This will take some time because I'm going to do this one at a time with personal notes. But I hope that some of these luminaries will stop by.

One pretty cool thing is that you can subscribe to these discussions via RSS. So you don't have to visit the web site every day just to keep up with the conversations. You will have to visit to post, of course. And to try to keep spam and other shenanigans to a minimum, I decided to use a registration system. I don't think it is too burdensome and it will (hopefully) avoid some problems down the road.

So, as I write this, I am the only registered user of the board. It's a little lonely. And this experiment could fail spectacularly. But unless we give it a try, we will never know.

I'm personally inviting you to get in on the ground floor of this new community development. It is rare that you get the opportunity to be there at the beginning of something like this. Most of the successful forums online have been around for years and the silverbacks and graybeards who have been around those communities forever are accorded a lot of respect simply for their longevity. Maybe we'll become those people someday for the experience community. I think that would be kind of cool.

Would you like to play?

Technorati Tags: Voices of Experience, Customer Experience, User Experience, Experience Community, Discussion Board, Forum, Message Board

But I'm not just going to play the pundit role here. No, your good ole uncle EGM is going to tell you what you need to build. I may not have the details just perfect for your specific organization, but I know that you are scary smart and can extrapolate to your own situation. If you keep your hands and arms inside the car until the ride comes to a full and complete stop, everything should work out just fine.

So, if you are like a bajillion other companies, you probably have an e-mail/newsletter/whatever sign up box somewhere on your website. I bet it looks an awful lot like this:

Look familiar? I bet it does. Eventually, I think this animal will become extinct. At least this species.

"We value your privacy?" You bet they do. Selling your information can be very valuable. But even if the company is on the up and up, there are plenty of reasons that this form of the marketing beast is gonna die.

1. Even though you are as pure as the driven snow, other people are ruining it for everyone else. The signal to noise ratio is hopelessly upside down. There is little hope of this ship righting itself anytime soon. Man the lifeboats! Spamberg off the starboard bow!
2. As a user, I really just want to get something from you as a company. In this case, I want some information or coupons or something. But in this scenario, I have to give you something before I can take: My e-mail address. And maybe more. Lots of forms require much more to sign up. Does "all fields required" ring a bell?
3. If subscribing is bad, unsubscribing is like doing medical experiments on yourself. In the end, it might help, but by the time it's over, you may wish you were dead. In other words, unsubscribing is hard and it doesn't always work (because sometimes it is designed not to work...you are trapped, sucka!).
4. For many e-mail marketers, it costs each time you send an e-mail. It may be just pennies or fractions of a penny. But with volume and over time, the costs add up. And as effectiveness declines, the real costs rise.

So why is RSS better?

1. I don't have to give you nuttin' to get something in return. I simply take the feed. No personal info needed. I like that.
2. The power to unsubscribe is truly in my hands. If I want to stop receiving updates from a feed, I drop the feed. No muss, no fuss. I like that.
3. I can look at stuff that happened before I signed up. Once e-mails have been sent, they are in the past permanently for any future subscribers (unless sent again). But with RSS, I can look at any messages in the feed even if they were created before I joined. It's sort of "try before you buy." I like that.
4. RSS feeds can be indexed by search engines. Try that with your e-mail newsletter (Gmail notwithstanding). I like that.
5. Beyond the time and expense to create an RSS feed (or feed engine, better yet), it costs you nothing to put another item in the feed. I like that.

There are other reasons, to be sure...but you get the point.

This isn't going to happen over night. It isn't even going to happen this year. I'm just letting you know well in advance so you can get some experience under your belt now. Oh, and if you run an E-mail Marketing company, you should start building tools to support this today and run them parallel with your other tools. You'll thank me if you do.

Here's how I see this developing: RSS is already becoming paired up with e-mail in some ways. The interface to feed readers such as Bloglines is distinctly similar to the metaphors used in reading e-mail. You can already read feeds from within Outlook using plug-ins like Newsgator or intraVnews . Unless I miss my guess, we will see feed readers built into the next generation of e-mail programs...both desktop and web-based.

I once heard that a picture is worth a thousand words. This one may not be worth exactly a grand, but it is worth more than the pixels used to create it. And if you build upon this idea, it might be worth a lot more to you.

Build this. Now.

Bonus points for creating even more sophisticated selection schemes, while preserving the ease and intuitiveness of the simple sign up. This could mean creating boolean options such as AND or OR. You might need to use AJAX or some other fancy schmancy technology to really make this work for the user. But I know it can be done.

I may be wrong in some of the details, but I think that the ship is pointed in the right direction. Just keep aware of your surroundings and make course corrections as needed.

