If you haven’t already started, right now would be the perfect time to deploy some last-minute conversion optimizing changes to your website to take full advantage of what will undoubtedly be a busy holiday season.

1. Use Optional or Temporary Password Masking on Your Authentication Pages

This is right out of a page from mobile operating systems that temporarily show the most recent character you typed in password fields. The theory here is simple, less people that are frustrated entering their password upwards of two or more times are likely going to abandon your site completely.

2. Be Cross-Border & Cross-Country Friendly

Sometimes the best niche stores are local to the east or west coast, and do a great job of converting with local customers, but a really terrible job of selling out of state. Don’t make that mistake; make sure your site is converting customers across the country and even across the border.

3. Review Your Return Policy & Link to it From Your Product Pages With “Feel Good” Messaging

Visitors are ready to buy, credit card in hand, so reduce any hesitation they might have in making the wrong decision in the heat of the moment.

4. Enable “Check Out as a Guest” to Your Shopping Cart

Sometimes holiday shoppers are promiscuous, and only want you for a one-night stand, I say let them! A quick sale is better than no sale at all, and if you woo your one-time customers enough, they’ll be back for more.

5. Remind Shoppers of Shipping Deadlines

Nothing says “buy it now” better than a looming shipping deadline incentivized with a coincidental sale or promotion. Is your shipping deadline the second week of December? Why not incentivize your sales by introducing a promotion that ends at the same time, especially for no cost shipping options.

6. Ramp-up Customer Advice Services Such as Live Chat & Social Media Efforts

Many retailers often miss great opportunities to increase assisted website conversions with extra personnel manning live chat and social media channels during the holidays. Remember that these channels are just as important as your sales center or phone lines and have to be scaled up accordingly.

Summary

As with any conversion optimization tips, make sure to thoroughly test these changes before committing them to 100 percent of your visitors. Luckily, the holiday season tends to send a lot of traffic, making significance levels quicker and easier to reach. Don’t stop testing!

Are you ready for the holiday rush? What’re you doing to move the needle this holiday season?

But where do you start? What should you test? And what pitfalls should you watch out for? Here are 20 conversion optimization tips on how to get started.

1. Use the Right Tool for Your Business

Conversion optimization tools have distinct methodologies for testing, vastly different performance capabilities, varying levels of vendor support and service level agreements, different cost structures (from free to freemium to costly), distinct reporting capabilities and significantly varied resourcing needs.

2. Optimize Acquisition Channels First

This is particularly useful if you need to realize a quick win to show the value of conversion optimization because it is easy to show a reduction in overall cost per acquisition. Start with paid search and display advertising landing pages first, delve deeper with top referred pages but be careful with organic search entry pages due to varying traffic volume and search engine algorithm changes.

3. Scrutinize Lift Versus Shift

Optimization efforts usually count success in lift, but never consider the possibility of shift. Lift can be defined as an incremental and sustained increase in positive business growth. Optimizations with true lift do not disrupt existing conversion events. If your optimization creates localized lift and destabilizes conversion events on other areas of your site, you’re really seeing a shift.

4. Feel the Pain

Put yourself in the shoes of your customer and brainstorm their goals on your site. How easily could you perform the same tasks you’re asking your customers to complete? Do you set realistic expectations on how quickly someone can complete these tasks?

5. Analyze the Competition

Think you’re smarter than your competition? Try testing their ideas with your audience to find out what they might be doing better. Remember that regardless of how similar you site, product offerings, or services might be, no two sites will perform exactly the same.

6. Engage Test Groups

Try user research groups to test your website. There are free tools online such as fivesectiontest.com and usabilla.com as well as paid online focus groups such as usertesting.com and even session replay software such as Clicktale and Tealeaf. Sometimes user testing is the easiest way to get in your visitors’ head and find prospective customer pain points.

7. Recommend Products and Services

Industry giants like Apple, Dell, Amazon, and GoDaddy leverage the art of the upsell and leverage analytics to increase conversion volume and value per conversion.