Technorati Tags: RSS Feeds, E-mail Marketing, Newsgator, IntraVnews

Remember how I said that I had some big plans in the works? Well, I'm so excited about them that I can't hold it all back any longer. I'm officially announcing the "Voices of Experience" project. My goal is to put together a plethora of resources related to customer experience and its related disciplines. I want to help to create a community of experience practitioners. I want to surface the web-less-travelled to a larger audience.

Ambitious? To say the least.

Audacious? Probably a little.

Possible? Yes, entirely...with your help.

I'm still working on a lot of this project. I'm doing the research by hand. I'm not just throwing out some algorithm to return all sites with a set of keywords attached. No, I want to create a directory and community with a human touch.

Unlike a lot of human-edited directories that have launched of late, it will be completely free to submit and be listed...as long as your site meets a minimum level of quality. "Quality" in this sense is a relative term. "Quality" doesn't necessarily mean "expertise." It can just as easily mean "passion."

I'm not quite ready for submissions but I'll let you know when I am. Who knows? I may have already found your site by the time I'm ready to launch.

I'll also be launching a discussion forum which will probably be ready before the directory is completed. I think this is actually a good thing because I'd like the community's help in setting the tone and direction of the project. It's sort of an experiment. But I've had the pleasure of corresponding to a number of individuals in what I am calling the "Experience Community." I was a bit surprised by the lack of connectedness. There are a number of places where the like-minded can congregate on the web, but nothing quite like what I have in mind.

But what I have in mind could morph with the input of others and I'll be tickled with the result.

In the meantime, I've launched the easiest part of this whole project which is a quasi-bookstore focused on Experience type books. It's an Amazon affiliate of course because it would be foolish to try to set something like this up on one's own. The process of just setting it up led me to discover a number of books that I now want to read very badly. Go check out the Voices of Experience Bookstore and see what I mean. It's interesting to browse even if you don't buy (Disclosure: ICE receives a small commission on anything you purchase through the Voices of Experience Bookstore. We hope to use these commissions to invest in even more customer experience resources for the community).

Stay tuned, Ice Cubes. Exciting things are afoot!

Technorati Tags: Voices of Experience, Bookstore, Customer Experience Books, User Experience Books, Web Design Books, Information Architecture Books, Search Engine Marketing Books, Search Engine Optimization Books, E-mail Marketing Books, Blog Marketing Books

This is my third degree (an undergrad, a previous master's and now an MBA) so you might be inclined to think that I am a serial student. I just felt like I needed to pursue a more formal business curriculum to help put some more structure around the things I have already experienced, believed, read, etc. To my unending relief, the program I attended did just that.

I'm going to give an unsolicited plug to my program. You can change the channel now if you aren't interested.

I attended the Fisher College of Business Executive MBA Program at the Ohio State University. The program was ranking #13 in the country in BusinessWeek's last poll. And it's a damn fine program. It's geared toward working professionals who have 10+ years in management. You have to spend 3 full days per month on campus in classes for 18 months. Plus, there is plenty of work to do outside of class including online work and collaborative work with teams. I heartily recommend it for anyone seeking more clarity in the world of business.

And don't discount it just because you don't live close to Ohio State. We had class members from all over the country. And the school is connected to a very swanky hotel. I would recommend this program without reservation.

But enough with the B-school schlockery. I'm done with the coursework and receive my diploma in less than a month. My graduation speaker is Sen. John McCain so I'm pretty excited. Plus, the Buckeye football team has been ranking pretty well in the pre-season polls (don't want to be too optimistic, lest we jinx our boys of the scarlett and gray).

I have been working on a number of cool things related to this site. I don't want to tip my hand just yet, but suffice it to say, these are pretty big plans. I hope to have more time to work on them now that I'm not burdened with school readings, papers and homework. Stay tuned.

I just wanted to post a little something to let you all know that I am not dead on the roadside somewhere. I know you were all concerned about that. You were concerned, right? You weren't? You didn't even give it a second thought? The blogosphere is a cold, cold place, isn't it?

Just kidding. You bastards.

Technorati Tags: no tags today

The only omissions I see are the pastel palette and rounded corners. If those die too, then all the Web 2.0 hipsters will have to find new cliches to beat to death.

Technorati Tags: PingMag, Web Design, Philip Lenssen, Google Blog-o-scoped, Web 2.0

I've seen a ton of postings where people send you to some snippet of Google Maps to look at rooftop grafitti, supposed iPod ads, and other sundry things. It struck me that you could play a game with Google Maps. List a bunch of stuff and have people hunt for it. Like scavengers. I'm thinking of calling it a "scavenger hunt." It's got a ring to it. It think it might catch on.

Of course, someone might already be doing it. I'm too damn lazy to do a Google search to find out. If so, kudos for reading my mind in advance and predicting what I was going to dream up today. Your powers of precognition are truly unmatched.

Anyway, much like my last Web 2.0 idea, here is the concept for you to steal (or just post links in the comments if you feel like it). Absolutely free. Gratis. You no pay me the money. Get it?

Find these things on Google Maps (disclaimer: I have no idea if these things even exist or could even been seen on Google Maps if they did exist):

1. A car backing out of a parking space
2. A stadium filled with people
3. A cop that has someone pulled over
4. A tractor in working in a field
5. Bumper to bumper traffic on a freeway
6. A highway construction crew
7. A train crossing a road
8. Bonus points for a train crossing a road with a car waiting to cross the tracks. Double bonus for cars on each side.
9. Crew fixing a telephone or electrical pole with a cherrypicker
10. Apparent accident in a parking lot
11. Four buses in a row
12. Bonus points if they are school buses
13. A prison with inmates visible in the yard
14. A completely filled parking lot with more than 100 spaces
15. Accident on a highway causing a traffic jam

You get the idea. What other things would be funny to look for? Can you find any of the things listed above?

Just curious. Feel free to go make some sort of mashup or whatever and make a fortune off of this uber cool Web 2.0 idea. Make sure to offer really good prizes. Like cash or free llamas. You know, the good stuff.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, Google Maps, Free Idea

But I came across this drawing recently at one of my favorite sites, Gaping Void. I can't say that I always agree with Hugh Macleod, the site's creator...but I am always challenged to think. That's enough for me. Count me in.

I wasn't going to write about this, but the cartoon stuck with me. I should probably show it to you before we go much further, huh?

OK. Pretty funny. But I wonder if it sends the wrong message. Or maybe it sends the right message that is likely to be misunderstood by the exact people who need to hear its message the most. I don't know. You choose. I'll go with whatever you decide. I'm ambivalent.

My concern is that people might think that they will be derided for checking their web stats. Well, if you are just ego surfing your web stats, you deserve to be derided. Let me be the first to pour a heaping, slotted-spoonful of derision on your deluded sorry ass. Plop. Derision is colder that you'd think it would be, isn't it? Smells kinda funny too.

Web stats are a tool and you need to know how to you that tool. Otherwise, you aren't accomplishing anything. At the very simplest level, your web stats should help you to figure out this overused business truism: "Do more of what works. Do less of what doesn't."

But if you really want to derive value, you need to delve deeper. You need to understand what the numbers are telling you. You need to see the Matrix.

Recently, I was bored in a hotel room during a business trip. As a lark, I created the Evil Genius Mission Statement Generator 2.0. The 2.0 thing is my own personal joke because there was never a version 1.0. It just seemed funnier if it appeared to be the second version of this stupid little thing. I entertain myself a lot with this sort of thing. Pity me for the geek that I am.

Anyway, the thing got picked up by a blog called The Generator Blog. It's a collection of all sorts of "generators." You can make your own "Dummies" book cover or your own road sign. Just some good old time-wasting fun. On Sunday, the Generator Blog got linked on Fark.com which is one of the most popular link sites on the web. As a result, tons of people came to my stupid little Mission Statement Generator through the Generator Blog via Fark. You following? So it was sort of like being "Farked" by proxy. Weekends are a pretty quiet place around here typically. Imagine my surprise when I saw over 10 times the normal traffic I would expect.

Now, if I just looked at the numbers, I might conclude that the thing I should focus on is creating more stupid little things like the Mission Statement Generator. Heck, it generated (pun intended) more traffic than any of my individual, yet rambling, blog postings ever did. Web stats don't lie.

Using stats in this way is misleading. And stupid. Following that path doesn't help my users (the ones I am really trying to reach...like you...and you. Oh, and you over there too.). I would have to guess that 99.9% of the people who visited via Fark will never come back. This site isn't for them. It's for the ICE Cubes.

Don't be a slave to your stats, but don't ignore them either. Use them to help you get better at what you want to do. You have to be true to your own voice as well. Heaven knows I go off the rails at times. But if I only produced articles that I knew were going to be popular, I'd probably stop doing this real fast. There is no creativity in that. Not even an ounce of treacle or tripe.

Technorati Tags: Web Stats, Web Metrics, Web Analytics, Gaping Void, Hugh Macleod, Fark, Generator Blog, Evil Genius Mission Statement Generator