8. Improve Self-Help

Areas on a website dedicated to helping people are most often frequented by loyal customers that prefer to solve their own problems. Help them save you money and phone calls and consider testing your self-help content by offering video tutorials, FAQs, comprehensive download archives, public service messaging and ensure you’re responding to social media channels.

9. Obsess Over Search Like Google Engineers

Search functionality on your website is often a last-ditch attempt that prospects and clients use to find what they want. It’s also probably the last capability you’ll ever consider to optimize. Start optimizing for search queries with no results and continue to optimize by matching synonyms and common misspelling with more relevant content.

10. Be Careful With Promotions

Incentives and urgency can have a strong effect on conversion rate but undesirable effect on lifetime value, use with caution. Online-savvy prospects are pre-conditioned to give a little to get a lot and are less likely to repeat purchase without further, unprofitable promotion.

11. Live Up to The Hype

Testimonials and professional affiliations can do wonders for conversion and consumer trust, if you can deliver. Get written approval for logo usage and recommendations and you’ve done your due diligence to avoid legal issues.

12. Be Trustworthy

Establishing trust for smaller brands can be challenging, especially online businesses. Ensure you’re doing your utmost to convey trust by including a no-nonsense privacy policy, clear contact us page, hours of operation, physical address and map locations, service level agreements (how long will it take to receive a call or email back?), trust marks and security certificates.

13. Content is King

Clear, concise content is still king, be cautious and exhaustively test reduction in content volume.

14. Integrate Web Analytics Capabilities

Optimization software can be very similar to web analytics but not exactly the same. In many cases, web analytics software knows more about user behavior, so leverage it!

15. Optimization Helps SEO

In a post-Panda world, Google revealed websites with better user experience (those that are optimized) perform better in the SERPs. Optimizations go hand-in-hand with SEO.

16. Leverage CRM Data

Optimizations take on new meaning (and better conversion) when you can target individuals based on CRM data. Consider augmenting optimizations based on aggregate customer groups such as lifetime value, customer tenure and likelihood to recommend.

17. Apply Monetary Value to Optimizations

Percentages are misleading. Lift and confidence is confusing. Equating an optimization to dollar value is crucial for scale because it can provide additional time for analysis and test execution, more money for better tools and additional human resources.

18. Make Optimization a Routine

Optimization isn’t a flavor of the month; it takes work and persistence to achieve long-term success. Plan ahead based on business goals and schedule optimizations based on priority and opportunity (or good timing). Planning also enables other stakeholders and team members to secure their own resources to make it happen.

19. Build a Culture of Optimization

Embed optimization into product, design or client lifecycles. Building a culture of optimization gives everyone a voice and means you’re never short of ideas for testing. Ensure that optimization software is integrated into all of your sites and platforms early in development so that you aren’t limited by technology penetration or lack thereof.

20. Take Everyone Along for the Ride

Unified organizational success is only truly realized when online and offline complement each other. Share findings from optimizations with front-line personnel and promote internal engagement to leverage offline experience in future optimizations. Conversion optimization should provide enough improvement to attribute value to all channels or organizational silos.

Have a favorite tip from above or seen it work in practice? Share it with us below.

Unfortunately, assumptions, strategies and tactics change so rapidly in our industry that it’s hard for most small business owners to keep up, let alone try to research all the current news and advice that floods the blogosphere.

Accountability is something that is near and dear to most of the writers here on Search Engine Watch because we realize that as an industry, it’s our duty to not only address all of the current search marketing and SEO issues for do-it-yourselfers, but also provide the know-how SMBs need to manage contract workers and agencies.

Whether you’re considering hiring an SEO, or have already hired one, here are the top five giveaways that can help you identify SEO con artists and some tips on how to protect yourself.

1. The “Bait and Switch”

This is a classic SEO con-artist tactic whereby traffic is purchased from paid online marketing services as reputable as Google AdWords. Savvy coders might even rewrite the traffic coming from AdWords to make it appear as legitimate organic visitors in logs and web analytics reporting.

Expert advice: Use a combination of web analytics reporting and web logs to try and determine where the true referrer of traffic is coming from. Install Google Webmaster Tools or Bing Webmaster Tools (better yet, both!) on your site for a true search engine view of organic traffic and rankings.

2. Hijacking Affiliate Codes

Much like the bait and switch, an SEO con artist may also opt to rewrite affiliate tracking codes for SMB websites that have active affiliate programs. This will make their “efforts” look good, and affiliate traffic look much worse.

Expert advice: Affiliates that send traffic to your site that converts relatively well won’t vary much from month to month. Ensure you communicate with your top-converting affiliates on a routine basis, in some cases they will notice something awry sooner than you do. If you’re on a first-name basis with them, they’ll tell you;  otherwise they’ll just start referring traffic to the competition.

3. Social Media Smoke & Mirrors

Social media is a hot topic lately with the emergence of Google+ and the increasing persistence of personalized search results tied to your circles. Many SEO con artists will often push the need to set up a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and/or a personalized blog as the answer to your SEO woes. Creating a blog and making it appear legitimate can be executed rather cheaply, but that cheap content can also sink your rankings (and traffic) to the deepest depths of the search engines.

Expert advice: Unfortunately, without persistent updating and the social aspect of building a real community of followers – something only you can really do – most of these efforts fall flat.

4. Bare Minimum Meta Tags

There are still those companies that ask large sums of money to update meta tags on a website and that’s all they do. Updating meta tags is probably the easiest and most ineffective task any SEO can do, it really is the bare minimum.

Expert advice: Ask for an SEO audit of your site that includes a comprehensive list of recommendations with time and material estimates for each. This audit should list out all the changes the SEO intends to make on your site and their reasoning for making them. At the end of the day, you should feel comfortable what was promised was actually delivered based on the “before” audit of your site and even examples of source code.

5. Here One Minute, Houdini the Next

The classic con artist doesn’t stay very long in one place, so it isn’t uncommon that SEO companies disappear after 2 months into a year-long contract.

Expert advice: Go after reputable firms in the industry by asking for references. Engaging an SEO shouldn’t be any different than researching a contractor for improvements to your home. Pursue the same due diligence. Look for experts in all the right places, such as conferences, trade shows, sponsored webinars, and on industry organization websites such as SEMPO.

Have a horror story you’d like to share for my next column? Have any questions on how to detect a con artist? Leave me a comment below!

The cold, hard facts on retargeting:

• Much of your advertising spend is wasted on visitors that will never get another chance to convert.
• Customers are less likely to convert in highly competitive markets and verticals.
• Many businesses don’t leverage all of their analytics to understand repeat visitors and repeat customers.

Although many tactics of ad retargeting can be regarded as creepy or annoying to visitors if not properly frequency-capped, the results of retargeting can be overwhelmingly effective. So how can you turn ineffective ad campaigns into retargeted success?

Filter Out Bad Prospects That Will Never Convert

There is no point wasting additional retargeting efforts on visitors to paid search or display advertising that will never convert. Consider the initial engagement of users to your site through advertising channels. Did they:

• Bounce immediately?
• Browse around a few pages?
• Actually add products to your cart?
• Make it halfway through the conversion funnel?

All of these criteria can help you gauge the quality of your campaign visitors.

Retarget Known Repeat Visitors & Customers via Email

Leverage all that you know about your customers from web analytics solutions, offline databases, CRM systems, Facebook open-graph, and opt-in lists. Try to:

• Offer helpful instructions on how to decide on a purchase.
• Offer alternatives for the products they were researching.
• Offer helpful reviews from other customers.
• Incentivize a purchase through a personally tailored promotion or coupon.

Constantly Update Your Retargeting Creative

Whether it’s via email or display, make sure you keep your retargeting creative from getting stale. Retargeting is only effective if you can serve up substantially different calls to action and figure out which of the 4 P’s visitors were not confident about: place, product, promotion, or price.

Don’t Forget About On-site Retargeting

Some of the best retail websites are able to effectively leverage data about their visitors for retargeting on their own site in subsequent visits. One of the easiest ways to do this is to connect visitor behavior with customer behavior (i.e., people who were interested in iPad cases, were also interested in styluses on subsequent visits).

Conclusion

Successful retargeting campaigns can often generate a lift of between 4x and 8x the original standalone campaign, so it’s easy to see why many are considering this once “creepy” technology. Have you tried retargeting yet? Let us know in the comments section below.

What’s next along the golden path of optimization? Where do you go for follow-up ideas on what and how to test?

1. Find Customer Pain Points by Listening to your Front-line Team Members

Some of the best suggestions for optimizing a conversion process come from prospects and customers who love your brand but hate your process. These are everyday folks that for whatever reason, found great enough difficulty in navigating, filling out a form, submitting an order, or even registering for your products and services to actually give you a call before giving up hope.

Consider the following:

• If you have a call center, find out whether they have specific metrics around website usage questions.
• If you have sales representatives, ask them what they tell customers to do that may not be intuitive to first time users of your website.
• If you have technical support reps on live chat or email, find out how they diagnose problems customers might be having with finding self-help information.

2. Try Some of Your Company’s Own Products & Services

It can’t be emphasized enough how important it is to step into the shoes of your customers. I’ve done it on numerous occasions with a high degree of success. It helps to assume an angry persona and pretend that you have less than 5 minutes to do anything you need to do.

Here are some tips on how to kick the tires for your own products and services:

• Sign yourself up for a normal (non-staff) account, even under an assumed name or perhaps masquerading as a relative.
• Try to validate some of the pain points learned in #1.
• Attempt several conversion scenarios, some as a prospect, and some as a customer.
• Determine how easy it is to upgrade, downgrade or cancel, paying close attention to the language and user experience of each.

3. Establish Conversion Testing Requirements & Document Potential Risk During the Product Lifecycle

Build a culture of conversion testing by baking it into the product or client lifecycle. Let’s face it, a lot can go wrong from initial conceptualization of a product or service to delivery, especially when development cycles are really wrong.

Don’t waste time on content, call to action and segmentation opportunities that you knew about early in the process. Many forward-thinking companies have sessions for “lessons learned” during projects, which are rife with conversion optimization ideas ready to be tested.

4. Leverage Web Analytics Information to Segment Test Audiences

Integration of web analytics data with testing platforms is much more common these days. Some testing platforms even enable you to “tag” pages or processes in such a way that mimic analytics solutions, but can specifically be used to segment test audiences. In the cases where analytics data is available for segmentation, be sure to try different scenarios such as:

• New versus repeat visitor.
• Customer versus non-customer, which could be as easy as defining a segment for users that never logged in.
• Cart abandoners, cart lingerers, cart hoarders versus quick purchasers.

5. Analyze the Competition

Sometimes the best original score is a remix. Think you’re smarter than your competitor? Prove it by testing their ideas with your audience to find out what they might be doing better or worse.

Although no two websites are exactly the same in terms of customer experience and behavior, similarly structured products and services likely attract similar prospects and customers. Note: do yourself a favor and segment out visitors from your competitors’ headquarters (and maybe even the entire state).

Not making the list this time around is to put your conversion process through the “Mom” test. My Mom hates technology and can’t understand how or why anyone would prefer to use the internet for the vast majority of fulfilling product and/or service needs. Perfect victim for suggestions on how to make things easier to use!

Some would say this explosive growth is due mainly to profit margins on mobile phone sales. A recent article by Horace Dediu of Asymco.com shows some convincing data on Apple’s growth, and while the revenue share is comparable with closest rival Samsung, the profit shares seem to suggest a 75 percent dominance of the entire market.

Of course, revenue and profit margin on unit sales isn’t the entire mobile story. Keep in mind that Apple has been smart to leverage the popularity of their mobile devices to take the lion share of app sale commissions, digital media sales and rentals, and books and magazine subscriptions. Some manufacturers such as RIM, know they need chip away at that share of hardware and have even resorted to giving away free tablets to app developers.

With an expanding market, Apple is poised to break records yet again, with the eventual release of the often-rumored iPhone 5 and iPad 3. Unfortunately, the future doesn’t look as bright for any of their closest rivals.

However, the one venture Apple has yet to perfect is their advertising platform. With the intimidating market share they possess, they must improve iAd inventory to compete with Google – the other elephant in the room.

For the mobile marketer, this data has a few implications:

• Develop your apps for the leading mobile phones to leverage the greatest market shares (obviously). Apple offers some fantastic iOS emulators and development kits, but not the quickest turnaround time on app submissions, so plan ahead.
• Don’t expect enormous traffic or lead generation from Apple iAd. The inventory just isn’t there yet. Stick to Google and/or Millennial Media for mobile buys.
• Track everything. Mobile analytics has come a long way, with much of the same (if not more) data points available for mobile device native code and embedded browsers. Don’t spend a dime without defined success measures in place. Apple relaxed their third-party analytics policy some time ago. Take advantage of that opportunity.
• Optimize websites for popular mobile devices and target those devices with relevant mobile downloads such as apps, podcasts, books and digital media available on the major app stores. Use HTML5 alternatives to Flash to ensure Apple compatibility.

Have you taken the plunge into mobile marketing or app development? If not, what’s holding you back? Leave us a comment below.

For many of us, the first quarter of the year means planning for the year ahead and prioritizing against a variety of opportunities competing for time and resources.

Unfortunately, no lone study of web analytics will satisfy everyone in your organization; the only solution to coming up with a prioritized list is analysis – deep cross-channel analysis.

At this point, you may be recollecting all those articles about calculating true campaign ROI, or perhaps reminiscing on an old economics class you attended that reviewed concepts such as “cost of goods sold” or “break-even analysis” or “first-in, first-out accounting.” If you’re just starting out, your cross-channel analysis doesn’t have to be that complicated.

Here’s a sample process to get you started in bridging your online-offline analysis:

1. Categorize your products and/or services by profitability. There’s no point in doing a deep-dive analysis on low-profit products. Note: try to find someone in finance to help you out with this one, as many of those aforementioned economics concepts will come into play here.
2. Compile a list of KPIs from your web analytics solution. Append this data to your product categories from step 1. Note: if you don’t have much of a sample size to work with, you may have to abandon analysis on even the most profitable items (or revisit your analytics implementation).
3. Look for a primary key that can be leveraged to identify prospects and customers online and offline. This doesn’t have to be internal account numbers or customer IDs, it can be anything that will get you closer to matching online behavior to offline activity. Note: it’s not uncommon that you may have to translate a web analytics ID to a CRM ID to an offline account number.
4. Match online (web analytics) data and offline data. Try to leave no stone unturned when it comes to offline data; investigate customer interactions in-store, over the phone, via snail mail, etc.
5. Aggregate your findings. Compile a report that offers insights detailing online behavior and offline activity that identifies key opportunities where:
   • Online success equates to offline success.
   • Online success online equates to offline challenges.
   • Online challenges equate to offline success.
6. Generate a list of optimizations you can execute to enhance the online contribution. Include a list of requests from other channels in your organization.
7. Share your findings with key stakeholders in your organization. Execute toward a common goal.
8. Revisit your analysis every quarter. Ensure assumptions and optimizations align to your business goals for all channels.

The goal of your study should never be to “nail” the statistical analysis on the head, but rather introduce the opportunity for further study. The best analysts will urge stakeholders to ask more questions, and execute additional insights on specific business requirements. Online-offline analysis will always raise a few eyebrows and often is the cause for heated debate, but those are two very good things.

Here are seven tips on how to land a job in the online space.

1. Dress to Impress

The online space is notorious for dressing down, but hiring managers and prospective employers take interviews seriously. You’ll rarely be criticized for over-dressing (although it has happened to me), so make sure to make a good first impression. You can dress down on a follow-up interview, if you make it that far.

2. Be Social

The crowd in the online space is naturally social, so put yourself out there on Twitter, LinkedIn or start your own blog. For best results, try to keep personal content and drunken disorderly pictures on Facebook behind strict access permissions. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve extended invitations to people that I’ve met socially at tradeshows or mixers or industry nights that have been vetted through peers in the industry long before reaching out for a first interview.

3. Show an Interest in the Industry and Organization You Want to Join

Working in an online channel is one of the most interesting places to be right now, so bring that shared enthusiasm to your interview. You’ll likely be asked the question, “what sparked your interest in this role?” and if you have no spark, it is painstakingly obvious. Some of the best candidates I’ve met were able to go off on tangents discussing new gadgets, social networking, recent blog posts from industry leaders, and books they’ve been reading.

4. Take Advantage of Soft Skills That Fit Online Roles

Don’t be embarrassed to admit you don’t have all of the technical skills listed on a job description. Some of the best interviewees I have met admit up-front the things they can and can’t do, and it goes a long way to increasing your credibility. Individuals that tend to rank higher in emotional intelligence are very sought-after because soft skills are often shared amongst strong leaders and lost on extremely technical people.

5. Market to Your Strengths and Prepare to Discuss Concrete Examples of Your Past Success

Let’s face it; people tend to blow a lot of smoke, especially in online circles. Anyone can claim to have done all kinds of things in a previous life, but few have the numbers, reports, diagrams, and process flows to back it up. Don’t be afraid to blank out the names of the innocent (your previous employer) and bring that evidence to your next interview. If you can show that your past experience directly impacts your interviewer’s prospective role, you are as good as gold. In addition, marketing your past success may help you to avoid a follow-up homework assignment that pit candidates against each other.

6. Ask Exploratory Questions

You have to ask at least three exploratory questions of the interviewer, because they are likely holding back some useful tidbits of advice, information, or insight into your prospective role. In addition, it lets your interviewer know that you aren’t just going through the motions; that you actually want to determine your own fate, especially if you’re looking to abandon your current position with another company. It’s risky to change jobs, so make sure the grass is truly greener on the other side.

7. Be Early, Be Patient, and Stay Professional

Really three tips in one, but all equally important to make a good first, second, third and nth impression.

Arrive early to your interview, but not so early that your interviewer doesn’t get a chance to grab their morning coffee or finish their lunch. Be patient in the process, especially with larger organizations that require prospective interviewees to meet several stakeholders in the process.

Expect to interview between 4-10 times with just as many unique interviewees. Each time, you will be expected to exhibit a good fit with the culture, as well as a familiarity with your interviewees function and how it relates to the prospective role (sales, marketing, operations, I.T., communications, human resources, product development, etc).

In technology giants such as Google, interview questions are often off-the-wall, highly technical, or ludicrously complicated. Don’t get discouraged by tough questions; think on your feet and break down the problem, verbalizing your rationale, and make fair assumptions. Interviewers often want to learn how you learn and problem solve.

Whatever you do, don’t ask your prospective hiring manager how long it would take to have their job. Sadly, it has happened.

Care to share any other tips you may have when interviewing, or have any weird interview experiences in the past? Let us know in the comments below.

Almost as quickly as November came to a close, news broke from StatCounter indicating Google’s Chrome browser overtook Mozilla Firefox as the second most popular browser worldwide for the first time. Internet Explorer, the incumbent for years still remains king of the pile, but even Microsoft has to be looking at their dropping share as an impending challenge to keep up with Google.

Unlike other browsers in the segment, Chrome appears to be the fastest growing browser of all time globally, rising to an unprecedented 25.69 percent share of usage in just over three years. Delving deeper into the numbers, Chrome still falls short of Firefox for usage in North America and Europe, but tops the charts in South American countries, well ahead of Internet Explorer and nearly doubling Firefox usage.

The masses seem to be abandoning Internet Explorer in favor of alternatives. The sinking ship used to be sole property of Microsoft until recently, when it appears a change in strategy sprung a few leaks in Mozilla’s boat as well. Mozilla introduced an accelerated release schedule earlier this year, which saw Firefox go from version 3 to version 8 in less than a year.

As most folks in the industry know, changing anything that quickly is a recipe for disaster, and here’s why:

• Add-on support sucked: Third-party and often enthusiastic developers made up a group of Mozilla’s hardcore advocates and community members. These are the folks that develop add-ons, extensions and themes for the browser that now have to work overtime to incorporate changes into each new version.
• IT Administrators couldn’t keep up: Browser share is likely to drop (obviously) if admins don’t have the time to deploy new versions of Firefox to users in their organization. It would be a relatively painless process if deployment was all they did, unfortunately they usually exercise some measure of compatibility testing, bringing me to my next point…
• Incompatibility with websites and web applications: The bigger tragedy was felt shortly after the first few monthly releases of major version increments, as more and more websites suddenly stopped supporting Firefox. Versioning that used to increment from 3.6.1 to 3.6.2 in one month’s time were now uncharacteristically moving from 4.1 to 5.0. Programs written to support minor increments of a browser and ensure compatibility were blown away by Mozilla’s rapid-fire release schedule.
• It really ticked people off: One of the major reasons I hadn’t switched to Chrome until recently was because Mozilla Firefox, despite all the blemishes (memory leaks, a big one), was a solid browser that didn’t follow the crowd. Community support was excellent, the rendering of websites was reliable, web applications ran as intended, add-ons were phenomenal, and most importantly, I could trust the product after years of unwavering reliability.

It’s still unclear why Mozilla adopted this strategy. Perhaps they decided they needed to increase the pace and align version numbers with Microsoft Internet Explorer.

To make matters worse for Mozilla, Microsoft has actually made significant improvements to Internet Explorer 9. Unfortunately, the browser version is not bundled with Windows 7, so they are likely challenged with trying to migrate users of their newest operating system.

Only time will tell whether the expected release of Windows 8 in the New Year will put a dent in Chrome’s meteoric rise to fame.

March was an extremely busy time for me personally, so I passed up the opportunity to write about an awe-inspiring keynote delivered by Michael Eisner of Disney fame at the Omniture Summit in Salt Lake City. In his address, he eloquently explained how technology enables a never-ending and consistently innovative evolution of content delivery mechanisms: from Gutenberg’s printing press back in 1440 all the way to present day with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook.

With much of the hype now turning to Google+, I was inspired to recall an important recurring theme from his presentation: new technology may emerge, but old technology never really dies.

Although the printing press represented a foundational change in content delivery at the time of Gutenberg, it threatened the existing content delivery mechanism of the day: scribes (mostly monks) who copied books (mostly Bibles) by hand.

Fast forward nearly 500 years to the early 1920s when the first news program was broadcast through the airwaves by a Detroit, Michigan radio station, which undoubtedly threatened the existing content delivery mechanism of <i>that</i> period: the newspaper. In relative terms, the first television broadcast was demonstrated not long after radio in 1929 and was thought to be the killer to radio and newspaper.

Isn’t it amazing how history repeats itself? How quickly we forget the past? How quickly we sensationalize the innovation and introduction of new technology in murderous terms?

One would argue that this sensationalism results from capitalism, but I’m not going to mix business with politics. My point is that it’s never too late to reinvent yourself, whether through continuous education, retooled business objectives, heck, even with conversion rate optimization. The true death of an organization, ideal, or technology is when it ceases to innovate and evolve, but that decline is never an instant death.

The recurring theme that each new technology that comes about is a killer of this or that is a direct result of sensationalism surrounding – unfortunately – less and less progressive innovation above and beyond existing technology. Case in point: Google+.

What functionality does Google+ introduce that would cause it to be a “Facebook killer”?  Not much, because at this point in time, Google+ lacks innovation worthy of recognition as a “killer,” although they certainly did themselves a huge favor in emulating a formula that worked for Zuckerberg.

I bet it sounds like I’m raining on Google’s parade – quite the contrary. I greatly admire Google for not giving up on social media, despite several failed attempts in the past with Wave and Buzz. Google Wave’s postmortem was likely some time ago, and Buzz is likely to soon be absorbed into Google+, not because some other people didn’t love those products, but because the company made a judgment call.

And those old-school content delivery technologies like books, newspaper, radio, television, and MySpace? They’re still around, they didn’t die, and as long as someone keeps creating and consuming that content, they’re likely to stick around for a while yet.